by Ron Hansen
Jesse called out, “Evening, Chas!”
Dyerr glanced to the porch and changed the grip on his lunch pail. “J.T.”
“They’ve got you working late again.”
“James gang robbed another train.”
“You don’t mean it!”
Dyerr apparently felt he’d already spoken at compromising length, for he crossed up into his yard without another word.
Jesse called in his shrill voice, “If they put a posse together get me into it, will ya?”
They heard a woman speak as Dyerr opened the screen door and the man responded, “Just that so-and-so next door.”
Bob said, “You really are the cool customer they make you out to be. I’m impressed as all get-out.”
Jesse’s cigar had gone out. He reached to ignite a match off the candle flame on the porch floor. He seemed suddenly glum, almost angry.
“I’ve got something I want to say.”
Jesse glared at him.
“It’s pretty funny actually. You see, when Charley said I could come along, I was all agitated about if I could tell which was Jesse James and which was Frank. So what I did was snip out this passage that depicted you both and I carried it along in my pocket.”
“Which passage would that be?”
“Do you want to hear it? I’ll read it if you want.”
Jesse unbuttoned his linen shirt and rubbed the camphor over his chest. Bob assumed that meant he should read it. He pulled a limp yellowed clipping out of his right pocket and announced, “This comes from the writings of Major John Newman Edwards.” He dipped to pick the candle up and placed it on the rocking chair’s armrest. “I’ve got to find the right paragraph.”
“I’m just sitting here with nothing better to do.”
“Here: ‘Jesse James, the youngest, has a face as smooth and innocent as the face of a school girl. The blue eyes, very clear and penetrating, are never at rest. His form is tall, graceful, and capable of great endurance and great effort. There is always a smile on his lips, and a graceful word or compliment for all with whom he comes in contact. Looking at his small white hands, with their long, tapering fingers, one would not imagine that with a revolver they were among the quickest and deadliest hands in all the west.’ ”
Bob raised his eyes. “And then he goes on about Frank.”
Jesse sucked on his cigar.
Bob tilted toward the candle. “ ‘Frank is older and taller. Jesse’s face is a perfect oval—Frank’s is long, wide about the forehead, square and massive about the jaws and chin, and set always in a look of fixed repose. Jesse is light-hearted, reckless, devil-may-care—’ ” Bob smirked at him but read no reaction. “ ‘Frank sober, sedate, a dangerous man always in ambush in the midst of society. Jesse knows there is a price upon his head and discusses the whys and wherefores of it—Frank knows it too, but it chafes him sorely and arouses all the tiger that is in his heart. Neither will be taken alive.’ ”
Bob flipped the clipping over and continued. “ ‘Killed—that may be. Having long ago shaken hands with life, when death does come it will come to those who, neither surprised nor disappointed, will greet him with the exclamation: “How now, old fellow.” ’ ”
Jesse creaked his rocker, scraped the fire from his cigar with his yellowed finger, and made the ash disintegrate and sprinkle off his lap when he stood. He said, “I’m a no good, Bob. I ain’t Jesus.” And he walked into his rented bungalow, leaving behind the young man who had played at capturing Jesse James even as a child.
2
1865–1881
We have been charged with robbing the Gallatin bank and killing the cashier; with robbing the gate at the Fair Grounds in Kansas City, with robbing a bank at St. Genevieve; with robbing a train in Iowa, and killing an engineer, with robbing two or three banks in Kentucky and killing two or three men there, but for every charge we are willing to be tried if Governor Woodson will promise us protection until we can prove before any fair jury in the State that we have been accused falsely and unjustly. If we do not prove this then let the law do its worst.
We are willing to abide the verdict. I do not see how we could well offer anything fairer.
JESSE W. JAMES
in the Liberty Tribune, January 9, 1874
HIS WIFE WAS ZERELDA Amanda Minims, a first cousin to the James brothers, her mother being their father’s sister, their mother, Zerelda, being the source of her Christian name. She’d nursed Jesse through pneumonia and a grievous chest wound at her father’s boardinghouse in Harlem, which is now northern Kansas City, and Jesse would later claim with great earnestness that he never looked at another woman after that. He lost thirty pounds, he coughed blood into his fist, he sank into fevers that made his teeth chatter, she told him, like five-cent wind-ups. He fainted sometimes while throned in plumped pillows, while Zee spooned him gravied vegetables and noodles; he hacked into a tin spittoon and cleaned his mouth with a bedsheet and apologized to his cousin for his sickness, said he normally had an iron constitution and the endurance of an Apache.
Jesse was eighteen and glamorous then; Zee was twenty and in love. She’d grown up to be a pretty woman of considerable refinement and patience. She was conventional in her attitudes and pious in her religion, a diligent, quiet, self-sacrificing good daughter who was prepared for a life quite apart from the one that Jesse would give her. She was small and insubstantial then, with a broad skirt and corseted waist and breasts like coffee cups. Her blond hair when unpinned could apron her shoulder blades but she wore it braided or helixed (each morning a new experiment) and she combed wisps from her forehead with jade barrettes. Her features were fragile but frequently stitched with thought, so that even when she was most serene she seemed melancholy or, when older, censorious; Jesse could be as shy and restrained as a schoolboy around her, and she would often consider him one of her children after they were married.
But in 1865 she’d heat towels with tea kettle water and carefully drape them over her cousin’s face; she’d wash his fingers as if they were silverware and close her eyes as she bathed his limbs and blow his wet hair as she combed it. She hunched on a Shaker chair beside his bed as he slept and stitched JWJ on his four handkerchiefs and on the region of his long underwear where she presumed his heart was seated.
They’d been playmates in childhood. Frank was two years older than she was and too rough and refractory to be good company for a girl, but Jesse was a good-natured, adoring boy two years younger than she was and he was willing to do whatever she suggested so long as they didn’t amalgamate with his grudging big brother. When her mother died Zee moved from Liberty to Kansas City, where she grew up in the family of her older sister and Charles McBride, and they kept up a haphazard correspondence until the Civil War. Long, illegible letters would come to the girl from Jesse, the first offering his sympathy for “your mama’s being called back,” but many of them telling how much he missed his papa (who’d died of cholera on a mission to California) and how unhappy he was with his own overbearing mother and his stepfather, Dr. Reuben Samuels. He wished he could have gone to Kansas City with Zee, or he wished that it had been he who’d died in infancy rather than Robert, the second-born son. On one occasion he ran away from Kearney to be with her at Hallowe’en, but they most often saw each other on holiday visits when Jesse would ask if there were any boys he could fight for her or would beg her not to think that his kissing a girl named Laura meant he was no longer obligated to Zee.
The Civil War interrupted their romance. Desperate, inept, and undisciplined Union Army troops were meddling with and imprisoning much of Missouri’s civil population, often plundering their crops and supplies or pillaging their shops, so that their Southern sympathies were magnified. Indignant young men who couldn’t sign on with General Shelby and the Confederate Army were joining with the irregular guerrilla bands, such as that of William Clarke Quantrill, which Frank was riding with by 1862, and in reprisal, the pro-Union state militia punished the families. They we
nt to the Kearney farm and roped Dr. Reuben Samuels as he tried to escape into a root cellar, but he wouldn’t give them any intelligence about the guerrillas’ plans or movements so they flipped the rope over the limb of a sideyard coffee bean tree and snugged a noose around his neck, jerking him off the ground four times, nearly strangling the man, and causing slight brain damage that would increase as he grew older. They then pressured Mrs. Zerelda Samuels for information, manhandling her even though she was pregnant (with Fannie Quantrill Samuels), and, giving up on her, went after the sixteen-year-old boy who was working the bottomlands. Jesse would write, days later, that he was wrangling with a walking plow when he glanced to his right and saw the militia galloping toward him, their guns raised, their coats flying. They ran him until his legs were rubber and one man scourged him with a bullwhip as Jesse dodged from one cornrow to the next, striping his skin with so many cuts and welts his back looked like geography. Only weeks afterward, they arrested Mrs. Samuels and his sisters Sallie and Susan (aged four and thirteen) on charges of collaboration, locking the mother and two daughters in a jailhouse in St. Joseph. Quantrill’s lieutenants, among them Bloody Bill Anderson and Cole Younger, organized for a raid on Lawrence, Kansas, where they slaughtered one hundred fifty defenseless males in less than two hours, looting and burning the town’s buildings, and then getting drunk in the pillaged saloons to glorify their victory. Frank James was there. General Thomas Ewing issued General Order Number 11 in reaction to the massacre, evicting more than twenty thousand residents from counties in Missouri that were congenial to the guerrillas. Dr. Samuels gathered their belongings and moved his family to Rulo, Nebraska, just over the border, and soon after that communications and Sunday visits from Jesse ceased and Zee learned, in 1864, that her wild and willful cousin was riding with Bloody Bill Anderson.
He was called Bloody Bill because of gossip that he’d chopped off enemy heads with his pirate’s sword and rode under the Black Flag with seven scalps joggling against his saddle. Jesse James was his preferred recruit; of the boy, Anderson would say, “Not to have any beard, he is the keenest and cleanest fighter in the command.” And Jesse responded to the praise with worship and imitation.
Jesse snuggled inside two coats in his sleeping room as he storied with Zee about days and nights of looting, robbing, and setting fires. He said he’d been with Arch Clement when he executed twenty-five Union soldiers on furlough whom they’d come across on a train from St. Charles, and he’d charged Major A. V. E. Johnson’s company at Centralia with Frank and two hundred guerrillas, annihilating over one hundred men in less than twenty minutes and killing Major Johnson himself. (Frank still wore the Union Army cartridge belt that he stole from a victim there.)
He said he’d drawn the short straw and been selected to reconnoiter a Union bivouac: he’d slithered into their midst at night with a tanner’s knife and had come out slimed with blood, having slit each of the six men’s throats from ear to ear. He told her how a Yankee bullet smashed his left middle finger at the nail and ruined his rifle stock. His brother made him so intoxicated on whiskey that Jesse couldn’t end his sentences, and then Frank snipped at the bone and skin with barber scissors until he’d neatened the finger to his satisfaction. At Flat Rock Ford two months later, a Minie ball punctured his right lung and he was assumed dead at seventeen, but he was walking again within four weeks and was exacting his vengeance in six.
And then, he told Zee, in August of 1865, five months after Robert E. Lee surrendered his sword at Appomattox, Jesse had returned from exile in Texas and had ridden with a detachment of Southern partisans into Lexington to receive a parole that was promised them. But members of the Second Wisconsin Cavalry overlooked their white flag of truce and fired broadside on the Confederates. Jesse was slammed in the chest not an inch from the earlier scar and he was nearly crushed beneath his stricken horse; but he extricated himself and staggered into the woods where two cavalrymen hunted him in seizing thickets until he shot a snared and rearing horse and the soldiers lost stomach for the chase. Jesse said he slept that night through in a creek in order to cool his fever and watched his blood curl into the water and unweave. He maintained it was his delirium and pure orneriness that enabled him to tow himself with roots and weeds into a field of timothy grass where a plowman discovered him and doctored him with liniments and cooked chitterlings before delivering Jesse to Major J. B. Rogers, the Union commander at Lexington. A surgeon delved into the gunwound with some ambivalence, then let the bullet remain and ruled that Jesse was all but deceased, and the government paid his railroad fare to Rulo, Nebraska, where his mother and kin still were. After eight weeks Jesse’s health was so little restored that his mother boated with him down the Missouri River to Harlem so that he would not die in a Northern state. “And you were here,” Jesse said with no little melodrama, “and you anointed me with ointments like the sisters of Lazarus, and I have come forth from the tomb.”
As Jesse talked the sun down, the hours late, Zerelda smiled and dreamed of him as he had been and was and would be. It seemed everything about him was dynamic and masculine and romantic; he was more vital even in his illness than any man she’d ever known. And he wooed her after a fashion. He was fascinated by attitudes and accomplishments her sisters would have considered common, he was attentive to her silky voice, her sweet disposition, he commended her spelling and her penmanship, which he thought was perfect as that of Piatt Rogers Spencer (it was not). She would do kitchen chores with her sisters and feel constantly criticized; she would dine at the long boardinghouse table with sour renters and feel juvenile and undiscovered; she would shop in Kansas City and feel indistinguishable from every other woman she saw, so that she couldn’t wait to get back and gain in stature with the stairs to his room.
When Jesse complimented her she said, “No, I’m not pretty; but it’s all right for you to say so.” And when he first kissed his cousin with passion, Zee said, “If you told me three years ago that this was going to happen, I would’ve laughed, and then I would’ve dreamt about it all night.”
She awoke before sunrise to collect bowls of colorful autumn leaves for his bedside and to furbelow her ordinary dresses and cook him batches of sugared delicacies that he could eat, possibly, the corners of. She thought of her mountainous meals for Jesse as communications of her enormous love and of her condition, without him, of famine. She wished to know all he knew, to feel what he did, to touch him and inhabit him and let him learn her secrets and desires. She wished to observe him as he chewed and shaved and read the testaments and asked for the vase and urinated (even that, she was loath to admit; that in particular). She made believe Jesse was her husband; she mourned that she wasn’t more beautiful, more sophisticated, that she was most likely the lowliest female her cousin had ever encountered. She worried that Jesse would someday leave the Mimms boardinghouse without discerning her affection; she hoped—and then chastened herself for it—that Jesse would never get well but would forever need her and demand her attentions so that she could surrender her father’s prissy name, renounce her unimpassioned life, and marry into the grueling pursuit of caring for and worshipping this Jesse Woodson James.
On Thanksgiving Jesse decided he could venture downstairs and did, leaning on her and smiling with mortification as the diners toasted and cheered. He asked to make a benediction over the food and recited from Luke, “When thou makest a feast, call the poor, the maimed, the lame, the blind: And thou shalt be blessed; for they cannot recompense thee.” He had become reverent and grateful in his recuperation and intimated his vocation would be to follow his deceased father into Georgetown College in Kentucky and vest himself as a minister of God. He interlocked his fingers with those of his nurse and said he was so indebted to her it brought him to the brink of tears. “I don’t know how to thank you,” he said.
Zee answered softly, “I can think of a way,” and on Christmas he proposed marriage.
THE ENGAGEMENT LASTED nine years. He returned to the farm of hi
s mother and stepfather, three miles northeast of Kearney, Missouri, about twenty miles from Kansas City. He was reinstated in the New Hope Baptist Church and went to the river on christening day in order to cleanse the Civil War from his soul, but received no instructions in religion beyond those he could glean from revival tents and what were then called protracted meetings. His mother scoffed at his inspiration of joining the clerical life and he could find no other work so he divided his time between agriculture and Sundays with Zee at the Samuels table.
The farm had remained much as it was when his mother inherited it from Reverend Robert Sallee James’s estate: about three hundred acres of corn and oats and meadows, thirty sheep, some cattle, a stable of horses, a yoke of oxen, a barn, a four-room house with seven-foot ceilings and a portico lifted by white posts, and two freed black servants left over from a chattel of seven slaves. The house contained two brick kitchen fireplaces that were wide as a jail, secondhand furniture hauled up from Kentucky and polished with linseed oil, and a library that dealt with mathematics, theology, astronomy, horticulture, oratory, Latin, and Shakespeare. Jesse would escort his cousin into the sitting room and break the binding of a book to read aloud whatever passage caught his fancy and then he’d grin at Zee as if he’d done something beguiling and quaint.
He’d visit his fiancée in Harlem and they’d stroll in the cold, embracing their fleece coats, or trade sips of cherry squeeze and soda water near the furnace at the apothecary. They’d chat about neighbors and relatives, give each other nicknames, or recline on their backs and oversee the fire’s slow extinction behind the sitting room grate. His health was still so precarious that he needed to stop on each step he climbed and his stomach couldn’t always completely capture his food, so their activities were constrained, their nights early, their social engagements were often fraught with illness and regrets.