The James Boys

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The James Boys Page 7

by Richard Liebmann-Smith


  In the present specimen of that voluminous correspondence, Henry spared his older brother few details as he went on to recount being unceremoniously hustled off the eastbound Number 4 Express “amidst a melee of wild whooping and deafening pistol reports,” then being hauled up onto Jesse’s powerful bay mare and taken on a wild night gallop through the brambles and thickets of the Missouri backcountry. For hours Henry clung desperately to his newfound brother’s muscular back, his ample posterior smarting from the pounding it was taking against the high cantle of Jesse’s saddle, his cheek pressed hard against the outlaw’s sopping shirt, which exuded, he reported, a “manly mélange of whiskey, tobacco, leather, and perspiration.” From the scene of the crime, the gang headed south, passing through the sleeping township of Florence a couple of hours after midnight, then cutting back into the woods and splashing along the bed of a shallow creek to throw off any trackers who might have picked up their trail.

  It was nearly dawn by the time Jesse reined his famously fine mare to a halt on the bank of that moonlit stream. The brothers had exchanged barely a word since the robbery. They now quickly dismounted, and as soon as the gang finished watering their lathered horses in the creek, Frank got down to the business of divvying up the loot, doling out portions according to an arcane system of seniority and function, with the lions’ shares going to the more experienced James and Younger brotherhoods. During this tense transaction, Henry hung off to the side, tending to his blazing behind, which he was “sorely tempted to douse in the soothing rush of that babbling brook.” Cole Younger, already apprehensive about the inclusion of Hobbs Kerry and the other newcomers to the gang in the Otterville operation, looked askance at the unexpected presence of this novel James brother in their midst. The alliance between the Jameses and Youngers had been forged on the hard anvil of guerrilla warfare over a decade earlier, a bond sealed in shared bloodshed and one that Cole no doubt felt should have been stronger than the ties of mere shared blood.

  Cole scrutinized the exquisitely tailored Henry James with undisguised contempt. “What in hell did you say he is, Buck?” he asked, addressing Frank by his old wartime nickname.

  “Why, he’s a novelist,” replied Frank with a knowing smirk. “A romancier, if you will. He skewers the foibles of the international set.” He gave the writer a broad wink. “Ain’t that right, Harry?”

  Henry was uncertain what to make of his brother’s arch characterization, which, however accurate, could scarcely have been calculated to endear him to the likes of the cutthroat Youngers. Flustered, the author merely nodded, senselessly pointed to his aching ass, and flashed Cole Younger what he hoped would be taken as an ingratiating smile.

  Frank grinned and redirected his attention to the task at hand, methodically doling out the greenbacks and negotiable banknotes from the haul into neat piles. Jesse, after making a point of retrieving Elena’s amber necklace from the heap of booty, began pacing the bank of the stream, taut and prickly as a strand of barbed wire, his own attention darting nervously from his men to the surrounding landscape, his keen eyes and ears taking in every subtle shift of light and shadow, every random rustling in the cottonwoods, every startled whinny of the horses.

  By now the ever-perspicacious Henry James had already come to intuit the dynamics of the gang: While Jesse was clearly the leader in action, Frank appeared to be the brains of the outfit. (If Jesse was a lean panther, as Elena had seen him, Frank was a sly fox.) James William Buel, a Missouri journalist, made a similar observation in his 1880 book The Border Bandits. Of Frank James, he wrote: “His cunning and coolness are remarkable, and to compare the two boys in this respect would be like comparing the boldest highwayman with the lowest sneak thief, so great is Frank’s superiority. In the matter of education Frank…is a student, being a lover of books and familiar with different phases of life.” By contrast, the newspaperman described Jesse as being “very limited” in the education department and “revengeful by nature, always sanguine, impetuous, almost heedless. It is due to Frank James’ strategy and Jesse’s desperate bravery that the latter has not long since been punished for his crimes.”

  The possibility of being punished for his crimes was very much at the forefront of Jesse’s present concerns, informing his every move. At the time of the Rocky Cut robbery, according to the outlaw’s biographer T. J. Stiles, “paranoia seeped through his words and actions, along with a continuing obsession with his enemies.” Even after the loot had all been properly apportioned and the other members of the gang had mounted up and ridden off in separate directions, Jesse remained vigilant, patrolling the banks of the brook as if expecting a posse to burst forth from the buttonbushes and ninebarks along its edges at any second. The outlaw’s slender fingers, Henry observed, were tensely curled, hovering over the grip of his holstered Navy revolver “like the hooded head of a cobra poised to strike.” In his letter to William, the writer went on:

  I must confess to a certain sinking of the heart at finding our brothers in such dire straits—hunted, haunted, with prices on their heads, & the more especially as there appears to have developed something of a bounty on my own belle tête, owing to which wholly unwarranted cranial premium my movements have of necessity been severely curtailed—at least until “the heat” is off. Please be assured that I am guilty of no crime, & yet the course of justice in these benighted parts is such that I dare not simply ride into town, proclaim my innocence & trust that a fair trial wd. exonerate me. The more likely outcome were I to embark on such a rash course of action, I am assured, wd. be that I shld. be set upon by an overzealous citizenry to be summarily strung up & left, as the colorful local idiom has it, “for buzzard bait.” Rather than risk ornamenting an oak as the guest of honour at such a “necktie party,” I have chosen, at the forceful invitation of our felonious brethren, to “hole up” & “lay low” here as their guest for an indefinite period.

  Despite his game attempt at maintaining the characteristic jaunty tone of his correspondence with William (and his apparent grim delight at flexing a new outlaw vocabulary), Henry must have been scared stiff. The “here” to which he referred was the infamous “Castle James,” which Pinkerton had described to Elena Hite, although, as the writer went on to portray the place, it was scarcely so imposing an edifice as its grandiloquent sobriquet might have suggested. Indeed, it wasn’t much more than a modest single-story clapboard cabin surrounded by split-rail fences and set on 275 acres of rolling farmland. There was little to distinguish it from countless other rustic homesteads in the region, nor to hint that it might have been the lair of a gang of notorious desperadoes, other than the fact that the walls were riddled with a series of peculiar cone-shaped holes set at about eye level. From the outside, these appeared only as little circles no larger in circumference than a silver dollar. But inside, they widened out like inverted funnels. At first glance, Henry confessed, he had taken these odd borings to be some sort of primitive rural ventilation system, but Jesse had quickly apprised him of their proper purpose: From within, a sharpshooter was able to slide the barrel of a rifle through a hole and swing the stock freely in the wide opening, allowing the marksman to cover a broad range of the surrounding countryside with scant danger of being struck by a shot from the perimeter. These were the dreaded gun ports to which Pinkerton had alluded in his interview with Elena Hite. Henry had immediately appreciated the workings of the system; in France he had observed similar installations, designed for crossbows, along the crenelated parapets of the medieval citadel at Carcassonne.

  Convinced that he was implicated as an accomplice in the Rocky Cut robbery, Henry found himself a de facto prisoner at Castle James, with his brothers as his wardens. The farm, however, was not the most horrendous hoosegow he could have imagined. While the surrounding western Missouri countryside lacked the studied old-world charm of his beloved “wide purple” Roman Campagna, he had to concede that it was not without a certain unassuming bucolic beauty: The early-summer fields were burgeoning with corn, h
emp, tobacco, and hay; flocks of bluebirds flitted through the dogwoods and huckleberry bushes; and the vast open sky provided a wide canvas for the long lovely sunsets of the season. Moreover, with the influx of hard cash from the Rocky Cut heist, a splendid store of groceries had arrived at Castle James—thick Kansas City beefsteaks, savory sides of sugar-cured bacon, tubs of silky apple butter, tins of aromatic Mojav coffee, imported English toffee and treacle, and even a few fifths of bonded Scotch whisky.

  And to Henry’s surprise—“delight,” he insisted, would have been too strong a word under the demoralizing circumstances of his incarceration—his prison turned out to offer a sterling selection of reading matter. Frank James had amassed an extensive private library that included, along with a number of editions of the Bible, the complete works of Shakespeare, a choice collection of Spenser, Milton, Thackeray, Trollope, Balzac, Flaubert (in the original French), and, most remarkably, a well-thumbed copy of his own Roderick Hudson. (Had Frank stolen all of these precious volumes? Henry could not help but wonder.) Whatever the source of his literary treasure trove, the senior outlaw’s storied scholarship was apparently authentic: Henry recounted to William an incident that occurred shortly after his arrival at the farmhouse, in which he had remarked upon the changes that the passage of the years had wrought upon his brother’s appearance. (Gone was the “adipose, genial” Wilky of their school days; the man before him was now craggy and creased, with a “scrawny gamecock” physique that made him look a full decade older than Jesse, though in reality, the outlaw pair were separated by only a couple of years.) Frank had laconically acknowledged that “time is the rider that breaks youth,” an expression Henry had assumed to be some cornball cowboy aphorism until Frank had curtly informed him of the quote’s proper provenance: “The Temple,” by George Herbert, metaphysical poet and orator of Cambridge University.

  Faced with such undeniable evidence of his brother’s erudition, Henry was unable to contain his curiosity about what this well-read bandit might have thought of his first novel. His coy query on the subject unleashed a critique that began with an all too familiar litany of complaints about the book’s coldness, the extraneous “knots, bows and ribbons” of its prose, and the overly rapid pace of its title character’s downfall, but which Frank soon managed to hijack into a self-serving disquisition on the aesthetic merits of his own larcenous oeuvre: A well-planned, well-executed holdup, the outlaw argued, was every bit as much a work of art as any literary production. It had structure, drama, and pace; it had a beginning, a middle, and an end. And so much more was inevitably at stake: Unlike the perpetrator of a novel, the armed robber risked far more severe opprobrium than mere carping reviews or lackluster sales; he faced prison or death. Henry found it difficult to discern whether his brother was joking, given the latter’s deadpan delivery. (The novelist Ron Hansen depicted Frank as “a stern and very constrained man; he could have been a magistrate, an evangelist, a banker who farmed on weekends; rectitude and resolution influenced his face and comportment; scorn and even malevolence could be read in his green eyes.”)

  Jesse proved considerably easier to read, but the emotional weather vane of his handsome face could swing unpredictably in the rapidly shifting gusts of his mercurial moods. One evening when the younger bandit was cleaning his big Colt Navy revolver, Henry committed the cardinal faux pas of addressing him as Rob, unaware of the fierce pride his brother took in his famous outlaw moniker. (Jesse believed, not without some justification, that a considerable portion of his national renown derived from its catchy alliterative appeal.) He informed Henry that as a matter of fact, his name was Jesse James, to which the punctilious author replied that, no, properly speaking, Jesse James was his alias.

  Jesse begged to differ: He pointed out that, properly speaking, his alias was Thomas Howard. His name, he insisted again, was Jesse James.

  “Then perhaps what you mean to say is that Jesse is your nickname,” Henry offered.

  “Nope,” Jesse contradicted his literary brother yet again, an ominous edge creeping into his voice. “My nickname is Dingus.” More menacingly, he repeated slowly, “What I mean to say is that Jesse James is my name.”

  Henry, who had spent a year at Harvard Law School during the Civil War, then played what he thought would be his trump: “Ah, but you haven’t had it legally changed, have you?”

  At this, a dark cloud scrimmed across Jesse’s already forbidding countenance. He paused in his gun polishing and shot his brother a murderous glance over the gleaming barrel of the revolver. The writer at last came to comprehend the gravity of his transgression. He cowered and began to stammer, fully cognizant of the possibility that his canny juridical remark might well have been his last. At which point Jesse burst out laughing. “Legally?” he yawped. “Legally! I’m an outlaw, you asshole. I don’t do shit legally!”

  All of this, as Henry was hardly unaware, might have been the stuff of fiction: The saga of a reunion among long-separated brothers of widely divergent social strata—and such colorful characters, at that—could doubtless have provided enough material for a whole series of novels. But even the prolific Henry James—who, especially in his early tales, was never one to shy away from the lurid conventions of melodrama—was finding his present predicament a bit too raw to consider subjecting to the alchemy of his art. He just wanted it over.

  Still, if there was one talent Henry possessed in abundance, in addition to his prodigious literary gift, it was a capacity for sheer endurance. The James brother who would ultimately outlive every one of his siblings knew how to make the best of a bad situation. In an oft-recounted vignette of family lore from their peripatetic childhoods, the James children—Henry was then twelve or thirteen—were once taken on an outing to the home of their French governess Marie Bonningue at Boulogne-sur-Mer. After a luncheon topped off with a memorable dessert of frosted cake, the children were shooed out into the garden to play. William was not in attendance that day and Rob and Wilky soon ran off to explore the surrounding terrain, leaving Alice and Henry alone in the flat sandy garden for the remainder of the long afternoon. As the sun slanted slowly in the sky, Henry sat patiently on a swing, content to muse his musings. “This,” the future author observed to his little sister, “might certainly be called pleasure under difficulties!”

  Under his present difficulties, Henry managed to keep his wits about him by establishing a routine for himself, passing the long hot days out under the shade of the coffee-bean tree in front of the house, reading his way through Frank’s library and scratching away at his detailed dispatch to William. “This was the young Henry in his familiar disguise,” as his biographer Leon Edel described him, “trying to bide his time, avoiding all overt action and hoping, by a kind of dogged persistence, to triumph.” Henry’s letter concluded:

  Behold me writing this on a rustic table, the rusty nails of which dig into my hand as I drive the pen. I weep for what our brothers might have become, but I do not delude myself about what they are—desperate hardened criminals little resembling the sweet seraphim of the nursery or the sturdy schoolyard striplings their names might evoke in your memory. I am already more than satiated with their society & leur manière d’être, but I am determined not to speak to you except with the voice of stoicism. Patience, I trust, will see any game out. In the meantime, please do not breathe a word of these baleful scribblements to the tender parental ears. The shock & shame of it all, I am certain, wd. simply undo them. I will write anon as events unfold. Until then, my blessings on yourself and all from your fraternal,

  H.J., jr.

  As events unfolded, however, Henry’s plight was soon to become even further complicated by the arrival of an unexpected visitor at the Kearney farm.

  On a sunny morning a few days after Henry posted his long letter to William, the reunited James boys were sharing a leisurely late breakfast in the kitchen when a buckboard came bouncing up the dusty drive in front of the house. At the crunch of carriage wheels outside, Jesse sprang
up from the table and scrambled into position at one of the gun ports, sliding a seven-shot Spencer carbine into the slot and tensely training the weapon on the approaching intruder. Though he immediately recognized the woman in his rifle’s sights as the young beauty from the robbery at Rocky Cut, the outlaw was deeply suspicious of her presence at the farm and especially concerned that she might not be unaccompanied. It would hardly have been above those devious detectives, Jesse must have reckoned, to employ a woman as a decoy to draw him into a fatal ambush. He ordered Henry out the door to greet the interloper.

  The writer stumbled into the yard, frantically pulling up his suspenders. He was wearing only an undershirt, his rumpled suit trousers, and a pair of Frank’s old cavalry boots—hardly a sartorial ensemble in which he would have liked to imagine himself greeting a refined young lady. “Miss Phoenix?” he inquired, squinting into the bright morning sunlight. Elena had gotten herself up for the occasion in her idea of western women’s garb: a cornflower-blue calico print dress with long leg-o’-mutton sleeves, a matching sunbonnet, white pantalettes, and high lace-up prairie boots, none of which served in the slightest to camouflage her congenital air of citified elegance. (She probably looked no more like a real country gal, she later confided to her diary, than Marie Antoinette had ever resembled an authentic shepherdess.)

  “Mr. Jones?” she responded with a wry smile, enjoying their private little name joke, to which Henry was still privy to only half. “I believe this belongs to you,” she went on, reaching into her reticule and withdrawing the author’s notebook.

 

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