The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (6 page)

Jesse squinted inside and tipped the candle, pattering wax on the oakwood. “That’s not exactly today’s news, is it.”

Zee sighed. “They’re lacking in gaiety tonight, aren’t they. Maybe I steeped the tea too long.” She then arose from the dining room table with fatigue and announced that she’d be knitting in the bedroom if she could keep her eyes uncrossed. Jesse walked to the pantry and picked two Havana cigars from a corked soapstone jar and bade his guest follow him with the candle to the front porch, where they could rock and smoke and raise their voices.

The weather had modified into a mild shower, the night sky grumbled in the east, runnels glittered in the street, somewhere a rooster crowed. Jesse lowered into a hickory rocker and Bob Ford took the mating chair. Bob saw his trousers drip rainwater as he bent forward over the candle and resettled, blowing cigar smoke in a gush. Jesse had nibbled off the end of his cigar but let the chew lump under his lower lip to induce drowsiness. It was almost one o’clock and he assumed correctly that a posse from Kansas City would have reached Glendale and begun an investigation.

Bob said, “I can’t believe I woke up this morning wondering if my daddy would loan me his overcoat, and here it is just past midnight and I’ve already robbed a railroad and scared the socks off some Easterners and I’m sitting in a rocking chair chatting with none other than Jesse James.”

“It’s a wonderful world,” said Jesse.

Bob’s cheeks collapsed when he sucked on the cigar and the button of gray ash absorbed him. “Have you ever heard outlaws call dollar bills ‘Williams’? I read that in
Morrison’s Sensational Series
. You see, Bill is a nickname for William.”

“I see.”

“You haven’t heard anybody say it though?”

“Can’t say so.”

“You know what I’ve got right next to my bed?
The Trainrobbers, or A Story of the James Boys,
by R. W Stevens. Many’s the night I’ve stayed up with my mouth open and my eyes jumping out, reading about your escapades in the
Wide Awake Library
.”

“They’re all lies, you know.”

“ ’Course they are.”

Jesse carved cigar ash off with his thumbnail. “Charley claims you boys once lived in Mount Vernon.”

“Yep. Played in Martha Washington’s summerhouse, even made a toy of the iron key to that jail, the Bastille? Lafayette gave it to General George Washington and neither one of them ever guessed that Bob Ford would use the dang thing to lock his sisters up in the attic.”

Jesse eyed Bob and said, “You don’t have to keep smoking that if it’s making you bungey.”

Bob was relieved. He reached over the bannister and dropped the cigar into a puddle. It wobbled and canoed in the rain. “I was seven when we moved to Excelsior Springs. Everybody was talking about the sixty thousand dollars in greenbacks the James-Younger gang stole in Liberty. My Uncle Will lived close to you, over by Kearney—Bill Ford? Married Artella Cummins?”

“I know him.”

“How we did love to go over there for Sunday dinner and spend the afternoon getting the latest about the Jameses.”

Jesse searched his pockets and brought forth a cake of camphor that he rubbed over his throat. “You know what he also said? Charley said you once had a shoebox practically filled with James boys mementoes.”

Bob submerged his resentment and acrimony behind a misleadingly shy smile. “That must’ve been a couple of years ago.”

“Or maybe it was Bunny who did that.”

“You’re making sport of me, aren’t you.”

Jesse caught Bob’s wrist and put a finger to his lips in order to shush the boy, and then inclined out over the porch rail to inspect the composition of the night. He resettled and patiently rocked the chair on its complaining runners and then Bob saw a stooped man with a lunch pail tramping through the rainmuck of the street. He was Charles Dyerr, assistant foreman at the Western Newspaper Union and next-door neighbor to a man known only as J. T. Jackson. Dyerr would much later claim he rarely saw Jackson engage in gainful employment and guessed he was a gambler, just exactly the sort of man that Dyerr held in deepest contempt.

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.

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

H
IS 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 went 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.