The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (7 page)

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 his 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.

She introduced Jesse to her girlfriends at parties but it seemed all he could do not to nod off over his tea; sometimes she lost him entirely to other rooms and attics where he could browse like an auction bidder. Whereas his own chums delighted him; he sent coded letters to aliases at tavern addresses and was jubilant when a note came back; even after his friends had taken leave he would savor their conversations, retell stories to Zee that were still vile and indelible in her mind, indicate the characteristics he found most attractive in the rowdies.

Jesse introduced Cole and Jim and Bob Younger to her in Kearney and she sat through a meal and several foul cigars with the four before she excused herself to walk on the lawn in her sweater so she could hear silence and take in the dark like a sedative and become somehow less alive. Jim and Bob were fine—cordial and slender and irresistible—but Cole was a red-haired beef of a man with sideburns and a horseshoe mustache, even more boisterous and extroverted than Jesse, a twin to him in his facial features, and the two in combination were so electric and incandescent Zee felt slow and shut-in and scorched.

And Cole was cruel; he fetched the viciousness in Jesse; he boasted with sayings like “I cooked his hash,” and frightened Zee with a Civil War tale about fifteen Jayhawkers he’d tied belly to back in a row in order to test an Enfield rifle at close range. Cole’s first shot bore into three men instead of the ten he intended and he had commanded, “Cut the dead men loose; the new Enfield shoots like a pop-gun!” He needed seven shots to slaughter all fifteen and said he reverted to the Army Springfield .45 from then on. Jesse listened with cold-blooded admiration, as if he’d had a rather intricate mathematics problem broken down on a blackboard; Zee brooded on how harrowed and deserted the last man killed must have been, hearing the rifle detonations and the moans of the Kansas soldiers, sustaining the lurch and added strain of cadavers on the ropes as execution moved toward him a body at a time.

And she would remember later that Cole mentioned the robberies of the banks in St. Albans, Vermont, where Confederate soldiers in civilian clothes showed their grit by getting the money in broad daylight and walking right out into the street. She would remember that because of a St. Valentine’s Day newspaper account about two men in soldiers’ overcoats who’d robbed the Clay County Savings Bank in Liberty, Missouri, and ridden off with twelve accomplices into a screening snowstorm.

Jesse came to the boardinghouse with divinity fudge and a red paper heart on which he’d doggereled about ardor, and as Jesse nudged a lizard’s fringe of flame from some embering logs, they talked about the crime, Jesse saying that it was really only just deserts for all Easterner-owned corporations like that. He asked, “How much loot does it say they got?”

She read that the thieves filled a wheat sack with sixty thousand dollars in currencies, negotiable papers, bonds, and gold. She also noted that a boy who happened by was killed by one of the men and that he was a student at William Jewell College, where Jesse’s father had once been on the board of trustees. “George Wymore?” she said. Jesse was still a moment and then said, “I know his folks.” She asked, “You don’t think it was the Youngers, do you?” He flicked the oiled paper back from the divinity fudge and broke off a sliver before sitting down on the floor next to her. He said, “I only know Cole’s been poor and Frank’s been with him.” He glared at the fire for a minute, his good lung not yet strong enough for him to breathe without gasps, his skeleton so evident that he seemed a young man dying. He said, “I’ll bet it was accidental,” and then he changed the subject.

Alexander Mitchell and Company, a banking house in Lexington, had two thousand dollars stolen from a cash drawer in October 1866. Five months later six bandits walked inside a firm in Savannah and demanded that Judge John McLain hand over the keys to his vault. He wouldn’t and an incensed man shot him in the arm (which in result was amputated), but the outlaws exited without McLain’s cash. And in May 1867, a rustler told his jail inmates in Richmond that the local bank would be robbed that afternoon. The rumor carried and the town square was monitored, deputies were readied, and the teller locked the two wide doors of the Hughes and Wasson Bank. Then twenty yipping, howling outlaws in slouch hats and linen dusters galloped onto the main street and fired at second-storey windows. A robber broke the clasp lock with a bullet and six men marched inside and the bank lost four thousand dollars. But citizens constructed a roadblock and resistance. Mayor John B. Shaw was killed while rushing the thieves, his revolver kicking with each wild shot. Several men in the gang had ridden over to the jail in order to release Felix Bradley, the rustler in confinement there, but a boy named Frank Griffin raised a cavalry rifle in the courthouse yard and fired on them. Someone aimed an answering shot at him and his forehead was staved in. His father was Berry Griffin, the jailor, who went insane when his son was killed and raced across the dirt street and tackled a robber’s boot and stirrup. The horse skittered and screamed. The robber looked at Griffin as if he were an inconvenience, and he lowered his revolver to the man’s head and fired, burning hair with the gunpowder spray. The man sank under the horse. With a section of his skull blown off and the robber fired a second time to make sure the jailor would remain dead. And then the gang rode out of Richmond without any casualties of their own, although Felix Bradley was soon lynched by an angry mob.

Zee Mimms read that account as she’d read the accounts of the other robberies, and then she knelt with her arms crossed on the windowsill, her chin on her wrist, looking out beyond the pink blossoms of the yard’s cherry trees to the cinder alley that Jesse would trot along on another man’s horse. He would arrive with something expensive and inappropriate—a brass candelabrum, a garlic press, a wire dressmaker’s dummy—and if she broached the issue of the Richmond murders, he’d maintain he hadn’t yet heard the news and then look sick with sorrow and pity as she told him about the Hughes and Wasson Bank and Mayor Shaw and the Griffins; or he’d maintain the marauders were most likely driven to the crime by an unforgiving enemy that would never give ex-guerrillas a chance at more regular jobs. He would ignore her questions or laugh about them and he’d grow forbidding if she insisted he tell her where he’d been over the week, and yet when Jesse came—with a walnut metronome—Zee decided to find out what her fiancé did with his hours: Did he weed and water? Did he drink? Did he whore? Did he mumble-the-peg, fling sticks to dogs, whittle turtles from oakwood? Did he ride into peaceful towns and train his pistols on shopkeepers and college boys as outlaws ransacked the bank? She jested her inquiries so that she would not offend, but lies and evasions were what she received in answer, or Jesse cartooned his endeavors, saying, “I’ve just been sitting around the house practicing the alphabet.”