The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (8 page)

She said, “You haven’t been doing anything bad, have you?”

“ ’Course not.”

“You haven’t been gallivanting around with the Youngers?”

He glowered at her and said, “I guess that’s my own business, isn’t it.”

Zee looked pained but practical. “I’m going to be your
wife
.”

His eyes seemed hysterical and what strength he had seemed governed only with great difficulty. He struggled with a thought and then shrugged back into his riding coat. “I can’t remember when. I worked the farm last. I’m always changing horses and I’m gone for days at a time. I’ve got shotguns and six-guns in every room, I’ve got gifts to bring you and I’ve got greenbacks in my pocket and if you look in my closet you’ll see more fancy clothes than you will in all of Clay County. So you tell
me
what I do for a living. You figure something out and then you tell me if we oughta forget about getting married.”

And Jesse was outside and climbing onto a stolen horse as Zee angrily shut the curtains. She folded up the newspaper and slid it under a cobbler’s door down the hall, she put a picture of Jesse at seventeen inside the top drawer of a jewelry box, she pushed the metronome’s pendulum and as it ticked in three-quarter time she gradually crouched by it with her crying eyes in her palms.

THE JAMES AND YOUNGER BROTHERS
larked into Kentucky in March 1868, and at the same time a man calling himself a cattle dealer visited the Nimrod Long and Company Bank in Russellville, Kentucky, chatted about escrow accounts, and departed. Soon thereafter the cattle dealer returned with four other men who drew revolvers from under their coats and received over twelve thousand dollars, which was thrown into the same wheat sack that had been noted in the Missouri robberies. Shopkeepers located revolvers and fired on the robbers in their ride out but ten sentries who were stationed on the avenue covered their getaway.

A Louisville detective named Yankee Bligh took on the Russellville case for a consortium of financiers and he identified Cole Younger and his confederates as the probable bank robbers. He was also concerned that two men named Frank and Jesse James had bloodied the bedsheets of a hotel in Chaplin, more than a hundred miles from the incident. A sallow man under a greatcoat had clutched his side as he slunk away from the open hotel room door and his grave older brother had informed the maid that the man’s Civil War injuries were still uncured. His wince when he moved, however, persuaded her that the wound was reopened in a scrap. And Jesse sealed the detective’s suspicions about the James brothers’ involvement when he mailed his fiancée a card that said a physician had instructed him to go to California or else lose his vitality.

He went to the Paso Robles Hot Sulphur Springs resort owned by his uncle, Drury Woodson James. There he mended his lung and recovered from an ear infection by consuming lemons and oranges and castoreum in addition to a pound of fish every day. A photograph of him at the time showed a cadaverous man with sunken cheeks and eyes darkened with hollow, his left hand clutching a cane; he would never again be as sick as he was then: Jesse would later say it was a condition that was brought on by being away from Missouri and Zee. It took him four months to convalesce and then he vacationed in San Francisco on stolen cash that he doubled with casino roulette and monte. He lounged in steam baths, he stood at the prow of a ferry, he ate six-course meals in French restaurants, he sinned in fandango saloons where the “pretty waiter girls” wore ostrich-feather bonnets and red silk jackets but nothing whatever below that except shoes, and for a dollar would let Jesse contemplate what he had never spied outside of art museums. It all made him feel guilty and unmoored, and it wasn’t long before he was climbing aboard a train that would carry him back to Missouri and make him himself again.

Zee was visiting her Aunt Zerelda at the Kearney farmhouse when Jesse arrived. His mother made an opera of his coming home and cooked a supper of pork and pies, complaining all the while of the illnesses and sleepless nights her boy’s going had brought her, and reporting on the many deputies and Pinkerton detectives who were skulking around the place. “Seems like I’m spending every minute making up alibis for you.” She proclaimed, as they were eating, that she’d attempted to get cash for some negotiable papers “the boys” had swiped from the Clay County Savings Bank but that a manager had snootily refused her. She asked if Jesse knew that it was Mr. Nimrod Long of Russellville who paid half the tuition for Jesse’s father to go to Georgetown College. She asked if Jesse wasn’t ashamed of himself. Through it all, Jesse miserably eyed Zee but saw that she was simpering at Zerelda as if she were speaking the lightest of gossip. And as the couple strolled down to Clear Creek to flip pebbles into the water and chat, Jesse saw that the woman he was pledged to had changed. Zee called herself a milkweed, a nuisance, a scold; she regretted her prying into his affairs, regretted giving him arguments when she knew that he needed allegiance and love. She wanted to accommodate him, to be a good wife to him, and nothing else really mattered to her. And that seemed to be true, for thenceforth Zee avoided all rumors and newspaper stories about the James-Younger gang, she shied from conversations about criminal acts and politics, she refused invitations into society, she never inquired again about the robberies or murders attributed to Jesse; instead, she’d accepted a simple, stay-at-home life for herself and was no more conscious of the James brothers’ crimes than she was of the Suez Canal or the mole on her back or the dust kittens under the sofa.

And yet Jesse made some efforts at conventional work: he was a millwright, a machinist, a coal salesman; he plowed in the sun with three pistols hooked onto his belt; he swapped cattle at the livestock shows. He would start a job with good will and industry, but then he would walk away from it because he was belittled or maltreated or weary and bored. Each occupation became a day-or week-long deception, for he was twenty-one years old and had already settled into the one career that suited him.

During the five years between 1869 and 1874, the James-Younger gang robbed the Daviess County Savings Bank in Gallatin; stole six thousand dollars from the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank in Corydon, Iowa; six hundred dollars from the Deposit Bank in Columbia, Kentucky; four thousand dollars from a bank in Ste. Genevieve, Missouri; two thousand dollars from the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway near Council Bluffs, Iowa; twenty-two thousand dollars from the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, Missouri; three thousand dollars from the Hot Springs stagecoach near Malvern, Arkansas. And so on. Jesse shot John Sheets in the head and heart and the banker drained off the chair; his clerk scurried into the street and the bandits fired twice, catching him fat in the arm. A cashier named R. A. C. Martin was told to open a safe and answered, “Never. I’ll die first.” “Then die it is,” said Cole and raised his dragoon revolver to Martin’s ear and fired. An iron rail was winched off its tie as a passenger train slowed on a blind curve and the locomotive tilted into the roadbed and then crashed to its side in weeds, crushing John Rafferty, the engineer, and scalding Dennis Foley, the stoker, so badly that he died within weeks. The six thieves were dressed in the white hoods and raiment of the Ku Klux Klan—for what reason, no one knows—and collected three thousand dollars in compensation for putting an end to two lives.

Stopping the increasingly common robberies became so paramount that the United States Secret Service and private detectives from Chicago and St. Louis joined the Pinkerton Detective Agency in stalking the James-Younger gang. Allan Pinkerton’s son William established headquarters in Kansas City and split his operatives between pursuit of the Youngers and the Jameses in the counties of Jackson and Clay; and yet, though many could recognize the gunslingers and their regular sanctuaries were known, investigators only came to misfortune when they got close to the gang.

John W. Whicher was assigned Dr. Samuels’s farm and, upon receiving a spy’s report that the James boys were present, walked there with a carpet bag and in poor man’s clothes on a cold night in March. He’d just crossed the wooden bridge over Clear Creek when he caught a slight noise, and then Jesse jerked the man’s chin back with his wrist and asked, “You looking for something?”

Arthur McCoy and Jim Anderson (Bloody Bill’s brother) scrabbled up from under the bridge with guns out and Whicher said, “I’m only looking for work. I was hoping to find a place on a farm. You happen to know of any?”

“Yep,” said Jesse. “I know just the right place for you. And Satan’s got it all prepared.”

Whicher was seen again at 3 a.m. near Owen’s Ferry, his mouth gagged and his legs tied astride a gray horse; and on March 11th his body was discovered in a cistern, still gagged and riddled with bullets. A note was pinned to his lapel that read: “This is the way we treat Chicago detectives; if you’ve got any more send them along.”

Only days later Captain Louis Lull and two associates were overtaken in the rain-soaked woods of St. Clair County by John and Jim Younger. They cocked shotguns and ordered the operatives to drop their pistols. They complied. But then Lull’s right hand glided down to a derringer and he shot it at John Younger, cutting into the jugular vein so that it surged red sleeves of blood out even as the dying boy got off a shot and killed Lull. One of the scouting party sprinted away through the woods but Jim Younger only gazed at his kid brother, who was tangled under his frightened horse. He then gazed at Edwin Daniels, the man who brought the operatives there, and calmly triggered his shotgun, catching the guide in the neck.

At Gallatin an overexcited black racehorse had torn from the rail before Jesse had mounted. He was dragged forty feet on a frozen dirt street, his greatcoat lumping up near his neck like a plow collar, before he could disentangle his boot and broken ankle from the stirrup. He hopped one-footed and climbed Frank’s arm and the two brothers galloped off on one horse as the filly sulked on a church lawn, her saddle rocked over to her flank, the left stirrup clinking on the flagstones when she browsed.

The filly was incontrovertible evidence linking the James brothers to the Missouri robberies, and yet they were again supported by Major John Newman Edwards, the grandiloquent author of
Shelby and His Men
and
Noted Guerrillas, or The Warfare of the Border
, in which Frank and Jesse James were gloriously mentioned. Edwards helped Jesse inscribe a letter to Governor McClurg denying involvement in the Gallatin crimes, claiming he had not murdered John Sheets, had not even been near Daviess County, that he had sold the filly a week beforehand and could furnish a receipt; however, he could not give up just yet and risk a vigilance committee that might lynch him.

Governor, when I can get a fair trial, I will surrender myself to the civil authorities of Missouri. But I will never surrender to be mobbed by a set of blood-thirsty poltroons. It is true that during the war I was a Confederate soldier and fought under the Black Flag, but since then I have lived a respectable citizen and obeyed the laws of the United States to the best of my knowledge.

Frank James smiled uncharacteristically when he read that and commented that he thought he was guilty of all those crimes but now he was having an argument in his mind about it.

If the James-Younger gang was beginning to be looked upon by the common people as champions of the poor, it was principally due to Jesse, who was the originator of their many public relations contrivances: the claims that Southerners and clerics were never robbed, the occasional donations to charity, the farewell hurrahs in honor of the Confederate dead. The James-Younger gang stole the treasures from each ticket holder in the Hot Springs Stagecoach except George Crump, of Memphis, who revealed he had been a soldier under the Stainless Banner. When they robbed the Iron Mountain Railroad at Gads Hill, they searched the passengers’ hands for calluses because they had purportedly forsworn harming workingmen or ladies in order to concentrate on “the money and valuables of the plug-hat gentlemen.” After ransacking the express car there, Jesse inserted an envelope into the conductor’s coat pocket and said in practiced words, “This contains an exact account of the robbery. We prefer this to be published in the newspapers rather than the grossly exaggerated accounts that usually appear after one of our jobs.”

The press release declared: “The most daring on record—the southbound train on the Iron Mountain Railroad was robbed here this evening by several heavily armed men and robbed of dollars.”

It rehashed their methods and indicated the direction of their flight and the colors of their horses, concluding, “There is a hell of an excitement in this part of the country.”

They rode west across Missouri, staying on farms overnight, one account saying they “conducted themselves as gentlemen, paying for everything they got,” and that fact alone seemed by then enough to certify that the criminals were the James-Younger gang; and yet when the St. Louis
Dispatch
printed its story implicating them in the robbery, Major Edwards sent a Western Union telegram to the city editor, saying: “Put nothing more in about Gads Hill. The report of yesterday was remarkable for two things—utter stupidity and total untruth.”

At the 1872 Kansas City Fair, Jesse and Frank and Cole brushed ahead of an idled line to the entrance gate, fastening red neckerchiefs over their noses. Cole and Frank extracted revolvers from beneath linen dusters and Jesse snatched the ticket seller’s tin cash box. He knelt in the dirt and pilfered over nine hundred dollars in greenbacks and coins as Cole and Frank rotated with irons and menacing looks. A thousand gawkers milled around, amazed by the convincingness of the actors and the skit as a ticket seller ran from his booth and wrestled Jesse for the cash box, beckoning for assistance. Cole knocked a woman aside and shot at the seller and missed but ruined the leg of a small girl. And then the three outlaws shoved through the crowd, unhitched their horses, and cantered off.