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.