Northfield (20 page)

The Schofield had returned to Jesse’s right hand, but first he pointed at a light perhaps a half mile away.

“See that farm, Doc?” he asked.

“Yes.”

Now the .45 aimed at my head, again.

“You reckon you can run all that way and not turn around? Because I’ll kill you if you turn around.”

“So long, Doc,” Frank James told me. “Your shoes don’t fit worth a damn.”

I did not wait to formulate a reply. I ran— Frank’s worn, ruined boots, three sizes too large for my small feet, flapping in the night. At any instant, I expected to feel bullets tear into my back, and, as I stumbled, staggered, and loped in an awkward gait, the events of my kidnapping pulled taut my nerves. My legs buckled from the strain, fear enveloped me, and the light from the farmhouse did not appear to be drawing closer.

They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me. They’ll kill me, shoot me in the back.

They didn’t, though. Fancy that. I would survive the ordeal and remove Mrs. Mann’s goiter in the afternoon, but not before sending a posse after my kidnappers. Jesse and Frank James would survive to reach Missouri, though, where they would rob and murder again.

But that was in the future. This was tonight.

I ran northeast. The James brothers galloped south.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-T
HREE
S
HERIFF
A
RA
B
URTON

The November morning brought a hint of snow, gray clouds blocking out the sun, and a crisp wind tried to cool the packed Rice County Courthouse room in Faribault. As my deputy escorted the defendants inside through the side door, their chains rattling, every man’s head craned to get a glimpse at the three Younger brothers, and I read disappointment in almost every spectator’s face.

Cole, Bob, and Jim Younger were freshly shaven, clean, wearing new clothes donated by various Faribault ladies. These men didn’t look like killers, didn’t resemble the ragged, wretched souls who had disembarked the train back on September 23
^rd
. Cole was practically bald, and the only evidence of any grave wounds that could be detected were the small bandages plastered to Jim Younger’s face. While my deputy removed their manacles, I stepped forward, took Mrs. Twyman, an aunt of the killers, by the arm and escorted her to the defense table. Retta Younger, sister of the brothers, walked behind us. I let them sit within the bar beside attorneys Batchelder, Buckham, and Rutledge.

The courtroom didn’t stay cool, not as more and more people crammed inside, hugging the back walls. Mrs. Twyman began fanning herself with Jim Younger’s hat, and, when the clock chimed ten, I stepped to the judge’s bench and called court to order, the Honorable Judge Samuel Lord presiding.

“Thomas Coleman Younger,” Judge Lord said in his stern baritone, “step forward.” The big man looked nervous, placing his hands behind his back as he limped to the judge’s bench, then dropping them at his side. He couldn’t even look the judge in the eye. “You are charged with the crimes of accessory to the murder in the first degree of Joseph Lee Heywood on the Seventh of September in the year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Six in the city of Northfield, state of Minnesota; with felonious assault with intent to kill one Alonzo Bunker on the Seventh of September in the year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Six in the city of Northfield, state of Minnesota; with the armed robbery of the First National Bank on the Seventh of September in the year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Six in the city of Northfield, state of Minnesota, and with the murder in the first degree of Nicolaus Gustavson on the Seventh of September in the year of our Lord Eighteen Hundred and Seventy-Six in the city of Northfield, state of Minnesota. How do you plead?”

My right hand slid into my coat pocket, and I fingered the note Cole Younger had written me the night before. I had visited him in his cell, told him it would go easier on him if he revealed the men who had gotten away, the men everyone knew to be the James brothers but could not prove. Younger wrote a note and handed it to me in silence. I knew what the note said. I knew how Younger would plead. I knew the sentence the judge would hand down, but still I found myself, like the rest of them in the courtroom that morning, holding my breath.

The prisoners hadn’t been in my custody long before Adelbert Ames paid them a visit. Ames had charged Cole Younger with the murder of the Swede, Nicolaus Gustavson, during the robbery.

“How many men did you kill, Governor,” Younger said at first, “down in Mississippi, you carpetbagging son-of-a-bitch?”

“I shot down no one, damn you. You killed the Swede. Murdered him!”

“That’s a damn’ lie!” the big man roared. “If anyone killed him, it was you, you and them city folks firing shots every which way. We kept shooting in the air, trying to keep innocent people from getting shot. It was you who killed that Swede.”

“Liar! Liar and murderer!”

I had to pull Ames out of the cell, led him down the corridor. Tensions ran high back then, but now it was mid-November, and the trial had finally begun.

“Guilty.” Cole Younger spoke so softly I heard a newspaper reporter on the first row ask a fellow journalist: “What did he say?”

“So be it,” Judge Lord said, and called Jim Younger forward after ordering Cole back to his seat.

The charges were mostly the same, the exception being that Jim and Bob would only be charged with accessory to murder of the Swede. Relief swept over the faces of many in the crowd, but others looked disappointed, wanting to carry the fight on forever. At last, Cole Younger looked at ease, too. Jim tried to act a little more cocksure, but I’ve yet to see a man who could look a judge in the eye without his voice quaking. Jim did the best he could—his speech badly impaired from the bullet wound taken at Hanska Slough—and the judge instructed him to be seated after writing down the guilty plea. Bob Younger would plead guilty, as well.

Cole Younger would talk to anyone at first, although we both restricted visitors after Mr. Ames’s visit, but Jim stayed in his room, his mood dangerously low. He wouldn’t even speak to his sister and aunt when they visited, just laid on his cot and stared at the ceiling, crying sometimes, consumed by gloom.

Bob, the youngest, had been the most popular with the ladies. I had boxes and bouquets piled on my desk, sent by young women too shy to ask to visit the outlaw himself. So many presents came, I had to parcel them out, even tried to give some to Jim Younger, but he had remained morose, till that morning in the courtroom when he put on an act.

“The charges having been read, and the defendants having entered pleas of guilt to all charges, it is my duty to pass sentence on you,” Judge Lord said.

My fingers still touched the note.

“Have you anything to say on your behalf?”

Retta Younger sobbed, dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief.

Some people in Rice County thought the Youngers should have been charged with another crime.

Back in October, Deputy Frank Glaser was guarding the outside of the jail, when another deputy, Henry Kapanick, started walking toward him on the night of the 2
^nd
. You have to understand how things were then. Rumors kept spreading that the James brothers, or other bushwhackers, would sack Faribault the way they had almost wiped out Lawrence during the war. Maybe I should have asked for help from the Army instead of pinning badges on inexperienced civilians and giving them rifles and pistols.

Late that night Kapanick walked toward a fairly frightened Glaser. Turns out that Kapanick’s pals had bet him $5 he could get to the jail without a problem. Perhaps we should have put those friends—friends, hell—on trial for what happened.

Glaser said, and I have no reason to doubt him, shaken up as he was after that incident, he spotted the figure and called out to stop.

“Who are you?” Glaser said when the man kept walking.

“Don’t you know I’m a policeman?” the man said, still walking.

“Stop!” Glaser cried. “I don’t know you!” He brought up his rifle, and, when Kapanick reached inside his breast pocket, Glaser said he feared the man was pulling a revolver or knife. Scared for his life, Glaser pulled the trigger.

The buried Henry Kapanick the following afternoon, and an inquest found that Glaser had acted in self-defense.

I just wondered when this would all end.

As three Younger brothers shook their heads, Bob Younger answered: “No, Your Honor. Nothing to say.”

The judge grunted. “It becomes my duty, then, to pass sentence upon you,” he said. “I have no words of comfort for you or desire to reproach or deride you. While the law leaves you life, all its pleasures, all its hopes, all its joys are gone out from you, and all that is left is the empty shell.”

“‘Leaves you life.’ What does that mean?” someone in the gallery whispered. “Ain’t they hangin’ ’em?”

It was the Madelia lawyer, Thomas Rutledge, who had first informed the prisoners of Minnesota law. Plead guilty to first degree murder, and the statutes demand life imprisonment, with the possibility of parole after ten years. Plead not guilty, and upon conviction—and no one doubted a jury would convict the Youngers—the death sentence could be meted out.

“Is that true, Sheriff?” Cole Younger asked me.

“It’s the law,” I conceded.

“Life or death, huh?”

“That’s the game you’ve been playing all along, Cole.”

“Silence in this courtroom!” Judge Lord roared, and the whisperer sank into his seat. “Thomas Coleman Younger, I hereby sentence you to spend the rest of your natural life in the state prison of Minnesota in Stillwater. May God have mercy on your soul.”

The courtroom didn’t remain silent for long. Bob and Jim Younger were also sentenced to life, and hurriedly we placed the manacles on them while their sister and aunt bawled, chained the prisoners together as the judge pounded his gavel and bellowed for silence, then gave up and adjourned court. We led the Youngers through the side door, hurried them to the jail, and locked them in their cells.

“Thanks, Sheriff!” Cole Younger called out to me as I left the corridor. “Reckon I still thought they’d hang us.”

“Perhaps you could have gotten a shorter sentence,” I told him, “had you named your.…”

He was smiling, shaking his head, and I did not finish. Outside, I withdrew the note he had written.

It’s finally over, I thought. Snow had started falling, Thanksgiving was right around the corner, and I always found the first snowfall to be cleansing, purifying, beautiful. A church choir had gathered around the outside of the jail and started singing “Are You Washed in the Blood of the Lamb?”

I unfolded the note.

Be true to your friends
if the heavens fall.

Cole Younger

Folding the note again, sliding it into my coat pocket, I pulled up my collar, and walked home.

E
PILOGUE
C
OLE
Y
OUNGER

Seven minutes…seemed like seven lifetimes.

Maybe it was, too. Seven lifetimes. Seven lives.

I think about that now, as this train carries me home, southward, at last back to Missouri, after twenty-five years in the Stillwater prison and a couple more as a paroled old fool.

Seven lives. Count ’em.

Joe Heywood, the fellow inside the Northfield bank. I’ve sworn that Charlie Pitts killed the cashier, figuring how Charlie wouldn’t mind, being dead and all, and I’ve sworn that the James boys was nowhere with us in Minnesota, that we’d latched on to a couple of no-accounts named Wood and Howard, and that they’re both dead now, one killed in an act of violence down in Arizona and the other claimed by fever. I’ve sworn lots of things. Even placed my hand on the Good Book and said that I had nothing to do with the killing of that Swede.

Hell, I killed the Swede. Don’t even know why. Lost my temper, saw my brothers getting shot up. And my best friend, ol’ Buck, he laid the banker low, and I’ll never know why. Not sure even Buck knows why he done it. But he did. And it’s over. Nothing can bring either one of ’em back.

Joe Heywood and the Swede, Gustavson. That’s two lives.

Bill Stiles and those loyal boys—Clell Miller, smoking that pipe, and Charlie Pitts, telling me that he could die as game as us Youngers. Three more. That makes five.

Then there’s my brothers.

When we pleaded guilty, avoiding the noose, they raised a ruction all over Minnesota. Figured we’d get maybe ten years, if we behaved ourselves, and that we done. But Yankees can be hard-pressed to forget. They never wanted us to set foot out of prison alive. Said they’d see us all dead.

Well, Brother Bob, he was the first to go. Just never did get over that chest wound he took at Hanska Slough. Come down with consumption, a death sentence after all. He was always asking us if we’d forgive him, if Jim and I would accept his apologies for getting us in this fix, that it was all his fault, on account he hadn’t listened to us, but we told Bob he wasn’t to blame. Jim and me, being older, should have made him listen. Besides, we didn’t have to ride north with him. Family, like Jim used to say.

Stillwater ain’t no place for a lunger, but Bob lasted longer than most give him. In the summer of ’89, the old sawbones at the prison hospital told Bob and the rest of us that he was a goner, said he could go back to his cell or wait it out in the hospital. Bob said he’d just as soon stay in the hospital. We sent off a wire to Sister Retta, and she come up.

For the deathwatch.

In the early evening of September 16
^th
, Bob asked Retta, Jim, and me to come be with him, that his time had come. A deputy warden sat in there with us. Bob…hell, I wouldn’t have knowed it was him if you hadn’t told me, if I hadn’t seen him wasting away all them thirteen hard years in prison. His eyes was plumb yellow, nothing left of him much more’n skin and bones.

He heard this bird chirping at the window, and he turned to me and said: “Lift me up, Cole. I want to see the sky once more.” For once, he didn’t cough his words out, said them clear, if softly, hoarsely.

That caused Retta to start crying, but Bob told her to hush, that he was going to a better place. He smiled. I hadn’t seen him smile in ages.

“You know, Cole,” he said, and this time he coughed some, but when he recovered, he went on: “I think when I die, maybe my soul….” Another coughing spell, this one worse than the others. “I…think…maybe my soul will rest a while….” More coughing. “On that hillside…. You…see…it?”

“I see it,” I told him.

“Just a little while,” he said. “Then I’ll…go…on…to heaven.”

He lasted three, four more hours, but didn’t say much till he whispered in my ear to tell his girl, Maggie, that he was thinking of her. Finally Brother Bob just closed his eyes and went into that sleep we all must sleep.

He wasn’t but thirty-four.

They shipped him back home, to Lee’s Summit, and Retta wrote me that there must have been some 800 folks who come over to the Baptist Church that September 20
^th
for Bob’s funeral. So Robert Ewing Younger was laid to rest.

I figured that would be the same for Jim and me, but Fate took pity on us poor Southerners. I think Buck, my pard Frank James, he was behind some of it. I’ll get to that directly.

Well, the politicians got together in April of ’01 and writ up this bill that said life convicts could be released after serving thirty-five years, lessen time off for good behavior. That was for me and Jim. The Northfield lawmakers didn’t want no part of this, but the bill passed.

On July 14, 1901, Jim and me left Stillwater prison after twenty-five years. It was a Sunday morning. As I told the newspaper boys: “I ain’t got a grudge against any human being alive or dead. Men, I’m happy.” I meant it, too.

’Course, being a parole man means you ain’t nothing in the eyes of the law. Can’t do nothing. Can’t marry. Can’t leave the state of Minnesota. I got along fairly well, working these bum jobs, going to the theater, but Jim, he had a tough go of it.

He never could talk good after getting his mouth shot up so bad at Hanska Slough. Man just never could find no level place to be. I’m talking about his emotions. When he got up, he was way up. But when he got down on himself, he was lower than a snake’s belly, and, since Northfield, he was mostly low.

Jim fell in love, you see, with this sweetheart of a newspaper reporter, and it was hard on ’em both. The girl’s parents drove her out of the state, hounding her so for trying to love a murdering bushwhacker. Jim tried desperately hard to be with her, but he couldn’t marry, on account of his status as a paroled convict, and he couldn’t leave the state to be with his honey, couldn’t do nothing.

“I’m a ghost,” he once told me. “Ghost of Jim Younger, who was a man, not an extra good one, but a man. But now I’m nothing.”

He tried for one of those conditional pardons, but the law wouldn’t have none of that. Minnesota didn’t want us here, but she didn’t want us leaving, neither. Well, things got just worser and worser for my brother, and he sent off a telegraph to his honey.
Don’t write
was all it said.

Early the next morning, October 19, 1902, Jim sat at his desk in his room and shot himself in the head.

I think Jim was insane, if only temporarily so. Pained me to see his casket loaded up and shipped south, where they buried him beside Brother Bob. Jim wasn’t but fifty-four when he died at his own hand. ’Course, he had been dead long before that. Least, that’s how he figured things.

They kept that service simple, Retta said. The choir sang “Rest, Weary, Rest” and “We Shall Know Each Other There”, then took him to the cemetery, where some 150 people watched him pass.

Jim and Bob. Two more lives. That makes seven.

Seven lives…seven lifetimes.

Maybe even more. Y’all have all heard about the treacherous death of Jesse James. Dingus and Buck made it back safe, and I don’t hold no anger toward them. They was honorable men. Dingus and me had our differences, and I can’t say I liked him, but I respect a brave Southerner, and that he was. And nobody, ain’t nobody, even that son-of-a-bitch who shot Brother Bob at Hanska after he had surrendered…ain’t nobody deserving to die the way Dingus did.

Bob Ford, backed by his yellow brother Charlie, of them no-account Fords, shot him in the back of the head at his home in St. Joseph, Missouri, in 1882. His wife and young ’uns was there when they murdered him. Not that I shed no tears over Dingus’s passing. Didn’t shed no tears when I learned that Charlie Ford shot himself in ’84 or when Bob Ford got blowed apart by a shotgun somewhere in Colorado in ’92.

Buck, he surrendered after Dingus got murdered, but Buck always was the lucky one. Got acquitted in a trial down in Missouri and another one over yonder in Alabama. Minnesota wanted to get him up here for a trial, but there just wasn’t no evidence. They’d sure never get me to testify, so Frank James walked out of jail a free man and went home to be with his ma, be with his wife and strapping young son. And I think Buck had a hand in my getting out of prison. He knowed people, became a celebrity what with his trials and all, and folks started working mighty hard on getting me freed, getting me back home.

Maybe Buck figured he owed me something. I don’t know. Reckon I’ll ask him when I see him again.

I’m growing old. That’s why the Board of Pardons awarded me this conditional pardon. Maybe they’re just sick of me in Minnesota as I’m sick of being here.

It’s February 16,1903, and I’m heading home at last. Heading home to see my brothers’ graves, to see Buck, see Retta and my other sisters, mostly, I hope, to live at peace.

Some folks say I’m a hero, but I’ll tell you this, straight and true. I ain’t no hero. Ain’t no hero of nothing.

Seven minutes…seven lifetimes. Seven lives: Gustavson and Heywood. Clell, Charlie, and Stiles. Bob and Jim. Almost twenty-seven years. I’m a fifty-nine-year-old bald, fat, old man. Age makes a man wiser, they say, and, looking back, I wonder if we ever knowed what we was doing when we rode north.

Hero? Not hardly. Have I been rehabilitated? I reckon so. Has prison taught me anything? Sure, and I don’t just mean learning now to make tubs and buckets.

The train rocks its way south, and I wonder if it will take me through Northfield. Doubt it. Hope not.

Long before I ever set foot in prison I knowed one thing: I wish to hell I’d never laid eyes on that town called Northfield.