The Woman Who Loved Jesse James (5 page)

I slipped my hand into the crook his elbow, surprised by the iron hardness of his muscles, aware of a growing tension within my own body. I thought of the devil and his amusements, and wondered at Jesse’s own devilment, and how he seemed to speak to every contrariness in my own soul.

“Where will you go from here?” I asked as we strolled just outside the line where light met darkness.

“Wherever I’m commanded to go. It may be a good while before I return.“

”Do you think the war will be over soon?”

“The formal battles may end soon. Conditions are bad all over, but especially in the South, and people and politicians are crying for an end to the fighting. But a treaty won’t end this fight. As long as the North insists on trampling the rights of Southerners, men like me will keep fighting.”

“I want the fighting to end,” I said. “I want life to get back to normal, to be able to buy coffee and sugar and cloth again.”

He patted my hand. “It’s natural for women to want such things. Men have to be more contrary.”

“Then you want to fight?”

“I can’t explain the feeling a good fight gives me. In the midst of battle, every sense is more keen. I feel so powerful, as if a force greater than myself is guiding my horse and firing my pistols.” He stopped and faced me, grasping me by the shoulders. “I believe God made each of us for a purpose in this life and fighting for the South is my purpose.”

“And what is my purpose?” I asked.

“Perhaps your purpose is to wait. To support the fighters.”

Then he pulled me close and kissed me, his lips firm and sure against mine. I cried out, but not in protest. Though I had never been kissed by a man before, I had never wanted anything more. I leaned toward him, pressing my body to his, feeling the hard wall of his chest, his strong arms enfolding me.

He tasted of the whiskey I knew the men had passed amongst them in a flask, and smelled of leather and gun oil and the faint tang of sweat. The stubble of his beard scraped the side of my face, and the callouses of his hands caught on the silk of my dress. Every softness in me was answered by a hardness in him, everything familiar transformed in his embrace.

I never wanted the moment to end, but of course it must. He released me and stepped back, his breathing uneven, his voice rough. “I have to go now,” he said. He retraced our steps to the elm tree, where he retrieved his hat and replaced it on his head. Then he slipped into the darkness once more.

I waited until even the echo of his footsteps had faded, unsure if I could walk on legs that felt made of jelly. I thought of what Jesse had said about going into battle and feeling as if something larger than himself had taken over. That’s what I’d felt when he had kissed me—as if someone other than me was kissing him back, pulling him close, behaving so wantonly. So
honestly
. That woman—that other me—had shaken off the bonds of demure Southern womanhood and surrendered to what she wanted. I had wanted Jesse, but now he was gone. Who knew when I’d see him again, or how much I would suffer until then?

Esme married Anthony Colquit
on a bright September morning scarcely a month after my sister’s wedding. At her request, he had grown a beard, which did a fair job of camouflaging his mole, but only served to make him look older than his years, owing to the fact that it was heavily streaked with gray. Esme professed not to mind and indeed, she looked happy as she stood in the parlor of her family’s home to say her vows. I stood up with her and wished her well, while the three Colquit children looked on with the expression of generals plotting disaster.

As happy as I was for Esme’s marriage, the loss of the company of her and my sister in the same month filled me with restlessness. Everyone was moving forward with their lives while I was plagued by uncertainty about the future. The bleak picture of myself as an old maid, spending my life by the side of my aging mother, seemed a very real and unsettling prospect. My two older sisters were married, my five older brothers either away fighting or established on their own, as my younger brothers Thomas and Henry eventually would be. And as pretty and lively as my younger sister Sallie was, I had no doubt she would marry well. I might one day soon be the only one of my siblings left at home.

For now, I welcomed the chance to run errands, escaping for at least a little while the house that might very well be my tomb. Even a trip to the general store for a packet of pins offered the opportunity to hear news and gossip, or glimpse a stranger passing through. If the storekeeper’s wife, Mrs. Riker, looked down on me, what did I care? Any chance to tweak her nose was a welcome diversion.

Mrs. Riker was absent from the store the October Saturday I next heard news of Jesse. Mother had sent me to the store for a tin of saleratus and a bottle of bluing, but I was making the errand last as long as possible, lingering amongst the sewing notions, examining cards of buttons, when a man burst into the store.

“Word just come from Centralia!” he shouted. “Bloody Bill’s done wiped out a hoard of Union soldiers.”

I froze at the mention of Bloody Bill. “Was Jesse James with him?” The words were out of my mouth before I could stop them.

But the man gave no sign that he thought my question unusual. “The James boys was with him, I hear,” he said. “Right there at the front lines. Bloody Bill had some eighty men with him. They cut the Northern Missouri rail lines and cleared the Yankees out of Boone County, then wiped out a bunch of bluecoats just returned from the Battle of Atlanta. Word is more than a hundred and fifty of the Yankees was slain in a fierce battle.”

Word of what came to be known as the Centralia Massacre soon spread. It was all anyone talked of and many of their tales featured Jesse, who was lauded as a particular hero of the day, though so many versions of the action circulated I could never be sure what, exactly, had happened.

But I pictured Jesse as Mr. Cleveland had described him, riding into battle with the reins of his horse gripped in his teeth, a loaded pistol in each hand, putting the fear of the devil into his enemies. In my mind, he was no devil, and certainly no mere man, but an angel—not the ethereal, meek harp players in the paintings in my father’s big Bible, but a powerful, beautiful, fearful being wielding a gun instead of a sword.

In less fanciful moments I knew Jesse was mortal, and subject to the same injuries as other men. In the days after that first announcement of the massacre, I combed what papers reached us, searching for mention of his name and news of his safety, but found nothing to ease my mind or satisfy my curiosity.

Finally, I resorted to asking my mother. “Have you heard from Aunt Zerelda if Frank and Jesse are safe?” I asked one evening while I struggled to darn a pair of black stockings that had already been mended so often there was more darn than sock.

“As far as I know, they’re fine,” Mother said. “Zerelda is very proud of them and talks of their heroism to everyone.”

To say that Aunt Zerelda was proud of her sons was an understatement indeed. From the time they were small she had praised her boys as the most handsome, the brightest and the best sons a woman could want. Any schoolmaster who dared to try to correct the James boys knew he would face a tongue-lashing or worse from Zerelda. Six feet tall with shoulders as broad as any man’s and a tongue twice as sharp, she reduced many a man to trembling, and the neighborhood girls had learned not to bat their eyes at Frank or Jesse, or risk Zerelda’s wrath.

“I’m glad to hear they’re safe,” I said, setting aside my darning, too weak with relief to focus on my work.

“I worry that Zerelda boasts too much,” Mother said. “She’s never been one to act meekly, but now is not the time to be so outspoken against the North. I heard just last week of a young boy being dragged through the streets of Quincy and beaten for stating a wish for the South to win the war.”

“Surely Aunt Zerelda’s suffering in jail has made her more circumspect,” I said.

My mother laughed. “My sister-in-law is not one to hold her tongue. If anything, jailing her made her more outspoken than ever. She’ll never cease to champion the cause of the South—or to sing the praises of her sons.”

I didn’t say, but I couldn’t see that championing ‘the cause’ was doing much for us. The sympathies of the entire state seemed to be shifting to the North, leaving those of us who clung to loyalty to the South isolated and in desperate straits. With so many men fighting, women had to work in the fields. Slaves were abandoning their masters and many farms fell into disrepair. My father preached about the darkness before the dawn, but I saw no sign of light.

In late October, Major Price’s troops were defeated in the Battle of Westport and Confederate forces were driven from Missouri. Three days later, a Union Scout named Samuel Cox captured and murdered Bloody Bill. The rest of the guerrillas, including Jesse, were said to be on the run.

That winter was the hardest we’d yet endured, with no word from Frank or Jesse and no sign of the war’s end. We ate a wild turkey my father shot for Christmas dinner. It was the first fresh meat we’d had in months. I made a duster out of the feathers and presented it to my mother, who gave me a pair of stockings she’d knit out of a vest of hers she’d unraveled.

In January, word came down that Aunt Zerelda had been banished from the state, forbidden to live here on pain of death. She was staying in Nebraska with friends, and sent frequent letters declaring her hatred of the Northerners who would persecute an innocent woman so. My mother read the letters, then burned them in the stove, unwilling for their venomous words to taint our family by association.

In April, the final blow came. General Lee surrendered at Appomattox Courthouse. The Confederacy was dissolved and everyone was required to swear an oath of allegiance to the Union.

Many did so gladly, anxious for peace and hopeful for a return to the prosperity we had known before the war. But our oaths were not enough for the federal troops who now descended upon our part of the state. These men went out of their way to take offense and to mete out punishment. It was as if the victor in a horse race had turned around and trampled the loser.

Still, I was
naïve
enough to believe those I loved would be safe. My father had an excellent reputation as a man of God, and my mother was known for helping anyone who needed nursing or a hot meal, or assistance of any kind. I was no longer allowed to come and go as I pleased, without my father or brothers accompanying me. I chafed at these restrictions, but I recognized their sense. The Union men were a rough lot, and not to be trusted.

But all my innocence was shattered on the day in May when my younger brother, Thomas, raced into the house, face flushed and eyes wide with excitement. “The militia men have taken Mrs. Peabody!” he shouted.

I almost dropped the kettle of blackberries I’d just removed from the stove. “Taken her? Taken her where?” I asked.

“It happened last night.” Thomas snatched a blackberry from a bowl on the table and popped it into his mouth. At eighteen, he was a charmer who could talk himself out of almost any trouble, and he was a favorite of my mother. “I heard folks talking about it in town just now.”

“Who took her?” I asked. “And where did they take her?”

“Some militiamen put her on a boat early this morning. Folks said they’d bloodied her nose and she was wearing nothing but her shimmy and a petticoat. They hung a sign around her neck that said “Confederate Whore.” He glanced at Mother, ready to dodge any blows she might mete out for using such language.

But Mother was too distressed over his news to scold him. “Where was the Sheriff while all this was happening?” she asked, her expression grim.

Thomas shrugged. “I guess he wasn’t there.”

With trembling hands, I stripped off my apron and flung it to the floor. “I have to go see,” I said.

“Sister, no!”

But I ignored my mother’s words, running out of the house and down the road toward Mrs. Peabody’s cabin. Tears blinded me as I ran, the horror of my friend’s disgrace filling my head.

Ever since President Lincoln’s assassination the month before, times had been hard as ever on anyone who formerly sided with the South. Groups of men—former Union soldiers and militiamen—had taken it upon themselves to punish those they deemed not sufficiently loyal to the Union. But why would they attack a defenseless woman who had never harmed a soul?

By the time I reached the cabin my side ached and my hair had come undone. Before I even entered the yard I saw that the jasmine arbor had been pulled from the porch, and the front door hung loose from its hinges. I heard footsteps pounding behind me and turned to see Thomas. “I figured I’d better come with you,” he said.

I nodded, grateful for his company in the eerie silence of this once-familiar cabin. Slowly, we walked up onto the porch and into the house. Broken pottery littered the front room, the remains of a tea set that had once held pride of place in a corner cupboard. Furniture was overturned, the drapes ripped from the windows. In the kitchen, sugar crunched under our feet and flour drifted over everything like lime dust.

Thomas stepped into the bedroom first, then blocked the doorway. “Don’t go in there, Sister,” he said. His face was pale, but he was doing his best to be manly.

I shoved him aside and stepped into a scene of more chaos. The bedclothes were dragged to the floor, the dressing table mirror shattered. The silver dresser set Mrs. Peabody had prized was gone, along with a blown-glass bird that had been a gift from Mr. Henry.

Only when I had absorbed these things did I recognize the other, more grisly evidence of what had happened here—the things Thomas had tried to keep me from seeing. Frayed rope hung from the four posts of the bed, knotted, then cut with a knife, as if someone had been tied there. Rusty stains flecked the linens of the bed, along with a single muddy print from a man’s boot. I turned away, fresh sobs escaping as my imagination filled in the story behind these ugly details.

Thomas took my arm and led me back onto the porch. The swing had been chopped to splinters, so we sat side by side on the top step. He gave me his handkerchief and I struggled to control my sobs. “What else did people in town say happened?” I asked. “Tell me everything.”

“There’s nothing else to tell,” he said. “They said she was put on the boat at dawn, so the militiamen must have come here some time during the night.”