I am Mrs. Jesse James Read online

  I am

  Mrs. Jesse James

  I am

  Mrs. Jesse James

  a novel

  PAT WAHLER

  Blank Slate Press | St. Louis, MO

  Blank Slate Press | Saint Louis, MO 63110

  Copyright © 2018 Pat Wahler

  All rights reserved.

  For information, contact:

  Blank Slate Press

  an imprint of Amphorae Publishing Group

  4168 Hartford Street, Saint Louis, MO 63116

  Publisher’s Note: Th is book is a work of fi ction. Any characters, places, incidents, or dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are used in a purely fi ctional manner.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Set in Adobe Caslon Pro

  Interior designed by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Cover Design by Kristina Blank Makansi

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941568

  ISBN: 9781943075461

  For my family.

  Without you, nothing makes sense.

  Contents

  Kearney, Missouri

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Afterword

  Author’s Note

  Sources

  Reader’s Guide

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Kearney, Missouri

  April 6, 1882

  A flash of sunlight glints off the polished coffin as four men, their skin dripping with sweat, bear his remains toward the grave. Zerelda walks next to me, a formidable figure dressed in black crepe. Yet even though she sniffles and mutters, her back is straight as an arrow. Two young children follow us, their eyes red and cheeks damp.

  Life around me appears ordinary. Chickens peck the ground for bugs. Bushes unfurl new green leaves. Grass grows soft and lush. Yellow tulips fringe the porch, and white blooms dot my favorite dogwood tree. The rich scent of rain-dampened earth permeates the air while robins chirp and chase each other in their annual mating rituals. The beauty of such an uncommonly warm spring afternoon seemed oddly discordant with the occasion.

  On such a day, how can I be burying my husband?

  I feel the watchful eyes of the hundreds of people gathered within sight of the old farmhouse. Some sit on wagons, others stand in respectful silence. Most were drawn here, I suspect, by the lure of sensational headlines. Perspiration glues my black silk dress against me, and dampness gathers on my forehead. I hold a handkerchief balled in one hand, but shrink against lifting my widow’s veil to dab my face. The idea of exposing raw lines of grief to those who may have come to witness such a sight makes my stomach roil.

  Our sad cortege moves slowly, until, finally, we stand at the burial site. Men have already dug a deep hole under the shade of a towering coffee bean tree. Zerelda peers into the darkness and nods.

  She had ordered the men to dig the grave no less than seven feet deep, and in a voice trembling with anguish and rage, later told me why. “We must keep him safe from vandals and ghoulish robbers who would try to steal his body away from us.”

  That macabre thought had not occurred to me before. Yet remembering how others had scavenged through our home, I knew Zerelda was right to worry.

  After she decreed he be laid to rest at the farm, the place where he grew up, rather than in a distant cemetery, I gave my assent without discussion. It would be a fitting place for him to sleep, for I knew Zerelda would defend his grave with the same passion with which she had defended his life.

  The four men wrap thick braids of rope around the casket. Their forearms bulge as they lower it into the ground.

  My brother, Robert, awkwardly pats my arm and whispers, “Zee, are you all right?”

  I nod, and Pastor Martin steps forward, holding a Bible in one hand and fist full of mud in the other. With his graying hair and spectacles perched at the end of a long nose, he reminds me of a poster I’d once seen of a sad elephant from Barnum’s circus. I can’t bear to watch the clods fall from his hand, so I close my eyes and distract myself by trying to think of something, anything, else.

  Memories materialize in moments, and I lose myself in the sounds of hooves thumping on a dirt pathway packed hard as stone. Fists pounding at a door. The crack and echo of a gunshot. Angry voices screaming for revenge. And the most fearsome memory of all—blood flowing in a dark, sticky pool of despair on the floor. If I’d spoken sooner, we might not now be standing beside a deep and dark grave.

  My hands clench so tightly, the nails cut into my palms. I long for a different image to hold, one that will comfort me.

  As though in answer to a prayer, the shadowy vision of a tall, sandy-haired young man appears. He walks toward me with the muscled stride of a horseman, then he laughs and reaches for my hand. His silver-blue eyes snap with youthful excitement from a time before anger and hate changed him into someone neither reporters nor detectives nor gossipmongers would ever capture accurately. The corners of my mouth turn up in a smile even though my lips are so parched they split when I move them. No one knew the man I married.

  Truth be told, I never completely understood him either. Could it have been within my power to change destiny? For I know his past molded him into who he would become.

  Just as my own past formed me.

  1

  Love should blossom before marriage, not the other way around. My conclusion seemed so obvious, I turned to Lucy and repeated it out loud.

  My sister, six years my senior, served as both a second mother and dearest companion. Her blue eyes sparkled at the prospect of a lively debate while she and I stirred a mountain of shirts, pants, dresses, and linens in a kettle of soapy water over an open fire. Without the element of diversion, washing the mountain of laundry from a large family in addition to dirty clothes our boarders paid us to clean, made for tedious work.

  “How can you say that, Zee? You know how things are with Papa and Mama.”

  “That was different.” I pulled a sheet from the kettle with a stick so it could cool. “Mama’s parents were gone and she had to provide for her brothers and sisters. What choice did she have but to marry the man Uncle Drury picked for her?”

  “Yes, indeed. And have you ever seen two people more in love than our parents?”

  My sister knew I couldn’t deny her question. I’d seen few marriages in my life as amiable as the one of John and Mary Mimms. Yet content as they were, I longed for a more adventurous future. Wringing the wet sheet, I opened it and snapped the fabric against a cloudless azure sky. The scent of soap mingled with sweet blooms from Mama’s lilac bushes. “They were lucky. Not all arranged marriages turn out so well.”

  Lucy chuckled. “From what I’ve heard, even matches that start with honeyed affection can turn sour over time.”

  “Well, that won’t happ
en for me.” I slung the sheet over a line stretched between two trees.

  Lucy ducked her head and tried, unsuccessfully, to hide a smile. “Now that you’re fifteen and Mama lets you put up your hair, I imagine she’ll soon allow you to be courted. Old Mr. Locke would likely make a suitable escort for you at the summer cotillion.”

  I pursed my mouth as though I’d bitten into a lemon. Our boarder, gray-haired William Locke, looked much closer to Papa’s age than mine.

  “You may have Mr. Locke for yourself, Lucy,” I said. “I can scarcely abide to look at his face, especially when he spits a wad of tobacco on the ground. Soon enough I’ll find my own beau.”

  I stared in defiance toward the boarding house. The large, two-story building sat anchored on flat ground between tall sycamore trees bursting with new green leaves. Their graceful branches shaded a wide front porch that stretched from one end of the house to the other. At some point, a kitchen had been tacked onto the side as though an afterthought. On its other side, a sturdy log barn stood near a pen housing chickens that fluffed their feathers and pecked busily on the ground. Beyond the yard a thick grove of trees hid the Missouri river from our view.

  Wisps of burnished gold hair strayed around my face, and I pushed them away. At the age of fifteen, I’d begun to think about beaus. Over the past few months, any number of eligible young men in town had cast glances my way or hastened to hold the door for me when I entered the mercantile. They provided a much more appealing sight than Mr. Locke.

  Lucy clucked her tongue and hung a striped cotton skirt on the line. “Papa and Mama may have something to say about that. You know they believe parents are in the best position to ensure girls are well settled.”

  “I know Papa won’t force me to do anything without my consent.” I turned to her and lifted my fist toward the heavens in dramatic fashion. “Lucy, I vow to you this moment that I will never marry for any reason other than true love.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes, but I thrust my chin forward. I’d never been more certain of anything. I knew what I wanted in life. Whenever possible, I stole away from the bustle of the boarding house to read, and the books I selected at the lending library or secretly shared with friends presented a much different picture than that of a farm wife or boarding house matron. Even though Papa wanted me to study Scripture, I preferred to escape from the woes of the day in my hiding place on the far side of the barn, well out of Mama’s sight, where I could rest my bare feet in soft green grass before even turning the first page.

  Any story that whisked me away and ignited my imagination became a favorite, but the most dog-eared book I acquired was one written by Miss Emily Brontë. Wuthering Heights, the tale of tragic love and shocking madness, appealed to a side of me my parents would have been quite unhappy to discover. Many considered the book controversial, but I saw past the violence, stark cruelty, and obsession with revenge into the very heart of Heathcliff, and soon began to dream of finding a hero who would become my own Heathcliff, although I wrote for myself a much happier ending.

  Lucy and I hung the last of the wet clothes, and then dragged the empty baskets back to the boarding house. She and my sister Nancy, would change bed linens while I helped Mama and Aunt Susan in the kitchen. I smiled and waved at my older brothers Robert, Thomas, and David, who were in the field behind the boarding house, preparing the ground for a plow. Not far from them, sunlight gleamed off the axes of Uncle Thomas and Papa as they chopped wood. Lucy glanced at me when I giggled. Sometimes even I struggled over names when we talked about a family member. Papa and Mama had chosen to baptize their large brood from names found within our extended family, which created no small amount of confusion.

  That included my own name. Mama chose it to honor her sister-in-law, Zerelda, the woman who wed Mama’s younger brother Robert James. Mama held a special affection for Robert and grieved for many months after he died of a fever while on a preaching mission in California. With no money to bring his body home to Missouri where Aunt Zerelda and her three young children—Frank, Jesse, and Susan—waited, Mama’s beloved brother was buried in a pauper’s grave, far from the people he loved. Even though my parents christened me Zerelda, they soon shortened the name to Zee, either to avoid confusion, or because no one would ever presume to give such a nickname to my formidable aunt.

  But now, silly distractions over names were immaterial. While I secreted away my novels and dreamt of adventure and true love, talk of secession swirled around me, like wayward ripples on a quiet pond. I knew most of Missouri kept their loyalty steadfast with the newly elected President Lincoln, but his plans to grant freedom to the slaves created sympathy for the Southern cause in rural Harlem. Many of our neighbors had farms that relied on the labor of slaves. We had no slaves ourselves, but I remembered my early life in Kentucky. Growing hemp and tobacco required many hands and we could not have managed the farm without their help.

  On the day Papa answered God’s call to become a Methodist minister, he freed his slaves and then bought passage for our family on a steamboat bound for Missouri. The smell of river mud and fish made my stomach roil, and I didn’t feel better until my feet were planted on firm ground in Clay County. We’d come to help Mama’s brother Thomas and his wife Susan run their boarding house. No one dreamed the business would keep us bustling from daybreak to bedtime, although Papa reserved Sundays—his one day of rest—for preaching.

  The endless supply of laundry, clothes to be mended, cooking, and cleaning made me long for the slower pace of life as a child in Kentucky. But if Papa and Mama taught us anything, it was the value of hard work and the sanctity of family obligations. And never more so, than at a time when each day brought greater turbulence.

  The usual topics of conversation in Harlem—farming and the cost of supplies for the men, recipes and childbirth for the women—changed by 1860. Abraham Lincoln’s election brought fear over what changes he might order. The possibilities were openly discussed everywhere, even at cotillions. On Sunday mornings, Papa preached, not only on Scripture, but on the foolhardy nature of the new president’s attempts to force his will upon the people. Papa’s parishioners—mostly poor farmers—came to the boarding house to listen. They stood under the shade of the sycamore trees and nodded in agreement when he spoke with such passion, birds in the trees grew silent. I listened to him but did not worry too much about the matter. Brave words from my father and older brothers were designed to convince me I had nothing to fear. They claimed the disagreement would not come to war. And if it did, I harbored a child’s notion the matter would be settled sooner rather than later.

  Yet unsettling tidings came to us through weary travelers and the few newspapers Uncle Thomas could obtain. First South Carolina seceded from the Union, followed in short order by Mississippi, Florida, Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Texas. A shadow of doubt flickered in Papa’s eyes, while Mama’s darkened with fear over what might happen next. In an eerie sense of foreboding, I wondered if we were teetering on the edge of a precipice.

  2

  Within months of South Carolina’s exit from the Union, news arrived that Major Robert Anderson had marched his small regiment from Fort Moultrie toward Fort Sumter in the Charleston harbor. They didn’t leave even when the Confederate states ordered them to vacate. General P.T.G. Beauregard answered Anderson’s refusal by raining fire and brimstone on the fort until a white flag of surrender raised. Southerners rejoiced at the nearly bloodless victory, but Papa and my brother David had differing ideas about what might come next. They discussed the confrontation while I helped them clear the ground and break up the soil for planting our garden.

  “That’ll be an end to it,” David crowed as he punched his shovel into the dirt. “The Federals will slink away and leave us in peace. They won’t force the matter if the people don’t wish to remain in the Union.”

  Papa sighed. “I hope you are right. Yet I am not sure the Union will let the South slip away so easily.”

  Something I’d seen in
town that morning prompted me to jump into their conversation. “When Mama and I were at the mercantile, we heard Mr. Smithson and Mr. Kerry shouting at each other about treason. Mr. Kerry drew back his fist, and the clerk took hold of his arm just in time to stop a fight. What could make them so angry?”

  “Daughter, we live in a state that voted not to secede. But no state can control the opinions of its citizens. Some of our neighbors are loyal to the North. Others believe the South is right.”

  I kicked a clod of dirt. “So people who were our friends are now our enemies?”

  “In many cases, I fear so.”

  David straightened his shoulders. “Missouri should have seceded with the other states. Abe Lincoln’s got no right to tell us what to do.”

  “He does as he sees fit, even as we must do the same,” Papa replied while tugging hard at a stubborn weed. “But in case the conflict comes to war, there are things we should do to prepare.” He straightened and squinted his brows together. “In my childhood, what I remember most of war is being hungry. We must shore up a supply of food and squirrel it away in the woods.”

  Papa and Uncle Thomas lost no time in preparing for the worst. They set aside a portion of our supplies and hid them deep in the woods. And it wasn’t a day too soon. Newspaper headlines announced that President Lincoln had called for seventy-five thousand volunteers to put down the Southern rebellion. In response, some of the young men of Harlem decided to march away and join the president’s Federal army. Others followed Governor Jackson’s call to be in Missouri’s state guard, which had a decided leaning toward the Confederacy. Their choices divided neighbors and deepened the rift in our community.

  The number of people who came for preaching fell to a handful. Most were women and children, along with a few white-haired gentlemen, who huddled together in a grim knot. Papa spoke of keeping faith in God no matter our fears, but I began to wonder at his faith. So many prayers had already been sent to the Almighty, yet still we were facing war. I suspected similar prayers had been offered in Federal homes, yet all our petitions had gone unanswered.