The Woman Who Loved Jesse James Read online

  Table of Contents

  The Woman Who Loved Jesse James

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Conclusion

  Afterward

  About the Author

  Blurb

  “I never meant to fall in love with Jesse James, but I might as well have tried to stop a tornado or a prairie fire. The summer that sealed our fate, when we saw each other with new eyes and our love began to grow, Jesse was all heat and light, and I was tinder waiting for a match.”

  Zee Mimms was just nineteen in 1864—the daughter of a stern Methodist minister in Missouri—when she fell in love with the handsome, dashing, and already notorious Jesse. He was barely more than a teenager himself, yet had ridden with William Quantrill’s raiders during the Civil War.

  “You’ll marry a handsome young man,” a palm reader had told her. “A man who will make you the envy of many.”

  “What else?” I asked.

  She shook her head, avoiding my gaze. “Nothing else. I wish you every happiness.”

  “There was something else,” I said. “You saw something that upset you. What is it?”

  She pursed her lips. “I saw that it won’t all be happiness for you,” she said. “There will be . . . hard times.”

  Hard times were nothing new, but the way she said the words sent a cold shiver up my spine—the feeling my mother referred to as ‘someone walking across your grave.’ I wanted to ask for more details. What kind of hard times would these be? But I was a coward and kept silent.

  Zee and Jesse’s marriage proved the palmist right. Jesse was a dangerous puzzle: a loving husband and father who kept his “work” separate from his family, though Zee heard the lurid rumors of his career as a bank robber and worse. Still, she never gave up on him.

  And he earned her love, time and again.

  The Woman Who Loved Jesse James

  by

  Cindi Myers

  Bell Bridge Books

  Copyright

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons (living or dead,) events or locations is entirely coincidental.

  Bell Bridge Books

  PO BOX 300921

  Memphis, TN 38130

  Ebook ISBN: 978-1-61194-105-0

  Print ISBN: 978-1-61194-082-4

  Bell Bridge Books is an Imprint of BelleBooks, Inc.

  Copyright © 2012 by Cindi Myers

  Printed and bound in the United States of America.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.

  We at BelleBooks enjoy hearing from readers.

  Visit our websites – www.BelleBooks.com and www.BellBridgeBooks.com.

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  Cover design: Debra Dixon

  Interior design: Hank Smith

  Photo credits:

  Cover art (manipulated) © Ateliersommerland | Dreamstime.com

  :MWtw:01:

  Dedication

  For Jim, Always

  Acknowledgments

  I need to thank many people for their support in making this book come together. Colleen Collins, Emily McCaskle and Isabel Sharpe read early versions of the manuscript, and their comments were immensely helpful.

  Thanks to the Duetters, the BGs and the Fairplay Secret Society for cheering me on and providing encouragement as I wrote. To the Hand Hotel and Mike Stone for the best writer’s retreat ever.

  And many thanks to Deborah Smith and Debra Dixon and everyone at BelleBooks and Bell Bridge Books for their enthusiasm for this project.

  Finally, I couldn’t have done this without the love and support of my husband, Jim. Love you.

  —Cindi Myers

  Prologue

  “There is a dash of tiger blood in the veins of all men; a latent disposition even in the bosom that is a stranger to nerve and daring, to admire those qualities in other men. And this penchant is always keener if there be a dash of sin in the deed to spice the enjoyment of its contemplation.”

  —The Kansas City Times, September 29, 1872

  March, 1881

  From the upstairs window of the house that was to have been our refuge, I stared down at the line of men with guns. That line of men on fine, fast horses, loaded rifles laid across their saddles, loaded pistols at their hips, had come to destroy everything I held most dear—to destroy me in the process.

  I gripped the window sill with hands like ice, determined not to surrender to the terror that threatened to buckle my knees, and looked back over my shoulder at my children. They slept peacefully, sweet angels unaware of danger. I feared for them, of course, but that fear was a beast behind a locked door, contained for the moment.

  The terror that threatened to overpower me was for their father, the man to whom I had linked my fate years before. My fear for him was a demon I wrestled daily, the distaff side to the love that bound us together.

  I cast one more fond look on my sleeping children, then felt in the pocket of my dress for the pistol their father had given me so many years before. I had never fired the weapon at anything other than tin cans or old bottles, but I would use it now if I had to, to defend all I loved.

  I shut the door softly behind me and started down the stairs. If this was the end, then I would stand with the man those gunmen had come for. I would stand with Jesse; my heart gave me no other choice.

  Chapter One

  I never meant to fall in love with Jesse James, but I might as well have tried to stop a tornado or a prairie fire. The summer that sealed our fate, when we saw each other with new eyes and our love began to grow, Jesse was all heat and light, and I was tinder waiting for a match.

  But I wasn’t thinking of Jesse that hot August day in the summer of 1864 when my oldest sister, Lucy, was married to Bowling Browder. I merely welcomed the distraction of a celebration after years of hardship before and during the war.

  “I hear tell there’s to be a band, with fiddles, and a flute player,” my best friend, Esme Purlin, said. Clad only in shimmy and drawers in the stifling heat of my attic bedroom, hair twisted in dozens of rag curls all over her head, she waltzed across the floor, arms extended to grasp the hands of an invisible beau. The air was heavy with the scent of honeysuckle that trailed across the sloping tin roof below my window, sweet with the promise of honey from the bees that droned among the golden blossoms.

  “And dancing,” I said as I struggled to roll my own hair in the strips of rags I’d torn from a worn-out petticoat. “Lucy promised there’d be dancing.”

  “It’s a shame we can’t dance,” Esme said, letting her arms fall to her sides. “It always looks like so much fun—though perhaps that’s why Papa says it’s sinful.”

  “I don’t care if it’s sinful or not,” I said. “If someone asks me, I intend to dance.” How many chances would I have to whirl around a dance
floor in a man’s arms?

  Esme sucked in her breath. “Zee, you can’t! What will people say? What will your father say?”

  “If he sees me, he won’t like it.” My father, a Methodist minister, would be scandalized by even the thought of one of his daughters dancing. If caught, I would be punished, perhaps severely. Having sired eleven children, my father was not one to spare the rod. But even a caning seemed worth the opportunity to give free reign to my feelings.

  Too often lately my life seemed a constant battle—the outer meekness I was taught was proper for a Southern lady warring with an inner boldness out of all proportion with my upbringing as a pastor’s daughter. Like the country itself, I was unsettled of late, and wondered if peace was truly possible, both for my nation and for myself.

  “I’m looking forward to the cake,” Esme said.

  I couldn’t remember the last time I’d eaten real sugar or light flour. The war had brought hard times here to Missouri, especially for Sesech families like ours. “But dancing’s better than cake,” I said. “Lucy said that after dark the Browders have ordered lanterns hung in the trees to light a dance floor. Which means there’ll be lots of dark shadows for sneaking away and stealing kisses.” I had never kissed a man, but I had thought of it often, and on a night when I anticipated such a rebellion as dancing adding kissing seemed scarcely to compound my sin.

  Esme giggled. “Maybe the unfortunate Mr. Colquit will try to kiss you.”

  I made a face and knotted the last rag into place. “Mr. Colquit and his misfortunes would do best not to come near me.” Anthony Colquit was a member of my father’s congregation, a widower who, in addition to three unmanageable children, was possessed of a prominent mole on his left cheek. His wife had died of cholera the year before, leading my mother and the other women in our community to refer to him as “the unfortunate Mr. Colquit.” Recently, he had indicated an interest in me, one which I had no intention of reciprocating.

  Esme plopped onto my bed, making the ropes holding the mattress squeak. “He’s not so bad,” she said.

  “I’m not interested in Mr. Colquit,” I said.

  “I’m not so sure either one of us can afford to be uninterested in any man who courts us,” Esme said. “We’re both of us already nineteen and it’s not as if there are a great many young men available, what with the war and all. At least Mr. Colquit has a farm, and he’s not so terribly old.”

  “He must be almost thirty!” I protested. But neither his age nor his mole nor his three terrible children were the chief reason I rejected the notion of Mr. Colquit as a husband. “I’m already a poor farmer’s daughter. Why should I end up a poor farmer’s wife?” And I didn’t want to wed a man who sought a convenient mother for his children; I wanted a man who would love me—not for what I could do for him, but solely for who I was.

  I searched in the drawer of the dressing table for the bit of red flannel I used to darken my lips, and the precious tin of rice powder, which I would wear to the wedding, even if my mother had forbade it. I avoided looking at my reflection in the spotted glass of the mirror. I was thin and pale, yet who of us wasn’t after so many years of deprivation? “I’m tired of suffering and making do,” I said. “I want someone who can offer me more in life.”

  “As if you’re going to meet a man like that in Missouri.”

  “Mrs. Peabody says a woman should never sell herself short.”

  “My mother says Mrs. Peabody is no better than she should be.”

  “My mother says the same thing, but that doesn’t mean Mrs. P. is wrong.” Amanda Peabody lived alone in a little cabin a quarter mile from our farm. She said she was a widow, though some folks thought otherwise. And no one could deny that Sheriff T. Wayne Henry—a married man—spent a great deal of time at her place. The sheriff claimed Mrs. Peabody was only doing his ironing, which led to any number of ribald comments about what, exactly, was being ironed.

  “I guess if anyone knows about a woman selling herself—short or otherwise—it would be her.” Esme hooted with laughter, and fell back on the bed.

  I scowled at her. “Mrs. Peabody is my friend, and I won’t have you saying mean things about her. She’s never been anything but nice to us whenever we’ve visited her.”

  “You’re right,” Esme said, staring up at the sloped ceiling. “I’m sorry. I’m just out of sorts, wishing I was the one getting married, and not your sister. With most of the young men off fighting the war and the ones left at home either old or crippled or Northern sympathizers—it makes me despair of ever finding a husband and having a family.”

  “The war can’t last forever,” I said. “When it’s over our men will come home and they’ll all be looking for wives. You’ll have so many beaux you won’t know what to do.”

  “I’ll have to ask Mrs. Peabody what to do. She’ll be able to tell me.”

  We were both laughing over this when my mother called up the stairs. “Sister! Esme! You girls come down here. I need you to take the punch over to the wedding.”

  Grumbling, we slipped on our wrappers and hurried down the stairs. We found my mother in the kitchen, stirring something on the stove with one hand and wiping jam from my little brother Henry’s face with the other. A row of flatirons heated on the stove, bundles of dampened linens piled on the hearth.

  “We can’t go anywhere right now, Mama,” I protested. “We just rolled our hair.”

  “Put on your bonnets and no one will see you. Your father’s already loaded the cask of punch into the trap, but he and Joey had to leave to see about a cow down by the creek.” Joey was the darky who worked for us part-time. We were too poor to afford even one slave, unlike the family my sister was marrying into. The Browders owned seven slaves, both field hands and household servants.

  “Why do we have to take the punch now?” I asked. “The wedding’s still hours away.”

  “It has to be put on ice to cool. Now go. All you have to do is drive over to the Browders and one of their men will unload it for you.”

  Esme opened her mouth to protest, but I tugged on her arm, silencing her. “We’ll be happy to go, Mama,” I said. “Let me run upstairs and fetch my bonnet.”

  I raced up the narrow flight of steps to my room, Esme at my heels. “What are you looking so cheerful about?” she asked. “It’s hot as Hades outside and over a mile to the Browders’s place. We’ll melt.”

  “We can come back the long way by the creek, in the shade.” I threw open the wardrobe and pulled out the dress I’d made special for the wedding. Or made-over, rather, from an old-fashioned ball gown Mrs. Peabody had given me. No one around here had seen new cloth since before the war.

  “What are you doing?” Esme asked as I tugged off my wrapper and tied on the crinoline hoops necessary to make the wide skirts then in fashion fit correctly.

  “Tighten my laces for me, won’t you?” I asked, turning my back to her.

  She did as I asked, pulling the laces to my corset tight and tying them in neat bows in the back. Then she helped me lift the dress over my head. Fashioned of blue and buff striped satin, it featured wide flared sleeves trimmed with flounces, a low, square neckline with more flounces, and a deep flounce around the hem. I had spent many an hour gathering all those ruffles and carefully attaching them to the dress, but I was proud of the results. I was sure I would be as fashionable as any young woman at the ball.

  “On the way home from the Browders’s we can stop by Mrs. Peabody’s,” I said as I smoothed my skirts over the hoops. “I want to show her my new dress.”

  “You can’t go downstairs all dressed up,” Esme said. “What will your mother say?”

  “Nothing. She won’t even notice.” My mother was so distracted by the demands of running a large household that whole days passed without her looking directly at me.

  “We’ll get in trouble.” Esme looked unsure.

  “We’ll ask her to read your tea leaves—to tell you about the man you’ll marry.”

  Esme’s
expression brightened. “All right.” She shed her wrapper and took her crinolines and gown from where she’d laid them out on the end of the bed. “Pull tight on my laces,” she said. “This is last year’s dress and it’ll never fit, otherwise.”

  In record time we were dressed and down the stairs, our rag curls hidden by deep poke bonnets. Mama was busy in the kitchen; she didn’t look up as we passed.

  The sun beat down on the main road, baking us beneath the patched parasols we held over our heads. The horse moved at a plodding pace, puffs of dust as fine as face powder rising with the impact of each hoof. Esme and I held an old blanket over our laps in spite of the heat, to protect our skirts from the dirt.

  The Browders’s property was marked by a wooden fence, whitewashed each spring by a team of darkies. Horses grazed behind the fence, and beyond that stretched fields of corn and hemp that drooped in the heat.

  I turned the trap in at the front gate, which stood open, its broad expanse decorated with wreaths of laurel and oak. An old darky near the front told me how to get to the kitchen, and I guided the horse to the open-sided cook house behind the main house. A trio of black women—two small and one very large—worked amid billows of steam from boiling pots and smoke from the pit fires where big joints of meat were roasting. I told the big woman I’d brought the punch and she ordered a younger man to unload it for me.

  As soon as we were able, I turned the trap and left. “We should have asked to water the horse,” Esme said. “And we could have asked for a glass of lemonade for ourselves.” She fanned herself. “I’m parched.”

  “Mrs. Peabody will have lemonade.” I slapped the reins across the horse’s back, urging him into a trot. He could have all the water he wanted at Mrs. Peabody’s.

  “But she won’t have ice,” Esme whined. The Browders were the only ones in our neighborhood who were wealthy enough to afford to have ice shipped down the river and packed in sawdust all summer in a special ice house they’d had cut into the side of a hill.