The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel by Ron Hansen Page A

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
    H IS 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