Northfield (15 page)

He pushed me toward the road. Then the clouds burst.

I swear to God, I had no intention of telling nobody what had happened. That’s right. I was scared. I run all the way back to Mr. Shaubut’s farm, and I was there in my little room beside the barn when he come home the following morn. He come charging inside, yelling that I was a lying, worthless little weasel, that the cow hadn’t been milked, his house was a shambles, the eggs hadn’t been gathered, his corn whiskey was stole, and the cattle not been moved to the pasture.

He seen me just shivering, just praying. Every damned time I closed my eyes, I seen Dingus’s brother, smiling, quoting Scripture or whatever he was reciting, him or his brother splitting my head open with their pistols, and I seen him in my dreams, with a big knife, cutting me, seen me gurgling on my own blood and that knife going down low in my britches. Hell, when Mr. Shaubut come charging in there, I fell to my knees, begging him—on account I thought he was one of those brigands—to spare my miserable life.

Suddenly Mr. Shaubut was holding me, good man that he is, comforting me, begging me to tell him what had happened. So I broke my vow to those outlaws. Is a word to a killer worth a damn? Tell me you’d do otherwise. Tell me.

I told Mr. Shaubut that I had been taken by Jesse James and his black-hearts. I told him that those boys wasn’t out of the state, not by a damned sight, told him they was past Mankato by now, heading toward Dakota.

Felt better once I’d confessed, too, but I’ll be drawing my time from Mr. Shaubut and lighting a shuck for somewhere else just as fast as I can.

C
HAPTER
S
EVENTEEN
J
ESSE
J
AMES

Personally I would have killed the yellow bastard, but Frank was right to leave his fate in Bob Younger’s hands, and Bob granted the sodbuster a stay of execution, a pardon, so we sent him on his merry way Not that we believed he’d keep his mouth shut. Our only hope was that the son-of-a-bitch ran back to his farm, not to the nearest law in Mankato. Trust him? Hell, I trust in the mercy of God.

God has been merciful. Waiting in the pouring rain that evening, waiting in the mud and muck, trying to determine our chances of sneaking through that city, I heard the train whistle in the distance. I wondered what would have happened had we robbed the bank here, instead of the one in Northfield. Well, we cannot change history. The train sang out its night song again.

“Mercy,” I said softly. “A train.”

“You want to take the train back home, Dingus?” said Jim, in one of his moods. “Or rob it?”

“Trains can’t swim the river. There’s gotta be a bridge down yonder somewhere.”

Jim leaned forward, suddenly ashamed of mouthing me so. “There’ll be guards.”

“Not as many as we’re liable to meet up with in Mankato.”

So we started walking, moving south a bit, skirting around the city, and then along the banks of the Blue Earth River, which hooked up with the big Minnesota River just a ways from us. And, sure enough, long about two in the morning, we come to the bridge.

Sentries had been posted, all right, two men and a teen-age boy, all of whom looked as miserable as we did, so we walked right up to them, hallooing the camp, where they had coffee brewing over a stove that had been made out of a rusty old barrel.

“We’re from Freeborn County,” I lied. “Been chasing those killers from Northfield. Coffee smells inviting.”

“Help yourself,” said a fat man with a handlebar mustache.

Didn’t have to tell us twice.

“You come a long way,” the boy said as we gulped down coffee and warmed ourselves by the fire.

“That we have.”

“Where’s your horses?”

“Livery.”

“You walked that far?”

“Mind your manners, Lars,” the mustached man scolded the boy but I caught him looking for his shotgun, which stood leaning against a tree out of the rain.

“I’d sure like to get a gander at them outlaws,” the boy said.

I showed him my Schofield. “You’re looking at them now,” I said.

“When’s the next train due?” Cole asked the leader, and, when we learned not until dawn or thereabouts, we tied the two men up and the boy, finished our coffee, hating to leave the fire, and crossed the railroad bridge over the Blue Earth River.

Didn’t matter now that we had let the spineless sodbuster go. Whether or not he opened his trap, these three guards would sound the alarm once they were freed or found. Such is fate.

Yet God blessed us again when Charlie and Frank caught some chickens at a farm on the far side of the Blue Earth, and this time we managed to cook and eat them before some law dogs came to chase us away. Morning found us on the north bank of Rush Lake, and we rested again.

“Lord, show me the way,” I whispered. Earlier, Frank had said we had come to the Rubicon, but I thought now we faced that figurative river, that now we had to make a decision, one that would affect our lives, perhaps decide which among us would live and which would die. Jim’s shoulder had taken a bad turn, and Bob had never been much good, though always game as a rooster, with his arm busted and shot to pieces. While the two desperately wounded brothers tossed about, delirious, fevers high, I poured the last of the corn liquor we had stolen from the Shaubut farm over their wounds, allowing Charlie Pitts to go to work with his knife and drain the pus and blood, rid some of the infection.

As Charlie commenced with his doctoring, I took a few steps back, and turned my head. The sight of blood often sickens me.

“It’s no good,” Frank told me.

Cole came over to join our parley. Cole Younger never cared much for me, and I can’t say I liked him much, but he was a good man, damned fine pistol fighter, and we’d been together for years. I hated for things to end this way, but the Lord had whispered the way in my ears. The only way.

“By now,” Frank said, “that farm hand and those inept guards at the railroad trestle have spilled their guts.”

“Most likely,” Cole said.

I loved Bob Younger as if he were my own brother, and wanted Jim at my side in a fight. We Missouri bushwhackers do not kill our own, and we damned sure don’t leave them to die, lessen we have to.

“I’m thinking the best deal for us is to split up,” I said. “We’ll steal horses, but that farm we passed down the pike didn’t have but two. Those on horses can ride like hell for the Dakotas. I’m betting the laws’ll take notice of them. That’ll make it easier for the ones afoot to sneak out of Minnesota.”

“I suspect you’re right, Jesse,” Cole said, and he never called me Jesse. Always Dingus.

“Can you ride, Cole?” I always called him Bud.

“No, you put somebody else on a horse. My leg’s swole up. Hard enough for me to walk, but I got a good cane. I’ll stay.”

Charlie Pitts had joined us, wiping his knife blade against his thigh.

“I’ll stay, too,” he said.

“Ain’t no need,” Cole began, but Charlie shook his head.

“Mind’s made up, Capt’n. If you stay, I’ll play out my hand with you.”

Charlie Pitts walked back to Bob and Jim, now awake, sitting up, faces ashen and weak.

“Then it’s settled,” I said. “Frank and Bob will take the horses. I’ll stay with you-all.”

I turned to embrace my brother, but Cole put his hand on my shoulder, and I looked back at him.

“Appreciate the offer, but Bob can’t sit a saddle. Jim…I don’t reckon he’s in no condition to ride right now, neither. No, you ride with your brother. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the posses will take after y’all.”

I half expected my brother to quote something from the bard—“parting is such sweet sorrow”— that kind of thing, but he just hung his head, shuffled his feet in the mud, and I shook Thomas Coleman Younger’s hand and walked over to his brothers. I didn’t have to tell them the plan. I could tell they knew this was good bye. Charlie stood up and made room for me, and I knelt beside those solid soldiers of the Lord, took off my hat, pulled them close, and, as we embraced for that final time, I began:

“‘The Lord is my shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he lead-eth me beside the still waters….’”

Afterward, I kissed Bob’s cheeks, shook Jim’s feeble hand, and, wiping tears from my eyes, I followed my brother out of the woods.

Jim Younger called out to our backs: “Die game, boys!”

Frank started to speak, but, for once, my brother could find no words, none to recite, none to create.

The next time we’d meet up with the Youngers and loyal Charlie Pitts, one way or the other, would be on the streets of Glory.

Our journey home would not be pretty. We stole a horse from the farm we had spied—the other damned nag was lame—and rode double. Almost didn’t make it through that night because somehow we rode right close to one of the picket camps at this bridge around this place called Lake Crystal. Foul luck. All the guards had fallen asleep except one.

“Who are you?” he yelled. “Halt and identify yourselves!”

“Go to hell,” I said, but damned if that son-of-a-bitch almost didn’t send me in that direction.

The rifle bullet tore off my hat, sending that worthless farm horse into a buck that spilled Frank and me into the soaking ground. By the time we scrambled to our feet, the horse had bolted down the road, and we hightailed it into the woods, Frank limping so bad now that I had to all but drag him.

Yet we did not stay afoot for long, because soon God showed us the light, the light of a cabin, and by the cabin stood a barn, and inside the barn we found a fine pair of grays. No saddles, but Maw had us riding bareback before we were out of diapers.

Onward we traveled. I bought a hat off a buck nigger along the Des Moines River—hated to wear a hat that had been on a damned darky’s head, but, hell, it was still raining. Hated to give money to some darky, but the boy was bound for church, and I figured the dollar would serve as my tithing.

When we wore out the grays, Frank stole a pair of black horses, and, as we made our way nearer the Dakotas, I had a good laugh at my brother’s judgment of horseflesh.

“You look well suited, Frank,” I told him.

“I love a black horse,” he said.

“As do I. You know your horse is blind in one eye.”

“Lucky is all.”

“How so?”

“Yours is blind in both.”

Thus Frank had the last laugh, as older brothers tend to get. One horse blinded in one eye, another blinded in both. How well the James boys traveled!

On Monday morning, we stole yet another pair of grays—Minnesota farmers must sure love gray horses, but for an old Confederate, they suited me—and sometime that day, we crossed into the Dakota Territory. God sent us a sign, I believe, for the sun burst through the gray clouds, which soon cleared, and bathed us in refreshing sunlight, drying our ruined clothes.

We rode to a farm around noon, and asked the farmer if we might partake of his well.

“Help yourself,” the man said.

“Where are we?” I asked. “We seem to have lost our bearings.”

“Valley Springs is the closest settlement.”

Before I could drink, my horse nudged me out of the way and slaked his own thirst from the bucket I had drawn. I let him finish, as he had a long way to travel before we could find some fresh mounts. As I reached for the bucket, still holding enough water for a man, the farmer cried out: “Hear! Hear! Let me get you a fresh bucket, mister.”

The bitterness hit me hard then, as I thought of that treacherous Bill Stiles, a man I had befriended, a man who had the gall to get himself killed, leaving us lost and stranded in Yankee country. I thought of those bastards in the bank, who refused to open the safe, and the men in town shooting at us from all sides, boys hurtling sticks, stones, and insults in our directions. I thought of all the Yankee sons-of-bitches who had slandered, shamed, or slaughtered my family And I thought of this cock-of-the-walk farmer in the middle of nowhere, looking at me as if I were trash.

“I’d rather drink out of a pail used by a horse than by some men I know,” I said, and let the cool water slide down my throat.

Safety is fleeting, as is good fortune, and, before the day had passed, we came across more posses. By then, word had spread that the James brothers, or some of the Northfield bandits, had escaped into Dakota. For a couple of days we hid in a cave, resting, but hunger drives a man. So does the thought of home, of a wife and mother and a year-old son.

We left the cave, slowly rode south.

Dakota is a miserable expanse of bad grass and treacherous ravines and rocks, of which we stumbled over many, and Indians, of which we saw none.

“Country can swallow up a man,” Frank said.

“Yes,” I agreed.

We had entered a badlands of pink and red cliffs and spires climbing perhaps fifty feet high as we entered a stream aptly named, as we had learned from a farmer upon asking directions, the Palisades.

“I think it’s best if we split up,” Frank said.

Again, I agreed with my brother.

He rode left, and I turned right, and for the longest time, after Frank had been swallowed up, I heard nothing but the hard
clops
of my gray’s hoofs on the rugged ground. The sound almost lulled me to sleep, and I dreamed of a twist of tobacco to chew. I glanced at the blue water rushing fifty feet beneath me, cutting a wide gap that separated me and my brother, somewhere on the opposite side. Some might call this beautiful, but I longed for Clay County.

Clop. Clop. Clop.

Heavy grew my eyelids.

Clop. Clop. Clop.

Soon, I slumbered in the saddle.

The gunshot woke me, or perhaps some instinct took over, and my eyes flew open a mere second before the rifle roared. I whirled in the saddle, drawing the Colt, preferring it in the saddle over the Schofield and Smith & Wesson. Giving the gray plenty of rein, I spurred the gelding ruthlessly.

Quickly I counted a dozen men behind me, saw the puff of a rifle shot, heard one of the men yelling at me, calling out to surrender, that I had nowhere to go.

Except hell.

I kept the gray running close to the canon’s edge, estimating the depth now to the river at perhaps 100 feet, yet the width between the canon’s high, hard walls lessened. Although tired, the horse underneath me was not blind, not lame, perhaps as grand a mount as any we had liberated in Minnesota, so I wheeled around and charged the posse coming straight at me, twice firing the Colt.

That caused those Yankee cowards to reconsider. Two reined up. Another galloped in retreat.

Just as quickly as I had begun my charge, I sent off another round, reined the gray around, and galloped for the canon. Behind me came the report of a rifle, then another, followed by a lawman’s stupid shout: “Stop, you damned fool! You’ll be killed!”

One way or the other, I thought. I pitched the Colt to the ground. Every bit of weight would count. The darky’s hat sailed off my head as the gray found its feet, leaped, soared. The wind battered my face, my heart pounded against my ribs, the gelding snorted as if summoning some extra effort, and the far red wall neared.

One way or the other, those sons-of-bitches chasing me would remember this moment forever, would remember Jesse James.

Forever.