The Woman Who Loved Jesse James (6 page)

“Why wasn’t Sheriff Henry here?” I wailed. “They wouldn’t have dared do this if he’d been here to stop them.”

“He didn’t usually spend the night here,” Thomas said. “Not all night, anyway.” His cheeks burned. “Leastways, that’s what I heard.”

So Henry had been safe at home in his own bed while his lover was abused and driven out of town in disgrace. Mrs. Peabody had said the moments of pleasure she enjoyed were worth the moments of pain—but surely not this much pain.

“What did Henry do when he found out about this?” I asked.

“I don’t guess he did anything. Nobody mentioned it.”

If he loved her, why hadn’t he gone after her? Why hadn’t he raised a posse to hunt down the men who had done this? How could he claim to love her, yet do nothing to avenge her? Was his reputation worth more to him than the woman he loved?

The cruelty of the answer to that question showed me the kind of man he really was. No matter that he was the Sheriff and a veteran of the war; Henry had been weak. He’d professed to love Mrs. Peabody, but hadn’t had the strength of his convictions to stand by her in her time of need.

While Mrs. Peabody had loved enough to give up whatever her life had been, to move here and live alone under the censure of her neighbors, Mr. Henry’s feelings had not moved him to raise even a word of protest in her defense.

One night not too many weeks later, her old cabin burned to the ground. Six months later Mrs. Henry, who was apparently not so much of an invalid after all, gave birth to a son, named Thomas Wayne Henry, Jr.

And still I had no word from Jesse.

The summer dragged on long and hot. I vowed to no longer think of Jesse. What was he to me but a boy I had kissed once?

But Jesse was a man I could not ignore. Though I banished him from my thoughts during my waking hours, he visited my dreams—as an avenging angel robed in white, or a laughing man who lobbed dirt clods at my skirt, then caught me up in his arms and kissed me until I was breathless.

Then Jesse came back into my life, not as the avenging angel I’d dreamed of, but as a ghost of a man who frightened me more than anyone ever had.

I deposited the greenery in two bowls my mother had set out on the kitchen table, and covered them with boiling water from the kettle on the stove. The rosemary infusion would be used to clean the wound, then a poultice would be made from the black walnut to draw out infection. The herbs steeping, I raced to the parlor, where my brother and father were reassembling the bed. I joined my mother and Aunt Zerelda at Jessie’s side. They had peeled back the blankets and unbuttoned his shirt to reveal a corset of blood-soaked bandages around his torso. I must have gasped, alerting the women to my presence, for my mother looked up and said, “Go away, Sister. We don’t need you here.”

“No. She should stay,” Aunt Zerelda said. “She can help you nurse him. It’s not safe for me to stay here and you’ll need her help.” She thrust a section of old sheet at me. “Start tearing bandages.”

I bit at the linen to start a tear, then ripped a long strip of bandage, forcing my eyes to remain fixed on Jesse. The women gently cut away layers of linen, revealing an angry hole on the right side of his chest. He groaned and I flinched, at the same time rejoicing at this sign of life. “What happened?” I asked.

“He was shot through the lung by a Union Patrol,” Zerelda said. “His friend, Archie Clement, cared for him and got word to me.” She pointed to a second scar very close to the first. “This isn’t the first time he’s been wounded,” she said. “He was shot last summer in a skirmish with the Missouri militia.” Rather than expressing dismay at the injury to her son, Zerelda sounded pleased at this evidence of her son’s bravery.

My mother laid a hand across Jesse’s forehead. “His fever’s high,” she said.

“The train trip was hard on him.” Zerelda discarded the last of the bloody bandages. “But he’s strong. If he was going to die from this, he would have done so before now.”

I could tell my mother didn’t share Zerelda’s optimism, but she kept silent. She went to the kitchen and returned with the steeping rosemary and clean rags, and began to swab Jesse’s wound. He opened his eyes, their blue darkened almost to violet, but he gave so sign of recognition of any of us.

Aunt Zerelda stuffed the bloody bandages and Jesse’s blood-stained shirt into the parlor stove and struck a match. They burned red and orange behind the isinglass stove door. Mother handed the bowl and rags to me. “Keep cleaning the wound while I make a poultice,” she said.

I knelt beside the pallet, and gingerly touched the wet rag to the edge of the wound. Even through the cloth I could feel the heat radiating from Jesse. The smell of putrid flesh and fever-sweat overpowered even the camphor smell of the herb, and I swallowed hard, determined to keep control of my feelings.

The man who had kissed me last fall had been broad-chested and muscular. This Jesse was wasted away to skin and bones, the outline of each rib clearly visible beneath his blue-white skin. His chest scarcely moved with each shallow breath, and fresh blood bubbled from the wound with each swipe of my cloth.

My mother returned with the poultice and Aunt Zerelda moved from the fire to help with the job of bandaging it in place. The bed was together now, and I helped Thomas spread it with fresh sheets and blankets. Then the women sent the rest of us from the room while they bathed their patient and dressed him in a clean nightshirt of my father’s.

When I returned, Jesse was in bed, covers pulled to his chin like a little boy tucked in for the night.

“Where’s Frank?” Thomas asked.

“He left already,” Zerelda said. She sat on the edge of the bed and sponged Jesse’s face with cool water. “He couldn’t risk being seen here. I have to go, too.” With obvious reluctance, she stood. “Someone should stay with him tonight,” she said. “To make sure he doesn’t become delirious from the fever.”

“I’ll stay,” I said. I knew I wouldn’t sleep if I returned to my bed. And I welcomed the chance to be alone with Jesse, to discover if my feelings for him were merely fantasies engendered by a single kiss, or something more.

I was left with a single lamp burning low on a table by the parlor door and the admonition to wake my mother if Jesse took a turn for the worse. My father knelt beside the bed and said a long prayer for healing, to which we all echoed “Amen,” then Aunt Zerelda vanished into the night after Thomas and the others trooped upstairs.

I pulled a chair close beside the sick bed and studied Jesse’s face in the dim light. Several days’ growth of sandy beard made him look older than he had before, or maybe it was the lines of pain around his eyes that added a maturity beyond his eighteen years. His hair had grown long in the months he’d been away, curling up at the collar, dark gold against the whiteness of the pillow case.

He slept poorly, each breath coming in an anguished gasp that made my throat ache. The fire had burned out and despite the summer’s heat the room felt cold. I wrapped my shawl more tightly around my shoulders and drew my bare feet up under my nightrail, my eyes never leaving Jesse. I had never seen a person die before, and I was terrified he would be the first. How could I bear to lose him when I had only just begun to know him?

Yet how could a man live with such a wound?

For several hours nothing happened. Jesse slipped into a deeper sleep and I felt some of my tension ease. I even dozed, sitting up in my chair, but was awakened by a moaning and the rattle of the metal legs of the bed against the floor.

Jesse had thrown off the blankets, and thrashed about so wildly I feared he would fall out of bed and injure himself further. “Shhhh. Shhh.” I rushed to his side, and pressed his shoulders against the mattress. He quieted some at my touch and stared at me with wide, uncomprehending eyes. “C
. . .
c
. . .
cold,” he groaned, his jaw clenched against the shivers that rattled his frame.

I pulled the blankets over him once more, but still he shook. The fever burned and I tried to cool it with wet compresses. But any coolness they offered disappeared almost immediately. His body, so wracked with pain and loss of blood, shook uncontrollably, his teeth chattering.

Desperate to ease his suffering, I searched the room for more blankets, but there were none. I could start a fire in the stove, but I’d have to go outside to fetch wood, and I dared not leave him alone in his condition. I could fetch my mother, but again—how could I leave him?

I put a hand to his chest, trying to hold him still, and felt the dampness of fresh blood seeping through the bandage. If I couldn’t keep him still and get him warm again I feared he would bleed to death, or the life left in him would simply burn up.

On winter nights when ice formed in the bowl on our dresser and the heat from the kitchen stove had no chance of warming our attic room, my sister Sallie and I would huddle together beneath the covers, drawing on each other’s warmth until we were able to settle into sleep in each other’s arms. What other way did I have to keep Jesse warm now?

Scarcely pausing to consider the audacity of what I was doing, I folded back the blankets and slipped into the narrow bed beside him. Pulling the covers over us both, I wrapped my arms and legs around him and held him close. His skin burned and he continued to shiver, but I closed my eyes and held on tightly, murmuring soothing nonsense beneath my breath.

After a very little while, he grew calmer. The tension drained from his muscles and his breathing became more shallow as he slipped back into sleep. I tried to leave him then, but he clung to me with a fierceness that belied his weakened condition. “Don’t leave me,” he whispered, a plea that held me as surely as his grasp.

I would have to extricate myself somehow before the rest of my family awoke, but for now I was content to stay with him. I rested my head in the hollow of his shoulder and listened to the reassuring beat of his heart. Anyone coming upon us might have assumed it was a commonplace matter for me to share a bed with a man I scarcely knew. How was it that I could be so at ease with Jesse, who was a stranger to me in spite of our family connection?

Yet for all our differences of gender and experience, I sensed in Jesse the same longing for adventure that stirred so often within me. As a man, he had found outlets for this spirit in war, while as an impoverished female, I was limited in my rebellions. Jesse had a wildness about him that drew me like a bee to honeysuckle.

I became aware of the heat of his body seeping into mine, and of the thin layers of cotton between the hard lines of his form and the soft curves of mine. I had younger brothers; I knew what men looked like below the waist. I had grown up on a farm, one of eleven children—the details of mating and procreation were no real mystery to me.

But lying so close beside a man, heat building within me that had nothing to do with fever, I was an adventurer into unknown territory. I craved Jesse’s touch, yet if he was incapable of touching me, I could not help but touch him.

Hesitantly at first, then with increasing boldness, I skimmed my hand across his bandaged chest, down to the faintly ridged muscle of his stomach. I rested there a moment, feeling the rise and fall of his breathing, and the faint pulse beneath my fingers. Gaining courage, I moved my hand lower, across thighs hardened by hours on horseback.

Jesse stirred and mumbled words I couldn’t understand. I stilled, heart pounding, scarcely daring to breathe. His arm reached around me, pulling me closer with surprising strength. My hand slipped, coming to rest between his thighs, finding evidence that in one respect at least, he was far from dead. I froze, appalled at what I had done, but powerless to undo it. I waited, feeling the heat and hardness of him, but he had lapsed into insensibility once more, his hold on me weakening.

Slowly, careful not to disturb him, I eased from his grasp and out from under the covers. He continued to sleep peacefully. I thought he was less warm than before, and a fine sheen of sweat dampened his forehead. I returned to my chair and tucked my feet up once more, arms wrapped around my knees, as if I might hold in the whirlwind of emotion that rocked me. I felt giddy at my own boldness, yet bereft with the knowledge that the pleasure had been one-sided. Jesse had not known I had lain with him. He would have no memory of my hands on his body. Would he even want me if he were in his right mind? Had that kiss in the trees months ago meant anything at all to him, or was it a mere diversion, one of dozens—even hundreds—of such kisses he had bestowed in his roaming across the country?