Shot in the Back (16 page)

“I know a place down by the river. We can go get our supper there. It might be hard to hire a cab, though, what with all the people in town.”

“I have an automobile,” Jesse said.

Frank smiled, for the first time, and shook his head.

“You would, Dingus. You would.”

The Riverboat Café sat on the west side of Broadway, which was the brick-paved road that separated the café from the cobblestone riverbank. At least half a dozen steamboats were tied up at the landing, the twin, fluted chimneys of the wedding cake craft rising high into the air. Jesse, Billy, and Frank were sitting in the single booth located at the rear of the café. They had chosen this location because it was far enough away from any of the other diners that it would allow them to speak without being overheard.

“You can't beat the fried catfish and hush puppies here,” Frank said.

“I always have liked catfish,” Jesse said.

Frank sighed. “Jesse, I don't know how it's possible that I'm sittin' across the table from you. But I know this is you. What are you doing here?”

“I came back to Missouri, hoping to look up Zee and make amends with her. I didn't know she had died.”

“How could you know? You never bothered to check, did you?”

“Ma is still alive, isn't she?” Jesse asked without responding directly to Frank's challenging comment. “I figure she is, because when I visited the cemetery, I didn't see any tombstones with her name.”

“She's still alive.”

“That's good to know.”

“How could you have done this to Zee? How could you have done this to Ma? How could you have done this to me? All these years, you've been alive, when every one of us thought you were dead. Did you never give us a second thought, Jesse?”

“Of course I did.”

“Pa?” Billy asked, his face contorted by confusion. “Pa, why is Frank James callin' you Jesse?”

“You mean even the boy doesn't know? He just called you Pa. I know this isn't Jesse Junior. Who is he?”

“Don't talk about me like I'm not even here, mister,” Billy said. “My name is William Anderson Alexander. And this is my pa.”

“Alexander? Is that what you're callin' yourself now?”

“Yes. My name is James Frank Alexander,” Jesse replied.

“Pa, what is goin' on here? What are you all talkin' about?”

“Your pa is Jesse James,” Frank said.

“What?” Billy gasped. “You're . . . you're Jesse James?” Billy was as shocked now as Frank James had been earlier.

“Yes, son. My real name is Jesse James.”

“Pa, I don't understand. I thought Jesse James was dead. I thought he was killed. The whole world thought he was killed.”

“That was the way I planned it,” Jesse said.

“You mean that, through all these years, you've been lyin'? You've lied to me and Frank?”

“He hasn't been lying to me all these years, boy. I hadn't laid eyes on him until this afternoon.”

“When I said Frank, I wasn't talking about you. I was talking about my brother.”

“Sorry, son, it was an easy mistake for me to make,” Frank said.

“What about Ma? Did she know?”

Jesse shook his head. “No, Billy, your mother never knew. I thought it best that she not know.”

“So, you took a second wife, and you weren't honest with her, either,” Frank said accusingly.

“I wanted to be honest with her, but the time never came where I could tell her without just making things worse.”

“Oh, what a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive,” Frank said.

“Still quoting Shakespeare, I see,” Jesse said.

“That's not Shakespeare. That's Sir Walter Scott.”

“You always were one for reading. You used to carry books in your saddlebags, even when we were on the run.”

“What about Zee?” Frank asked. “Apparently, when you married this boy's mother, it didn't bother you that you were still married to Zee. But I guess you figured if Zee thought you were dead, it wouldn't matter all that much.”

“Zee knew I wasn't dead. She not only knew, she helped set it up so that the rest of the world would believe I was dead,” Jesse explained. “She knew it was probably the only way to keep me from being hung.”

“Did she know you had another family?”

Jesse shook his head. “I never got in touch with her again after I left. I thought it would be safer for her.”

“And easier for you. Would you mind telling me who that is that's lying in the grave beside her?”

“Then that means Zee kept the secret even into her grave. I can see that she would do that. She was a good woman, Frank. A better woman than you ever knew, and a better woman than I deserved. Especially after what I did to her.” Jesse sighed, then ran his hand through his hair. “I expect the person beside her is Charlie Bigelow.”

“Charlie Bigelow. Hmm, I remember everyone wondering whatever happened to him. Jesse, you and I both have done our share of killin'. Please don't tell me you murdered Charlie just to set this up. I never liked the squirrelly little bastard, but I wouldn't like to think of you killin' him in cold blood.”

“I didn't kill him, Frank. Bob Ford did it, just like everyone thought. Only it wasn't me he killed, it was Charlie Bigelow. And at the time, Bigelow was goin' for his gun to kill me.”

“Here it is, gentlemen,” a waiter said then, arriving with a large tray bearing three empty plates in addition to a platter of fried catfish, another of hush puppies, and a third of fried potatoes.

“The fish you're sending down to your liver spent last night in the Mississippi River,” he said, laughing at his own joke.

Frank drummed his fingers on the table until the waiter left.

“What are you goin' to do now, Jesse?” Frank asked. “Are you goin' to come out of hiding? Because I don't think that would be such a good idea.”

“Why not? You did it.”

“It's not the same.”

“How is it that you can sit back there at the fair in front of Lord knows how many people, telling God and everyone who you are and not have the law comin' for you?” Jesse asked.

“You might remember, Jesse, that right after Northfield I told you that I had had enough. Do you also remember how much money we got for that raid? We got twenty-six dollars. Everyone in our gang but you and I were either killed or captured, all for twenty-six dollars. We never should have gone. You might remember that I was against it.”

“You might have been against it, but you went. When I told you how much money we could have gotten . . . should have gotten, you went along easily enough.”

“It turned into a slaughter pen.”

“You were the one who killed Heywood,” Jesse reminded him.

“He had a gun, Jesse, and he was pointing it straight at you. If I hadn't killed him, he would have killed you. I had no choice.”

“I thanked you for that before, and I thank you again,” Jesse said.

Frank was silent for a moment. “I tell you the truth, Jesse, by God if I had known then what I know now, I would have let the son of a bitch kill you.”

“No, you wouldn't,” Jesse said. “You wouldn't because we are still brothers. Despite everything, we are still brothers.”

“When we got back home from Northfield, I was ready to quit,” Frank said.

“You didn't quit, though, did you? You haven't forgotten the Blue Cut train robbery, have you?”

“That was another fizzle,” Frank said. “We only got three thousand dollars.”

“Three thousand? Pa, that's—” Billy started to say, but at a stern glance from his father, he altered what he was going to say in midsentence, “not a lot of money for a train robbery, is it?”

“No, it wasn't,” Frank said. “And half of that we took off the passengers. The passengers, Jesse. We had never stolen from the ordinary people before. We had only stolen from institutions. Banks, trains, but never from the common people. And that wasn't bad enough. You had to walk through the cars, without a mask, bragging to everybody that you were the famous Jesse James.”

“I was a lot younger then.”

“You were thirty-two years old, Jesse. You were a long way from being the kid you were right after the war.”

“You took your share of the money, didn't you?”

“Yes, I had to. I was sick of the whole thing, and I needed that money to get away. I left Missouri and went to Tennessee.”

“I knew you had gone to Tennessee,” Jesse said. “And I knew you had no wish to ride with me anymore. And I figured it would be better for you, and for Annie, if I stayed away from you.”

“You figured right.”

“How did you avoid the law down there?”

I took the name Ben J. Woodson.”

Jesse chuckled. “We took each other's names. I am James Frank Alexander, which is your whole name, but just backward, and you are using my middle name for your last name. What was the J. for? Jesse, or James?”

“I've never actually had to use anything other than the initial, ‘J.' If you want to think so, I guess you could say it's Jesse.”

“Tell me, how are Annie and little Bobby getting along?”

“Annie is fine, and ‘little' Bobby, as you call him, is twenty-six years old. He is home, managing the farm.”

“What did you do in Tennessee? How did you make a living?”

“I worked some as a teamster; I raised hogs. Frank smiled. “I even joined the Methodist church. And Annie got a job teaching school.”

“I remember that Annie was a real smart lady, well educated.”

“Yes, she graduated from college. I made it a point to make friends with prominent citizens and officers of the law. I figured it might be good to have their favorable opinion of me, if ever the time came when my true identity might be exposed.”

“I can understand that. I've made a few friends of the law myself,” Jesse said. He thought of his friendship with Sheriff Larry Wallace, and even the fact that he had acted as a deputy and posse member. He recalled having killed Pete Arnold when he was riding with a posse, and he wondered how Frank would take that. He didn't tell him.

“I have to tell you, Jesse, my old life grew more detestable the further I got away from it.”

“But now you are in the open about who you are. How come you aren't in prison?”

“You're getting ahead of the story,” Frank said. “I'm coming to that.”

Jesse smiled. “You always did like to draw a story out. All right, go ahead.”

“I was in Tennessee when I heard you had been shot. I had been out for a walk, and when I came back, Anne told me you had been killed. That did it for me. Up until then, I had been keeping my identity a secret, in part to protect you. But with you dead . . . that is . . . at least I thought you were dead, I decided to see what I could do about starting over. I sent Annie back to Missouri to meet with Governor Tom Crittenden about my surrendering. I hoped I could get a pardon from him, but he said he couldn't do that. He did offer me a fair trial and promised not to extradite me to Minnesota. And, I'm sure you know that if I had gone up there, I would have been hanged for sure, not just because of Heywood, but with all the killing that took place during our failed attempt to rob the bank there. I was tried in Clay County, Missouri, which was the best place I could possibly be tried. General Joe Shelby was there, and he testified for me, then came over to shake my hand after his testimony.” Frank chuckled. “Neither the judge nor the prosecutor liked that one bit. As it turns out, the jury was almost entirely made up of former Confederate soldiers, or Confederate sympathizers, and after they retired for the deliberations, they came back within fifteen minutes with a verdict of not guilty.”

“I thought it must be something like that. You said it wouldn't be good for me to come out of hiding now and tell everyone who I am. Why not? I mean, it worked for you.”

“I never was anything more than second banana to you, Jesse, and you knew that. Knew it? Hell, you reveled in it. It didn't bother me any that you were the one all the newspapers wrote about, but if you were to try and come out now, believe me, that would come back and bite you. The war was too long ago, attitudes have changed, and I promise you, Jesse, you would not get a sympathetic jury. Not at this late date, and especially after everyone found out what a . . . trick you had played on people. Including your own family,” he added.

“All right, maybe I'll just be quiet about it so that only you and Ma know. I would love to see her again.”

“No, you can't see her, and she can never know.”

“What do you mean, I can't see her?”

“Jesse, you are my brother, and I love you. But I'm going to have to ask you never to see me again. Or our mother.”

“Frank, I—”

Frank held out his hand. “Jesse, after what you put Ma through, if you would show up now, the shock would kill her. And I can't let that happen. I won't let it happen. As far as the world is concerned, you are dead. As far as Ma is concerned you are dead. As far as your two children are concerned, you are dead. And as far as I am concerned from now on, you are dead. Don't ever come to see me again; don't ever write to me. And for your own safety, don't ever let anyone know you are still alive because, Jesse, sure as a gun is iron, they will hang you.”

“I'm sorry you feel that way, Frank. After all this time, I thought, that is, I was hoping, that maybe we could—”

“You thought after all this time you could just come back like the Prodigal Son, as if the last twenty-two years had not happened?” Frank shook his head. “No, Jesse. It doesn't work that way.”

Frank stood and looked down at Jesse, and at Billy. “Boy, if you care about your pa at all, you'll keep just real quiet about what you've heard here today. Don't ever say a word about it, because they'll hang him sure.”