Dust of Lies

Chapter Three-Cowboy

      Early the next morning I headed to Little Rock to dig up any statistics I could find on Jesse Cole James. I was looking for the usual – birth and death certificates, any record of relatives I might be able to talk to. I managed to secure copies of both, as well as his World War II draft registration and the birth certificates of two of his children. I returned home and spread the documents out on the kitchen table.


The original documents were handwritten and somewhat faded, making the copies hard to read. Magnifying glass in hand, I set about the task of gleaning facts about Jesse Cole James.








    First I looked at the death certificate. Ora Louvinna Price Townsend Hacker James reported that Jesse Cole James was born in Texas, had ten siblings, and his parents were Jesse W. James and Emma Andrews. I compared that information with his birth certificate. Very few things matched up. His birth certificate was issued in 1956. 1956! He would have been seventy-four years old when it was issued! I was clearly going to have to take everything I read with a grain of salt. His birthplace was listed as Miller County, Arkansas. The draft registration listed his birthplace as Houston, Texas and the place of birth listed on his children’s certificates was Plainview, Texas. What a mess. I knew it was not uncommon for there to be errors on old records, but none of these were related in the least. I didn’t have the faintest clue where to begin. Hopefully, Viva could steer me once again.





      I waited until midmorning before approaching Viva with this tangled mass of data. To my surprise, she was ready for me. She had brewed a fresh pot of coffee and placed two cups on the table in anticipation of my arrival. The coffee smelled wonderful. Could it be that she actually looked forward to seeing me? I filled the cups and sat down next to her so we could view the papers together, feeling like a schoolgirl who couldn’t wait to share a secret. I began with the multitude of reported birthplaces ranging from Arkansas to Texas. I couldn’t imagine how anyone could make sense of the conglomerate, but I knew that she would give it a try.





    “Cowboy knew how to keep a secret,” Viva said, nodding. The discrepancies hadn’t surprised her in the least. “He never let you know more than he wanted you to know. He never told anyone—except maybe Ora—directly where the came from.” She looked at me, smiling. “People would ask him where he was going and he’d say, that way, and when they asked him where he came, from he’d say, back that way. Sometimes he’d just tell them it was none of their concern.”





    “Sounds secretive,” I commented, sipping my coffee.





    “As far as I can tell, he never lied,” she said, still with a half-smile on her lips. “He’d talk in riddles, though, and it was up to you to figure it out.“





    “Thanks a lot,” I said, my voice sarcastic. “It’s harder to solve riddles once the people involved are all dead.” But even as I said it, I knew I wanted give it my best shot. I would do it because of Viva. I would do it because of Ezra. I would do it for me.





    Viva … I so wanted to connect with her, and the poem was the first hope I have ever had to pierce the invisible wall between us. I wanted this very badly.I put down my coffee.





      “Viva, can you think of anything … any tidbit about Cowboy that might lead me in the right direction?”





      “Well, here’s what I believe,” she said. “I do believe that in some fashion, Cowboy was responsible for Ezra Hacker hanging himself. I never thought for a moment that a young man with a newborn son, less than a few months old, would abandon his wife and child. They might have had a spat, but abandonment? Jail? Suicide? My goodness, if you were serious, you would just lie and say you wouldn’t do it again, and then leave in the middle of the night.”





    I had a feeling that Viva would do just that. Lie and fix it later.





    She was still talking. “And look at Ora. She was fifteen years old when Ezra supposedly hanged himself. What could she possibly have done to make a young man, still in his teens, prefer to die rather than return home?”





    I didn’t have an answer to that. I couldn’t imagine choosing suicide in any situation, much less the one she was describing.





    Viva took a long swallow of her own coffee and then set the cup carefully back down.





    “Kay, remember, the poem says that Ora Price was the cause of it all. But think about that! When Ezra died, her name was Hacker, not Price, and no one knew that better than her husband. I can’t think of any law—old or new—that would put a man in jail for wife abandonment. Yes, Ezra Hacker was hanged in that jail, but not by his own hand, and he was not the one who wrote that poem.”





    There you have it. My mysterious suicide was beginning to take on the nuances of a murder. Every word that Viva had spoken made sense.





    “Do you remember when I told you about Ben Townsend’s objections to a Christian burial for Ezra, and how cold he was to Emma, Ora’s mother?” Viva asked. “Something was never right about that family.”





    Her voice had dropped to a whisper. Was she emotional about it? I asked the obvious question.





    “How did you get so entangled with these people?”





    “Well, Ora was my closest friend, and I was her only friend. The first time I ever laid eyes on Ora was the day of Ezra’s funeral. He died on the 19th of December, don’t you know, and they put him in the ground two days later. Papa preached the service and Momma played the organ. I just sat quietly on the back pew trying my best to be invisible. That’s when I saw her come in the church with Emma, holding a small baby in her arms. They walked real quick-like to the front of the church and sat in the front pew.”


I got up and poured more coffee. Viva nodded. “Thank you. Oh, Kay, I remember it so well. Emma there as stiff and still as stone. Ora looked like she was crying, but she didn’t make a sound. But the one who was crying, was the baby. So I nipped up there and took him—little Joseph, that was his name—I took him outside.” Viva took a deep breath.





    “And you know what everybody was waiting for, don’t you?”





    “What?” I felt breathless.





    “They were all waiting for the other mourners to come. But no one came. Not Ben Townsend! Not William Hacker – Ezra’s dad. No one.”


   


    Another deep breath.





    “So then Papa did the service. It was short and sweet. When Ora came out I could see she was in no condition to take care of the baby. So I told her to go on and she could pick him up later. And that’s how we became friends: she came over later for the baby, and after that, she came over a lot, too. Maybe she needed someone normal in her life.”





    “Why was Ezra shunned in death?” I asked.





      “Well, some people believed that suicide was a sin and Ezra was doomed to hell. Other people said it was because they were afraid to show their faces at the church, because after all, if Ezra didn’t kill himself, then someone else did.”





    “What did Ora think?”





    “I’m not sure she knew what to think. I know she believed she was the cause—but, don’t you know, she knew better than anyone that it was him who’d abandoned her. All she would say was she’d told him something that she shouldn’t have told.  Ol’ Ben broke the news to her that Ezra was in jail, and the next day he was dead.”





    Viva’s account of the young widow was depressing as well as thought-provoking. I needed to understand why Viva would think that Cowboy was involved in Ezra’s death—and precisely how. This dark story appeared to be cocooned in a time capsule that was slowly emerging from the depths of my elderly mother-in-law’s mind.





    Viva was smiling now. “I used to get tickled with Ora. She told me she prayed daily to the Lord for a man. Any man would do, she would say. Between you and me, Ora wasn’t very pretty, don’t you know. She was as thin as a pencil and she always twisted her hair into a knot at the nape of her neck. Even at the age of sixteen she looked matronly. Lord, it had to be divine intervention for Ora to get a man. But in less than a year after Ezra died, she got her one … even if he was shot up and almost dead.”





    I put down my coffee cup so hard it clattered on the table. “What are you talking about? Who got shot up?”





    She was still smiling. “It happened like this,” she said. “Ben Townsend and Bud Hooper were neighbors and always seemed to be up to something. It wasn’t friendship, ‘cause Ben was not the kind of man to have friends, don’t you know. But they were always up to something, like I said, and one night they pulled this man out of a boxcar. He was all shot up and bleeding. So Ora went there to take care of him.”





    “Viva, who was it?”





      She met my eyes and nodded. “It was Cowboy,” she said. “And Ora was spending all her time with him, her and Joseph, nursing him back to health. She tried to talk to him, too, but he made it clear he didn’t want any conversation, and he never even seemed to notice the baby was there.”





    “Doesn’t sound very romantic,” I commented.





    Not very,” Viva agreed. “And as you can imagine, no one was more surprised than Ora when Ben Townsend informed her that she was to marry this man when he was up and about. All she could say to me was that she had prayed for a man and now she had one.”





    For better or for worse, I found myself thinking. “Cowboy,” I said.





    She nodded. “Cowboy,” she agreed. “And what a man! Over six feet tall, don’t you know, with dark hair and blue eyes. I remember he always wore a starched blue shirt with his jeans and his boots were always polished. Quite striking in appearance. You know how some people just have a way of dominating a room, just by being there?” She waited for my nod. “That was Cowboy. I was always a little afraid of him, don’t you know. He seemed cold like a snake—cold and quiet like a copperhead. Pretty, but lethal. I would have preferred him to be more like a rattlesnake-at least they warn before they strike.”





    “You mean that Ora just up and married a man she hardly knew?” I asked. I’d thought that arranged marriages were only in foreign countries or stopped with the middle ages.





    “Well, Cowboy did tell her one thing before the wedding. She said he looked her straight in the eye and told her that his father was Jesse Woodson James, and that there would always be grave danger if she married him. He emphasized the middle name like he wanted there to be no confusion with any other man named Jesse James.”





      I gasped. “Did he mean Jesse James, as in the famous outlaw?





    “I believe so. Ora was convinced that he had the past of an outlaw. I’m sure that coming into Booneville shot up and half-dead helped.





    This story was getting better and better. “What do you believe?” I asked her.





    Viva took her time about answering, as though she were choosing her words with care. “I never challenged Ora. In her heart she accepted what he told her.”





    It wasn’t a very satisfactory answer, and I had a feeling that Cowboy was more than just the husband of Viva’s best friend. But she looked too tired for me to ask her about it, and I wanted to go home and make notes and think a little more about Ora Price Townsend James.





    It was a fascinating story, there was no doubt about that. Had Ezra committed suicide, or did he die to conceal a secret? Who was Cowboy, and how did he fit into Ezra’s demise? Was Ora really the cause?


I decided to focus, first, on Cowboy and his parentage. Was he in fact the son of Jesse Woodson James? I kept that question with me all the rest of the day, determined that there would be answers in the morning.





 


      I am old enough to appreciate the value of a Big Chief Tablet in the initial stages of research. I’d spent many hours in the research labs, laboriously recording the data of each chemical trial by hand in a journal; this was before laptops could crunch and save information with mindless keystrokes. Technology was a great boon to the research field, but something got lost in the shuffle as well. The tactile touch of a pencil that connected directly from my fingers to my brain seemed to immerse me in a project in a way that was not possible with a keyboard. So with studied deliberation I listed what I knew in columns on a simple paper tablet.





      Name                      Mother                Father                            Place of Birth    DOB


      Jesse Cole James  Emma Andrews  Jesse Woodson James  Houston, TX      Feb 13, 1882


      Jack James              Emma Anders                                          Plainview, TX    1884


      JC James                                                                                  Miller County AR                                                           


   


The only real conflict seemed to be the place of birth and the mother’s name. However, Viva had told me repeatedly that Cowboy’s mother’s name was Anders, not Andrews, so I was going to waste little time on that one.





    The real mystery was the place of birth. I turned on my computer and brought up Mapquest. I needed to know just how all of these locations lay in relationship to each other. I was particularly interested in the distance between Houston, Texas, on the Gulf of Mexico, and Plainview out in the west part of the state. When I typed in Plainview, Texas, the screen popped up, stating that there were six towns in Texas with the name of Plainview, please pick a county. That thought had never crossed my mind! I should know better than to make assumptions. I was scrolling through the list of counties to choose from when Houston County leapt off the screen. Plainview, Houston County, Texas. Two anomalies had melded into one plausible location. I was quite excited with my find. Although it did not explain Miller County, I did feel that it was the first step in unraveling Cowboy’s story. If this was truly his birthplace, Emma couldn’t be far away.


 


    I turned once again to the Internet; this time I was looking for a person, not a place. This task proved a little more difficult. There are many websites for genealogy, so I narrowed my selection down to Ancestory.com and Genealogy.com. Each proved to contain a wealth of information.





    I pored over the census data, day after day, looking for the elusive Emma Anders.  I felt myself reverting back to old habits – drowning in my obsession to complete a task – to solve the puzzle. I turned to the computer in the morning and refused to leave my post except for food and bathroom breaks; partly to please Viva and partly to feed my deep seated drive to conquer a challenge.





    Darrel often was called away for several days at a time with his job as a geologist for a local mining company.  He loved roaming the Arkansas hills and getting paid for it.  I used to dread these trips that would take him away – now I relished the time to do my research.





    But Darrel was not pleased with my newfound pursuit. He shrugged his shoulders in dismissal anytime I mentioned Cowboy’s name. But I would soon find the answer and our lives would return to normal. I just needed a little time.  Anyway,  he was out of town for a few days and wouldn’t be back until this evening.


“Are you still working on that stupid computer?” The sharp edge to his voice startled me.


Darrel was standing in the doorway with one arm clasped to the frame.  It was Darrel’s voice but this was not the demeanor of the man I knew. 





      “What’s for supper or are you too busy to cook?” Sarcasm oozed with every word.





    Before I could answer, Darrel stormed out the front door.  I never saw this coming.  My sweet, mild manner husband had morphed into a sarcastic - and yes – a mean spirited person. 





    “Wait a minute!” I shouted running after him.  “What is your problem?”





    “My problem is that you spend all  of your time running after silly poems and dead men.”





    “That’s unfair.  I only work on it when you are gone.” I snapped. 





“Kay, leave it alone. I don’t want Cowboy in my house!”





    His words sound as if Cowboy was a living, breathing person in our home. I couldn’t tell if he was pleading or commanding me to quit. My mind raced to Viva’s warning “Don’t tell anyone. If you do doors will shut.” Is this the first door or is Viva’s admonition playing with my mind? I can’t quit – but I don’t want to lose Darrel either.  I needed to walk this back.





    “I promise not to let Cowboy interfere with our lives. But please don’t take this away from me.”





      Darrel shifted side to side as if trying to regain his balance.





“You don’t know what you are getting into, Kay. Let the past be the past. I’ve told mom the same thing.  She listened to me until you came along. Anyway, why do you care?”





    My cheeks flushed a telltale bright red. Anger and fear fought for control of my senses. Was I choosing to chase Cowboy to win Viva’s approval? Does Darrell blame me for his mother’s obsession with Ora? I felt caught in the middle but that beat being on the outside. I would move cautiously – but I meant to have them both.





    “I’ll be careful.  I won’t talk to anyone except you and Viva.” I managed to squeak out after a few minutes.





    “Suit yourself, but I don’t want any part of it.”





    This wasn’t exactly what I wanted, but I knew we had a truce.  I would put the story away until the next time he went out of town.





      A week later  I found her. Emma A. Anders, born 1867 in Marlin, Falls County, Texas. The name, location and age were right for my Emma.





    There was only one conclusion: Viva and I would have to go to Texas. I hoped she was up for the trip. It would be a long one, but I was too intrigued now to back up … and only Viva knew what I was looking for. I would wait until Darrel was away on business – but we would go.