EPILOGUESummer 1935
The Jesse James Scrapbook
Tom Gardner, age forty-one, climbed out of his government-issue Ford and eyeballed the dying farm. Dust in dunes covered the land, lay in drifts against the listing barn, the tumble-down house, and the windmill, becalmed and skeletal. He thought he’d seen despair in the soup kitchens and bread lines of Chicago and New York—in the faces of the little men huddled in alleys or selling pencils on street corners. But here, along the Oklahoma panhandle, it was hell on earth.
A rotting couch lay sprawled on the porch of the sway-backed farmhouse. A scrawny dog hid from the heat in its shadow. A woman, young but worn looking, watched from the door, a thumb sucking five year old braced against her hip.
“You from the gov’ment?”
“The W. P. A.,” Tom t
