Book Description
“Nobody likes me. Everybody hates me. I’m gonna eat a worm.” ... Jesse James, circa 1878, or so he supposedly claimed.
Nobody in Freeborn, South Dakota likes the illegitimate son of notorious outlaw Jesse James. The story unfolds in wild Freeborn with the appearance of the James gang. This sharpens the focus between two competing visions of the town, between the outlaws who see Freeborn as a haven for their revelry and earnest Mayor Nater and his ineffective Sheriff Dan. When Sylvia Jane Landsford, a strong and confident prostitute, loses her rythmn in a bandit tryst and births baby Woody James in the same year as the Mayor’s daughter Audrey May, a new dynamic begins.
This intensifies when Audrey May befriends the boy, causing the Mayor to pack her bags and send her to Carrie Nation’s sister, the head mistress of the School for Girls from Bandit Towns. For Woody, this proves only one thing. He must leave Freeborn and prove, once and for all, whether he can be a true western hero, or the villain that all thought he was destined to be. All the while, the Mayor concocts a new plan to gain courage for Sheriff Dan in the eyes of the bandits. The novel follows these three subplots along a trail of humor and action throughout the wild American west until the two real questions of the novel are answered. Who is the real hero of Freeborn? And is anyone truly free born?
From the Publisher
From the Author
First off, I believe there’s more than one, and depending on the day, you could choose any of them as the predominant hero in the novel. Woody James struggles throughout the book to do good and heroic deeds, but is not accepted because of who his father was. Sylvia Jane Landsford is the only member of the community who has enough backbone to put Jesse in his place, and she fights like a badger for her son; there’s a measure of heroism in those deeds, even if she does it from a bordello’s balcony. Audrey May Nater, the Mayor’s daughter, ... it’s hard not to include her in that description either.
From the Inside Flap
Nobody in Freeborn, South Dakota likes the illegitimate son of notorious outlaw Jesse James despite the fact that he is nothing like his pop, until Woody proves, once and for all, that he is a true western hero.
Freeborn, a Tale of the Wild West’s Most Unlikely Hero, is a novel that combines the comedy and western with rare aplomb. With the ribald humor of Blazing Saddles added to the whimsy and spirit of the Princess Bride, Jeff Peterman has loosened the grip of the old west with a fictional fable of raucous nights that would make Deadwood proud, the grasp of family heritage on the next generation, and the power of love to change a prairie landscape, or at least the non-bandit portion of the wild west. Freeborn, ... Deadwood and Tombstone, but with a sense of humor.
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The six other bandits moved like a wave across the room, each choosing a dancing girl for the pleasure of the night, three moving directly upstairs to the dancing rooms that awaited the long tired traveler with condiments and the compliments of the proprietor. Nobody chose one pleasant looking young girl who sat to the left in a fine pink dress, scratching her arm; a large, dyspeptic woman with a facial mole near the bar; or the strong and confident lady who leaned against the player piano chatting with Piano Pete about his newest composition. Another bottle shot down the bar when Frank snapped his finger, repeating the earlier attempt by his sibling as both brothers rose from their stools.
Through the mayhem, Jesse and Frank walked across the floor toward an empty table situated beneath the railing of the stairs. Frank began to sit, but Jesse continued to pace toward the player piano and the confident dancing girl, Sylvia Jane Landsford. Her strong, fine features born from dark Irish stock and equal demeanor indicated something everybody in Freeborn already knew, ... that she could be his only equal in this town. Jesse snaked his arm around her shoulder.
“Jesse, I was gonna take Sylvia Jane tonight,” Frank called as Jesse and his feminine match started toward the stairs without so much as one word exchanged between them.
“First come and all,” Jesse reminded, glaring back toward his brother with a glint of pleasure gleaming from his bloodshot eyes.
“Come on, little brother. It’s my birthday next week, how about an early present?”
“Now, what did mom tell us about patience,” he stated with a wry smile. “Plus I already bought, ... err, procured you one last week.”
“Okay. Okay. You can take Sylvia Jane then, ... but who'd you want me to get?” Frank asked with displeasure. Jesse pointed toward the scratching, left corner girl in the pastel dress with pink lotion on her arms.
“What about her?” Jesse laughed the question, nearly choking on the swill he slugged with the ascension of each next step. It’s not as if these options had not been covered during the manly chest thumping cavalcade of insults hurled around last night’s campfire. But pecking order has its privileges, as we all know, and Frank was well below the head rooster on the list of chicken coop foxes despite the fact that he was older.
“I'm not shacking up with Calamine Annie,” Frank stated, incredulous to the option.
It was solely Frank’s fault that his selection of women was below grade. No time to take a leak when the men were discussing next evening’s whore draft. He knew better than that, but had eaten more than a few helpings of the hot sauce chili that had the tendency to cause a river to run directly through a bandit colon, so he had no choice but to miss the selections and never completely understood the concept of a proxy vote.
Calamine Annie was just eighteen, sweet as lime punch and more than pleasant to look at, if you could overlook the scratching. Apparently, that pink lotion made for a consistent foundation base for the young lass just learning a trade and finding out what pleased a man. As Jesse and Sylvia Jane climbed the steps toward the second floor balcony, he shrugged both shoulders at Frank.
“It's either her or Burping Bertha.”
Seated in the chair beside the piano, Burping Bertha picked her mole, actually just a bad-looking chocolate Raisinette, plucked it into her mouth, and burped. Her ample rear creased the worn wood like two feather pillows that had been well used and her round cheeks bulged like several ten pound sacks of potatoes had somehow become lodged inside her mouth. No choice.
