The Dam of Outlaws: An Arsenal of Mother Love : MAMAW<i> by Susan Dodd (Viking: $18.95; 348 pp. 0-670-82180-2) </i>

The mother of Frank and Jesse James was born Zerelda Cole in Kentucky in the early 19th Century. She was fatherless at 2, motherless at 14 when her young widowed mama married a farmer and left Kentucky and her daughter for Missouri. Susan Dodd’s “Mamaw” (Dodd won the 1984 Iowa Short Fiction Award) is an impressionistic meditation on this dam of outlaws.

Zerel is sent off to a convent by her guardian uncle, where she is conspicuous for being “not of the faith” and--although not yet 15--nearly 6 feet tall. “She’s no beauty, Zerel: man-size girl with boy clothes and no manners. Her nose is too big by half; a cynic lurks around the eyes and mouth. Her voice is deep. Her hands are rough. Thighs you could build a house on.” Despite this seeming handicap, her wild spirit attracts a young divinity student named Robert James, who finds her “dazzling,” something in the girl “more fearsome than beauty.”

This description strikes the note we are to hear throughout the novel: Earth Mother of outlaws. Susan Dodd gives us a Zerel with a passion for land, for planting and harvesting, for the feel of soil itself against her mountainous body. Much is made of her girth, her heart, her “mighty thighs,” her “scent like grass.” She is “uncontained, elemental.” Wife of three, mother of eight. Endlessly fecund, untamable, without moderation.

Dodd’s vision of Zerel mandates the form and language of “Mamaw,” for better or worse. This is Zerel down by the creek, giving birth all alone to her second child: “Zerel feels the heat fondling, lapping, the penetrating, possessing her almost like Robert does. With the soles of her feet feeling their way along the rough ground, she raises her knees, then parts them slowly, opening, offering herself to the sun. Her hands curve, reach, enclose, lift her breasts. Zerel’s breasts rise into the stroking of the sun.”

Sometimes this heightened, frequently anthropomorphic language works, now and then gives us the very feel of the feeling; but more often it gives us the sense of authorial straining after the “poetic,” apparently identified as scattershot rather than bull’s-eye.

Better are the passages in which Dodd’s voice is intense but more precise, as in Robert James’ departure for the California gold fields, abandoning Zerel and their small sons, Frank and Jesse: “As Robert James turns and rides away from his home and family, setting off toward the gold-studded hills of California, his 3-year-old son, Jesse, stands beside his mother, watching from the doorway. The child’s eyes are bright and very blue, his mother’s very dark, yet the two pairs are similar; hot and dry. Reaching the crest of the small hill that marks the boundary between his own land and the country road, the Rev. James reins his roan mare, turns in the saddle and lifts his black hat against the early morning sky in a last gesture of farewell to his wife and son. The woman turns from the door and busies herself at the hearth. Standing alone now, the child slowly raises his hand. Taking careful aim, he shoots his deserting, dreaming father through the heart with one pointed finger, tiny and utterly merciless.”

A telling image. It gives us something of the pith of Zerel and Robert; it points to the future of the “utterly merciless” Jesse James; it suggests that Robert James--for all the care of his flock--might have murdered his son as surely as Robert Ford did in the spring of 1882.

It would have been impossible to consider this extraordinary woman without reference to the violence in which she lived her life. The history of the period becomes increasingly central as the focus of the story widens beyond Zerel the single, singular women to include Zerel the adoring, fiercely defensive mother of that exceptionally beautiful outlaw Jesse James.

Everything relevant is here: the border wars of the mid-1800s between Missouri and Kansas; the terrorist Quantrill, with whose savage Civil War guerrillas both James boys, the Youngers and countless lesser bandits served their apprenticeship; the failed Northfield bank raid, which marked the downward turning of the fortunes of the James gang.

Upon Jesse’s murder, Dodd reasserts the metaphor that informs the book: Like the Earth, Mamaw makes a “mockery of death,” charges quarters for a curious public to view Jesse’s house, Jesse’s mother, Jesse’s grave.

Zerelda lived to be 86, died in a Pullman berth on a train home to Missouri after a visit with Frank James in Oklahoma City.