The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (12 page)

Annie partially convinced Zee that Jesse was a preposterous, irresponsible man, but America seemed spellbound by him. Correspondents sought to locate him, mysteries about the James brothers were considered in editorials, reports of their robberies seemed to be such a national addiction that nickel books were being published in order to offer more imaginative adventures. Insofar as it wasn’t them that the James gang robbed, the public seemed to wish Jesse a prolonged life and great prosperity. He was their champion and their example, the apple of their eyes; at times it even seemed to Zee that she wasn’t Jesse’s only wife, that America had married him too. And it seemed a joy to many of them when a reinvigorated James gang—without the man’s more prudential older brother—robbed the Chicago and Alton Railroad at Glendale, Missouri, in October 1879.

Some men with six-guns pushed the checker players at Joe Molt’s corner store fifty yards to the Glendale depot, where the station attendant ate the barrel of Jesse’s revolver until he agreed to whatever the outlaw commanded. Jesse then wrecked the telegraph apparatus with a crowbar (Tucker Bassham thought it was only a sewing machine) and the red flag was raised next to the railroad tracks in order to notify the engineer that passengers wanted on. After Dick Liddil climbed aboard the locomotive, Ed Miller sledged in the express car door, and currencies, bonds, and securities were swept into a meal sack and divvied six miles out of town, each in the company receiving $1,025, more than most of them could make in a year. The engineer told newspaper correspondents that the captain of the group had come up to him prior to riding off and had said, “I didn’t get your name, but mine is Jesse James.”

His pretext was that setting up a farm required a great deal of money, and he made an effort to persuade Frank to join him when again the James gang was plundering, but Frank was settled and intransigent and in the course of one of their increasingly common arguments Frank smashed a beer bottle against the Colt that Jesse had pulled in exasperation.

So Frank was again not with the James gang when, in November, they moved against the Empire City Bank. It appeared, however, that someone had spoken of their intentions, for the gang was forestalled by a preliminary reconnaissance that showed more than a dozen townsmen inside, each with more pistols and shotguns than he could possibly use. The gang therefore fragmented, with most of them returning to their chores as if they’d merely been on a club excursion, but Jesse and Whiskeyhead Ryan met again in September 1880 to rob the Mammoth Cave sightseers’ stage in Kentucky. Five men and Judge Rutherford Rountree and his daughter, Lizzie, were ordered out of the stagecoach at gunpoint and gave up $803 and jewelry, including a diamond ring that Jesse would later slip on his wife’s finger, and a gold watch that was a gift to the judge from the governor of Kentucky and was found two years later among the belongings of Mr. Thomas Howard of St. Joseph, Missouri. Ryan sipped from a pint bottle of whiskey during the presentation, and, as Jesse jumped onto his horse, complimented the passengers for their graciousness, drinking to their continued well-being. Judge Rountree would later recognize T. J. Hunt as one of the culprits and the poor man would be imprisoned for eighteen months before the judge’s mistake was repaired.

Jesse displayed the ring, the gold watch, and the money to Frank James, and then made a practice of sashaying by his older brother’s workplace in his gentleman’s clothes. The temptation of an easier income at last became too persuasive and Frank joined Jesse and Whiskeyhead Ryan when they stopped a government paymaster on the road to Muscle Shoals, Alabama, in March 1881, splitting a five-thousand-dollar payroll three ways.

It was Frank’s ill luck then that he was immediately suspected of participation in the Muscle Shoals holdup, the only robbery he’d committed since Northfield in 1876, and it was only the compelling polemics of his lawyer, Raymond B. Sloan, that kept him out of jail. Then, on March 26th, Whiskeyhead Ryan gripped a mahogany bar in a grocery store saloon and swallowed a shot glass of sour mash after each of twelve cove oysters. He got surly and then he got arrested and in his buckskin vest was found more gold than a man of his capabilities ought to have owned. Descriptions of him were telegraphed to police departments around the country and Kansas City responded with a wire petitioning the state of Tennessee to extradite William Ryan to the state of Missouri.

Overnight the B. J. Woodson and J. D. Howard families vanished from Nashville, and by the summer of 1881, Zee was again in Kansas City and mothering a six-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue. Jesse was calling himself J. T. Jackson in remembrance of Thomas Jonathan “Stonewall” Jackson, the Confederate general, and Zee was again feeling dwarfed by her husband, subsidiary to him. It seemed they moved and lived and concealed themselves according to his will, and she dwindled under him like a noon shadow, she was no more than an unnoticed corner of the rooms he filled. She could imagine a life without Jesse but knew it would be without consequence or surprise, nothing would be in jeopardy, and she would die a completely ordinary woman, one as insipid and colorless as the girl who stitched initials into handkerchiefs and read Robert Browning by candlelight. Much later Frank Triple would write that Jesse “married a woman, who while amiable, good, and true to him in every sense of the word, yet possessed no will of her own, and whose mind, weak, plastic, and yielding, took form from, rather than shaped that of her husband. To such a mind as this, no matter how good, no strong effort is a possibility, and it will sooner drift into the channels of excuse and justification than to make a bold, strong stand against wrong.” Zee could only agree.

ON THE NIGHT
of July 14th, Sheriff Pat Garrett stole into a sleeping room on Pete Maxwell’s ranch in the New Mexico Territory and there shot and killed the twenty-one-year-old outlaw who was known as Billy the Kid.

And on July 15th, two days before Mary James’s second birthday, two wary men of unequal heights and qualities bought tickets for a Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific sleeper to Des Moines, Iowa. They would not stay on the train long enough to conclude the journey. They were overdressed, as was common then, even in a sultry July: each wore a gentleman’s vest and suit cut in the English style, a black slouch hat, calf-high Wellington boots, and an open white linen duster of the sort that cattlemen used to keep cow grime off their pants legs and to protect against railroad soot and sparks. It was not immediately evident that they were carrying heavy Navy Colt revolvers or that the jaunty sport of the two had shoe-dyed his spruced hair and beard.

They lodged themselves magisterially in an opulent, chandeliered drawing room that was called a palace car. Shades were still strapped down to the sills to keep out the pernicious late afternoon sun and Jesse pushed them aside to peer out at the porters and railway policemen. And when they jolted into motion, Jesse moseyed from one coach to the next, stooping to look at the countryside, tipping his hat to the more antique women, pivoting only slightly away if ever a railroad employee approached.

He interrupted his partner’s nap at six to suggest they visit the dining car, where some passengers would later recall their speaking about the robbery of the Davis and Sexton Bank at Riverton, Iowa, four days earlier, a holdup then accredited to the James gang, but which the two men were positive was actually accomplished by Poke Wells and his gang.

The man eating across from Jesse was Ed Miller, the rugged, unintelligent younger brother of the late Clell Miller, and a good friend of Charley Ford, whom he’d introduced to Jesse at a poker game in 1879 and whom he’d arranged to make part of the James gang of late. Ed Miller looked much like Clell—brown eyes and waxy brown hair the color of coffee beans, and a smug, vulgar, open-jawed face that seemed rigid enough to barge through wooden doors. He sank into the dining car chair as if he were delighting in a too-occasional, good hot soak and Jesse guided a match beneath his cigar until a duplicate flame licked up from the tobacco. They talked about the new governor, Thomas T. Crittenden, a Democrat and a onetime Union colonel who’d been financed by the railway companies in his 1880 campaign. His inaugural address-in January pledged the government to the job of ridding Missouri of the James gang, and Jesse said he was going to take measures to guarantee his men’s allegiance. He whispered, “You won’t none of you get away with bargaining or making exchanges. I’ve got a wife and two children I’ve gotta look out for.”

“You can trust me,” said Miller.

Jesse rocked back in his dining car chair, his fingers lacing his hair like a shoe, his green cigar angled up, and he gave himself over to a long thought before saying, “I know I can, Ed.”

Then a middle-aged conductor in a blue suit and cap tapped the dining car table with a finger as he politely carped that cigars could only be enjoyed in the smoking car. Jesse reacted genially, saying that was exactly where they were going.

Soon after 9 p.m. on the milk-stop train, they were in Cameron, thirty-five miles east of St. Joseph, and stepping up into the smoking car were two glum, sweating men in long wool coats who—though they’d been chatting together on the depot platform—diverged once they were in the smoker, the younger sitting forward, the larger man sitting just ahead of Jesse James and Ed Miller. The man sitting forward was Robert Woodson Hite, the Kentucky cousin of the Jameses, and the man closer to Jesse was his brother, Frank, his sandy sideburns shoe-dyed black and lifts in his riding boots giving him two inches in height. He looked just once at Jesse, tilting up his exaggerated nose, and then he lighted a cigarette and looked out at the Cameron buildings that were slowly gliding away.

They were going eleven miles north to Winston. A good many yards beyond that was a stone trestle that bridged Little Dog Creek and there Dick Liddil, Charley Ford, and Wood’s brother, Clarence Hite, were tying seven horses in a copse of trees. They then trudged back along the roadbed with Dick assigning jobs to his more agitated partners. They could hear crickets and frogs in the weeds and as they gained the Winston depot they could hear singing in the Presbyterian church.

Already on the depot platform were Mr. A. McMillan, a masonry contractor, and a crew of four that included his two sons. They were going home to Iowa that Friday night and were joshing and goosing each other; the James gang avoided giving the crew their faces when they achieved the platform, and the three were straggled along it when the locomotive’s headlight yellowed their skin. McMillan and the four got on, but the brooding gang lingered. Conductor Westfall slanted out from the smoking car, his left arm hooked in the grab rail, and hollered, “All aboard!”

Dick Liddil called out that they were only waiting for somebody, and when the conductor swung back inside they plunged through engine boiler steam to jump up onto the front and rear porches of the U.S. Express Company car, just behind the coal tender.

Conductor Westfall moved down the smoking car, gripping seats to steady himself when the rolling stock jerked forward, spraddling his legs out like a man on a horse when he stopped to punch a spade design into a passenger’s ticket. He didn’t see the guns in Frank’s hands, didn’t see Ed Miller’s glare.

They’d gone only forty yards and Westfall was checking a sleeping man’s ticket when Frank pushed a blue mask over his nose and pulled himself up, yelling, “Stay in your seats! Don’t move!” And when a man laughed at the joke of that James boys act, Frank fired his guns every whichway, into the floor, the gas lamps, the ceiling, making ears ring and making the forty passengers sink down beneath their crossed arms. Westfall straightened at the gun noise and edged just enough into it that he caught a shot between two ribs. His right hand went to the injury and he groaned and then staggered out of the smoking car as Ed Miller and Wood Hite joined in the gunfire; but Jesse James gave Westfall only the chance to get out the car door before his unaccidental gunshot killed the man and Westfall teetered off his legs, banging down the iron stairs and sliding off the train onto the roadbed.

Frank McMillan and John Penn were standing outside the smoking car in the July night when the gun noise began. They crouched down and a lead ball crashed through an overhead window, spiderwebbing the glass, and John Penn jacked himself up to peek inside and drop down again. McMillan asked, “Who is it?” and Penn said, “I can’t tell,” and Frank McMillan was craning his neck to look inside for himself when a lead ball punched into his forehead above his right eye, stopping his life instantly. His body collapsed just as the air brakes screeched and McMillan too slipped off the slackening train.

Jesse, Wood Hite, and Ed Miller were by then running forward through gunsmoke to get into the express company car, and Dick Liddil and Clarence Hite were scuttling over a coal pile to the locomotive in order to guarantee that it wouldn’t go further than their horses. But a crewman had switched on the automatic air brakes, which meant Dick had to command the engineer to bring the train gradually along until it was over Little Dog Creek.

Charley Ford was standing by the baggage agent’s passageway with a disguise on, a gun cocked near his ear, but he gave way to Jesse, who rammed against the wooden door as if his bones were made out of timber, slamming the door into a packing case. He slapped aside the agent, Frank Stamper, and then rammed against an interior door as Charles Murray, the express messenger, was jarring an outside door shut. Ed Miller pushed Stamper into a wall and pressed a revolver into the agent’s cheek, saying, “You get out of here!” Stamper stepped outside and looked at the long gray beard hooked over Charley Ford’s ears, and Frank James, who was by then walking along on the ground, gripped the baggage agent by the leg and jerked him into a pratfall. “Keep your seat,” Frank said.

Jesse scared Murray into yielding the key to the express company safe by saying one man was already killed so they had nothing to lose by killing him too. The only light in the express section was a coal-oil lantern that was hanging from a finger hook and though Jesse was thorough in gathering over three thousand dollars into a grain sack, he missed a good deal more in gold bullion and grieved about it for a week.