The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (16 page)

The two heard a gate creak and saw big Wilbur strew a shock of garden corn stalks into a feed trough next to the barn. He doused the stalks with salt water from a tea kettle in order to lure the milk cows, and then seemed inclined to visit his shivering younger brother. But Bob shook his head in the negative and Wilbur changed his mind and maundered across the yard to the kitchen, banging the tea kettle with his knee. It was near dusk and the weather had cooled and Bob wanted a coat, but instead he asked, “So what’re you three cahoots cooking up?”

“Don’t know that I should say.”

“Much loot in it?”

“Thousands and thousands of dollars.”

“I don’t want to wheedle the dang news from you, Dick.”

“How about let’s leave it a mystery and then we won’t neither one of us regret our little chat.”

Bob clamped the tile brush with his teeth and crossed his eyes at Dick in a measure of exasperation, then clutched the towel around himself and reached down for his holster. Dick pinned it with his boot. “Let me carry your six-gun for you, Bob.”

Because of the brush in his mouth, Bob’s “All right” came out “Awri.” And he had taken no more than two strides toward the house when he felt Dick cuddle to him with the cold revolver insisted under the towel and blunt against his scrotum. Bob let the brush drop and shrank a little from the ice of the nickel barrel. He said, “Feeling lonely, are you, Dick?”

“You and me, we horse around and josh each other with lies and tomfoolery, but now and then we need to get down to brass tacks. Which is: you so much as mention my name to Jesse, I’ll find out about it, you better believe that. And then I’ll look you up, I’ll knock on your door, and I will be mad as a hornet, I will be
hot
.”

“You be careful with that iron.”

Dick removed the revolver and smacked it into Bob’s leather holster. He walked beside Bob. “You know where I stand on these matters and that’s all there is to it. We can be friendly as pigs from now on.”

“Could be I’ll never see Jesse again.”

Dick drew the screen door wide for Bob and restricted it with his shoulder as he pried his boots off on a mud-caked iron jack. He said, “Oh no. I’ve got a hunch about it. Jesse will come a courtin’ Ed and Jim and me, and then he’ll find himself in the neighborhood and call on them two Ford brothers. Jesse don’t miss much. He has a sixth sense.”

Inside, cooking smells maneuvered through the house: cow liver, sweet potatoes, stewed onions, cabbage—scents that were as assertive as colors. Dick moved sock-footed into the kitchen, bumped Clarence aside, tendered Martha’s rump with his hand and removed it before she could skirt from him, and spoke heartily to the assembled. Bob went to his sister’s bedroom, where he ripped the brown shop paper from his clothes and dressed in his new white underwear. Over Martha’s chiffonier was a square mirror that he could tilt to admire himself from toe to topknot, and he’d just noted his cowlicked, straw-wild, ginger brown hair when an intuition sickened him and he rushed the stairs to the room overhead, where Wood and Charley were rooting through his mementoes. The shoebox was crushed, newspaper clippings skidded on the floor with each wind puff, everything he’d stolen or saved was sinking shadowed cups in his soft pillow: a compass and protractor encased in a box of blue velvet; a green tin of playing cards missing only the three of clubs, once used by a Mr. J. T. Jackson at Ed Miller’s Thursday poker game; an item that was short as a thumb and wound in a linen handkerchief; a barkwood pocket knife with two blades and an awl, filched from Jesse’s stepbrother, John; a magnifying glass; brittle licorice that no one could chew; a sardine can that clattered when Wood shook it; a bag sachet that smelled of lavender.

Bob shouted in a juvenile voice, “You two have some nerve!”

Wood looked at him with more consternation than guilt. “What
is
this junk?”

Charley said, “Thievings; isn’t that right, Bob.” He was at the nightstand drawer, stirring his finger among yellowed book pages and tattered newspaper columns that were knitted together with shirt pins. His brother bodied Wood aside and gleaned the articles on the bed as Charley peered at a Civil War photograph and skittered it into the drawer. “This ain’t Jesse.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Never wore no mustache; never was anywheres
near
a cannon.”

“I can’t even calculate what I’m lookin’ at,” said Wood.

“Ever since he was a child, Bob’s collected whatsoever he could find about the James brothers. Got himself a little museum in this room.”

Bob rammed the nightstand’s drawer closed. “Next time you snoop around up here, you’d better strap on a shootin’ iron.”

Charley showed his buck teeth when he smirked. “You can see how scared I am.”

Bob scowled at Wood and said, “You too, Wood Hite. You cross me again and I’ll put a bullet through your head.”

“Now is that any way to talk?” Charley asked.

But Wood simply extended his fingers to Bob’s chest and disdainfully flicked a wooden button on Bob’s union suit and Bob sat on the mattress as if he’d been muscled backward. Wood sneered, “You better recollect who my cousin is. You seem to’ve misremembered that Jesse loves me like the Good Book. Jesse’s my insurance. You can play like you’re a dangerous person with people at the grocery store, but don’t you misremember who you’ll be accounting to if I so much as have my feelings hurt. I’d be gooder than you’ve been to me if I was in your shoes.”

Martha climbed a stair riser and called. “Do I have to yell suwee?”

Charley said, “Why don’t everybody make up and be pleasant for once? Why don’t we pass the evening like pleasant human beings?”

IT WAS THE EVENING
of September 19th and President Garfield was on the New Jersey shore, fighting chills and nausea as surgeons talked about his degeneration and newspaper correspondents smoked cigarettes on the seaside lawn. An aneurysm that had developed over a ruptured artery apparently collapsed at about ten o’clock, for the president woke from sleep, complaining of an excruciating pain close to his heart. And at 10:35 p.m. James A. Garfield died.

Perry Jacobs stopped by the Harbison place at noon on the 20th to pass along that telegraphed news and he sipped coffee with Martha and Bob as Wood Hite and Dick Liddil packed for a trip east to Kentucky. When Dick came downstairs with his coat and bags, Martha kissed him on the lips and whispered something to his ear. He smiled and said, “Oh, goodness! Maybe I’ll change my mind.” But then Wood was behind Dick and bumping him toward the door and after some speedy farewells they were off.

They rode east sullenly, rarely speaking, rocking on their horses. Wood read a penny newspaper four inches from his nose under the brim shade of his hat; Dick counted crows and chewed sunflower seeds and watched the geography snail by. Brittle weeds slashed away from the horses; children clattered down cornrows with gunnysacks after school, jerking orange ears from the stalks; a young brakeman in a mackinaw sat on a freight car with a slingshot that knocked on far-off barn doors. “Cecil?” someone called out. It took them a week to reach St. Louis, where Dick caroused with someone named Lola who danced on a grand piano. Then the two ramped up onto a Mississippi River barge and worried throughout the long slide south to Cairo. The outlaws couldn’t swim and their water fright contaminated the animals so that they reared and bucked and showed their teeth with each crabbed movement on the current.

Then as the two outlaws crossed southwest Kentucky from Cairo, Wood began nagging and carping at Dick for his pettiness, his chicanery, and his philandering with Martha, pushing on to an imaginary problem with the divvy at Blue Cut. It was Wood’s contention that Dick stole one hundred dollars from his grain sack in the second-class coach and that he’d never turned it over to Frank when they apportioned the loot afterward. But that was all a smokescreen for his trepidation that Dick would try to romance Wood’s stepmother, Sarah, who was known to be susceptible to passionate attentions.

Wood’s father was Major George V. Hite, once the richest man in Logan County, Kentucky. He owned a grocery store, a mansion, and six hundred acres eleven miles south of Russellville, close to the Tennessee border, and was said to be worth one hundred thousand dollars when just one dollar represented a man’s daily wage. But he’d invested in the commodities market and lost so much on tobacco and cotton that he filed for bankruptcy in 1877. His first wife, Nancy James Hite, died a year later and he was sundered. After a suitable period of mourning, however, he began to consort with and court Sarah Peck, who was referred to by a newspaper reporter as “the pertest and prettiest widow in all this whole country.” And yet the community was scandalized by their eventual engagement, and the Hite clan was incensed, for Sarah was considered carnal and licentious and was even rumored to have been enjoyed by Jim Cummins in the course of an Easter visit. When Major Hite married the widow, most of his children left the mansion in anger, but the James gang would return whenever they needed seclusion and Jim Cummins made a second career of boasting that he’d tampered with Sarah in a pantry as pork chops burned in a skillet. And by the time Wood skidded the main gate aside and rode onto the Hite property, his case against Dick was so repeatedly and tempestuously made that the two were not speaking at all and only Dick’s promise not to toy with her feelings kept him from being prohibited from the grounds.

Beautiful thoroughbred horses milled about on the green pasture, colts dashed along the fence and cut away for no particular reason. Two ex-slaves threshed in a golden field a quarter-mile off, a black woman pinned laundry on a clothesline, and Mrs. Sarah Hite was weeding among the withered remains of a vegetable garden, five acorn squash sacked in her apron. One rolled out and dropped to the earth when she waved.

Wood said, “She eats men alive.”

Dick licked sunflower seeds from his palm and never paid attention to her; nor did he look at Sarah much at supper when she sat next to her emaciated husband, speaking wifely courtesies into his black ear trumpet. And because his shyness and silence were beginning to show, Dick leaned over his pot roast and asked, “You cook this, ma’am?”

She shook her head and said, “I’ve got a nigger woman.”

Hite inclined toward his wife with the trumpet. “Hmmm?”

“Dick asked if I cooked this.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

Major Hite picked up Sarah’s white hand, which was wristed with lace, and showed it to the assembled like a lovely greeting card. “You boys ever seen such dainty nubbins?” He grinned at her red-faced resentment and said, “Sarah’s my plump little plum.”

Dick looked at his knife and fork and Wood said, “She knew what he was like when she married him.”

After dessert the Hites and Dick repaired to the broad porch, where they were seated on chairs that the butler, John Tabor, skidded across the floor. The talk was dull and void of thought, consisting almost entirely of observations that were manifestly true—the railroads make money going each way; it’s no fun being sick; sometimes you don’t know you’ve eaten too much until you get up from the table. At eight-thirty the old man stood with pain and yawned until his body shuddered and said, “Morning comes awful early.” But Sarah said she wasn’t sleepy and stayed with a wicker rocker and embroidered daisies on a kitchen hot pad as the men chatted—Wood and Dick and George Hite, Jr., the grocery store manager, who was grotesquely hunchbacked and lame. Wood prevailed upon Dick to sing Confederate Army ballads and Dick complied in a tenor voice that was so tragic and piercing that Sarah momentarily put down her needlework. Then a stillness came and there was only the creak of the chairs and the Hite brothers retired, and though Wood scowled at his young stepmother, she obstinately remained in her rocker with her stitching, a squat candle between her black, buttoned shoes, a silver thimble clinking whenever she drove the needle.

Sarah was buxom and broad as a stove and was considered voluptuous. Her eyes were bright blue, the sort that can seem a mosaic of silver and white, and her hair was the color that was then called nut brown, and it curtained her cheeks as she concentrated on the flower’s yellow disk.

Finally, Dick said, “I guess we’re the night owls, you and me.”

She simpered but did not look up. “I’m glad.”

“Oh?” Dick asked, as if he were Clarence. “How come?”

She made an ambiguous motion with her shoulders and smiled at her shoes. “I could listen to you sing and carry on until sunrise. You have a real pleasant disposition; and you’re interesting to look at; and, I don’t know, you sort of make me warm all over.”

“I’m what they call a worldling.”

“Well, I knew there had to be a name for it.”

“You and the Hite family don’t get along, if I’m to trust Wood and his version of the situation.”

She let her hands and sewing sink in the navy blue lap of her dress. Orange candlelight raised and lowered on her face and she tucked her bottom lip with her teeth. “We hate each other like poison, if you want to know the truth. Most of the Hites wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire.”

Dick never missed even the most concealed insinuation. He said with a wink of his skewed right eye, “They say when a woman catches fire you’re supposed to roll her around on the ground and cover her with your body.” And Sarah laughed so loudly she clamped her mouth, and then called him a naughty tease and said he tickled her to such an extent her cheeks were burning up. And then Wood was at the screen door in a nightshirt, his hair as sprigged as a houseplant. “Isn’t it just about bedtime?” he asked, and Dick kissed Sarah’s dainty nubbins as he exited for the second-floor bedroom.

Dick took off his boots and clothes and tucked himself under the bedsheet. He wacked the pillow, he rustled and stirred, he announced that he’d drunk too much coffee. He saw Wood in the bunk across from him as he arose in his longjohns and woolen socks. Wood’s eyes glared at him. “I need to visit the privy something terrible,” Dick said.

What he did was sneak down the first-floor hallway and touch the master bedroom door two inches inward to see Major George Hite alone in the room, puttering a snore. Dick did not allow the screen door to clap as he went outside. He walked around the rocking chair and across a cold lawn to a two-hole outhouse in back. The board walls showed interior candlelight at each severance and crack. Dick paused and looked around at the night, then slid into the outhouse and shut the door carefully behind him.