The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (17 page)

The candle was tilted in a tin cup that was nailed below a small side window and Sarah sat next to it, prim as a child, her dress hiked up and collected like laundry, her pale thighs squeezed and puckered a little with fat, her ankles thin above her shoes. He could see her blush and her downcast eyes were a maiden’s, but she seemed less shocked than amused. She said, “This is embarrassing.”

“You can go ahead and do your duty; I don’t mind.”

“Well now, I’ve sort of got stagefright with a strange man in the commode with me.”

“You look awful pretty.”

“Do I?”

“I’ve never seen such well-shaped limbs.”

She glanced fleetingly at the bent pronouncement at his crotch and then at his chill blue eyes. “Is Wood awake?”

“Just me.”

She contemplated her knees for a moment and then blew out the candle. She rose with her navy blue dress still bunched at her waist and shyly moved toward Dick. She said, “I bet you thought I was a lady.”

DICK LIDDIL
stole into the house at eleven o’clock, crawled up the stairs so that the footboards wouldn’t creak, and saw that Wood’s bunk was empty. He reclined on the mattress for a minute or two, contemplating causes and effects, then sat up and removed his revolver from its scabbard and slid it under the woolen blanket like something pleasurable. And he awoke at sunrise to the calm voice of Wood Hite in middle sentence: “—moonlight and held a conversation with myself over what I should and shouldn’t do. Should I blow the sidewinder to kingdom come? Should I chop his perty face into hash? Maybe I could cut his oysters off like a steer.”

He sat on the bunk across from Dick, his eyes pouched and green with sleeplessness, his nose colossal beneath the strip of daylight allowed by a window shade. Dick’s pistol had somehow been fished from its place and was squashed under Wood’s thigh. Wood continued, “But I took into account our months together on the wrong side of the law and what I come up with is you and me should duel; and may the best man win.”

“You’re making this more grievous than you oughta, Wood.”

Wood smacked him with a pillow. “The honor of the entire Hite family is at stake!”

So the two accordingly stood back to back on the cold, dew-white lawn, revolvers raised like ear contraptions, Dick in his longjohns and boots. Wood created gentlemen’s rules for the duel as Dick kidded and negotiated and finally counseled Hite about the jeopardy to his very being that was forthcoming. Nevertheless, Wood counted out numbers in a stately, funereal measure and the two marked each word with a stride, greening the grass with their boot tracks. But Dick was a man who left nothing to chance; not only did he angle toward a broad ash tree as he walked, but he turned at nine instead of ten and fired at Wood’s left ear.

Wood ducked in reaction to the gunshot and the sizzle of a miss that veered wide of his skull, then he crouched and spun around to see the green lawn in streaks that slewed toward the ash and a flicker of yellow hair next to the gray bark. He clutched at his trigger and the revolver jumped so violently it sprained his wrist and a chunk of ash tree exploded. Dick bent out and shot at Wood a second time—his arm kicked up, there was a noise akin to a window that has crashed down in its sash, blue gunsmoke ballooned and then dwindled, and another noise like the snare of a saw cut the air near Wood’s neck.

The gunpowder noise surprised Wood’s relatives and servants from sleep and they rushed down the hallway to the screen door, closing robes around their nightshirts and nightgowns, as Dick discharged his last round and crackled branches in a woodrow next to the road. He snapped the hammer into three detonated cartridges, saw the Hites behind the screen door, and ran to them in the clomping, clumsy way of a cowhand unused to his legs as Wood shot at his back twice, neglecting to lead Dick each time.

Dick struck the last riser on the stairs with his toe and walloped into a slide across the porch. Major Hite flattened his nose to the screen as he hollered, “Here now! Stop this! Wood? Wood! I won’t have any gunplay on my property! I’ve told you a thousand times.”

Dick slithered toward the old man’s bare feet and Wood shot another time. It shattered a chair strut and nailed a dark hole in the windowsill. Major Hite stamped down on a throw rug and yelled, “Wood! You listen to me! No more!”

Wood looked down the revolver muzzle and clicked the chamber around. “That was my last bullet anyways.” He eyed the revolver at a bird feeder. “Something must be wrong with the sight on this thing.”

George Hite, Jr., was bent next to his father. He said, “You’ll notice I wasn’t in on it, Daddy. Don’t even own a shooting iron.”

Major Hite looked down at the man cowering near his white calves. “What’s the reason for this ruckus? Huh?”

Dick saw Sarah slink over to her husband, pink slippers on her feet and a patchwork quilt shut around her. Dick arose and said, “Me and Wood, we woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, is all.”

Major Hite showed no signs of hearing Dick; he merely waited for the man’s mouth to stop moving and then said, “You know what? You’ve worn out your welcome, young fellow.”

DICK LEFT AT ONCE
and rode north as far as Russellville, where he rented a room with a concealed stairway above a blacksmith’s shop and worked infrequently for ten cents per hour and chewed tobacco on a store bench with veterans of the Mexican-American War. Afternoons he roistered with Mrs. Sarah Hite when she could visit town, or she arranged strange venues with Dick, sunrise on Mud River, or midnight near a revival tent, or noon underneath a railroad trestle, where she smeared a bedsheet flat over the weeds.

Her go-between in arranging these meetings was the ex-slave, John Tabor. He’d stand in the alley as the blacksmith rammed the ceiling overhead with a rod and Dick would skip downstairs in his socks; he’d throw twigs at Dick’s window, announce a time and location when the sash was raised, and then slip off into darkness.

One Thursday at nightfall, John Tabor lightly rapped a restaurant’s window near the table where Dick swabbed stew from his dish with pumpernickel bread. Dick went outside and the butler gave him a come hither look that lured him into an alley. John Tabor was reed thin, close to fifty, the brown of saddle leather, and he liked to claim a resemblance to the Great Pacificator, Senator Henry Clay. He twisted his coat collar up and blew in his fists and invented Alaska out of the nip of the air. “I won’t be delivering no more notes,” he said. “I won’t be fetching Sarah no more for you, neither.”

Dick saw that his checkered dinner napkin was still tucked under his belt. He removed it and stroked his wide mustache with a corner. “You in a snit, John?”

“Yeah. Uh huh.” He looked over his shoulder into the empty street and then he bowed closer to Dick. “Wood seen me and it don’t make him happy, a colored man owning a white lady’s secrets, setting her onto a backdoor man which ain’t her husband. He don’t know much yet but he
suspects
. That’s more than plenty right there. He’ll cut me dead, I don’t be careful.”

“Naw.”

“Said he would. Said he’d stick an axe betwixt my eyes.”

“She does want to meet me though, doesn’t she? You’ve come so far, you may as well tell me where she’ll be and make them your last words.”

Tabor gripped his coat and walked into the wind but as Dick hunched next to him the butler said, “At creekside, over near the pigsty; tomorrow evening, about nine. Now my mouth’s gonna be shut, as far as you’re concerned. You ain’t gonna hear no more from John Tabor.”

Dick Liddil saddled his bay mare at seven the next evening and rode south in a slow walk, his stomach so queasy that he submitted to one of Jesse’s prescriptions and ate salts of tartar and powdered gum arabic. And as he crossed onto the Hite acres, panic overtook him; he sometimes circled his horse around to check the night woods, to decipher the crackle of autumn leaves, to cock his Navy Colt at a raccoon that truckled into the creek. Trees groaned and sighed as the wind pressed against them; grasses rolled with the soft susurration of mourners whispering in a candled parlor; and Dick was conjuring phantoms, he was as spooked as a man alone in a room who watches a closet doorknob turn and the door ever so slowly open.

He crossed a meadow and motivated his mare down the creek bank, where she sloshed in water that was as shallow as the coronets of her hooves. The pigsty was a low barn with a roof over the feedboxes and the rest a mud roll-around inside an ill-made slat fence. Dick creaked his saddle and read his pocket watch with a matchstick and looked around for Sarah. He slid off the mare and let her drag her reins over to leafmeal as he walked to the brow of the hill.

Hogs oinked and grunted and climbed over each other for corner food. Weeds lowered under the wind and apprehensions spidered his back. He wandered about and broke sticks in his fists. The hogs snorted and crowded and there was a sound like pages being torn from a book and pigs screeched around a sow that was greedily wolfing something down as she trotted away from the corner. Dick leaned on the sty’s fence like a slow country boy and asked, “What the heck are you critters chewing on?”

Then Dick saw a shoe and ankle wobble as the hogs shoved and scuffled above a muddied wool coat. His skin nettled cold and water came to his eyes and he screamed at the animals as he swatted them in the hocks with his hat. They scampered and squealed and snorted the earth. A sow remained and wrenched at a cord of sinew that made the body jerk but Dick shot a bullet that punched into the mud and the sow scurried back with the others.

The wool coat was screwed around to the side and one sleeved arm was crooked beneath the man’s back while the other lolled over the bottom slat on the fence. Dick could see that the skin on the man’s knuckles was brown but that was the sole clue that this was John Tabor, for most of his throat and face were eaten off, there were only red sinews and laces of muscle and cartilage and the blood-slick bones of the skull.

Then there was a low moan that could not have issued from Tabor, that came from the pigsty, and Dick crouched with his Navy Colt lifted toward a collection of juts and ovals and shadows. “Wood?” he shouted. He clicked back the hammer, steadied the quavering revolver with his other hand, and shouted, “Jesse?”

The shadows broke and reconnected and he saw that the creature was closer by a foot and Dick jibbed to the side like a boy playing dodge ball, and he listened for the corduroy sound of a careful slide of iron from leather. “Can’t we talk about it, Jesse? Or Wood?”

The creature moved and Dick called out, “I’ll shoot! So help me, I’m scared enough to be real undependable with this Colt.” There was a snuffle and a sob and he called out, “Sarah?” and he turtled around the sty, his Colt raised, his coat sleeve skating off the fence rail, until he could make out Mrs. Hite. She was feeble with shock and her eyes were cloudily bottled by tears. The acid stink of her vomit was on her dress and for one insane moment Dick was ready to murder the woman because she smelled bad.

“Did Wood kill him?”

Sarah’s neck seemed restrained by a shackle and then she was able to nod, twice.

“You tell the sheriff that. You tell the sheriff that Wood Hite is a killer. You swear out a warrant for his arrest, but don’t you say word one about the James gang, and don’t let my name cross your lips.”

And then Dick walked by her without even nicking her dress, sliding down the creek bank to his mare. Sarah was standing in the same position, motionless, staring at the remains, her hands gloved with blood and stalled at her sides as if sewn there. Dick climbed into the saddle and trotted his horse westward across the Hite meadows and never saw the woman again.

JESSE JAMES RODE INTO KENTUCKY
in October as he’d promised Clarence Hite he would, but he went by way of Louisville and then south into Nelson County, where his cousin Donny Pence was a sheriff. He stayed a week, hunting pigeons and quail in the daytime with Congressman Ben Johnson and playing cards in the Pence sitting room at night. Johnson would later retell how they were reading the newspaper one evening when Donny gave J. T. Jackson a page with an article about the James gang robbing a train in Texas. The man slapped the newspaper down and walked over to a windowpane, there scratching into the glass with a diamond ring:
Jesse James
and
October 18th, 1881
. He then turned to the congressman and said, “I want you to be my witness that I was in Kentucky on this date and not in Texas.” And then, having compromised himself, Jesse forgot about going south to Logan County and instead journeyed west to Missouri, stopping off in Saline County at the cabin and sixty miserable acres owned by Ed Miller.

He rattled the cabin’s cloth-screened door on its hook and looked around at the yard, at a bruised mule harness, a perilous rake, and a rusted plow embedded in soil, and then Jesse looked back at the door and saw Ed Miller with a gun in his hand and fright in his eyes. Ed asked, “You come by for a visit?”

“You going to let me in or do I have to talk through the screen?”

Miller flipped up the hook and Jesse pulled the door, passing the speechless man as he walked inside.

The room was a mess: in it was a kitchen table on which smeared dishes were stacked, a green suede of mold on their caked meats and rinds; newspapers were shocked like corn against a couch, a chair was tipped over, a patched shirt was draped over a closet door, a cat was on the kitchen cutting board licking something from the sink. “You aren’t much of a housekeeper, are you?”

“You didn’t just
happen
by,” Miller said.

“Why not?” Jesse glanced at the gun and Miller put it on the grimy table. Jesse said, “Clell kept himself so untidy you could rub his neck and make dirt worms.” He sat down on a ringed rug and nodded toward a sagging couch. “Go ahead and take the load off your feet.”

Miller did as instructed and looked out the window, twisting his unclean hair with his fingers. His clothes were as wrinkled as crumpled paper, his fingernails were outlined with filth, a corner of his mouth was stained brown with gravy or tobacco juice.