The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (18 page)

“You ought to get yourself a wife.”

Miller glared briefly at Jesse and then shrugged. “I was going to ask Martha—Charley’s sister? I was going to ask her if she could imagine it, but I guess Wood has plans of his own, and there’s always Dick Liddil getting in the way. I’ve give it some thought.” He picked something out of his hair and wiped it on a pillow. He couldn’t seem to put his eyes on Jesse; his right foot rapidly tapped the floor.

“Your crops in?”

“Don’t got much,” Miller said. “A garden patch and pasture. I was sick at planting time.”

“How you feeling now?”

He glanced fleetingly at Jesse and asked, “Why?”

“You’re acting queer.”

“You and me, we haven’t been just real good friends lately. It’s not your fault, you understand. You hear talk though.”

“Talk.”

Miller explained, “People tell you things.”

“Give me an example.”

Miller sighed. “Jim Cummins come by. Oh and Jim says—you know those boys got caught for the Blue Cut deal?—Jim says he got word—don’t ask me where—that you’re planning to kill them.”

“Why would I do that?”

Miller shot a glance at Jesse’s gun hand and then reestablished his gaze on the yard. “It’s just talk probably.”

“To shut ’em up?”

“Just talk.”

“Cummins say anything else?”

“Nope. That was it basically.”

“It don’t explain why you’re scared.”

Miller looked at Jesse with watery eyes and spit on his mouth, light glinting off the oils on his skin. “I’m in the same position, you see? I was
petrified
when I saw you ride up!”

“I just happened by, Ed.”

“Suppose you heard gossip though. Suppose you heard. Jim Cummins come by here. You might’ve put two and two together and thought we were planning to capture you or Frank and get that reward. Isn’t true, but you might’ve suspected it.”

Jesse got up, leaving coins from his pockets on the rug, and jiggled a pants leg over his boot. “Haven’t heard a lick of gossip lately.” He looked out at the road and at a sky that was pink with sunset. He grinned at Miller and said, “I’m glad I happened by.”

Miller worked at a smile and said, “Me too.”

“I want to put your mind at rest.”

“I’ve got six hundred dollars stashed away; I don’t need any governor’s reward.”

“It’s the principle of the thing too.”

Miller pulled himself to his feet and swept a hand over a plate to shoo away flies. They sewed in the air and resettled. “I can’t offer you supper; my cupboards are empty.”

“How about if we go for a ride? I could buy you something to eat in town and then be on my way.”

Miller gathered his mare in the paddock and saddled it as Jesse sat on a gelding with the night all around him. Then they trotted westerly, their bodies jumping off the saddles until the horses eased into a graceful lope and then into a walk. A farmer with a hayrake recognized Ed Miller and waved and Jesse nudged his horse to the right so that he couldn’t be seen. He said, “It’s a great month, October.” Some minutes later he said, “Your mare’s cheating on her right leg. Looks like she might be wind-galled.”

Miller couldn’t get himself to say anything.

Jesse pretended a cinch problem, slowing his horse, and said, “You go on ahead, partner. I’ll catch up.”

Miller slumped in his saddle and peered ahead.

Jesse gentled his gun from the leather holster at his left thigh and thought for a second or two before jogging his horse ahead.

When he got close enough, Jesse angrily said, “You ought to get better at lying.”

Miller stopped his horse but apparently couldn’t persuade himself to drop a hand to his pistol until he’d spun around, and just then Jesse tripped the hammer and a cartridge ball pounded into Miller’s cheek, snapping his head to the side and propelling his body off the mare so that he walloped onto the road.

Jesse stepped his gelding forward through gunsmoke and peered down at a man whose mouth and eyes were open in the rapt look of death. He got off the horse and tugged at Ed Miller’s legs, swatting weeds flat beneath the man’s coat, swishing leaves aside with each surge, towing the body under sumac and elm trees.

The mare was found browsing in its paddock two days later, a saddle rolled counterclockwise on its cinch until it was almost under the animal’s belly, the saddle fenders and stirrups sloppily bird-winged. Ed Miller was not found for many weeks and by then the coroner could only guess that the body was male and not yet middle-aged, it was little more than a bird-pecked skeleton with yellow teeth and a hank of black hair in clothes that had squashed flat in the rains.

Jesse disappeared.

DICK LIDDIL SOLD HIS HORSE
in Kentucky and took a train to Kansas City, where he spent October and November in the apartment of Mattie Collins, his common-law wife. They’d met in a courtroom following her cross-examination by a prosecuting attorney. She’d killed her brother-in-law, Jonathan Dark, as he was punching his wife and she pleaded her case so convincingly that the gunshot was ruled justifiable. Dick had just been paroled from the Missouri penitentiary in which he was serving time as a horse thief and in which he’d developed an interest in legal manipulations. Mattie Collins seemed sharp, prudential, accomplished, and when she stepped down from the stand, Dick leaned over a bannister to whisper, “I admire your spirit.” Within weeks they were a couple. Their marriage was more tempestuous than happy, though, and Dick periodically separated himself from Mattie, repeatedly coming back just as he did in October, with a robbery in his past, anxiety in the present, and a promise of constancy in the future. He lied to Mattie about the previous two months; she grew petulant and burned a mincemeat pie and pitched asparagus soup at him; she coldly apprised him of his limitations and cruelty, his inability to love, the shipwreck he’d made of her life, and by midnight they were compromised.

He passed his days with sleeping and pool and penny-ante poker. Mattie took him shopping and made Dick buy her, over the course of the month, a veiled black hat, an oyster shell pillbox, eight damask naperies, and white gloves with four pearl buttons that were near her elbows when worn. Liddil kept seeing Pinkerton operatives in every floorwalker, newspaper reader, or common man poking about in a store; in the evening he would insist there were prowlers and make a simpleton of himself by going out in his nightshirt and gun. And even in the pool hall he was getting the feeling that each shot was being watched, each comment was being overheard, until the creepy sensations at last grew so strong that he spun around and saw Jesse step into the lamplight. “You want to go for a ride?” he asked, and Dick could only agree.

It was the weekend after Thanksgiving and cold weather was so regular that they gave it little attention as they rode out from Kansas City in the morning. Jesse could wake up with a speech prepared, but Dick was just the opposite, sleep kept him in its grip until he’d been up and around for an hour; so as they rode east, Dick Liddil listened and Jesse slipped in and out of topics like a man at a clothing store trying on coats. He was happily loquacious and Dick was suspicious and unnerved, but he gradually relaxed and even grew drowsy within Jesse’s spindle of yams. His was a pelican’s nest of unlinked sentences, fragmentary paragraphs, scraps of extraordinary information, variations on themes, but the issue he kept nipping at and tucking into everything else was that of the Jackson County court trial of Whiskey-head Ryan.

He said a prosecuting attorney—who’d been elected on the basis of a campaign against the James gang—had released Tucker Bassham from a ten-year sentence in the Missouri penitentiary in return for his craven testimony about the Glendale robbery in 1879. According to the newspapers, Jesse said, Bassham took the stand and testified that it was Bill Ryan and Ed Miller who recruited him into the James gang, and he furthermore claimed that he was ordered around at Glendale by none other than Jesse James, who was the man who’d looted the express car. Jesse said Cracker Neck boys had bullied some witnesses, Tucker Bassham’s house was burned to the ground, and railroad men were so scared off that none of them showed up in court; and yet, Whiskeyhead Ryan was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years at Jefferson City. “I can’t have that happening,” Jesse said.

“How can you stop it?”

Jesse didn’t say. He looked up into cross-hatching trees and said, “The wind serenades a purified man.” He leaned back on his saddle cantle, his right hand on his bedroll supporting his weight. “Did I tell you that I moved out of Kansas City?”

“Where to?”

Jesse ignored that and said, “I’ll strap a chair on my back and walk out into the wilderness some nights. The prairie sounds just like a choir.”

“Are we going to your place?”

Jesse hooked a finger inside his cheek and flicked out the last of his tobacco chew. He wiped his finger clean, on his trousers. “I got word about you and Wood. You two ought to patch things up.”

“I’d still like to know where we’re going.”

“You seen Ed Miller lately?”

“Nobody has.”

“Must’ve gone off to California.” He scratched his neck beard and saw Dick looking at him with perplexity. He said, “If you were going to see Jim Cummins, wouldn’t you follow this road?”

“I guess so.”

“God damn it, Dick; use your head.”

James R. Cummins had served in the Civil War with Frank and Jesse under Brigadier General Joseph O. Shelby and in the late seventies had participated in many of the James gang’s robberies, though his reputation in Jackson and Clay counties was merely that of a common horse thief. His sister, Artella, married William H. Ford, Bob and Charley’s uncle, in 1862; and it was partly that connection that caused the Ford brothers to join on with the gang. And it was to Bill Ford’s farm near Kearney that Cummins withdrew after Blue Cut, prior to leaving the state for the hot springs in Arkansas.

He was already gone when Jesse and Dick approached the Ford house in late November, and Bill Ford was out in the meadow, doctoring sheep. His boy, Albert, scrunched at a tall window off the sitting room and stared at the two as they climbed down from their saddles at the rail fence. Then the raised curtain dropped from the boy’s shoulder and the stuck mahogany door screeched open.

Albert was fourteen and good-looking in a choirboy way—his cheeks dimpled when he smiled and there was a scampishness to his eyes. He wore black trousers with a scrim of straw and mud on the cuffs, and a green pullover sweater that was rotted at both elbows. The boy said hello but was ignored for a minute as Jesse reconnoitered the yard and then gravely ascended the steps. Dick could see past Albert to the kitchen, where Mrs. Ford and her daughter, Fanny, stirred clothes in a steaming laundry boiler. Jesse peered into other rooms.

The boy asked Dick, “Are you friends of my pa’s? Because if you are, he isn’t here right now but you’re welcome to sit a spell and enjoy our hospitality until he gets back.”

“We’re friends of Jim Cummins,” Jesse said, and rolled a cigar in his mouth.

“Oh?” said, the boy. His Uncle Jim had schooled Albert on how to answer a sheriff’s interrogations. Albert gained thirty years, became sullen. “Well, it so happens he’s been gone since August and never said where he gone to.”

“I’m Matt Collins,” Dick said, and shook the boy’s hand.

“Very happy to meet you.”

Jesse strode over and clenched the boy’s hand and introduced himself. “Dick Turpin.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Jesse smiled around his cigar but stalled the shake and crushed Albert’s hand in his until the boy winced. Albert was about to cry out when Jesse clamped his left hand over the boy’s mouth and yanked him into the yard. Dick softly shut the mahogany door.

Jesse manhandled the boy toward a red barn, once slamming Albert into a cottonwood tree so that he lost his wind and water came to his eyes. Dick shambled after the two, looking apprehensive and ashamed, backing sometimes so he could check the road, blowing on his red fingers.

When he was rear of the barn, Jesse twirled and threw the boy to the earth and stepped a boot onto Albert’s throat. “Don’t you yell,” he said. “Don’t you say nothin’ except how I can find Jim Cummins. Matt, aim that six-shooter.”

“Come on, Jesse! He’s just a kid.”

Jesse glowered at Dick for letting his name slip, then returned his attention to the choking boy. “He knows where his Uncle Jim is and that’s gonna make him old pretty soon.”

The boy shook his head as he brawled and kicked at Jesse.

“Maybe he doesn’t know,” Dick said.

“He knows.” Jesse fell to his knees on the boy’s biceps and Albert cried “Ow!” and his mouth was clutched closed in Jesse’s left hand. Four bruises later colored his cheek like blue nickels. “You need to ask and ask sometimes. Sometimes a child won’t remember much at first and then it’ll all come back.” He twisted the boy’s ear like a clock wind-up and Albert’s eyes showed agony, his body racked wildly, his boots thudded against the earth. “Just tell me about your Uncle Jim, that’s all! Where’d he sneak off to; where’s he hidin’ out?”

The boy purpled and his swats at Jesse lessened with exhaustion. Jesse screwed the left ear more and Albert’s scream was snared in Jesse’s palm as he bent over with the cigar in his cheek and scrutinized the injury. “My gosh, I believe it’s about to tear, sweetie. Just a little more to get her started, then I can rip your ear off like a page from a book.”

Dick was slumped against the barn, sick to his stomach and overwrought. He moaned, “Let the kid
go
.”

“He’s lying.”

“Jesus; he can’t even talk!”

“Where’s Jim?” Jesse asked, and then chanted it: “Where’s Jim? Where’s Jim? Where’s Jim?”

“Quit it!” Dick yelled and slapped Jesse’s hat off and immediately felt juvenile.

But Jesse squatted back and reconsidered and rubbed his hands on his thighs and the boy wept but couldn’t make words. He wiped his nose and eyes with his hands and shuddered with sobs as he sucked for air and when at last he spoke his voice scaled like a child’s. “You bastard! I don’t
know
where he is and you won’t
believe
me and you never gave me a
chance
you kept my mouth squeezed shut so I couldn’t breathe and my ear, my ear’s burning up, how’d you like me to do that to you? I never know where Jim is or when he comes so leave me alone, get off me, you son of a bitch!” Grunting, Albert bucked under Jesse and shouted again, “Get off!” and Jesse rose.