The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (19 page)

The boy rolled over and Dick walked around the barn and to the road, his hands fisted inside the pockets of his sheepskin coat, his neck splotched crimson with fury and disgust. When Jesse came forward, Dick was already in his Texas saddle. His face was moon white, his mouth was weak, and he looked at his boot toe in order to talk. “I’m worn out, Jesse. I can’t—” He sighed and abandoned the sentiment and squinted down the road a mile until it was not more than a needle. The curdled sky was the color of tin and the woods were rose and gray in the twilight. Dick said, “My mind’s all tangled anyway. Little deals like that just make me feel dirty.”

Dick looked over to collect Jesse’s reaction to this and was astonished to see him caved forward into his bay horse, his nose flattened against its neck and mane, his mouth in the crescent of a man noiselessly crying, a grimace of affliction in his face.

“You all right, Jesse?”

He nuzzled into the gelding’s winter hide and muttered words that Dick couldn’t master. The boy limped toward the Ford house, tenderly cupping his left ear and crossing his nose with his sweater sleeve.

Dick said, “Maybe you better ride on to wherever it is you’re living now, and maybe I’ll sell this animal and skeedaddle on over to Mrs. Bolton’s and, you know, apologize to the Fords; put everything in its best light and so on.”

Jesse accorded his back to Dick and scrubbed at his eyes with a blue bandana. “I must be going crazy.”

Mrs. Ford and Albert and Fanny were at the tall windows but when Jesse glimpsed them the curtains closed. Jesse dickered with his left boot until it thrust into the stirrup and then he swung up with an elderly sigh and rode off without a word.

CONCERNING ROBERT WOODSON HITE
and what Clarence called “Wood’s scrape with the Negro,” it is only necessary to know that Sarah swore to a murder warrant and Wood was arrested by two deputies from Russellville, the county seat, as he fished in a creek with a bamboo pole. He’d become cold-blooded and complacent and unconcerned, and he seemed so tractable that the marshal rented an upstairs room in a city hotel rather than lock him in the crowded jail. A man sat outside the room with a shotgun but he appears to have been bribed by the Hites, because Wood was able to walk down the stairs one afternoon and exit the hotel through the chandeliered lobby, and ride out of town on a saddled and provendered horse that was hitched next to a tobacco-store Indian. Thereafter records lose Wood Hite in his torpid pursuit of Dick Liddil until finally in December the cousin who was given Jesse’s middle name was seen in Missouri.

Wood rode from Saturday night to Sunday morning, rocking sleepily inside a once-white goat-hair coat and long blue muffler, with his eyes shut and his left wrist tied to the saddle horn so he’d know if he slid. His face was bricked with windburn, his mustache was beaded and jeweled with ice. Snow made boards of his trousers and sleeves, his nose was injured with cold, and sometimes sleet sailed piercingly into whichever eye was open. Wood reached Richmond before six, warmed his cheeks and ears and backside at a railroad switchman’s stove, and turned toward Mrs. Bolton’s farmhouse. He saw Elias Ford near the corn crib shooing cattle toward the silage he’d scattered on the snow. Elias lectured the animals but his words were lost on the wind; quills of gray smoke left his mouth and disappeared. When he saw Wood he was startled, for he assumed it was Frank James who glowered at him from the road—the resemblance was strong even without the deception of darkness. Elias threw up his arm in greeting and then invited him in from the cold, pointing first to the stables and then to the farmhouse.

Wood walked his horse inside a stall, threw a moth-eaten brown blanket over it, and shoved a tin pail of oats at its nose to entice it to alfalfa. Then he walked to the kitchen with Wilbur, who was teetering with a milk can. Wood inserted his mittened hand in the can’s twin grip to make the carry less clumsy. He shouted into the arctic wind, “How come it’s always you does the chores?”

“Charley and Bob pay extree to Martha so’s they don’t have to!”

“Still don’t seem fair!”

“Well,” Wilbur said, then lost whatever their justification was and pitied himself for a moment or two. Then he shouted, “You know how I could tell it was you? You was carrying but the one six-shooter and the others carry two!”

Wood pulled the storm door for the man and he banged the milk can inside. Wilbur said, “I’d take a rag to my nose if I was you; it’s unsightly.”

Martha dumped bread dough onto a floured board and kneaded it with both hands. Oatmeal boiled in kettle water on the stove and her daughter yawned as she stirred it with a wooden spoon. Wilbur straddled a chair and blew into his hands; Wood removed mittens that dangled from sleeve clips like a child’s. A coal-oil lamp was on the fireplace mantel and Martha saw her shadow leap and totter against the wall as the lamp was moved to the oak table. She turned and saw Wood thawing his right ear over the lamp’s glass chimney as he stuffed a handkerchief up his coat sleeve.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” she said.

He rotated his head to thaw the left ear.

“You come from Kentucky?”

Wood circled the chimney bowl with his hands and looked at Martha in order to construe what she did and did not know. “You mean the news never got this far?”

Wilbur enlightened his sister. “Wood and Dick had a shooting scrape month or two ago.”

Elias closed the kitchen door behind himself and stamped his boots. “I thought you was Frank James when I saw you. I thought, ‘What in tarnashun is Buck doing here?’ ” He buffeted his ears with his mitts and, apparently captivated by his earlier stupefaction, repeated the query: “I thought, ‘What in tarnashun is Buck doing here when he’s supposed to been gone East?’ ”

Bob was awake upstairs and sore from a night on the duck feather mattress. The north window was raised and the room was so cold spirits left him with each exhalation. He attached the flame of a match to a floor candle and lay back with his hands behind his head and a socked foot dangling near the heat as Charley snored and Dick mewled. Over the breakfast noises he heard his sister Martha say, “Look what the cat dragged in.” Bob stared at the brown smudges of squashed spiders on the bedroom ceiling and pondered women and money until Wood’s voice penetrated the kitchen chat.

Then Bob bolted out of bed and crouched next to the inch-wide crack of the door. He missed some words from Elias and then Martha said, “Cover the kettle, Ida.” Bob could hear his sister trickle coffee beans into the box grinder, could hear a chair moan as someone skidded it on the boards. His sister said, “What on earth did you and Dick get into a fracas about?”

Bob scooted over to the cot and pressed his left hand over the Navy Colt beneath the pillow before he said with insistence, “Dick!”

Liddil automatically reached under the pillow but discovered the pistol trapped and saw Bob with his ginger hair jackstrawed, his eyelids welted green with worry and sleeplessness.

“Wood Hite’s downstairs.”

Dick boosted onto his right elbow and Bob released his hand from the pillow and the Navy Colt beneath it. Both listened to Wood claim yet again that Dick stole one hundred dollars from his Blue Cut loot—perhaps he’d said it so often he was now convinced that that was the cause of his ire. Martha cranked the coffee grinder and Wood claimed he’d been in the wilderness since October. He made no mention of Sarah or John Tabor or his recent arrest for murder.

From above the two heard Martha say, “I-da! Don’t stick your thumb in the cream when you skim it! Goodness sakes.”

And Wilbur said, “Dick told me a complete other version of that affray.”

Bob and Dick listened as a chair screeched on the floor and Wood said, “You mean he’s here?”

“Come in late last night.”

Dick cocked his revolver and nestled it under the five woolen blankets on the cot and said, “I’m going to play possum.” Bob shrank back, then crawled over to the nightstand between the twin beds as Elias told Wood to simmer down and Martha said, “Don’t you boys get into a fracas up there. I’ve almost got breakfast cooked.”

Bob extricated a loaded revolver from Charley’s holster and hunkered low and shivered as Wood made a racket on the stairs. Wood slammed the bedroom door with his boot so that it bashed the wall and plaster dribbled from the doorknob’s concussion and Charley jolted up. Wood strode into the room in his tall black boots and hairy coat, a blued Peacemaker outreached so that it was trained on Dick’s twirled and blond mustache. Wood kicked the cot and it jounced an inch. He roared, “Come on outside, you oily sack of puke!”

Bob saw Dick flutter his eyes a little and then the wool blankets lashed with the gunpowder’s detonation and Dick’s shot smashed a hole in the bedroom door. Wood ducked aside from the shot and then regained himself and fired once at Dick and strewed pillow feathers, and a second time as Dick rolled off the mattress, the ball striking short and swiveling a slipper.

The noise muffled Bob’s hearing until afternoon and left a high wail in his ears for days, so he couldn’t make out what Dick or Wood or Charley was yelling, nor could he see them much because of the gunsmoke that seeped from the accumulated blankets and moved over the room like desultory weather. He cowered next to the slat bed and clicked back the hammer on the revolver, so scared he could neither shudder nor swallow nor shut his eyes though they burned and itched with gunsmoke. He created rules and modified them—if Wood shot at Bob, Bob would kill him; if he murdered Dick, Bob would kill him; if Wood merely confronted Bob with his gun, surely Bob would need to kill him; if he looked at Bob, then kill him—until it seemed there was nothing left but to kill Wood, kill him soon.

Bob saw Dick dive across to the lady’s dresser and miss another shot at Wood that ripped a calendar down. Charley got out of bed and lunged to the windowsill, where he bent to squirm under the sash. Wood shot at Charley but missed; Bob nearly shot at Wood’s neck but checked himself because of scruples and Charley slipped on the eave shingles and slid off the roof and wumped into a snowbank that was twelve feet below.

It was when Wood was foolishly turned toward Charley that Dick triggered a shot meant for Wood Hite’s heart that snagged Wood’s right arm like an angry wife. Blood flowered under the goat hair of his sleeve and Wood cradled his arm, cherished it for a second, then dipped under the gunsmoke to see Dick slithering backward on the seat of his red union suit to the nook next to the closet door. Wood pointed the Peacemaker at the paramour’s groin but his injured muscles crippled with the revolver’s weight and the cartridge ball veered into Dick’s thigh and blood swatted the floorboards and bedsheets and Dick rocked with agony. Yet he lifted his Navy Colt again as Wood lurched around the doorjamb into the corridor and peeked back. The Colt’s hammer snapped against an empty chamber and Wood switched his pistol to his left hand and squinted the muzzle’s sights in line and it was then that Bob Ford, with calm intention and without malice, shot Robert Woodson Hite.

The round went in just right of his eyebrow and made a small button of red carnage that shut Wood’s motor off. Bob felt his wrist and arm muscles twitch spasmodically when the revolver jolted and he saw Wood’s skull jar to the side, saw Wood collapse to his knees as his brown eyes jellied and reason vanished and a trickle of blood lowered to his blue muffler, and then Wood fell to the left with a concussion that jostled the room, his cheek wetly smacking the boards.

Bob started to rise, but couldn’t. Dick looked at him with consternation, as if Bob had grown antlers or spoken in tongues. Bob released the revolver onto his mattress as he rose over it and walked around to Wood with sickness in his stomach, an apricot in his throat.

Dick asked, “Has he passed away?”

Bob cupped his ear. “What?”

“Is he dead?”

Bob moved him some with his foot and Wood’s maimed right arm slipped from the heap of his coat. Wood’s chest swelled and gradually relaxed and then expanded again. Blood pooled wide as a birdbath under his skull. “He’s still sucking air, but I think he’s a goner.”

Dick collared his thigh with his hands and choked it and brushed his eyes on either shoulder to quench the tears that collected. He said, “Hitch my leg up onto the bed so it won’t dispense so easy.”

He gritted his teeth when Bob seized his ankle and sagged back with a moan when Bob lifted it onto the mattress. Bob snuffed the candle on the floor and walked out to the corridor and looked down at Martha and Elias on the bottom stairs. “Maybe you oughta come up and wish him well on his journey.”

Blood crept away from Wood and drooled into board cracks that languidly conducted it toward the door. Bob stared at it as the stairs creaked, and on hearing the rustle of his sister’s dress, said to Martha, “He’s losing all his stuffing.”

She bumped past Bob, removed her apron, and carefully wadded it under the exit wound. “Do you want to be moved?”

Wood said nothing. His eyes were closed. A string of saliva hung from his mouth to the floor and it bowed with each cold draft of air. Martha tugged the blue muffler off and picked the blood-tipped hair from his brow.

Elias squatted next to her and canted his head to examine the injuries, inquiring here and there with his thumb and then wiping it off on his shirt. He said, “You were a good fellow, Wood. You talked kindly and you took care of your horse and you always pulled your own weight.” Elias looked around, somewhat embarrassed, and then arose with effort.

Martha said, “I hope the pain isn’t frightful, Wood. I’d fetch something for you to drink but I’m afraid it would just make you choke.” Martha paused and added, “Little Ida’s going to miss you. So is the rest of the family.”

She moved off to the side with Elias and cinched the muffler around Dick’s thigh as Bob came so close his toes brushed Wood’s cold fingertips. He said, “Just in case you never noticed, it was me who shot you. I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward you, I was just scared and looking out for my own well-being.” A finger ticked on Wood’s left hand and Bob retreated an inch or two and then recovered his composure. He said, “You’ve done a gallant job of dying so far and have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed about.”