The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (2 page)

Jesse yelled, “Me and him, we’re circuit riders is why you never seen us beforehand.”

The man continued to gawk. Frank untethered his mount and swung up and, as the two brothers ambled onto the eastward road, the man crossed to a hardware store to report his conclusions about the hard cases he’d observed.

Jesse said, “You stop for a meal in these burgs and you don’t have to wait but five minutes for some fool to spend an opinion about the ugly strangers in town and what their appetites are like.”

Frank said, “I’m gonna regret those cucumbers. They’re gonna argue with me through evening.”

Jesse glanced at his brother with concern. “What you need to do is tap some alum onto a dime, cook it with a matchstick, and lick it clean before you partake of your meals. That’s the remedy for dyspepsia. You’ll be cured inside of four days.”

“You and your cures.” Frank crossed in front of his brother, jamming his horse, and they turned left on a twin-rutted road and a median strip of grease-smeared, axle-flogged weeds. A great many animals had ganged on the road for a half-mile, then shambled into cannon-high straw grass that meandered into green bluffs. The James brothers pursued eccentric routes in that general direction, Jesse weaving right or left in his boredom, bending extravagantly from his saddle as he steered, shouting questions and assessments across the open to Frank. They meshed inside the woods, Frank ducking under an overhead bough that whapped dust from his coat shoulder, Jesse yanking his horse right and into a coulee where it noisily thrashed fallen leaves.

Ahead was brown shale and green ferns and humus where the sun was forbidden, and then two naked trees connected by twenty feet of hemp rope, to which had been reined a considerable number of horses. Here thirteen men squatted with coffee and idled or cradled shotguns: croppers and clerks and hired hands, aged in their late teens and twenties, wearing patched coveralls and wrinkled wool trousers and foul-looking suit coats that exposed their wrists, or overcoats the color of nickel, of soot, that assorted weeds had attached themselves to. They were hooligans, mainly, boys with vulgar features and sullen eyes and barn-red faces capped white above the eyebrows. They were malnourished and uneducated; their mouths were wrecks of rotting teeth. Consumption was a familiar disease, they carried infirmities like handkerchiefs; several were missing fingers, one was sick with parasites, another two had lice, eyes were crossed or clouded, harelip went undoctored.

Robert Woodson Hite and his simple younger brother, Clarence, were cousins from Adairville, Kentucky; Dick Liddil, Jim Cummins, Ed Miller, and Charley Ford had been in the James gang on previous occasions, the rest had been recruited to check the horses and divide the posses and parade with Henry rifles outside the passenger cars, firing on the recalcitrant and defiant. They bunched around the James brothers when they arrived that afternoon, several exhorting and goading Frank and Jesse in an exercise of kinship or special influence, the others wary and timid, slinking over or sniggering or investigating whatever was under their eyes.

The Jameses descended from their saddles and a lackey pulled the horses to wild feed and Jesse hunkered with coffee brewed from his own fine-ground beans and chatted with Ed Miller and Wood Hite as some gangling boys eavesdropped. Jesse inquired if the Chicago and Alton managers had stationed guards in the depot or mail cars. He inquired about the nearest telegraph machine. He inquired about the time of sundown.

Meanwhile Frank quit the main group to reconnoiter the woods and the railroad and the meager farm and inhospitable cabin belonging to a man named Snead. He stood in green darkness and weeds, smoking a cigarette he’d made, perusing the sickle curve in the rails and a grade that was hard work for a locomotive. The southern cliff on which he tarried rose about thirty feet above the cinder roadbed, the northern ridge had been a lower elevation on a hill the railroad had excavated and was about ten feet above the cut. Three miles east was Glendale station. Mosquitoes and gnats hived in the air and inspected his ears but he did not slap at them because he was using his hearing to position some fool crashing through weed tangles and creepers to the left and rear of him. The noise stopped and Frank opened his gray coat to slide his right hand across to his left pistol.

“Excuse me,” a boy shouted, “but I see I’ve sort of traipsed in and interrupted you.”

The voice was genial, golden, unrecognizable; Frank trudged up the hill some until he perceived a young man in a gray stovepipe hat and overlarge black coat that was reduced and cinched by a low-slung holster. His thighs were clenched by green bushes. His hands were overhead, as if a gun were on him, and the cuffs had dropped deep on his forearms. He had ginger brown hair and very small ears and a sunburned face that could have prettied a girl except for lips that seemed slightly pursed and swollen. He looked to Frank like a simp and a snickerer, the sort to tantalize leashed dogs.

Frank queried, “Which one are you?”

“Bob Ford.”

“Ah, Charley’s brother.”

Bob received that as an invitation to lower his hands. His face creased with a wide smile that hung on as Frank stubbed his cigarette cold on a cottonwood trunk and returned to his inspection of the geography, disregarding Bob Ford.

The boy hunkered next to Frank and swatted his stovepipe hat around, dividing screens of mosquitoes and gnats that blew awry and rejoined and touched lighter than breath on his neck. He said, “I was lying when I said I just happened on down here. I’ve been on the scout, looking for you. I feel lousy that I didn’t say so at the outset.”

Frank dug in his pockets and extracted cigarette makings. He was not inclined to converse.

Bob scratched his hat-matted hair. “Folks sometimes take me for a nincompoop on account of the shabby first impression I make, whereas I’ve always thought of myself as being just a rung down from the James brothers. And, well, I was hoping if I ran into you aside from those peckerwoods, I could show you how special I am. I honestly believe I’m destined for great things, Mr. James. I’ve got qualities that don’t come shining through right at the outset, but give me a chance and I’ll get the job done—I can guarantee you that.”

Frank slimed the cigarette he’d made and struck a match off his boot sole. “You’re not so special, Mr. Ford.” He inhaled tobacco smoke and let it crawl from his mouth before he blew it. “You’re just like any other tyro who’s prinked himself up for an escapade; You’re hoping to be a gunslinger like those nickel books are about, but you may as well quench your mind of it. You don’t have the ingredients.”

“I’m sorry to hear you feel that way,” said Bob, “since I put such stock in your opinions.” He slapped a mosquito and looked at his blood-freckled palm and stood, rehatting his short, baby-fine hair. “As for me being a gunslinger, I’ve just got this one granddaddy Patterson Colt and a borrowed belt to stick it in. But I’ve also got an appetite for greater things. I hoped joining up with you would put me that much closer to getting them. And that’s the plain and simple truth of the matter.”

“So what do you want me to say?”

“You’ll let me be your sidekick tonight.”

“Sidekick?” said Frank. He’d heard the term applied solely to matched horses in a team-span.

“So you can see my grit and intelligence.”

Frank examined his cigarette, sucked it once more, and flipped it onto a roadbed tie where the butt was later shredded under a railroad detective’s laced shoe. He said, “I don’t know what it is about you, but the more you talk, the more you give me the willies. I don’t believe I even want you as close as earshot this evening.”

“I’m sorry—”

“Why don’t you
go
?” Frank said and the boy tramped up the hill, slapping weeds aside.

THE LATE CLELL MILLER’S
kid brother Ed had imposed a large iron pot in the hoop of his saddle lariat, and he and Dick Liddil scrounged for wild onions and scarecrowed vegetables as Jesse gardened his rant into a second hour. He cut and rooted and cultivated until he’d worked on Shelby in the Civil War and the might of iron submarines and Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln’s hysterics. Often he was facetious, but no one adventured a smile until Jesse did. His audience varied according to jobs they were expected to perform—steeds needed tending, roads needed watching, rookies were bossed into cooking chores—and each vacated seat was bullied over as Jesse continued what he liked to call wabash.

His cousin Robert Woodson Hite remained on his left, sulking and mooning the afternoon through over some imagined slight. Next to Wood was his nineteen-year-old brother, Clarence, who was stooped and consumptive and slack-jawed, and as void of calculation as a sponge. Persevering too was Charley Ford, who snorkled mucus and spit it, who chuckled and hee-hawed soon after the others did, continuing on with his bray seconds after the others had ceased, and who covered his left boot with a corrupted coat in order to conceal a clubfoot that practiced walking had made practically imperceptible. He had abetted the ransacking of the express car on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway, which the James gang had boarded on July 15th, and gave accommodations to the outlaws afterward at his sister’s place near Richmond. So he was in good favor. His brother William had married the sister of Jim Cummins, which was how Charley was initially noticed, and he hunted pigeons and turtledoves with Ed Miller, who had recruited him into the James gang by introducing him to Jesse on a gambling night in 1879—he had impressed Jesse as a savvy, sporting man then; just how Charley never could fathom.

Charles Wilson Ford was a rail-thin, rough, and likeably ignorant country boy who apologized for his failings before they could be found out: there was something of a good-natured dog about him, something hungry and grateful and vulnerable that made up for his general vulgarity. His lackluster brown eyes were sunk in his skull and his right eye was slanted enough to look akilter and borrowed and slapdash. Mismatched also were his ears (the right appeared to have taken wing), and his teeth (his overbite made it seem as if he were incessantly sucking his lower lip). He had heavy black eyebrows and a black mustache no coarser than body hair, that never seemed more than a random smear of newsprint under his nose. His complexion was pestered with acne, his fingers often looked shoe-grimed, he spoke with a paltry lisp that somehow made him seem younger than twenty-four.

Jesse was on the subject of the first electric power plant, which Thomas A. Edison was constructing on Pearl Street in New York City. He explained, incorrectly, how the incandescent lamp worked, and Charley stabbed at the dirt with a stick or pinched scarlet eruptions on his shoulder and neck or measured the others with sidelong glances. Then a boy in a gray stovepipe hat emerged from the snaggles and claws of the woods and reached into the blue smoke of the fire and praised the miscellaneous stew and principally slouched about doing fraudulent chores in order to eavesdrop on Jesse. At last Clarence Hite relinquished his seat and the boy pushed John Bugler aside and capered over boots and legs and wormed down next to Charley Ford with the incivility and intrusion that bespoke brotherhood. The boy had been introduced to Jesse more than once but the outlaw saw no reason then to store the kid’s name, and now, as he culled a list that Frank had read aloud Monday night, he kept returning to the name Bunny. The boy nodded like a horse whenever Jesse’s words seemed to want affirmation; whenever Jesse leavened his chat with humor the younger Ford boy laughed overloudly and infectiously with whoops and idiotic rises, like a knuckle-run on a piano. His were the light-checkered blue eyes that never strayed, the ears that picked up each nuance and joke, the amen looks that suggested he understood Jesse as no one else could.

Frank returned from his reconnaissance and scowled at the loiterers even as he drank black coffee with a carefree Jim Cummins. Dick Liddil rattled a wooden kitchen tool around inside the iron pot and sang “Chowtime!” and the gang filed by the fire with invented spoons and bowls. The Ford boy was the last to get up, finding his legs only when Jesse stood and closing on him like a valet.

“Am I too late to wish you Happy Birthday?”

Jesse grinned. “How’d you know?”

Bob Ford ticked his head. “You’d be surprised at what I’ve got stored away. I’m an authority on the James boys.”

Jesse asked, “Your name isn’t Bunny Ford, is it?”

The boy was so avid to second whatever Jesse said that he nearly admitted it was, but checked himself and corrected, “Why no. It’s Robert Ford.”

“Of course it is.”

“Bob.”

Jesse simpered a little and walked to the fire; Bob sidled and hopped to keep in stride with him. Jesse said, “I don’t recollect: you’ve never been with the gang before, have you?”

“Oh no sirree. I’m a virgin.” Bob thumbed back his stovepipe hat and grinned just as Jesse might. “At least in that one respect, if you get my meaning.”

“Yes?”

“I’ve been fretting and fidgeting like I had ants down my pants the entire afternoon. Your brother and I had a real nice visit over toward the railroad, chatting about this and that, enjoying each other’s company, but otherwise I’ve been organizing my mind and working at calming my innards.”

“Cook alum,” Jesse said, and took a heaped bowl and spoon from a man in a gunnysack apron. Jesse lowered onto a stump in his vast gray coat and Bob sat on the earth at his feet with his holster removed and his own coat opened for rather overdue ventilation. Jesse chewed and wiped his mouth on his hand. “Do you know what this stew needs?”

“Dumplings?”

“Noodles. You eat yourself some noodle stew and your clock will tick all night. You ever see that woman over in Fayette could suck noodles up her nose?”

“Don’t believe I have,” said Bob.

“You’ve got canals in your head you never dreamed of.”

Bob was scraping his stew out of a blue envelope. Juice broke from a corner and spoiled his trouser fly in a manner that suggested incontinence. He would not notice this until later. He flapped the envelope into the fire and licked his spoon with a hound’s care before submerging it in his pocket. He said, “Your brother Frank and I had just a real nice visit this afternoon. Must’ve been a hundred subjects entertained, having to do with the Chicago and Alton Railroad and the U.S. Express Company and assignments on board the cars.”