The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (20 page)

ACCORDING TO MARTHA’S
April confession, Wood Hite died “when the sun was an hour high”; at which time the men removed Wood’s clothes and lifted the corpse onto Bob’s twin bed and Dick Liddil onto Charley’s. Dick drank from a bottle of corn whiskey as Martha bathed Wood and anointed his chapped skin with alum and oil of sassafras, then Elias cared for Dick’s mutilated leg with veterinary medicines and a sewing kit that was such an affliction to Dick that he swooned.

Bob put Wood’s goat-hair coat on a closet hanger and balled everything else up in a box. He dressed in the heather green suit he’d purchased in Liberty and he slicked his hair in the mirror over his sister’s chiffonier. He sat down to breakfast and saw Charley sitting under a striped blanket on the stove, steam growing off his back, his sprained ankle round as a melon. Wilbur stood at a window vagrantly lettering the mist on the glass; Ida was weeping on the sofa; Martha served cold oatmeal and boiled milk and frequently rubbed her eyes with a dishtowel. Only Bob seemed without melancholy, only Bob seemed uninclined to brood. He showed Wilbur the shell of the bullet that murdered Wood Hite and loitered about the kitchen sniffing the burned gunpowder in it. He carried in a jorum that was packed with snow and made Charley step down into it in order to relieve his swollen ankle.

Neighbors visited oh their return from church and Wilbur was dispatched upstairs to shut the bedroom door. The wife talked about the preacher’s inspiring sermon and about the peace that always descended upon her on Sundays, and her husband, John C. Brown, followed his nose through the house, slapping his prayerbook against his thigh. “Do I smell gunsmoke?”

Bob explained, “I ought to get our flue pipes cleaned. Might be chimney swifts in them. I might could do that today.”

“You ought to keep the Sabbath, Bob.”

“You got your religion, I got my own. It isn’t right to spoon it down our throats every Sunday.”

“It’s just that me and the missus, we’re Spirit-fired people, and when you think you’ve got the answer, well, you want to share it.”

“I’d just as soon you didn’t,” said Bob.

Then it was afternoon and the neighbors were gone and no one mentioned Wood or an undertaker, nor wrote a letter of condolence to the Hites in Adairville, Kentucky. Ida mooned in her mother’s room, bread rose in towel-covered tin pans, Elias kept his scowl in a coffee cup, and Wilbur tinkered with a broken clock. Martha sat mute and motionless across from Bob, who intently perused
The Farmer’s Almanac
. Charley hopped into the kitchen on one foot and snared a cookie in an earthenware jar. He said, “One thing’s settled: can’t take him into Richmond.”

Wilbur looked up. “How come?”

Charley munched the cookie, sprinkling crumbs on his chest. He licked his scant mustache and said, “One: the sheriff will put Bob away in jail. And two: Jesse will find out his cousin Wood’s been shot dead in our house and that’ll be the end for each and every one of us.”

Bob clenched his teeth so that his jaw muscles twitched, but resisted any comment. The conversation languished and Charley hopped back to Ida with the cookie jar. Martha simmered tea and served it to herself. Ice melted from the eaves and peppered the snow underneath. The sun approached the mullioned windowpanes at four o’clock and then it was colder and the sun was screened by the southwest woods and Elias made himself portly with sweaters and coats and patiently waited at the door until Wilbur could torture his feet into Wood’s fine leather boots.

Bob followed Elias and his chores from the kitchen window, squeaking an eyehole in the glass with the elbow of his suit coat. The oven door clanked as Martha took out four bread loaves and Ida came inside from the root cellar with jars of vegetables clenched by their lids. Bob could see the girl in the looking-glass of the evening-darkened window. She gazed at him with misgiving and asked, “Does Uncle Bob like okra, Momma?”

“Can’t you see him standing there? Why don’t you find out for yourself?”

Bob smirked. “She’s afraid of me, Martha.” He saw Elias and Wilbur in conference next to the water tank and he then tacked on, “You all are.”

He sliced a loaf on a tin plate, dipped a knife into molasses, and let the syrup braid off onto the bread. Then he climbed the stairs with it and looked into the bedroom from the corridor. The candle was on the nightstand and Dick was moving his lips as he read a yellow book about a woman of riotous appetites. Wood’s mouth was open but someone had covered his eyes with spoons. Dick licked a finger and turned a page without looking over the book at Bob. “He ain’t disappeared, if that’s what you were hoping.”

“What chapter are you on?”

Dick said, “She’s seen some young swell and got herself all agitated.”

“How’s your leg?”

“Full of torment, Bob. Thanks for asking.”

Wood’s skin was sallow and smirched slightly green where veins branched at his neck. His fingers were vised together at his stomach. Bob ate over Wood but the syrup was tainted and it was a penance to chew and swallow the bread. He set the tin plate down and lowered onto Dick’s bed and examined the excavation in Wood’s stern and arrogant skull.

“I ought to feel sorry but I don’t. I’m just glad it’s Wood who’s dead and not me.”

Dick stared at Bob, his book closed on his index finger. “You and me, we’ll have to sit down and talk a few things over. Circumstances have changed.”

Then Elias was there with a moth-eaten brown blanket that smelled of animal sweat. His cheeks were clownishly red with the cold and moisture was clinging to the end of his nose like a teardrop. “Ready?” was all he said.

They lifted Wood and let him sink onto the brown horse blanket. They then towed him across the boards and skidded him down the stairs so that his skull thudded and his body fished from side to side. Charley and Wilbur solemnly rose from kitchen chairs as Wood was carried out; Ida covered her face with her palms and Martha turned to the stove.

The December cold sliced inside Bob’s coat sleeves and across his ears. His knuckles ached with the cumbersome load and the brothers periodically let the body down to relieve their backs and exercise their fingers. “Nippy,” Bob said once, but Elias must not have heard. After they’d achieved the second rank of the woodrows, Elias concluded it was enough of a remove that the stink wouldn’t reach the cattle lots, and they rolled the naked body into a snow-filled ravine that was once a sweetwater creek. Elias slid Wood to the right with his boot, then crouched to tuck the horse blanket over him. The two cleared snow and kicked at the ravine so that its dirt banks spattered down, then they collected whatever rocks and slabs were near. Elias swarmed apple leaves and strewed them over the cadaver as Bob ripped dead branches off the trees and swooped them down onto the long mound.

Then Elias stood there lugubriously, his arms crossed over the hat at his chest, and Bob stuffed his hands in his coat pockets. Elias prayed, “ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.’ ” He paused and then petitioned Bob with his eyes.

“Meek,” Bob said.

“ ‘Blessed are the meek….’ ” After a moment Elias beseeched his brother again.

And Bob recited, “ ‘For they shall inherit the earth.’ ”

DECEMBER 1881–FEBRUARY 1882

No one should know more about Jesse James than I do, for our men have chased him from one end of the country to the other. His gang killed two of our detectives, who tracked them down, and I consider Jesse James the worst man, without exception, in America. He is utterly devoid of fear, and has no more compunction about cold-blooded murder than he has about eating his breakfast.

ROBERT A. PINKERTON

in the Richmond
Democrat,
November 20, 1879

A
MAN ON A CHESTNUT HORSE
walked the road next to the Ford brothers’ farm at least once each week after the Blue Cut robbery. He wore a blue watchcap under a gray hat and he lived for hours at a time in the woodrows, as motionless as a clocktower, staring across the cow-ruined cornfields to the busy kitchen and the barn.

He was Sheriff James R. Timberlake of Clay County, and whenever a caller rode in, the sheriff noted in a journal the animal’s color and gender, the rider’s physical characteristics and comportment. His stakeouts were intermittent and without system however, whatever he encountered was by chance; and Timberlake’s information was so inadequate that on Monday, December 5th, he recorded the arrival of Jesse James but ascribed it to a visit from a Methodist circuit rider with whom Jesse shared a resemblance.

The man came at dusk and tied his bay horse to a Martin box, then peered through two windows and entered the house without announcement, greeting the Fords in a country way and letting the door blow wide until a girl pushed against it. The sheriff saw what he could of the man companionably roughhousing, rowdily swatting shoulders and biceps, receiving the Ford brothers’ handshakes, but soon the night was too cold and black and Timberlake lost patience with the dreariness and solitude and rode west from Ray County to Clay.

Bob was in the living room when Jesse arrived. Ida embroidered next to a candle and Bob sank in a chair across from her, poking grit from a comb with a sewing needle, listening to clockworks as they counterweighted. He saw branches veer over a windowpane and tremble still, and as he thought about it he became so spooked that he swiveled and adjoined his eyes with an apparition that receded from the glass. And then Jesse was inside the kitchen, as loud and large as a beer wagon, and Bob was scuttling up the stairs.

Dick Liddil was already hopping one-leggedly toward the closet, wincing with each movement.

“Why’d he come by, Dick? Does he know about Wood, do you think?”

“I can’t figure it, Bob. I only know that he don’t miss very much.”

“What should I say about you if he asks?”

Dick let himself slide down into a corner and consider for a moment, then said, “Just tell him I’m in K.C. with Mattie.” Dick swaddled himself in yanked-down petticoats and crinolines as Bob closed the closet door.

When Bob shied into the kitchen, Jesse was at the stove in a mountain of clothes that included a reddish beaver coat that was stolen, he claimed, from a Hapsburg crown prince on a buffalo hunt in Nebraska. He turned with a coffee cup at his mouth but lowered it when he viewed Bob. “Why, it’s The Kid!”

“How’s everything?” Bob asked.

Jesse ignored the question and took off his hat with care and slid it onto a breadbox that was crudely ornamented with painted gladiolas. His skull was encompassed by a brimline that divided reddened skin from white and scored his oiled brown hair. He wrestled out of his massive coat and laid it over a chair, then unbuttoned a cardigan sweater that showed a burn hole at the belly. No one talked as Jesse moved—it was as if his acts were miracles of invention wondrous to behold. Martha stared at Jesse as she cooked, Ida was moonstruck as she set down another dish, Charley and Wilbur grinned gregariously whenever his eyes floated near. He said, “I never take off my gunbelt.”

And Wilbur said, “Good thinking.”

Jesse walked back to his coffee and Charley hitched aside. “Hurt your leg?”

Charley smiled. “I slipped off the roof and smacked down into a snowbank like a ton of stupidness. One second I’m screaming, ‘Whoa, Nelly!’ and the next second, poof! I’m neck-deep in snow.”

“The roof! Whatever possessed you to climb on the roof in December?”

Charley lost his smile and saw the criticism in Bob’s expression. “There was a kite—what am I saying? There was a
cat
. A cat was on the roof and I went after him. A torn cat. Yowling and whatall; and I slipped.” Charley rubbed his slanted right eye and coughed into his fist.

Jesse winked and said, “I thought maybe your clubfoot was gaining on ya,” and Wilbur guffawed as if that was funny and Charley noised the room with his hee-haw laugh and Jesse smiled at his own zaniness as Martha carried a bowl of ham hocks to the table.

Bob said, “Dick was here for a little bit and then he went on to Kansas City to be with his wife.”

Jesse acted as if he hadn’t heard and presumptuously sat down at the table and there tickled Ida’s side and stomach, saying, “Kootchy kootch,” as if she were two, until the girl was sore with giggles and the fun was over and Martha at last said, “Oh, quit it, you two.”

Jesse’s mood was genial and he reacted to Martha’s regulation without anger, immediately diverting his attention from the daughter to her mother and tucking a napkin under his collar as he began a disquisition on the subject of Charles Guiteau. His court trial for the assassination of President Garfield had commenced just three weeks ago and was already a gaudy spectacle, one or two columns about it opened every newspaper, and Guiteau gloried in the publicity, giving outrageous speeches, interrupting the prosecuting attorneys, generally playing the wild-eyed maniac as correspondents ecstatically copied down his every pronouncement. Following prosecutor Corkhill’s examination, Guiteau jumped up and said, “It is the unanimous opinion of the American people that you are a consummate jackass,” and as a surgeon gave his testimony, Guiteau screamed, “Is there any limit to this diarrhea?”

Jesse went on and on about it, a one-man show, a sorcerer, so physical and passionate his audience seemed no more than weeds. For more than an hour over a meal and chocolate cake and coffee, Jesse’s shrill voice contained the Fords, contained the room; he seemed to fill the house like a foot in a shoe; and it was only Bob and Martha who seemed to remember the Sunday murder, the body covered in apple leaves in the snow, Dick Liddil upstairs concealed in a closet, Cousin Albert roughed up by this man. Ida was girlishly in love with Jesse, Wilbur chuckled and shook his head with mirth at each sentence, Charley toyed with his gossamer mustache and crossed his legs like a gentleman and rivaled Jesse now and then with his own penny yarns and paltry jokes about Charles J. Guiteau. Jesse graciously gave him audience and acknowledged the news items with “Fascinating” and then developed another description.