The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (21 page)

At seven Martha collected the dishware and Ida scraped garbage into a battered tin bucket for swill and Charley said, “Here’s a cute story, Jess. Bob and me went to the Moore School as children over toward Crescent Lake? And what with it so near Kearney, conversations just naturally had to do with the exploits of the James-Younger gang. Well, Bobby was—what—eleven or twelve? And he couldn’t get enough. He practically
ate
the newspaper stories up. You were by far his most admired personage. It was Jesse this, Jesse that, from sunrise to sunset.”

“Fascinating,” Jesse said.

“No; there’s more. This is cute. We’re at supper and Bob asks, ‘You know what size boot Jesse wears?’ ”

Bob said, “Jesse doesn’t care about this, Charley.”

“Oh, shush now, Bob. Let me tell it. Bob says, he says, ‘You know what size boot Jesse wears? Six and a half,’ Bob says. He says, ‘Ain’t that a dinky boot for a man five feet eight inches tall?’ Well, I decided to josh him a little, you know, him being my kid brother, so I said, ‘He don’t have toes, is why.’ ”

“Really stupid,” Bob said.

“Shush. Then my momma pipes up and says, ‘He
what?
’ and I’m not letting on. I say, ‘He was dangling his feet off a culvert and catfish nibbled his toes off.’ Well, Bob taxed himself trying to picture it until Momma let on that I was playing him the fool. And Bob says—I want to get this right. What was it exactly you said, Bob?”

“I said, ‘If they’d been catfish he’d a drilled them with his forty-four.’ ”

Charley clapped his hands sharply and laughed. “Yep, that’s the exact words, exactly.”

Jesse looked at Bob without comment.

Bob said, “It’d be a good joke if it was funny.”

“You’ve got to picture it though. Bob saying you would’ve shot them catfish, then smiling in every direction, real satisfied with himself. Oh! And you know what he said next? He said, ‘You
need
your toes.’ ”

“How’d I miss this?” Wilbur asked. “Where was I?”

Charley carved a shred of pork from between his bucked teeth and licked the meat off his nail. “ ‘You
need
your toes.’ ”

“ ’Course you do,” Jesse said.

“Isn’t that a cute story?”

Jesse suppressed his opinion. He was no longer galvanic; he’d turned the voltage down. He seemed preoccupied, slightly pained; he regarded Bob in a way that implied the sight was disappointing. He searched under his cardigan sweater and removed a cigar that he skewered with a tine of his fork. “Give me some other conversations, Bob.”

Bob was reluctant. “You know how children are.”

“It’d be cheery to hear what you fancied about me,” Jesse said. “It might make me laugh and help me forget my cares and woes.”

“I can’t recall much of any consequence.”

“I got one,” said Charley. He smiled at Jesse, whose eyes were crossed on a match flame below the green cigar. “This one’s about as crackerjack as the one about your toes.”

“Which?” Bob asked.

Charley looked over at him. “About how much you and Jesse have in common.”

Jesse said, “Why don’t
you
tell it, Bob; if you remember.”

Bob inched forward in his chair. “Well, if you’ll pardon my saying so, it
is
interesting, the many ways you and I overlap and whatnot. You begin with my daddy, J. T. Ford. J stands for
James!
And T is Thomas, meaning ‘twin.’ Your daddy was a pastor of the New Hope Baptist Church; my daddy was part-time pastor of a church at Excelsior Springs. You’re the youngest of the three. James boys; I’m the youngest of the five Ford boys. You had twins as sons, I have twins as sisters. Frank is four and a half years older than you, which incidentally is the difference between Charley and me, the two outlaws in the Ford clan. Between us is another brother, Wilbur here (with six letters in his name); between Frank and you was a brother, Robert, also with six letters. Robert died in infancy, as most everyone knows, and he was named after your father, Robert, who was remembered by your brother’s first-born, another Robert. Robert, of course, is my Christian name. My uncle, Robert Austin Ford, has a son named Jesse James Ford. You have blue eyes; I have blue eyes. You’re five feet eight inches tall; I’m five feet eight inches tall. We’re both hot-tempered and impulsive and devil-may-care. Smith and Wesson is our preferred make of revolver. There’s the same number of letters and syllables in our names; I mean, Jesse James and Robert Ford. Oh me, I must’ve had a list as long as your nightshirt when I was twelve, but I lost some curiosities over the years.”

Jesse was still as a photograph; he could have been a man of cultivation at a concert. His hands were assembled at his stomach, his collar was concealed by his two-inch brown beard, smoke spiraled from his cigar in a line and then squiggled above him like sloppy handwriting; but his eyes were active, cagey, they calculated and appraised and then carefully looked at the green cigar as Jesse tapped ashes into his coffee cup.

He said, “Did I ever mention that scalawag George Shepherd to y’all?” He grinned at Bob and reached a right hand to grip Bob’s forearm in apology while saying, “George was one of Quantrill’s lieutenants and he gave me a story like Bob’s, is why I thought of him, giving me everything we had in common and so on, just so he could join the gang. How could I know he had a grudge against me and was lying to get on my good side? I said, ‘Come on aboard, George. Glad to have ya,’ and so on, but I got good old Ed Miller to keep his eye peeled.” Jesse gripped his fingers once more and then released Bob’s forearm, bringing his right hand back to shave the ash from his cigar with the lip of the coffee cup. He said, “I’m talking about eighteen seventy-nine. November. I was arranging to rob a bank in Galena, Kansas, and sent George on in to look at it. Did I say he only had one eye? Used to wear one of them pirate eyepatches and flip it up or down, depending on how much he wanted to scare ya. So: he goes to Galena, but then my spy, Ed Miller, comes back and reports that Shepherd went and sent a telegram to Marshal Liggett, giving him the date of the robbery and whatall. It’s ten o’clock the following morning and Shepherd comes riding into camp, bump-be-dump-be-dump, and much to the poor man’s surprise about twenty guns open up on him. He’s banging away and hating himself for being so goddamned stupid when I hear a ball whiz by my head and just then I make up my mind to pretend I’m a goner and flop to the ground. George hightails it with Jim Cummins giving him what-for for maybe a mile or two, and the next thing I see in the papers is George Shepherd running off at the mouth about
killing
Jesse James. Yes! Lordy; here’s the end of my cares and woes, I’m thinking. Jim Cummins goes up to Clay County and says what George is been saying is true, and I get some of the boys to slaughter a cow and once it’s stinking pitch it into a coffin that they wagon on through Kearney, I even get Zee to put on black and weep her way up to my momma’s place. I forgot to let Momma in on all this, though, and she’s the one got the sheriffs onto me again. She says, ‘Don’t you all have any common sense? You need
two
eyes to get Jesse.’ ”

Charley and Wilbur laughed for a suitable period of time and Jesse laughed with them until coughing made him stoop with the cigar near his ear and scrub his mouth with the checkered tablecloth. He rubbed the water from his eyes as he said, “My goodness, that Zerelda. She’s a caution.”

Bob said, “You oughtn’t think of me like you do George Shepherd.”

“You just brought him to mind.”

“It’s not very flattering.”

Martha waitressed around them and took their cups and saucers; Jesse returned the cigar to his mouth and made himself complimentary. “Good eating, Martha.”

“Glad you liked it,” she said.

Bob asked, “How come George had a grudge against you?”

Jesse cocked an eyebrow. “Hmm?”

“You said George Shepherd had a grudge against you and I’ve been wondering what it was.”

“Oh. George asked me to protect this nephew of his during the war and it so happens the kid had five thousand dollars on him. The kid winds up killed, and all that money swiped from him, and when George was in prison someone whispers to him it was Jesse James slit the boy’s throat.”

“Just mean gossip, was it?” Charley asked.

Jesse looked at his cigar and saw it was out. He then made a comic gesture of presenting it to Bob, who glared at him icily, and dropped the cigar in a pocket, saying, “Bob’s the expert; put it to him.”

Bob rose with his knuckles on the table and was cautious lest he shove his chair awry on exit and appear a stamping boy in a snit. “I’ve got something to do,” he said.

“I’ve made him cranky,” Jesse said.

Wilbur snickered and Bob said with august gravity, “I’ve been through this before, is all. Once people get around to making fun of me, they just don’t ever let up.”

Martha said, “Someone’s speaking awful fresh over there!”

Bob was forced to walk past Jesse to reach the main room and Jesse kicked his left leg out across Bob’s path, clouting the floorboards with his boot. Bob glanced down at the bogus grin of a playground bully, and at the suggestion of menace that was beneath Jesse’s antics. Jesse said, “I don’t want you to skip off to your room and pout without knowing why I dropped by for this visit.”

“I suppose you’re going to tell us how sorry you are that you had to slap my cousin Albert around.”

Such great heat seemed to come then from Jesse’s eyes that Bob nearly glanced away as from sunlight, but in a second the man cooled and said, “I come to ask one of you two Fords to ride with me on a journey or two. I guess we’ve agreed it ought to be Charley; you’ve been acting sort of testy.”

Bob was pale and silent. He stepped around Jesse’s obstructing boot, calmly climbed the stairs to the upper room, and carefully shut the door. Dick shoved open the closet door with his toe and stared at Bob from among the women’s things. “I’d say that was really stupid.”

Bob covered his mouth and slid his back down the newspapered wall to a sit.

JESSE AND CHARLEY
rode west at nine and after twenty miles in the cold chose to risk a Pinkerton investigation by staying over at the Samuelses’ long, ramshackle house.

A dog slept by the fireplace in the kitchen, an alphabet sampler was on one wall, the ceilings were only seven feet high; snores came from the sleeping rooms and Mrs. Zerelda Samuels sat in a motionless rocking chair as Jesse sipped the cocoa she’d cooked. She was a huge, mannish, careworn woman with a mercurial temper and the look of a witch. A robe sleeve was limp where her right hand and wrist had been blown off, her white hair scattered wide when let down, and she sucked her lips over violet gums that contained no more than twenty teeth. She said, “You’re Charley Ford.”

“Yes, ma’am. You seen me once or twice with Johnny.”

“But you’re not my son’s age.”

“No; that’s my brother Bob.”

“You got the consumption or don’t you eat right?”

Charley shrugged and grinned at Jesse with shame. “I guess what it is is that I’m just skinny.”

She massaged her right forearm and said to her boy, “I got a letter from George Hite. Hasn’t seen hide nor hair of him.”

Jesse squinted at Charley. “And you say you haven’t seen Wood?”

“Can’t imagine where he could be.”

Zerelda rose from the rocking chair and said, “I best get some shut-eye. I’ve gotta be up and at ’em by six.”

After his mother left, Jesse settled down on a cot that was under a window the size of a man. Charley tucked his wool bedroll into a pink davenport and was out as soon as he completed his prayers. But he awoke at four and saw Jesse seated on an abused Queen Anne chair, absently scratching the sole of a foot through his sock. “You finished with your sleeping?”

Charley switched cheeks on his bedroll. “I could use one or two more hours if it’s no trouble. I can’t operate on less than five. I run into walls and fenceposts.”

Jesse said, “I’ve been holding a discussion with myself over if I ought to tell you this or no. My good side won out and now, well, I’d like to make a clean breast of things.”

“My mind is cobwebby yet, is the only drawback.”

Jesse crossed to the davenport and sat so close his right knee encroached and Charley retracted his leg. Jesse smelled of onions and camphor. He asked, “Can you hear me when I whisper this low?”

“Just barely,” Charley said.

“You knew I went into Kentucky?”

“Yes.”

“I’m talking about October now. I come back through Saline County and thought to myself, ‘Why not stop by and see Ed Miller?’ So I do and things aren’t to my satisfaction at all. Ed’s got himself worked up over something and I can tell he’s lying like a rug and I say to myself, ‘Enough’s enough!’ and I say to Ed, ‘Come on, Ed; let’s go for a ride.’ Do you understand what I’m saying?”

“Going for a ride is like giving him what-for.”

“Exactly. Ed and Jesse, they argued on the road and when push come to shove, Jesse shot and killed him.”

“Jesse did.”

“You’ve got it.”

“You.”

Jesse condescendingly patted Charley’s knee and rose up from the davenport. “So you see? Your cousin got off easy. I was only playing with Albert.”

Charley said, “I’ve made him squeal once or twice myself. I’m just not as thorough as you are.”

“You want to swap a tale with me now?”

Charley camouflaged his fright with ignorance. “I don’t get your meaning.”

“If you’ve got something to confess in exchange, it seems to me it’d only be right for you to spit it out now.”

“Can’t think of a single thing.”

“About Wood Hite, for example.”

“I’ve been saying over and over again I can’t figure out where he’s gone. I’m not going to change my story just to have something to spit.”

“Why was your brother so agitated?”

“Which?”

“Bob.”

“It’s just his way. He’s antsy.”

The dog in the kitchen sighed; Jesse reseated himself in the Queen Anne chair. He said, “You can go back to sleep now.”

“You got
me
agitated now: you see?”

“Just ain’t no peace with Jesse around. You ought to pity my poor wife.”