The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (22 page)

“Ed Miller was a good friend of mine. He introduced me to you at that one poker game. I’m a little angry with you, if you want the God’s honest truth.”

Jesse crossed his legs at the ankles and shut his eyes. He pushed his hands deep in his pockets. He said, “You ought to pity me too.”

THEY AROSE
with the colored cook but did not remain for breakfast. Instead, Jesse fished around in the chicken coop until he could show off three brown eggs crammed between the fingers of one hand. He chopped the shells open with a pen knife and drank the yolks down, slobbering his chin with the clear albumen, and proffered one to Charley.

He shook his head in the negative, saying, “I can get along without breakfast. I’ll eat something on the way.”

“It’s a good journey.”

“It isn’t Kansas City?”

“I moved again. San Hose-say!”

“Don’t know that—”

“Saint Joseph!”

“Oh.”

It was late afternoon when they arrived and their horses were sore in their mouths from the clove bits, and yet they were spurred into a leisurely walk so Charley could see the wonders of a city of thirty-four thousand. Jesse saved for the last the marvel that was the grand, red-bricked World Hotel, where wooden chests that contained bathtubs were rolled from room to room by bellboys, where gas lamps burned all night long in the corridors, where a sanitarium for epileptics covered one entire upper floor and was run by Dr. George Richmond, the inventor of an elixir called Samaritan Nervine.

Charley was nearly overcome. “There must be something to see every dad-blamed place you look!”

“It takes getting used to; there’s no argument on that score.”

Shopkeepers were locking up and girls in long woolen coats were crouching out of the evening cold as Jesse and Charley roamed south on Twenty-first Street to Lafayette, where Jesse had rented a cottage in November. It was common and white and sat on a corner behind the shade of a wide porch that curved around it like the bill of a cap. Because the lot was small, they stabled their horses elsewhere and on the walk back Jesse instructed Charley about his assumed identity. He said he was listed in the city directory as Thomas Howard. His occupation was supposed to be that of a cattle buyer, so he made a point of visiting the St. Joseph stockyards once per week, but he spent much of his time there in speaking about two fillies he was racing in Kentucky so that his nonappearances wouldn’t be suspect.

“I can’t remember all this.”

“You’ve got to, Charley.”

“Do I get another name? I mean, I can’t be plain old Charley Ford, can I?”

Jesse considered options as they walked through a crust of snow to the cottage and stomped their boots on the porch. “Johnson,” he said at last. “Why don’t you call yourself Johnson?”

(It was not until much later that Charley learned Johnson was the name of a man in Tennessee whom Jesse had sued for “acting under false pretenses.”)

The front door sucked open and the storm door rattled in its frame. Zee was there in an orange gingham apron and Mary was riding the saddle of her broad hip, her face lowered as she cried. Zee looked sadly at Jesse and then pushed open the fogging storm door. “So. It’s Charley this time,” she said.

DICK LIDDIL RECOVERED
from the gunshot slowly because of a maroon-colored infection that swelled from his thigh muscle like a split apple, but within a week of Jesse’s visit he had mended well enough to ride and it became common for Dick and Bob to eat lunch in Richmond and clerk or play checkers at Elias Ford’s grocery store. They claimed they were looking for income opportunities, but they also claimed prior commitments if work was offered. They made some vague inquiries about the James gang, the sheriff’s office, Allan Pinkerton’s detectives, and the manhunt for the perpetrators of the Winston and Blue Cut train robberies. And increasingly Bob noticed a man alone at a cafe table, jotting notes in a journal, leaning on a pool cue and staring at Dick over the foam on a beer, or riding on a chestnut horse on the street and swiveling in his vast gray soldier’s coat to see them stamp the snow from their boots and walk into an apothecary.

At last at lunch in Christmas week, Bob carried a plate of pigeon pie over to a round rear table and cut the meat with a spoon as he measured the stern man sitting there. Compared to Bob he was enormous, as tall as Frank James but more muscular, six feet two at a minimum and wide as a gate in his shoulders and chest. He was exceptionally handsome in a foreign, somewhat villainous way. He looked like a circus lion tamer or the leering remittance man in a melodrama; his skin was as chestnut brown as his horse was, his mustache covered his mouth like a crow’s wings, and his eyes evinced the black shimmer of coffee in a cup as they studied Bob with an arrogance that was close to animosity.

Bob said, “Sorry for the intrusion. I didn’t mean to interrupt your meal, but I’ve seen your face off and on around Richmond and I can’t place who you are.”

“I own a livery over to Liberty; maybe that’s where you seen me.”

“Of course. That must be it.”

The man looked around Bob to Dick. “Why don’t you call your friend over here and we’ll get acquainted.”

Bob considered it for a second, then motioned, and Dick slid off a stool and limped over with a mug that sloshed pennies of coffee on the floorboards. The man skidded two chairs out with an unseen boot and Bob and Dick warily sat down.

“I was constable of Liberty Township for two years; that could be where you seen me too.”

“No, it must’ve been the livery,” said Bob. Dick bent over his coffee in order to conceal as much as he could of himself.

The man continued, “And I’ve been sheriff of Clay County since eighteen seventy-eight, so I’m in the public eye a lot.”

Dick kept his face lowered but angrily kicked Bob in the shin. Bob restrained his ouch.

The man rose an inch from his seat and shook Bob’s limp hand. “My name is James R. Timberlake.”

“Very pleased to meet you,” said Bob and then sat back on his fingers.

“You’re?”

“Bob.”

The sheriff looked with interest at Dick and he responded without raising his eyes from his coffee. “Charles Siderwood. I’m just on a visit and…Well, there isn’t no
and
, I’m just visiting is all.” He drank from the mug as if he were suddenly parched.

Timberlake licked a thumb with his lower lip and flipped the pages of his journal, scanning each like a librarian until he located the correct description. “Robert Newton Ford. Born January thirty-first, eighteen sixty-two. Presently living on the old Harbison farm. Single, average height and weight, brown-haired, clean-shaven. Occupation unknown. No prior arrests.” He smiled very briefly and then looked at Dick and reviewed several pages before he ironed one flat with the heel of his hand. “You’re Charles Siderwood?”

Dick glanced at him from under his eyebrows. Timberlake wrote down the name. Bob said, “I’ve always wanted to be written about in a book.”

Timberlake inclined massively toward Bob, overwhelming the table. “Do you think I
care
about you two and who you are and who you aren’t? It’s the James brothers I want. I’ve been on the loop for Frank and Jesse since eighteen seventy-six and by God I’m going to get them.”

Timberlake withdrew a little and considered his thoughts; a round businessman made an entrance into the cafe, making noise about the cold, whacking snow off his trouser legs and calling, “Mollie, why don’t you cut me some of that good apple pie?”

Mollie said she’d sold the last of it and the businessman winked inclusively at Bob. “Well, give me some of that good chocolate cake so I don’t shrink away to nothing.”

Timberlake rolled a cigarette and licked it and struck a match off Dick’s coffee mug. He winced when the smoke broke against his eyes. He said, “Do you know about the governor’s proclamation?”

Dick gave Timberlake his rapt attention but Bob pushed away from the table and said, “This is all very interesting, but if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to order some of that good chocolate cake I’ve heard so much about.”

“Sit down.” The sheriff picked a shred of tobacco off his tongue, flicked it onto the floorboards between his boots, and dried his finger on the tablecloth. Then he unbuttoned a broadcloth shirt and retrieved from inside it a parchment that was torn at the corners and folded in quarters. He slid the parchment across to Dick, and Bob reached across the aisle to slide his cold dish of pigeon pie onto another table.

Dick perused the document as he imagined an attorney might, with concentration and no little scorn and with occasional nods of concurrence. “It mentions Glendale and how certain parties confederated and banded together to steal what was on the train. It goes on about the Winston shebang last summer and how ‘in perpetration of the robbery last aforesaid, the parties engaged therein did kill and murder one William Westfall,’ and so on. Ta-da-ta-da-ta-fo, ‘I, Thomas T. Crittenden, Governor of the State of Missouri, do hereby offer a reward of five thousand dollars—’ ” He looked for a reaction from Bob and then from Sheriff Timberlake, who canted into the windowsill and placidly smoked without comment. “ ‘And for the arrest and delivery of said Frank James or Jesse W James, and each or either of them, to the sheriff of said Daviess County, I hereby offer a reward of five thousand dollars, and for the conviction of either of the parties last aforesaid of participation in either of the murders or robberies above mentioned, I hereby offer a
further
reward of five thousand dollars, in testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand,’ and ta-da-ta-dum.”

Timberlake took Dick’s coffee mug for his cigarette ashes. “You know why I gave that to you, don’t you, Mr. Siderwood.”

Dick scratched at a circle of starchiness in his trousers, where his wound had festered into the cloth. The pain seemed to reach into marrow and muscle like the roots of a sturdy weed. Dick said, “I meet a friend of mine, a friend who’d made some mistakes and maybe got himself into a mean scrape or two. You think I could tell him the government will erase whatever’s on the slate just for helping your people?”

“You go talk to Henry Craig in Kansas City if you want to make arrangements.” Sheriff Timberlake drew on a cigarette stub that was now so short it must have charred his mustache. He released it into an inch of coffee, where it hissed succinctly and floated. He said, “You tell your friend the governor’s got a regular toothache over the James gang. My guess is he’d agree to do just about anything if it’d make the pain go away.”

SOMETIME IN CHRISTMAS WEEK,
Thomas Howard and his cousin, Charley Johnson, ascended Lafayette Street on foot, in slush, with a city councilman named Aylesbury who wanted to rent out a seven-room house owned by Mrs. August Saltzman. The rise was steep as a playground slide and on several occasions Aylesbury needed to rest in order to catch his wind.

Jesse smiled and said, “At least if you get weary of climbing this hill you can always lean against it.”

Aylesbury shook his head and respirated, his gloved hands on his hips. “I don’t know if I want stairs or a block and tackle.”

Charley reached the crest at 1318 Lafayette Street and there slouched around a one-storey, green-shuttered white cottage that was called the House on the Hill. He counted two scantily furnished bedrooms, a sitting room and a dining room, and a recently attached kitchen with a shaded rear porch that looked eastward over a ravine into wilderness. He could see fifty miles of countryside to the north, east, and west, and if he walked onto a neighbor’s corner lot, Charley could see Kansas, the brown Missouri River, an iron bridge that was the color of rust, the shuttle and steam and collision of boxcars at the railroad yard, and brick stores and downtown businesses with their streets of mud and brown snow and with a roof of coal smoke overhead.

Charley saw Aylesbury skid a shoe in the snow to reveal the loess soil underneath and he slunk after the two men as they clambered through snowdrifts to a smokehouse, to a stable that was cut into the earth, to a shed for “garden tools and what-have-yous,” and a warm outhouse that could seat two.

“You can see into next week from here,” Charley said. “You won’t never be surprised by company again.”

Jesse did not acknowledge the remark.

The city councilman walked from room to room in the cottage, his arms wide, his voice dwindling in closets. He shut doors, he raised and lowered windows, he sat on mattresses and sofa cushions, he informed Mr. Howard that across the street was Thomas Turner and his wife, along with a niece named Metta, who was three.

Jesse seemed lost in reveries. “So my little girl will have a playmate.”

“And it’s romantically situated, isn’t it? Here on this lofty eminence?”

Charley said, “I like the address most. Lafayette Street. When I was a kid I used to tinker with a French music box that the Marquis de Lafayette gave the father of our country.”

This was such a startling bit of information from such an improbable source that Aylesbury only looked over his nose to evaluate Charley for a moment, and then returned to the man he knew as a cattle buyer named Thomas Howard. “The rent is fourteen dollars a month.”

Jesse squinted at the councilman and slowly walked to the kitchen.

Aylesbury said, “I’ve priced about twenty places in town and that’s what a cottage goes for these days. I may even be a little low.” Jesse leaned on a kitchen window sash in a black mood, looking out. His coat shadowed the room like shutters. Aylesbury called, “How much is comfort and contentment worth?”

THE THOMAS HOWARD CLAN
moved into The House on the Hill on December 24th, and in the late afternoon Jesse and Charley strolled downtown St. Joseph with a list Zee had written out: candies and chocolates and peppermint canes, a cloth hand puppet with a porcelain head, ivory barrettes carved to represent angels, and
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
, a children’s book by Margaret Sidney. Jesse bought what he could with the little cash he had, then Charley saw a notice that said the Second Presbyterian Church was holding its annual Christmas party that evening, and the two walked over to Twelfth Street, slipped into the unlocked basement, and stole a game of feathered darts, a green metal hoop and stick, a rubber ball and six jacks, a sack of popcorn balls that were covered with molasses, a reed whistle, and a red Santa Claus suit and a white whisker set that was constructed from baling wire and painted binder twine.