The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (24 page)

Bob indicated the sheet that skirted the Christmas tree and asked, “Did you notice there was a present under there for you?”

Jesse beamed. “You’re teasing.” He stooped under a cincture of popcorn blossoms sewn with a thread and retrieved a cardboard box that was the size of a brick and wrapped in blue tissue paper. He shook the box and the contents clobbered inside. “Heavy!”

“I can’t wait to see your eyes twinkle.”

Wilbur grinned at his brother. “It’s a gun, ain’t it, Bob.”

“You’ll see soon enough.”

Jesse ripped off the paper and the box flap and with childish astonishment withdrew a black, ironworked model of a salacious naked woman, her arms crossed beneath her head, her legs lewdly cloven and lifted.

“It’s a bawdy bootjack,” Bob said.

“I’ve wished I owned one a thousand times.”

“Well. Now you do.”

Jesse stroked the woman’s round breasts with his thumb and blushed as he smiled. “I love Christmas.”

“I can see that.”

He imitated shame. “But I don’t have anything for you! I never dreamed—”

“Your friendship is plenty.”

Charley slunk in from the kitchen and then warily approached Jesse to examine the articulation of the ironwork. He asked his brother, “What is it?”

“It’s a bawdy bootjack,” he said.

“It’s something I’ll cherish always,” said Jesse.

“Then we both have something to cherish,” said Bob.

JESSE REMAINED
on the farm that Christmas night and Bob remained awake. The moon was in the window and a window of moonlight was on the floor so that Jesse was unkenneled, released from the room’s darkness and there on the cot like a man on a coffin, a man collected and in arrangement. Bob sat in his bed in his gray underwear, his wrists crossed, his ankles clasped, incapable of movement. He could see that there was a gun on the nightstand to his left and could imagine its cold nickel inside his grip, its two-pound weight reached out and aimed, but he couldn’t even maneuver toward it, it was like a name he couldn’t remember. He was a boy again, a rube, there were connections he was missing; and there across the room was Jesse, placid and sovereign, certain of both Heaven and Earth. His color in the night was the blue in veins of marble and the handsome head that rested on the pillow was appetitive and proud and pleased with itself.

And even then, with the man asleep, with his acute senses unattended, his keen reflexes numbed and slowed, the exact location of his firearms possibly forgotten, Bob could not screw up the courage to act. It was as if some spell or sorcery had rendered him meek, infirm, confounded. He could contrive many ways of snaring Jesse; he could invent a thousand deaths; but Bob feared it would always come to this, he would see a chance and then he’d interpret it and speculate on its consequences, he would ponder each option and particular and soon the opportunity would pass away, or qualms would overmaster him, conscience make him impotent.

Bob consoled himself with the thought that next time he would not stall so long—later, when Jesse was sickened or sorely distracted or the right situation presented itself, when Bob had mustered his courage and was not so susceptible to uncertainties. Bob was not yet twenty, after all, while Jesse was thirty-four and in physical decline; each calendar week subtracted from Jesse the powers that Bob accrued. So Bob could afford to wait if Jesse would only let him. And that, of course, he did.

With that, Bob slid under the covers and closed his eyes in imitation of Jesse and he woke next at sunrise to noises in the kitchen. Charley still snored to his left, but the cot across from Bob was vacated and downstairs a tea kettle piped once before it was removed from the stove. Bob skulked down the staircase and across the sitting room, tomfoolishly tiptoeing to the kitchen entrance and peeking around the doorjamb.

Jesse had amassed his suit clothes next to the butter churn and skidded a laundry boiler into the pantry, where he stood naked in two inches of steaming water, wringing a soaped washcloth over his skull, spitting the water that trickled into his mouth. He didn’t notice Bob in the room. He scrubbed his elbow and knuckles with a tile brush and rinsed his arm and coughed twice and then again until he was racked like a chain-smoker for more than a minute and Bob smiled as he thought,
You are old, Jess. You are dying even now.

His skin was white as sheep’s wool and the scars on his chest were red as slaughter. He was muscular in the back and shoulders and sinews crossed his pectorals like laces and his biceps bunched when he lifted his wrist to tenderly examine it, but his ankle was knurled where he’d broken it, varices mapped his calves and thighs, his buttocks were flat as books, there were wrinkles of skin at his kidneys and neck, his ribs could be easily numbered, his shoulder clicked when he circled it, he bent with apparent pain. The many injuries of a reckless career had made him prematurely decrepit, as ancient as the Noah that Ham spied on in the tent.

Jesse coughed into his fist once more and swished his hand in the water at his feet, then lifted an ocean shell ashtray and sacredly doused the crown of his head. It was then that he saw Bob Ford and said, “Go away.”

“It never crossed your mind that I was here and it’s been nigh on to three minutes at least.”

“You sure of that?” Jesse stepped from the laundry tub onto a red flannel shirt on the floor. He covered his face with a dishtowel and then rankled his dark brown hair with it as he smiled insincerely at Bob. “Maybe I was fooling you. Maybe we’re playing cat and mouse.”

“I’ve never seen you without your guns neither.”

Jesse towed a bath towel off a chair and revealed, almost incidentally, a twelve-inch Remington revolver on the seat. “Don’t happen more than once a year.”

But Bob simpered with self-satisfaction. “Isn’t no one can sneak up on Jesse James, is the way it used to be.”

Jesse shawled himself in the white bath towel and sat down on the chair to soothe his feet in the laundry tub. “And now you think you know otherwise; maybe that’s just what I wanted.”

“I’m making fun is all, you understand. I wouldn’t dream of mocking you or causing you any ill feelings.”

Jesse rounded forward under the towel and cozied his feet in the bath water. It was as if no one else were around and Jesse was once again alone and at ease with his meditations. He said, “I can’t figure it out: do you want to be
like
me, or do you want to
be
me?”

ON NEW YEAR’S EVE,
Bob and Wilbur attended a party at Greenville. Since it was too cold to use the milk barn, George Rhodus, the host, had moved and stacked his Colonial furniture and rolled the blue carpet against the north wall and installed a string quartet in the dining room so the guests could waltz to Viennese music or converse around a galvanized bucket that was filled with hot cider and spiced apple slices. Bob and Wilbur lurked in a corner and exchanged pleasantries with whoever chanced by but mostly restricted themselves to occasional greetings and nods and otherwise sipped from glass cups and looked sly.

Then Jesse’s stepbrother, Johnny Samuels, came in, uninvited, with two churlish companions who smutted the atmosphere. John was the comeliest of Zerelda’s children; records mention a graceful young man with luxurious golden brown hair, liquid blue eyes, a soft, combed mustache and beard, and the complexion of a girlchild—one writer even compared his beauty to that seen in Flemish paintings of “the calm, benignant face of Him who died on Calvary nearly two thousand years ago.”

He slunk over to Bob and Wilbur and asked, “You two seen Dave?”

Bob said, “He came on Christmas but went off with Charley the very next day.”

Johnny seemed to want no more than that. He scooped up apple cider with a tin can that once contained apricots and then joined a man with a scar through one eye socket who spiked Johnny’s cider with clear grain alcohol. Mr. Rhodus sent the hooligans a not-in-my-house-you-don’t look but it didn’t curtail what a guest would later call “their boozing,” and by midnight George Rhodus and two-enormous sons were steering Johnny Samuels outside into the cold. He squirmed and tried to jerk free as Rhodus said, “I’ve had about enough of you, young fella. I’ve had a belly full! I don’t care who your brothers are!”

Bob heard Johnny scream, “Come back here, Rhodus! Rhodus! You coward! Come back out here and settle this!” Wilbur moved a window curtain aside and Bob saw Johnny spit on the shoveled brick sidewalk as his two friends punched their hands into woolen mittens and tramped across the yard to a wide string of brown horses. John Samuels was not about to give in so easily, however. He made a snowball and threw it but it sifted like sugar on the winds. He shouted oaths at Rhodus and kicked at short clumps of peony bushes. There was a bird feeder with icicles on it like the cushion tassels then in fashion and these Johnny collected with a sweep of his hand and pitched them with violence at the front door, so that a cluster of knocks startled the ladies inside.

Wilbur said, “Johnny’s lost his sense of humor, ain’t he.”

Bob continued to stare without emotion as Johnny blasted snow with his tall black boots and tantrumed like a caricature of his wild and hot-tempered stepbrother. The front door whined open and cold rushed into the room and Bob heard Rhodus bellow, “Now that’s enough of that carrying on, John! You’re all liquored up and angry about nothing! You three boys go on home now and sleep it off and let’s let bygones be bygones!”

Johnny moved onto the road, where he stood with his boots wide, clutching his wool coat closed. He shouted, “I ain’t
on
your goll-danged land, George! I’m standing on public property!” And he skipped and clogged in the snow for the jeering show of it.

Rhodus became overexcited with that and went to a closet for a gun. He shouldered past men who tried to muscle him back inside and then was on the sidewalk with a Confederate pistol raised at Johnny’s flat-brimmed black hat. He shot once and a woman shrieked and the three boys on the road squatted.

“Go!” Rhodus cried out, but John Samuels rose with a brick that he’d somehow unearthed from the sidewalk and he trotted forward and heaved the brick at Rhodus with great strain. The brick crashed through a tall window, bursting glass like ocean spray, swatting a curtain into the room, savagely denting the cherry wood floor on its strike, and in the next moment the revolver went off again, blue smoke billowing gray in the cold, the noise so loud it seemed two shots or three. And this ball socked into the right side of John Samuels’s coat, swiveling him on his boot. He staggered as if he’d been thrown something cumbersome and then clutched at his upper ribs and looked toward the lit Rhodus house with disappointment and tribulation and abrupt sobriety, then he tilted backward and fell and his skull knocked the road like wood block against wood.

Great consternation followed, of course. John Samuels was carried into the Rhodus house by six men and laid next to the fire embers, where his clothes were removed with exceeding delicacy and his naked skin cooked to the warmth of a Sunday roast. An osteopath was in the neighborhood and was soon kneeling over John, manipulating the injury, resting his ear against the right lung. And while hypotheses and rumors and wild speculations about why “John was shot were communicated and contradicted, George Rhodus invited some male partygoers to a conference in his upstairs bedroom, where they were evidently sworn to secrecy about what they each termed “a mishap.”

It was then that the Ford brothers discreetly left in order to avoid any appearance of collusion, and for all of the next week Bob rode to Richmond so he could scour the newspapers for information about the shooting and its aftermath. “Young Samuels,” the Kansas City
Journal
stated, “is reported as being quiet and orderly when sober, but is decidedly wild when under the influence of liquor, and it is in that condition he attended the dance, where he became engaged in a quarrel and was put out of the house, and in retaliation threw a brick through a window.” The shooting was recounted and the medical circumstances were conveyed along with the prognosis that “death has been daily expected since.” Concerning George Rhodus, however, there was little news—a sentence or two regarding a sheriff’s investigation or a notation about a forthcoming grand jury inquest into the misadventure—with the result that Bob would ride back to the farm each afternoon with a feeling of astonishment. He kept expecting an obituary for George Rhodus, a news item about a Greenville dairy farmer who’d succumbed to a grisly execution: skewered, perhaps, by his Confederate Army sword while contritely praying at a chapel kneeler, or murdered as he napped on a parlor sofa, carbolic acid having been poured into his ear through a funnel.

But nothing happened, nothing at all. Johnny Samuels was dying and yet Jesse James was not going to avenge him. Soon the court reporters forgot about the Greenville incident except for a brief note that said the grand jury “failed to find a true bill” against the man who shot Jesse’s stepbrother, and Bob Ford came to a new appreciation of just how much was possible.

ON JANUARY 4TH,
Dick Liddil boarded an afternoon train to Richmond and hiked out to Mrs. Bolton’s farm in smarting cold. He could smell snow but it only started to lick into him when he crossed onto the rented property at nine. By then Martha was asleep, so he went to the untidy room off the barn where Elias, Wilbur, and Bob were gambling pennies at cards. Dick sat close to the hayburner stove and acquainted them with a highly selective history of his days in Kansas City, and though Bob asked in every way imaginable if he’d made an arrangement with Police Commissioner Craig or Sheriff Timberlake or Governor Crittenden, Dick never strayed in his denying.

Elias and Wilbur would be at their livestock chores before sunrise, so they turned in at eleven, and Bob and Dick sat alone at the oakwood kitchen table, chatting in voices so low they would not buckle a candle flame that was two inches from their mourns.

Bob seemed more mature to Dick, more intuitive and shrewd; it was almost as if he’d taken a wife. Gone were the giddiness and ingratiation, though his good manners still seemed artificial and the air of performance and duplicity was still very strong. He listened attentively as Dick presented his plan to get involved with racehorses and eventually own a string, but he pulled away from any further exposure of his intentions when it seemed that beneath Bob’s occasional comments there were sharp questions that would never be asked, inferences that Dick had inadvertently encouraged, implications that Bob was making of his omissions. Bob finally pushed the dialogue closer to his own prescriptions by asking if Dick remembered the July newspaper reports about Sheriff Pat Garrett and the killing of Billy the Kid.