The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (25 page)

Dick made no reply.

Bob asked, “Do you know what the Kansas City
Journal
’s comment was? They said a sheriff like Pat Garrett was just what Missouri needs: a man who’ll ‘follow the James boys and their companions in crime to their den, and shoot them down without mercy.’ ”

“You say this was in a newspaper?”

“Yes! And I’ll quote you something else too. They said the man who gunned down the James boys would be ‘crowned with honors by the good people of this commonwealth, and be richly rewarded in money, besides.’ ”

Staining the oakwood was a dark ring that Dick rubbed with his thumb. He said, “Maybe I
did
read that after all.”

“You recollect it?”

Dick glanced away from Bob to the sitting room. The yellow eyes of a cat were looking at him and then the cat curled down to lick at its chest. Dick said, “You’re not as hungry when you get to be my age, Bob. You get to be twenty-nine years old and you look back and see you’ve never done anything good that you can brag about and you sort of forget all your pipe dreams. I gave up all my ideas of grandeur.”

Bob slid his chair back and moved the coal-oil lamp from the kitchen to the sitting room. He said, “Oftentimes things seem impossible up until they’re attempted.” Then he lidded the chimney glass with his palm and suffocated the light.

CLAIMING A MORNING APPOINTMENT
with a dentist in Richmond and some chores to accomplish afterward, Bob left the house at dawn on January 5th and surreptitiously journeyed to Kansas City by railroad car. He dunked cinnamon doughnuts in coffee at a Kansas City cafe and scanned three Missouri newspapers for more information about John Samuels but saw not a word about him, only about Charles Guiteau: a jailkeeper had allowed more than three hundred visitors “to inflame and gratify the assassin’s vanity and indulge their own morbid curiosity by an admission to Guiteau’s cell.” The correspondent went on to say, “It is an admonition to persons about to commit murder: ‘Choose a big man for your victim. Shoot a President; club a Cabinet Minister; creep up behind a Senator and kill him with a slingshot; but don’t kill any private citizen, for if you do the Court will deal harshly with you.’ ”

Bob brushed cinnamon off his mouth and tie, tipped the counterman a nickel, and browsed through a clothing store’s city directory for the address of Police Commissioner Henry H. Craig. He noted the cross streets on his shirt cuff and walked outside.

The streets were mud and slush and rutted manure, coal smoke cindered the sidewalks and made the air blue, telegraph, telephone, and electric wires criss-crossed overhead and chattered when a wind rose. He was slightly lost but could tell this was the commercial district: male accountants, secretaries, clerks, and commodities brokers stood under lowered awnings conferring about the universe, all in creased and corrugated suit coats that were black or navy blue in color so that they need never be cleaned. Bob cut between two surreys to cross a street and saw a boy with unsold copies of the Kansas City
Times
rolled under his left arm. He followed the boy down West Fifth to Main and then into the Times Building, where Henry H. Craig leased a law office in room number 6.

He blew his nose and knuckled the sleep from his eyes. He removed his bowler hat and slicked his fine brown hair with his palm. He rapped twice on a window of frosted glass and saw a faint blur become a man’s black form and then he was being appraised by an apprentice attorney-at-law who seemed scarcely seventeen. Bob said, “I’m looking for Commissioner Craig. I’ve got some information about the James gang.”

The apprentice glanced down to see if Bob carried a gun, then invited him in and shut the door. He asked for Bob’s name but Bob wouldn’t give it. He said Mr. Craig had a client with him at the moment and Bob said he expected the information would keep. The apprentice disappeared for a minute and then invited Bob into a room that contained green chintz furniture, tall bookcases of Kansas and Missouri statutes and judicial opinions, and a cherrywood box with a crank and black ear trumpet, which Bob took to be a telephone.

He heard the room’s door creak and click shut and turned to see a stern man in his late forties with his suit coat off and circular bifocals on. His left eyebrow was cocked in a manner that made him look quizzical; his wide brown mustache was streaked with gray and covered his mouth and chin with shadow, so that he seemed even more severe than he was. “My assistant mentioned something about you and the James gang.”

“Yes sir. I want to bring them to justice.”

“The James gang,” Craig said.

“Well, not each and every one all at once. Maybe I’d start out with the lowlier culprits and that would give me the opportunities I need to capture Jesse and Frank.”

Craig squinted at Bob. “Who sent you here?”

“Sheriff James Timberlake of Clay County. Sort of indirectly. By that I mean he mentioned you but didn’t know I was coming.”

Craig hooked a finger inside his cheek and flicked a smidgen of chewing tobacco into a brass cuspidor. He moved his tongue around inside his mouth, then bent over and spit. He asked, “How do you know the James brothers?”

Bob foresaw the snarls of cross-examination and answered, “Did I say that I did?”

“Do you spy on them?”

“You’ll excuse me for saying so, but isn’t what matters the fact that I can round these culprits up?”

“I get told that once a week, and they’re still uncaught. You can see how I’d be skeptical.”

Bob lowered into a magisterial chair and rested his bowler hat in his lap. He let his palms appreciate the sculpted mahogany armrests. “Just lately?” he asked.

“Just lately what?”

“Anybody come to you lately saying he could bring in one or two of the James gang?”

Craig cleaned his eyeglasses with a white handkerchief. “Why do you want to know?”

“I just sort of thought they might’ve.”

“It was a woman.”

“She give her name as Mattie?”

Craig moved a chair over and sat across from Bob, shrugged forward like a rowing coach, his elbows on his knees. “You tell me. Her name was Mattie. Mattie what? Who was she acting for? Who were they going to bring in? You in Dutch with Jesse? Or is it only the reward money? You’ve got to give me something. I don’t even know your name.”

“It’s Bob.”

“Just Bob?”

“Right now, yes; for the time being.”

Craig flickered a smile and combed the broad wings of his mustache with his thumb. “What’s the first name on your list, Bob?”

Bob rose from the green chintz chair and walked over to the telephone. He could see that copper wires were attached to brass screws at the rear but couldn’t fathom what they were for. He flicked one with his index finger and a stab of electricity twitched into his wrist.

“Did it nip you?” Craig asked.

Bob shook his hand and smiled with embarrassment. “I never knew these contraptions had teeth before.” Bob looked down at it. “How’s it work?”

Craig sinuated his right hand. “Your voice moves on undulating electrical currents. You scream into that mouthpiece to talk and then stick your ear next to it to listen. Most times you feel like a damned fool.”

“What was the joke I read in the newspaper? Oh yes: “The telephone has developed an entirely new school of
hello
-cution.’ Do you get it?
Hello
-cution? Like elocution?”

The commissioner stared at Bob without a word. A streetcar outside rattled and clanked. Girls screamed with laughter in the corridor. Bob said, “He’s a friend. I don’t look on it like I’m betraying him though. Jesse means to kill him, even offered a thousand-dollar reward for his carcass. I look on it like I’m saving him from injury.”

Craig remained as he was.

“Dick Liddil,” said Bob.

Craig was unmoved. “Do you know where we can find him?”

“The reason is, Dick’s a conniver and I can’t figure out what his plans are, I just know he’s got some fancy tricks up his sleeve and he won’t pity me.”

Craig walked to a chest-high accountant’s desk and flipped open an inkstand to scratch Bob’s information into a journal ledger.

Bob said, “He can’t know it was me.”

Craig attended to his notes. “You give me an exact time and location where we can catch him, and I’ll guarantee your name will never get out. You’ll be cited as an anonymous spy; not even Timberlake will know. If there’s a reward, you’ll get it, but beyond that I can’t offer you any legal or physical protections.” Craig looked over his shoulder and saw that Bob’s brow was stitched, his mind in a careen. “Do you get the gist of what I’m saying?”

“Absolutely.”

“Do you know where Jesse’s living?”

“He
was
in Kansas City.”

Craig registered incredulity and said, “You’re pulling my leg.”

“Over on Woodland Avenue; and then Troost. He’s moved again though. My brother knows where but he’s been and gone before I could ask.”

Craig inscribed something in the journal and Bob walked over to study the entry. “Does the name Bob Ford mean anything to you?”

Craig dipped his quill in the ink bottle and scripted cursively on a brown blotter. “Is that your actual name or your alias?”

“Actual,” said Bob, and he grinned with delight when he saw the name recorded in Craig’s elegant calligraphy. “Pretty soon all of America will know who Bob Ford is.”

BOB TOLD THE COMMISSIONER
that Dick Liddil was sleeping over at their rented farmhouse while his maimed leg mended and then created a crude map of the Harbison property, leaving out the creek where Wood Hite’s remains now mouldered but including Richmond and country roads and nearby railroad tracks.

That afternoon Commissioner Craig activated a special unit of the Kansas City Police, a company of twelve that included himself and Sheriff Timberlake, a Sergeant Ditsch, two detectives, a constable, and six city policemen. They were called to the central station at nine that same evening, received instructions and coffee, were issued revolvers and rifles and cold weather gear, and after midnight on January 6th, climbed aboard a chartered train that consisted of a locomotive and two blackened smoking cars. The locomotive accelerated to a speed approaching fifty miles per hour until Lexington Junction, where it was switched to tracks that carried the men beyond Richmond to a crossroads a short walk away from the Harbison farm. They came without horses and that would matter later—Craig wanted no noise.

The January thaw lasted only two days; by late afternoon on the 5th the sun was cast over by a latticework of clouds, by evening it had started to rain, and by the time the twelve moved into the woodrows the rain had turned to sleet that made tree branches clatter and iced the snow so that it was like saltines. The company circumnavigated a white, ramshackle house with oil-paper windows and a buckled roof and an elm tree that scratched at the shingles, and for a time some men tilted along a ravine that might have introduced them to the orange and petrified cadaver of Robert Woodson Hite, but the moment never came; instead of continuing on that route, the men circled close to the cattle lots and made a reconnaissance of the brown, leaning barn, then scuttled back to the fruit trees where Sheriff Timberlake and Commissioner Craig were in anxious consultation.

It was about 3 a.m. and every vista was blue or black and the sleet scored their cheeks like a cat scratch. No one could tell if any were awake inside, if rifles rested on the windowsills, if the communication with Ford were merely a preposterous bluff made to lure them into a skirmish and counterattack from the James gang. And it was the if of Jesse’s being there, the maybe, the perchance, that persuaded Commissioner Craig and Sheriff Timberlake to practice care and prudence and to wait in the cold until sunrise.

So they remained in the woodrows and neither talked nor smoked nor stamped their boots to the earth. Cold watered their eyes and cemented their mittens to their rifle stocks and turned their feet into flatirons. Craig looked at his vest watch and clicked it shut and minutes later checked the vest watch again. Then the night lessened, the clouds ashened slightly, and the men became starkly black and brown against the gray of the snow. Craig walked out to scan the east and saw pink in the mile-off woods and he turned connotatively to Sheriff Timberlake.

The sheriff whistled succinctly and motioned forward for the deputies to move on the farmhouse and the twelve crept forward. Craig sucked on his index finger to thaw it, then nestled it next to the rifle’s trigger. Timberlake waved the company in a circle around the house and saw a boy wipe an upstairs windowpane with his fist, peer out sleepily, and withdraw into the room.

That was Bob. He woke without really knowing why and listened for a clue, which came as a clink and then as the crunch of boots in rain-iced snow. He scurried from bed in his nightshirt with one name only on his mind and with a cavity inside his chest, and at the window he made out six armed men and maybe more, as rounded-over as hedgehogs, coming out of the woods as if they were created there. “Dick!” he insisted, and swatted the sleeping man’s foot.

Dick inclined on an elbow, rubbing his eyes, then slanted over just enough to see a man in a city coat slugging his legs through a knee-deep snowdrift, a rifle crossed at his chest. Dick shot from bed, collapsed a little on his wounded leg, and hopped on the good one to the clothes he’d thrown over a chair. “Who is it?”

Bob climbed into cold woolen trousers and hooked suspenders over his nightshirt. “I saw a tin star on someone’s pocket; that’s all the information I need.”

Dick said, “God damn Mattie anyhow,” and buckled on his gunbelt.

Bob looked down into the sidelot. A young deputy genuflected into the snow and steadied his arm and rifle with a raised knee. If he fired, glass would crash across Martha’s four-poster bed. A big voice in the yard called, “Jesse!”

Dick was in his knee boots and corduroy trousers, one suspender twisted on his shoulder. He bundled his coat and gloves at his stomach and asked, “How do I find the attic?”

“We know you’re in there!” Timberlake cried out. “Come on outside with your hands up!”