The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (26 page)

Sheriff Timberlake was near the iron well-pump in the dooryard. His eyes watered in the wind, his iced mustache was like an ivory comb, and though he may have been mortally afraid at that moment, he looked austere and authoritative. He bracketed his mouth with his mittens and shouted, “You boys are cornered! If you know what’s good for you, well, you’ll come out peaceably and no one will get shot up!”

Timberlake saw the kitchen door suck inward and he crouched down. The storm door misted with the inside warmth and then it was pushed open and Bob Ford leaned outside. “Don’t shoot!”

Timberlake turned to Craig. “You know who that is, don’t you?”

Craig claimed he hadn’t an inkling.

“Bob Ford. He lives here with his sister.” The sheriff called, “Come on out and show yourself!”

Bob took a probationary step out onto the porch and then rooted there with his hands squeezed under his arms. He rubbed a stockinged foot on his calf. “If
this
isn’t a surprise!” he said.

“That’s how we intended it,” the sheriff said, and slogged forward with Commissioner Craig and two Kansas City policemen as Bob Ford courteously butlered at the door.

Martha was at the oaken table, a frayed blue bathrobe clutched at her throat, her feet in scruffy white stockings. Craig withdrew circular eyeglasses and hooded them over his ears but resisted looking at Bob. He tilted his head to listen for footfalls overhead.

The sheriff asked if Jesse James, Jim Cummins, or Ed Miller was in the house and Bob said no, they weren’t. Craig asked if Dick Liddil was perchance there and Bob responded in like manner. “Your friend, Charles Siderwood,” the sheriff said. “Is that actually Dick Liddil?”

“No; that’s Charles Siderwood.”

“Is he here?”

Bob said, “You can look around if you want, but you won’t find whoever it is you’re after. It’s just me and my kin here.”

Craig instructed the sheriff to stay with the boy and took Sergeant Ditsch and two policemen with him to the second floor. Timberlake stood Bob in a corner and then poked charred stovewood with a fork, seeking red ash or embers.

Martha consented to start a fire and Timberlake invited the rest of the company inside out of the cold, which, as it turned out, was a compassionate but careless action to take. The sheriff moved around in the sitting room and kitchen and occasionally pulled out a counter drawer. Ida sleepily walked in with a wool coat over her nightgown and stared at the many policemen with big-eyed bewilderment. Martha set a coffee kettle on the stove and a coal-oil lamp on the sideboard. Smoke fluttered two feet above it. She kept trying to interpret Bob but couldn’t tell if he was pretending innocence or if he’d caused the posse to come. She remembered how Bob used to lick sugar from his palm; he used to throw apples on the roof when she had girlfriends over; she’d once chased him into the creek because he dumped mustard powder into her cake pan.

Bob could hear the party moving through rooms on the second floor, yanking and overturning drawers, rummaging through clothes. “Come
on
,” he muttered and the sheriff scowled at him. Martha carried empty coffee cups to the men. The kitchen was still so cold that their breaths steamed before them when they chatted. Martha came around with a coffee kettle and filled the cups and though Timberlake meant to smile at the widow, he sneered and then returned his glower to Bob Ford. He was six inches taller than Bob and sixty pounds his better, and Bob didn’t risk a sip of his sister’s coffee for fear the sheriff would punch the cup into his mouth.

Sergeant Ditsch came down to summon Bob to the second floor and Timberlake followed them upstairs. Bob said, “You’re not going to find anything. My momma and daddy brought us Ford children up right. I sleep in the presence of angels.”

The sergeant frowned at Bob and at Timberlake as he unclosed the bedroom door. Timberlake shoved past Bob into the room, saying, “Don’t mind what the boy says. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.”

Commissioner Craig was sitting on a mattress with Bob’s shoebox in his lap. He said, “You’re quite the packrat.”

And Ditsch said, “Show us how to get to the attic.”

“You mean you haven’t been there already?”

Craig looked over his round eyeglasses and squinted sourly at Bob. “I don’t think we’re going to find much in the attic. I think our spy sent us on a wild goose chase.”

Bob said, “You need to move the boxes on the closet shelf. They left off the stairs to the attic and cut out a cubbyhole in that closet.”

Timberlake slid the boxes off the shelf and threw them, casting black dresses and crinolines across the floorboards where Wood Hite left the world. Bob sat down on the cot and rested his skull against the newspaper corset advertisements on the wall. He didn’t care if Dick shot at the men when they entered the attic; he didn’t care if Dick surrendered and confessed all and he himself was convicted for murder. He was shivering and sick to his stomach and wished only to lie down. The lady’s white dresser that was next to the closet now lacked its three drawers; coats and trousers rugged the floor; books had been tossed like cow chips.

As Craig and Ditsch looked on, Timberlake climbed on a chair and whammed at the ceiling cover with his elbow until it skipped up off its wooden frame and the sheriff could slide it aside. He then drew his revolver and raised it and called, “You there! Give yourself up!” He looked to his knees as he waited for some sort of answer, then received a lit candle from Sergeant Ditsch and rested it inside the attic.

Craig scowled at Bob and Bob confidentially nodded and Craig said, “Go on in, Jim.”

So the sheriff boosted himself over the frame and they could see his legs swivel as he looked around the attic but there were no shots, no sounds at all. “Sparrows,” he said once, then, after a movement, “You’ve got a window open, you know that?”

Craig said, “Come on down, Jim,” and took his eyeglasses off to clean them. “Looks like our spy was playing games.”

Martha was in the corridor in a blue gingham dress and white sweater. She saw the chaos in the room and with sarcasm said, “I thought a man’s home was his castle.”

Craig smiled inauthentically and made some notes in the journal and closed it. “Why don’t you show us the stable and barn, Mr. Ford?”

Bob buttoned on a coat and circled a wool scarf around his neck and Timberlake accompanied him across the snow as if they were two chums out on a skate. The sheriff said, “They’re going to love a pretty boy like you in the penitentiary. You won’t never be lonely again.”

It was then about twenty minutes after sunrise. Wilbur came forth from his shack accoutered for chores and the sheriff and two detectives searched the lofts and crannies of the barn.

Bob remained outside in the cold with his fists in his coat and squinted at the attic’s north window. He could see it had been jimmied open. A strip of white cloth blew from the sliver that snagged it; a sparrow was on the sill; shingles showed in the snow rut that Dick had cleared away as he silently skittered down off the roof. His boots made buckets in the snow. The left veered a little, like a comet’s tail, as if he’d hurt his ankle on the considerable drop to the earth.

The two detectives had by then discovered the snow destruction of a mounted horse running north into the orchard, but since they were on foot they couldn’t chase after Dick, so they merely cussed their luck.

Bob listened to them and closed his eyes. The stable door creaked and Bob smelled chewing tobacco and looked to see Commissioner Craig there next to him, considering everything. Craig said, with some irritation, “God takes care of fools and children.”

And Bob said, “Not all the time He doesn’t. I think this is an exception.”

A
PHYSICIAN INFORMED
Clarence Hite in October that his coughing was due to consumption, and so he went back to Kentucky to recuperate, though life wasn’t especially pleasant there. Mrs. Sarah Hite ran away following the killing of John Tabor; Wood Hite was jailed, then escaped, then disappeared; and word came that Ed Miller was found decomposing in the woods. And then, Clarence would later confess, “about a week before Johnny Samuels was shot, Jesse wrote me a letter. It was postmarked Kearney, Missouri, but I think was written in Kansas City. He said in substance that I had better leave home; Dick was in with the detectives and they would soon take me away.”

How Jesse could have known that remains a mystery: it could be he was guessing; it could be that clairvoyance was one of his gifts, just as he always claimed. In any case, Jesse was a month premature, for it was on January 24th, 1882, that James Andrew Liddil gave himself up to Sheriff Timberlake in Liberty, Missouri. Henry Craig had kept his promise and permitted no one else to know that it was Bob who put Dick Liddil in jeopardy, and Dick perceived Bob as such a friend that he pleaded with him to act as an intermediary between himself and the government.

Dick was sent to Kansas City with Sheriff Timberlake and two deputies and was met at the depot by Commissioner Craig and Police Chief Thomas Speers, who scuttled him into the Second Street jail before reporters could learn his identity. Sitting on a slat bed in his jail cell was the Jackson County prosecuting attorney, William H. Wallace, and on a chair was a skinny amanuensis who wore half-moon spectacles. It was night by then and the jail was so cold that mists came from their mouths, and yet Wallace interviewed Liddil for more than three hours. A physician visited the cell and scolded Liddil about his injured leg as he milked pus from the wound and sprinkled it with powdered rosin before wrapping it in cloth.

Clarence Hite was by then doctoring himself with a weed called candlewick that he steeped like tea, and he was brewing a pot of it in February when he responded to a voice like Bob Ford’s calling him into the yard. Clarence went to the windowed door in his long underwear and a woman’s bathrobe, a red handkerchief flowered at his mouth. It was night and he couldn’t see anything outside a hanging lantern’s yellow circle of light. He squeezed out between the door and doorframe and saw Bob Ford shying away from reproach and Dick Liddil in a rocking chair, blowing clouds into his manacled fists. Then a man who would later introduce himself as Henry Craig came forward and asked Liddil, “Do you know this man to be Clarence Browler Hite?”

Liddil nodded with sorrow; Clarence merely examined a stain of blood on his palm and wiped it on his seat.

Craig shouted to Bob, “Mr. Ford?” Bob raised his stare. “Do you identify this man as one of those who committed robbery on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway at Winston, Missouri?”

Bob said, “You don’t look any too sassy, Clarence.”

Clarence acknowledged the remark with a cough. He seemed to have shrunk two inches in every direction. “I’ve been sort of wolfish about the head and shoulders for nigh onto four months now.”

Craig nudged an arrest warrant into Hite’s ribs and recounted its contents as Clarence puzzled out the great seal and the signatures of the governor and the secretary of state. Sheriff Timberlake connected handcuffs to his wrists and Clarence called to Bob, “You know them warts I cut off? They come back, every last one.”

Clarence Browler Hite was remanded to Daviess County on February 13th and there two indictments were made, one for the murder of William Westfall and a subsidiary one for participation in the Winston train robbery in July. He was arraigned within weeks and, to the dismay of his defense attorney, pleaded guilty to the charge of robbery just so he would not be cross-examined and perhaps spill something important that the government could use. He was sentenced to twenty-five years in the penitentiary in Jefferson City, and in 1883, when his private information had long since ceased to matter, he would make a confession of his crimes and then he’d promptly die of consumption, as he’d predicted he would.

SNOWSTORMS MOVED
over Missouri on Sunday, February 19th, and shut down commerce for more than two days. The snow removed roads and made hammocks of telegraph wires and submerged cattle high as their shanks. It cut off every railroad line east of Kansas City to St. Louis, it stopped the mail somewhere south of Omaha, its run-off would make the Mississippi sixty miles wide around Helena, Arkansas, and yet it couldn’t prevent Bob Ford from presenting himself to Governor Crittenden at the Craig Rifles Ball on Wednesday. He rented two rough brown horses and a wooden sleigh with steel runners that initially marked the snow with rust and he guided the team with reins that were so cold they branched out from Bob’s mittens like ribbons of tin. The horses clouted through snowdrifts for two or three miles, sometimes sinking so deep that they lunged and swam with fright, but then Bob reached a main road and steered into twin gullies made by another sleigh and the horses clopped along at a trot. The sunshine was radiant on the snow. The woods were rose and brown against white. The sky was blue and with only gray wisps of clouds overhead, like scriptures of chalk erased from a slate. Bob crouched out of the cold and clenched into himself, his ears scarfed in a girlish way, listening to the whisper of the sleigh runners in the ruts.

He arrived in Kansas City late that afternoon. Coal smoke gloomily darkened it and the streets were stacked high with muddied snow and Catholics walked the sidewalks with a priest’s cross of soot on their foreheads. February 22nd signaled the joint celebration of George Washington’s birthday and Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent, and as Bob slipped along toward the St. James Hotel, he could hear church bells as well as artillery salutes. He liveried the two workhorses and strolled the purple carpet of the hotel lobby, thawing his fingers at his mouth, until he figured out where to ask for Henry Craig’s room number and took the steps three at a time.

The commissioner shouted for Bob to come in at his rap, and Bob sidled inside like a cat. Craig was naked in a wood and tin bathtub that was narrow as a coffin, scrubbing a foot with a pumice stone. “Didn’t expect you to make it.”

Bob seated himself in a Queen Anne chair and slid his bowler hat beneath it. “I couldn’t pass up meeting the governor. Me and him’ve got some important matters to take up.”