The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (3 page)

Jesse had closed his eyes but kept the spoon in his mouth. He exercised a crick in his neck.

Bob went on. “Well, the upshot of our visit together was we sort of mutually agreed that the best thing for all parties concerned would be if I could use my
huge
abilities as your helper and, you know, apprentice. So we could be confederates together and come out of this unscathed. That was the upshot.”

“Well, Buck does the figuring.” Jesse looked at his bowl of stew. “Do you want the rest of this?”

“I’m sorta off my feed.”

“Hate to waste it.”

“My innards are riled as it is.”

Jesse arose and dumped his leftovers into the iron pot and gave over his bowl and spoon to a boy for washing. He said to Bob, “If you order a beefsteak in a restaurant and they don’t broil it long enough? Don’t ever send it back, because if you do the cook spits all over your food; tinctures it something putrid.”

Bob was dumbfounded. He said, “I don’t like to harp on a subject but—”

“I don’t care who comes with me,” Jesse said. “Never have. I’m what they call gregarious.”

Bob smiled in his never-quit way. Frank was drinking coffee and scowling again as he walked over from the far side of the fire. Jesse raised his voice. “I hear tell you and young Stovepipe here had a real nice visit.”

Frank looked askance at Robert Ford and flung on the ground the remains of his coffee. He dried the tin cup with his elbow. “Your boys have about an acre of rock to haul, Dingus. You’d better goose them down yonder.”

THEY SKIDDED
a rain-surrendered cottonwood tree down the bank and horsed it over the polished steel rails, ripping bark away from the bone-colored wood. They carried limestone and sandstone and earth-sprinkling rocks that were the sizes of infants and milk cans and sleeping cats, and these they hilled and forted about the tree as shovels sang and picks splintered and inveigling footpaths caved in along the vertical Blue Cut excavations. Jesse supervised the rock-piling, recommending land to be mined for stone, dedicating his men to various jobs once the locomotive was shut down, chewing a green cigar black. Shadows grew into giants and died as the sun burned orange and sank. Mosquitoes flitted from hand to cheek until a night wind channeled east on the tracks and carried the insects away, even tore the ash of cigarettes and battened light coats over backs on the higher exposures. Clouds bricked overhead and were brindled pink, then crimson and violet; leaves sailed like paper darts and the air carried the tang of cattle and hogs and chimney smoke.

Frank was a solemn sentinel on the southern ridge, big as a park bronze of the honored dead, two inches taller than most of his men and majestic with confidence and dignity and legend. Bob Ford heaved rock and yanked the horses to creek water and stirred the camp fire out, and each time he passed Frank James he said “Hello” or “How do you do?” until Dick Liddil indicated that robbers crossed paths with each other many times in the course of an evening to-do and Frank considered it silly to even once exchange pleasantries.

Jesse, on the other hand, was the soul of friendliness and commerce, acknowledging each of Bob’s remarks, letting the boy ingratiate himself, rewarding him with trivial tasks that Bob executed with zeal. Then he asked Bob to strike a match as he read the dial of a pocket watch in a gold hunting case, stolen from a judge near Mammoth Cave. The clock instructed him and he retreated into the dark and after some minutes returned with a kerosene lantern and with a burlap grain sack over his arm like a waiter’s towel. “You can stick with me but don’t heel. I don’t want to bust into you every time I have the notion to change direction.”

Bob muttered, “I’m not a moron, for Heaven’s sake,” but his irritation was quiet and his head down—one might have thought his boots had ears.

Jesse wasn’t listening anyway. He scrubbed his teeth with his linen shirt collar and bulged his lips and cheeks with his cleansing tongue. He curtained his coat halves over his unmatched, pearl-handled pistols (a .44 caliber Smith and Wesson and a Colt .45 in crossed holsters), but he kept his gray suit jacket buttoned at the lapels in accordance with fashion. He told the boy, “They’re supposed to have a hundred thousand dollars in that express car; at least that’s what the gossip is.”

Bob smiled, but there was something incorrect and tortured about it. He said, “My fingers are already starting to itch.”

Jesse squatted and struck a match and turned up the flame on the lantern, then wadded a red flannel sleeve around the glass chimney under the curled wire protectors. The yellow light rubied.

“That’s ideal,” Frank called. He was on the south ridge above Jesse and the railroad tracks, up where the grade increased and horseshoed to the right, about twenty yards east of the rock accumulation on the rails. Dick Liddil, Wood Hite, Jim Cummins, Ed Miller, and Charley Ford were near Frank, murmuring and smoking and sitting or squatting with rifles erect on their thighs, their fingers inside the trigger housings. The Cracker Neck boys, the sickly sharecroppers and have-nots, had congregated with Jesse and been instructed to range along Blue Cut’s northern ridge, which they did in a lackadaisical fashion: they rambled far down the tracks, grew lonesome, rejoined, huddled, bummed cigarettes, strewed out again and perilously crossed paths with each other in the night of the woods. Frank commented, “They’re going to trip and shoot each other into females.”

Dick Liddil said, “I bet I can find them husbands if they do,” and that jollied even Frank.

Jesse held the lantern over his pocket watch. Both hands were near the IX. He said, “About two years ago we robbed the same railroad, only it was right in Glendale we boarded her.”

“I know that,” said Bob, a little peeved and superior. “You may not realize it yet but I’m a storehouse of information about the James gang. I mean, I’ve followed your
careers
.” Bob had snipped two eyeholes from a white handkerchief and this he stuffed under his stovepipe hat so that it concealed all but his mouth and chin. However, he had cut one hole slightly low and inside of where it should have been, resulting in a mask that gave the impression he was cock-eyed and pitiable, which was not at all what he had in mind.

Jesse looked at him curiously but recommended no alterations. His concerns were apparently historical. “Do you know what happened five years ago to the day? To the
day
? What happened on September seventh in eighteen seventy-six?”

“You made an attempt on a Northfield, Minnesota, bank.” Bob rummaged in his memory and asked, “Was it owned by General Ben Butler? The Scourge of New Orleans?”

“That’s right,” said Jesse.

“Knew it.”

Jesse said, “Bill Chadwell, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts—they were killed outright. The Youngers have been in prison ever since. It’s painful to recall.”

Bob added unnecessarily, “And you never got a plug nickel from that bank.”

Jesse failed to register a facial reaction; he merely replied, “So you can see how this date would have an aroma for me.”

Then Jesse seemed to pick up a sound as a receptive animal might, twisting sharply to the east, specifying and assessing and then grasping his lantern to walk off the cliff, hopping down ten feet in three plunging, dirt-sloshing steps. He stamped his boots (a pain shooting up his injured ankle) and shook out his trouser cuffs, then knelt to hear locomotive noise translate through the rails. The steel was warm and burnished with wear and smooth as a spoon to his ear. The hum was like insects in a jar. He called to his older brother, “She’s right on schedule, Buck.”

Frank was smoking another cigarette and beguiling Dick Liddil and Charley Ford with long passages from
The Life of King Henry the Fifth,
ending with, “ ‘But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.’ ”

Dick Liddil asked, “How much of that you got memorized?”

“Over a thousand lines.”

“You’re a man of learning.”

“Yes, I am.” Frank rubbed his cigarette out against the rough bark of a tree. “You’d better go down to Jesse.”

Jesse raised his blue bandana over his nose as soon as he could make out the boiler cadence, and he placed his right boot on the rail as Dick Liddil slid down the southern cliff, ouching and cussing and clutching weed brakes. Dick then tied a red bandana over his nose and ambled over, shaking dust from a beige shirt and from brown pants that were so long for his legs and were so creased with constant use that they looked like concertinas.

The locomotive’s chuffing was growing loud. Jesse’s right foot tickled with rail vibrations. He looked around and saw Liddil to his right with his Navy Colt hung in his hand, the Hites and Ed Miller to the east, preparing to strongarm the passengers, many other boys ranged along the cut with Henry rifles slung over their wrists, Bob Ford on the cliff behind him, looking like a gunfighter.

Jesse could hear the locomotive decelerate on the grade, hear the creaks and complaints as the carriages listed north on the curve. The brass headlamp’s aisle of white light filled the passage called Blue Cut and streaked across scrub brush and into the forest, causing Charley Ford to blind his eyes, and then the light bent and flooded toward Jesse. The cowcatcher hunted the tracks and the black smoke billowed into hillocks and mountains over the smokestack and train, and Jesse swung his flannel-red lantern over the rails in a yardmaster’s signal to stop.

The engineer was Chappy Foote. He had his elbow and goggled head out the cab window and his left fingers on the handle for the steam brake valve. On seeing the lantern, he leaned his body out and concluded that a freight train had stalled on the grade until he saw the man’s bandana and ten yards behind him the high rubble on the rails. He turned to his fireman as he yanked the valve handle and yelled, “Looks like we’re going to be robbed!”

The young stoker, John Steading, cupped his ear because of the boiler roar but picked up enough of the sentence to swing out for a look and say, “Mercy.”

Jesse avoided the cowcatcher and saw the toggle-joint between the brake blocks rise, compelling them against the steel tires with a scream that made him clamp his ears. Hot steam broke over him and couplings banged and sparks sliced off the rails. The running speed had been twenty-five miles per hour; it was fifteen a few seconds later; then five. Steamer trunks slid; the mail agent was thrown enough to punch through a slot of the walnut route sorter, bruising his thumbnail and knuckle; a fat man in the sleeper careered half its length and clobbered the door like a rolling piano; in the caboose a mechanic used his handkerchief to dab macaroni soup off his clothes. The engineer braked in time to creep the locomotive into the rubble, the cowcatcher just kissing the rock with the
chunk
of a closed ice-box door.

They could hear a quartet of Englishmen in the Pullman car singing pleasantly, “Come out, ’tis now September, the hunter’s moon’s begun, and through the wheat and stubble is heard the distant gun. The leaves are paling yellow and trembling into red, and the free and happy barley is hanging down its head.”

Then the gang was running and bounding and skidding down the embankments. Jesse watched as Bob Ford slid down like a debutante in petticoats, his left hand snatching at weeds and roots as his right unveiled his eyes enough to peek around at the commotion. Men were rushing alongside the train and levering their rifles and slouching about in a manner they fancied was ghoulish and frightening. Frank James was on the south side of the train with a rifle slack in his arms, his cardigan sweater closed with a fist, instructing everybody. Steam trickled from the locomotive trucks and spirited in the breeze, and the engine huffed “church” and once again “church” and then sighed with embering fire as Jesse hiked onto a cab step and brandished his cocked revolver.

The engineer cringed down under his hands, shouting, “Don’t shoot! Ain’t no call for that!”

And Jesse said, “You two best come down from your machine and bring a coal pick along.”

Chappy Foote replied, “You’ve got the gun,” and obediently removed his goggles and hooked them over the brake handle. His stoker was scared sick and worked at getting his gumption back by resting on the fold-down bench, his sweat crawling over the filth of his face. He looked about sixteen. The engineer dropped a coal pick onto the cinder bed and lingered on each step as he climbed down. The stoker followed, neglecting the last two rungs. Then Jesse shook the hands of both workers, introducing himself as Jesse James, the man they’d read so much about.

AFTER THE LOCOMOTIVE
slammed to a halt on the grade known as Independence Hill, a porter named Charles Williams bent down from the platform of the ladies’ coach (where tobacco smoke was forbidden) and made out three or four men near the engine and Chappy Foote disembarking onto the cinder bed. Williams was a small, brook-no-guff child of ex-slaves, dressed in a brass-buttoned, navy blue uniform and a blue hat that was cocked on his head. He retrieved his lantern, intending to learn the nature of the predicament, but no sooner did he scurry around the cars than a man near the caboose shouted, “Get back inside, you black bastard!” and four bisecting gunshots sent him back onto the platform. He opened the door to the ladies’ coach and saw the women inside lowering the thirty-four curtains and concealing valuables, hiking their skirts to tuck folding money under their corsets, poking jewels into their brassieres, shoving purses and necklaces under seat cushions. (One woman who had secreted over a thousand dollars and a delicate watch in her stockings would compliantly offer her embroidered handbag to Frank James and have it courteously refused.) Men rushed in from the smoker chucking dollars into their derby hats and then sloped down in their seats with their children huddled next to them or under lamp tables or between the tasseled chairs and the walls.

Williams scurried down the coach and ducked out the rear door at the end of the passageway. (The vestibules that connected coaches and kept out the weather had not yet been invented; the only protection was a platform railing and roof.) He snuck down the stairs and saw three masked men beneath the lamplit second compartment of the sleeper, one man smoking a cigarette, another kicking soot clods from the carriage. It had been several minutes since they’d stopped the train, they wanted activities and hobbies; soon they’d be looking for bottles to break.