The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (30 page)

Jesse recited, “ ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.’ ”

Bob nodded. “You hear it at funerals.”

Jesse let the book divide from his finger and sought Psalm 41, which he scanned, vigorously scratching his two-inch beard, gingerly petting it smooth. He ironed out the page with his fist and knee and smiled wryly at Bob and then began a private study of the words, as if he were without company.

Bob tried to imagine how Jesse’s children saw him: he would be the giant figure who could fling them high as the ceiling. They knew his legs, the sting of his mustache against their cheeks, the gentle way that Jesse had of fingering their hair. They didn’t know how he made his living or why they so often moved; they didn’t even know their father’s name; and it all seemed such an injustice to Bob that he asked, “Do you ever give your past life any thought?”

Jesse squinted at him. “I don’t get your meaning.”

Bob managed a grin and asked, “Do you ever give any thought to the men you’ve killed?”

Jesse moved the candle forward so that it was near his left hand and he angled a little in-the pew. “Give me an example.”

“I just thought you’d’ve imagined it maybe: how it must’ve been for that cashier in Northfield or that conductor you shot in Winston. You’re doing your job, you’ve just ate maybe, you’re subtracting numbers or you’re collecting tickets from passengers and then—bang!—everything’s changed and a man you don’t even know is yelling at you with a gun in his hand and you make one mistake and—bang!—you’re killed.”

Jesse shut the book and rubbed a thumb across the two gold words on the black leather cover. Rainfall was the only noise. He said, “I’ve been forgiven for all that.”

Bob said, “You might’ve had a good reason for killing them. I don’t know. I’m just saying it must’ve been like a nightmare for them, and maybe it is for you too, right now.”

Jesse said again, “I’ve already been forgiven,” and then leaned to his left and blew out the candle.

BOB AWOKE
with sunlight coming through the mosaic windows in colors of red and blue. Charley was already slugging his feet inside damp boots. Bob slunk up the aisle, looking down pews, until he found Jesse rounded asleep inside his coat, his mouth open, his ankle twitching, a gun in his left hand. Bob then scuttled out of the church in his socks and saw Charley meandering through the cemetery, reading the inscriptions. He ambled over to him with his palms cupping his elbows.

Bob said, “Craig gave me ten days.”

Charley considered an angled gravestone and the engraving
GONE ON TO GREATNESS.

“For what?”

Bob thought a moment, tugging up his right sock as he chose the proper term. “Arresting him,” he said.

“You and me,” Charley said.

“It’s going to happen one way or another. If not us, then some deputy sheriff in Saint Joe, or some Pinkerton man in Kearney, or some simpleton with a pistol on loan like it was in the swamplands when the Youngers were captured. It’s going to happen, Charley; and it might as well be us who get rich on it.”

Charley scratched his neck and looked across the road to a greening sward where cattle and sheep were mixed. Timberland was a blue smear on the horizon. His sunken cheeks and cruel overbite made him seem to be sucking a mint. He said, “Nobody’s going to get Jesse if he’s still live enough to go for his gun. He can kill ya with every hand.”

“I’ll go alone then,” Bob said.

Charley glanced at his kid brother disparagingly. “And besides that, he’s our friend.”

“He murdered Ed Miller. He’s going to murder Liddil and Cummins if the chance ever comes. Seems to me Jesse’s riding from man to man, saying goodbye to the gang. Your friendship could put you under the pansies.”

Charley sighed and said, “I’ll grind it fine in my mind, Bob. I can’t go any further than that, right now.”

“You’ll come around,” Bob said, and returned to the church, twisting the crick in his spine.

Jesse was by the altar and above the congregation in a pulpit of inlaid wood. He looked both pious and possessed. His face was stern as he flipped pages at the lectern, his fingers clenched the railing, and his blue eyes had silver fire in them as he put them on the Fords. He called, “From now on you two won’t go
anywhere
without me! From now on you’ll ask for
permission;
you’ll ask to be
excused!
”

THEY MADE ST. JOSEPH
by afternoon, with enough sun overhead to tarry at the railroad station and watch the men shunt cars, to number the cattle and sows in the stockyards, and to buy licorice and
Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper
at an apothecary. Jesse asked what the clocktower said and Bob leaned from the store to read the time, almosting it, and they rode east through the mud and smoke of the city. Jesse carried himself like a chamberlain with two groundlings and intermittently winked or touched the brim of his fedora whenever a man called the name “Tom” in greeting.

Soon they were near the red-bricked World Hotel and Jesse told Bob to raise his eyes to the roller coaster of Confusion Hill more than a quarter-mile off. Bob looked over the roofs of bungalows and a steep ascent of timber to a high skull of land on which rested a white cottage with green shutters. He could see laundry swelling with wind on the clothesline, the measured white pickets of the yard fence, the swing in the sycamore tree.

Charley said, “Jesse finally come up with a place to match his prominence,” a comment he’d plagiarized from Zee.

And Jesse said, “I could mow down a thousand scalawags with no more than a thousand cartridges. I’ll never be surprised by anything again.”

The horses strained up Lafayette Street and stopped as soon as they heard the children. Jesse crawled off his saddle and accepted his daughter in his arms as he knelt to kiss Tim, and then, with a general’s arrogance, assigned Charley the stable chores, Bob the job of bringing their gatherings in, and moved off to the rear of the cottage, Mary clutching his right leg.

Bob skidded the packs and paraphernalia onto the stoop and eavesdropped on a conversation that was too remote to comprehend. Bob took off his bowler hat and bent close to the locked door, his pale forehead blotching against the screen. “Halloo!” he called and rattled the door on its hook. Zerelda James backed from the stove to see him and winced a little and said rather crossly, “You never mentioned Bob would be here.” And yet she squeezed her hands dry in her apron and managed an indulgent smile as she walked across the room and unlocked the door.

“He didn’t tell me you’d come along,” she said.

“Maybe he was saving it as a pleasant surprise.”

Little Mary was submerged in the woman’s skirt and glowering at Bob. Zee combed the girl’s hair and said to her, “You’ve got
two
cousins for company now,” and then mothered the child back into the kitchen.

Bob threw clothes and whatnots inside and then removed his gunbelt and soldier’s coat as he examined the room. The floornails had not been countersunk and were raised and silvered with shoe scuffs. A red rubber ball and two jacks were strewn on the tasseled green rug.
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
was astraddle the rim of a straw portfolio that had been decorated with a gladiola seed package and nailed onto the wall. The sofa pillows had been shammed with lace and white doilies on the chair backs were tanned with the stains of hair oils and pomades. To the right of the door was an oak bed and a soogan quilt lighted by a tall window of flawed glass slatted by Venetian blinds. On the left was a corresponding window and a plaster wall that was papered with roses and an intricate scheme that had been scribbled upon with a child’s crayon. Contrary to the fabrications of magazines and stage sets, there was no tapestry embroidered with the sentiment “God Bless Our Home”; instead there was an ornate walnut frame and a watercolor painting of a racehorse named Skyrocket. Jutting from a wicker sewing basket was a feather duster made from some blue and brown exotic bird. Against one wall was a rush-bottomed chair and wine table, eater-cornered was a rocker, against the dining and sitting room wall was a broad sofa and a black, ironworked, naked woman whose lewdly cleft legs were used as a bootjack. Staring at Bob was Jesse. The man walked into the kitchen and muttered to Zee with amusement, “That boy can make our sitting room look like a matinee.”

BOB AND CHARLEY REMAINED
at 1318 Lafayette Street until April 3rd, so more than a week was frittered away in inconsequential chores, afternoon naps on the sofa, and loudmouthed and lingering meals. The routine was to wake at seven, see to the care of the animals, then stroll down to the post office, where newspapers that Thomas Howard subscribed to arrived, each neatly rolled into a brown paper mailing sleeve. The three men would straddle wicker chairs and flatten pages on the dining room table until Zee carried in a farmer’s breakfast to them and Tim was sent off to school. By nine they would have finished two kettles of coffee and the men would retire to the sitting room while Mrs. James cleaned the kitchen. They would mention the two-or three-day-old news items they’d read and comment on each crime or predicament in accordance with their own creeds and stances. Jesse would wind his pocket watch; Jesse would wind the clock. Jesse would clean a revolver and load it and then he would clean another. Weather might be introduced as a subject of conversation and for many minutes the weather would be rigorously considered. Questions might be lazily asked about spring planting and the crops. Bob cited locusts once and ascertained from the increased interest that he’d inadvertently entertained an exciting topic that was never before discussed.

Lunch was served at noon and then the three would nap or kill time on the kitchen porch, where they would watch Mary play with a girl named Metta Disbrow. They scrupulously pored over a collection of nineteen ambrotype photographs. Bob reread
Noted Guerrillas, or The Warfare of the Border
, by John Newman Edwards, the one contemporary book that Jesse owned. Jesse exercised in the sun with weighted yellow pins. He touched his toes one hundred times. He twisted horseshoes with his fists. He looked at his physique from various angles in the mirror of the shaded kitchen window. He made his daughter feel his muscles and laughed at her mystified reaction. He made Bob and. Charley cup flexed biceps that were as round and solid as baseballs. He Indian-wrestled them one at a time and then struggled with them together, gradually becoming disgusted with their clumsiness and frailty.

At four they walked down for the evening newspapers and
The Police Gazette
and absorbed themselves in them until the main meal was served at six. Jesse never scolded the children, rarely even corrected them; the grammar, hygiene, manners, and temperament of his children, even if improper or inadequate, were either never noticed by Jesse or else caused an anguished look from him and a call for his wife’s ministrations. He spent the evenings in the crowded sitting room with one child next to him, another riding the jouncing pony of his knee, while Zee sewed and the Ford brothers simpered. Only when the children were asleep would the three men journey into the city, where they played pool in a South Jefferson Street saloon. By eleven or twelve they were asleep themselves, or at least they pretended to be.

After three days of this dreary routine, Bob was markedly nervous; by the fourth day, Bob was so skittish his legs jittered whenever he sat, he couldn’t remain in a chair for more than two minutes, he chewed his fingernails and clawed at his baby-fine hair and generally carried on so much that Jesse said, “Appears to me you’ve got the peedoodles, Bob,” and then compassionately prescribed Dr. George Richmond’s Samaritan Nervine.

Bob once went to the kitchen and slurped water from the bucket dipper as Zee separated egg whites and yolks. She usually swiveled away from Bob whenever he was near or curtailed their conversations by inventing chore-girl activities. Now she simply lifted on her toes to find a bowl in the cabinet and ignored Bob’s sulky consideration of her body. He saw the fine blond hairs raise from her neck as he stared and he sent his eyes to his feet. She moved to her mixing and Bob said, “If you want to clean your floor, you should first off scrub sand over it and follow that with a soda lye applied with a real stiff brush. You rinse it with warm water and when it’s nearly dry, you know, sort of coolish to your feet, you wipe it down with hypochlorite of lime and let it cure overnight. I learnt that at the grocery store.”

Zee sifted white flour into a bowl and said, “This isn’t my kitchen. We’re renting.”

Bob let the water dipper sink in the bucket. He scratched his calf. Zee spooned bicarbonate of soda from a canister and set it down. Bob was about to reach for the canister in order to read it but Zee shot a glance at Bob’s knuckles and he stalled. He sniffed a sliver of brown, gritty soap; Zee mashed cream of tartar into the bicarbonate of soda with a soup spoon. She asked, “Why are you so antsy?”

Bob improvised by saying, “It’s just this cussed boredom. This sitting around inside the livelong day, getting into your hair, getting slow and sleepy, making jail house dogs of ourselves.”

She looked at Bob with some animation and attention subtracted from her eyes, as if she were recalling something even as she spoke. “He’s sometimes gone for months. We sometimes change houses five times in a year. It’s gruesome being hunted, Bob. He can stay in his nightshirt all day if he wants; I’m just grateful that he’s around.”

“You can see it’s damaged his mind some,” Bob said.

She ignored his comment by rubbing flour from her palms with her apron and returning to her recipe.

Bob watched her work a minute more and said, “You’re making a cake.”

THEY WALKED TO A POOL HALL
at nine on Saturday, and as the Fords shot eight-ball, Jesse maneuvered among the pool tables, letting players clap him on the back, making jokes, remembering names and relationships, visiting corner tables if anyone called him over, which was frequently and with gusto. A gunsmith chatted with Thomas Howard about a .22 caliber pistol the man carried inside his boot. Mr. Howard said, “You can’t more than make a man itch with that article,” and soon the two were in good-natured argument about marksmanship. They settled on a competition and walked outside to the alley with a starved-for-entertainment crowd.