The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (31 page)

Bob watched Jesse pry the lead ball from a cartridge and saw a notch in it with a skinning knife that he then fixed into the crook of a tree so that the cutting side was a thin, silver streak in the night. He worked a string into the cut lead ball and stomped his bootheel on it to close the nick, and that string he fastened to an overhead branch so that the ball swayed close enough to tick the skinning knife. He made a boy stand near the target with a coal-oil lamp. He took five strides from the oak tree and announced to the audience that the boy would set the cartridge ball in motion and the gunsmith and he were going to fire five times. The trick was to strike it just so and make the skinning knife shave both the swinging and the speeding bullets with one shot.

The crowd grumbled their grave doubts or murmured in awe or made side bets and the gunsmith raised a .22 caliber revolver with grim resignation. The boy flipped the ball into a metronomic swing and stood aside with the coal-oil lamp as the gunsmith shot at and missed the moving target five times, scattering oak bark and cursing the foolishness of the contest.

Jesse then removed his suit coat, rested his right hand on his hip, and with his left lifted the revolver he called Baby. The boy slapped the cartridge ball into a wide arc and retreated and Jesse squinted down the muzzle sights and fired. Wood chipped but the ball continued to swing. It ticked against the knife like a clock. Jesse jiggled his left arm by his side to relax it and then raised it again and missed a second time.

“Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of,” the gunsmith said. “It’s next to impossible.”

Jesse grinned at the gunsmith and said, “If I didn’t know I could do it, I wouldn’t have concocted it.”

The ball still clocked but with shorter strokes and Jesse squinted a third time and then there was a gunshot noise of plank clapped against plank, a chime as two cartridge balls skinned off the knife, and the long song of the steel blade as it quivered and rang.

Silence followed the accomplishment and then some men applauded and yahooed and some others crouched at the oak tree and a gratified Thomas Howard was rushed to by people who wished to congratulate him and vigorously pump his hand and gladly introduce themselves.

The boy carved the cartridge balls out of the oak tree and walked around with them as if they were wedding rings on a silver tray. Bob lifted one and rubbed his thumb on the flat of it and the boy asked, “Is it still hot?”

Bob moved over to his brother. “He arranged that for our benefit.”

Charley smiled. “You thought it was all made up, didn’t you. You thought everything was yarns and newspaper stories.”

Bob looked over at the shootist, who was then showing Baby to the gunsmith. “He’s just a human being.”

The Fords returned to the pool tables and Bob won the next rack. He supported his chin on the pool cue if standing; he snared his coat over his gun butt so that it showed when he leaned over the green felt and clacked the ivory balls. At midnight, Jesse winged his arms around Charley and Bob and weaved them out into the street, and on the climb up Confusion Hill gave them his recollection of the James-Younger gang’s robbery of the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank at Corydon, Iowa, in 1871: then nearly everyone was at the Methodist church as Henry Clay Dean pleaded the case for a contemplated railroad; the holdup attracted no attention and seven men were able to split six thousand dollars. Jesse now expected many people in Platte City, Missouri, to be at the courthouse on April 4th to see Colonel John Doniphan perorate in the defense of George Burgess, who was being charged with the manslaughter of Caples Burgess, his cousin. The Wells Banking Company—commonly called the Platte City Bank—would remain open for its commercial customers, but with only a teller or two in attendance.

They reached the cottage and Jesse reclined on the sitting room sofa, sending Charley out to collect firewood for the stove. Charley lolloped off and Jesse wedded his fingers on his stomach and closed his eyes. “How it will be is we’ll leave here next Monday afternoon and ride down to Platte City.”

Bob seated himself on the floor and crossed his ankles. “How far is that from Kansas City?”

Something in Bob’s inquiry made Jesse resistant and he chose to answer around it. “Platte City’s thirty miles south. You and me and Charley will sleep in the woods overnight and strike the Wells Bank sometime before the court recesses.”

Bob asked when that would be exactly, but his voice was too insistent, his attitude too intense, and Jesse said, “You don’t need to know that.”

Bob scrawled on the floorboards with his finger and Jesse arose to a sit. He said, “You know, I feel comfortable with your brother. Hell, he’s ugly as sin and he smells like a skunk and he’s so ignorant he couldn’t drive nails in the snow, but he’s sort of easy to be around. I can’t say the same for you, Bob.”

“I’m sorry to hear you say that.”

Jesse was silent a moment and then asked, “You know how it is when you’re with your girlfriend and the moon is out and you know she wants to be kissed even though she never said so?”

Bob didn’t know how that was but he said that he did.

“You’re giving me signs that grieve my soul and make me wonder if your mind’s been changed about me.”

“Do you want me to swear my good faith like I did for your mother?”

Charley clattered wood into the stove’s firebox and returned from the kitchen, slapping his hands. He saw Jesse glowering at Bob with great heat in his eyes, and said, “You two having a spat?”

“I was getting ready to be angry,” Jesse said, and then smiled at Bob. He reached out and coddled Bob’s neck and said in a gentling voice, “Sit over here closer, kid.”

Bob vacillated a little and then scooched over, smirking at his brother with perplexity and shyness.

Jesse fervently massaged Bob’s neck and shoulder muscles, communicating that all was forgiven, and he continued with his sketch of the robbery. “You’ll stay with the animals, Charley, and The Kid and I will walk into the Platte City Bank just before noon. Bob will move the cashier over away from the shotgun that’s under the counter and he’ll tell the man to work the combination on the vault. They’ll finagle about time locks and so on and I’ll creep up behind that cashier and cock his chin back like so.” And Jesse cracked his right wrist into Bob’s chin, snapping the boy’s skull back and pinning him against his knee as he slashed a skinning knife across his throat. The metal was cold and left the sting of ice on Bob’s fair skin and for an instant he was certain he’d actually been cut and he slumped against the sofa, incapacitated, in panic. Jesse’s mouth was so close his mustache snipped at Bob’s ear when he said in a caress of a voice, “I’ll say, ‘How come an off-scouring of creation like you is still sucking air when so many of mine are in coffins?’ ”

Bob’s eye lolled left to see the skinning knife vertical near his cheek. There was a crick in his neck and the man’s wristbone was mean as a broomstick under his chin. Bob manufactured a smile and said, “This isn’t good riddance for me, is it?”

“I’ll say, ‘How’d you reach your twentieth birthday without leaking out all over your clothes?’ And if I don’t like his attitude, I’ll slit that phildoodle so deep he’ll flop on the floor like a fish.” Jesse then retracted his arm and rudely shoved Bob forward and rested the skinning knife on the sofa cushion. Then his temper abruptly altered and he slapped both knees gleefully and grinned at Bob and exclaimed, “I could hear your gears grinding
rrr, rrr, rrr,
and your little motor wondering, ‘My gosh, what’s next, what’s happening to me?’ You were precious to behold, Bob. You were white as spit in a cotton field.”

Bob examined his neck by finger touch. “You want to know how that feels? Unpleasant. I honestly can’t recommend it.”

“And Charley looked
stricken!
”

“I
was!
” Charley said.

“ ‘This is plum unexpected!’ old Charley was thinking. ‘This is mint my day!’ ” He looked from Bob to Charley and joked some moments longer, laughing coaxingly, immoderately, sarcastically, unconvincingly, and when at last the two laughed with him, Jesse adopted a scolding look and slammed into his room.

SO IT WENT.
Bob was increasingly cynical, leery, uneasy; Jesse was increasingly cavalier, merry, moody, fey, unpredictable. If his gross anatomy suggested a strong smith in his twenties, his actual physical constitution was that of a man who was incrementally dying. He was sick with rheums and aches and lung congestions, he tilted against chairs and counters and walls, in cold weather he limped with a cane. He coughed incessantly when lying down, his clever mind was often in conflict, insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot, he seemed in a state of mourning. He counteracted the smell of neglected teeth with licorice and candies, he browned his graying hair with dye, he camouflaged his depressions and derangements with masquerades of extreme cordiality, courtesy, and good will toward others.

He played the practical joker and party boy. At suppers Jesse would make his children shiver by rasping his fork away from his mouth so that the tines sang off his teeth. Zee set down a soup tureen and he winked at Bob when he asked, “Is this fit to eat or will it just do?” He’d belch and murmur, “Squeeze me.” He surreptitiously inched the butter or gravy dish under Charley’s elbow so that the chump stained his sleeve; he hooked Charley’s spurs together as he snored in the sitting room and then screamed the man off the sofa so that Charley farcically sprawled. He repeated jokes at the evening meals, making each more long-winded and extravagant than it was in his recollection, altering each so that it commented on the vices of railroad officers and attorneys—who were so crooked, he claimed, that they had to screw their socks on. But even as he jested or tickled his girl or boy in the ribs, Jesse would look over to Bob with melancholy eyes, as if the two of them were meshed in an intimate communication that had little to do with anyone else.

Bob was certain the man had unriddled him, had seen through his reasons for coming along, that Jesse could forecast each of Bob’s possible moves and inclinations and was only acting the innocent in order to lull Bob into stupid tranquility and miscalculation.

Once Bob was occupying himself in the stables, scraping the clinging mud from the horses’ fetlocks and pasterns with a wire currycomb. Then misgivings overtook him and he straightened to intercept Jesse peering in angrily at the window and in the next instant disappearing. And yet, when reencountered on the kitchen porch no more than five minutes later, Jesse dipped his newspaper to happily remark on the weather. On some nights Jesse segregated the two brothers and slept with Bob in the sitting room, a revolver, as always, clutched in his strong left hand. His brown hair smelled of rose oil and his long underwear smelled of borax; sleep subtracted years from his countenance. Bob listened to each insuck of air so he could tell when Jesse went off, and when the man’s inhalations were so slow and shallow they never seemed to come out again, Bob cautiously rolled to a sit and placed his feet on the cold boards and the revolver was cocked with three clicks. “I need to go to the privy,” Bob said.

“You think you do but you don’t,” said Jesse, and Bob obediently returned to bed.

On Monday, Zee worked outside in a wide brown dress with the cuffs rolled to her elbows, stirring a white froth of laundry in a cast-iron wash boiler that steamed into the blue sky. Charley dampened a red handkerchief and ran it along the metal clothesline in order to remove the rust. Bob cringed up to Zee and asked if she would wash his clothes and she consented with some annoyance. She swished his socks and shirts in a soapwater tub on the stove and scrubbed them against a Rockingham pottery washboard, but after they were rinsed and cranked through the wringer, Bob refused to clothespin them and returned with them to the sitting room, where he smoothed them out on the oak bed so that they would gradually dry.

Jesse walked in, slapping a rolled newspaper against his thigh, seeking company. He oversaw Bob’s meticulous care in the arrangement of a shirt’s sleeves and then espied an H.C. laundry mark on some white underwear. He asked, “Whose initials are those?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Jesse frowned and inquired, “What’s H.C. stand for?”

Bob looked at the letters and then remembered that he’d confused Henry Craig’s underwear with his own that night in the St. James Hotel. He couldn’t fiction an answer.

“High church?” Jesse offered. “Home cooking?”

Bob fidgeted a little and smiled ingratiatingly. “I stayed in a workingman’s hotel and saw them squished up in a closet. I couldn’t find any cooties, so I kept them as a sort of memento.”

Jesse either accepted that or considered it a subject not worth pursuing. He strolled out onto Lafayette Street. Bob sank down on the mattress and cooled his eyes with a wet sock; Jesse circled yard trees, scaring squirrels with sticks.

THE SITTING ROOM
conversations were about Blue Cut that week: the Kansas City newspapers carried front-page articles about the movement of John Bugler, John Land, and Creed Chapman from the Second Street jail to Independence, Missouri, where there was a court trial over their complicity in the Chicago and Alton train robbery. The reporters called them stool pigeons. Creed Chapman had lost forty-two pounds while incarcerated; John Land was rumored to be so apprehensive about reprisal by Jesse James that he refused to even mention the man’s name. “He evidently is in fear of bodily injury,” one man wrote, “and dreads the idea of ever again leaving jail.”

On the afternoon of March 30th, a policeman meandered near the cottage and then loitered on the sidewalk to inventory the geography of St. Joseph. He wore a riverman’s short-brimmed cap and a navy blue coat with brass buttons and a brass star. A shoulder sling crossed the man’s chest to a black leather holster that housed a dragoon revolver. He made a cigarette and, like a cat with its catch, seemed to look everywhere except the cottage, and then he found cause to rest his elbows on the white picket fence and lounge there, scrutinizing and squinting.

Charley was sunk in a brown study: he creaked a rocking chair forward and back and stared morosely at the marred wallpaper as he smoked a cigarette. Jesse came out of the master bedroom with a revolver tucked inside a folded newspaper, looking imperiled and perturbed. He asked in a whisper, “Is anyone out there?”