The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (32 page)

Charley craned around to see out the screen door and saw the policeman allow smoke to stream from his nose. “Yes!” Charley said, and slid off the chair as Jesse crouched across the room. “How in Heaven’s name did you know?”

Jesse raised the revolver next to his left ear and split two bottom window blinds with his fingers. He said, “I had a premonition. ’s-5’

Charley squatted against the front wall, ground his cigarette out on the floor, and suspected the governor had grown impatient and that the cottage was at present encircled with perhaps fifty policemen and two hundred state militia. Plaster would spew if they shot; glass would sprinkle, pictures would tilt, even the sofa would move.

The window sash had been raised four inches in order to ventilate the room. Jesse rested his .44’s muzzle on the sill and steered it toward the policeman’s face.

Charley peeked out the screen door and saw the policeman screw his boot down on his dropped cigarette and then cruise over to the sidewalk gate. When the man’s thumb tripped the metal latch, the revolver cocked with its soft clicks and Charley prayed,
Go home
. The policeman was only a suggestion away from stepping onto the rented property when he lost either the gumption or the yearning and shut the gate and strolled on.

Jesse uncocked the revolver and covered it with the newspaper.

He said, “An angel tugged on his coattails,” and then with graceful nonchalance walked back into his room.

BOB WAS IN TOWN
at the time. He’d told Jesse that the cash he’d earned at the Richmond grocery store was burning holes in his pockets and that he wanted to look for an Easter suit at the Famous Boston One-Price Clothing House. And 510 Main Street is indeed where he went, there buying a fifteen-dollar gentleman’s suit of salt-and-pepper tweed. Bob told the salesman that his name was Johnson, and that he was a cousin to Thomas Howard.

The cattleman?

Bob lent his affirmation.

Good neighbors, the salesman said. Always polite and respectable, with a pleasant word for everybody.

Bob started toward Lafayette Street but then got a notion and instead skipped down alleys and cut through stores until he came to the American Telegraph office, and there Bob slanted into a standing desk for many minutes, scribbling twenty messages that he might send to Governor Crittenden or Police Commissioner Craig.

He could be a glib and even grandiloquent speaker, but writing was agony for him: the right words seemed to disappear whenever he grasped a pencil, plus he was hampered by the grim recognition that he really had nothing to say. He listed the chances for capture that Jesse had given him and came up with only two: Bob had gallivanted past the kitchen window and noticed Jesse asleep in a chair; and Jesse unbuckled his gunbelts to scrub at a washbasin and Tim had strapped them on. But Zee was ironing a blouse close by as Jesse slept, a shot would have stabbed her left breast; and Bob himself wore no gun on the second occasion and to go after Jesse with anything else was unimaginable to him.

For the man was canny, he was intuitive, he anticipated everything. He continually looked over his shoulders, he looked into the background with mirrors, he locked his sleeping room at night, he could pick out a whisper in the wind, he could register the slightest added value a man put into his words, he could probably read the faltering and perfidy in Bob’s face. He once numbered the spades on a playing card that skittered across the street a city block away; he licked his daughter’s cut finger and there wasn’t even a scar the next day; he wrestled with his son and the two Fords at once one afternoon and rarely even tilted—it was like grappling with a tree. When Jesse predicted rain, it rained; when he encouraged plants, they grew; when he scorned animals, they retreated; whomever he wanted to stir, he astonished.

So some of Bob’s telegrams were apologies, some were clarifications, still more were prognostications of when the criminal would be “removed,” until finally Bob settled on a coded note to Sheriff Timberlake, providing him with clues about their living situation in St. Joseph and about the contemplated robbery in Platte City on the 4th. All he could think of as he jotted it down was Jesse’s story of George Shepherd sending a telegram in Galena, Kansas, and then riding into a barrage of gunfire from the James gang.

It took five minutes for the telegraph operator to code and transmit the note and two hours for Timberlake to receive it because of the court session in Independence at which he was an expert witness. But thereafter the sheriff acted with great speed, arranging a company of fifty deputies who would ride their horses into two freight cars at sunrise on the 4th and surround the Platte City Bank while the James gang was inside. Timberlake even went so far in his preparations as to order a Hannibal and St. Joseph locomotive’s engine ignited and kept fully steamed in the Kansas City roundhouse so that it could race to Platte City or St. Joseph without much delay. Having satisfied himself that the appropriate steps had been taken, the sheriff dined with Commissioner Craig on the night of the 30th and they toasted a victory that they seemed only days away from achieving.

GOVERNOR CRITTENDEN GAVE
an interview that week in which he bragged about the many members of the James gang who were already in jail or in courts of law, going on to claim that certain arrangements had been made that could snag the James brothers themselves very soon. He could say no more than that, the governor smugly asserted, as if he had not already divulged enough to put the Fords in jeopardy.

On March 30th the Kansas City
Evening Star
carried a leading article that stated: “Commissioner Craig, Sheriff Timberlake, and Dick Little have been closeted in Craig’s office all afternoon, the outlaw having been engaged in making an affidavit to all the operations of the old gang. The
Evening Star
is able to state as a positive fact that Little has been working with the officers for several months past.”

And the
Evening Star
for Friday, March 31st, again concentrated its attention on Dick Liddil’s confession in an article that was somewhat inaccurately titled “The James Gang.” It accused the James gang of the robberies at Glendale, Winston, and Blue Cut, but then incriminated only Dick Liddil in the alleged murder of Wood Hite, even moving the gunfight to a location near Springfield, Missouri. “Jesse was greatly incensed at the murder of Wood,” the writer stated, “and Little ran away from the gang to escape Jesse’s wrath. Thereupon Jesse offered a reward of $1,000 for Dick Little, alive or dead, saying that he would prefer him dead. When Little learned of this offer, he surrendered himself to Commissioner Craig and Sheriff Timberlake, and betrayed, or pretended to betray to them, the whole gang.”

And though the Kansas City
Times
published similar stories, Jesse’s subscription to it meant it came by mail, so he couldn’t read about Dick Liddil’s collusion or make the correct inferences about the Fords until the morning of April 3rd. And yet he acted with the skepticism and suspicion of a man who already knew. He scarcely acknowledged Bob’s remarks all day on the 31st nor spoke at supper except to complain about an overdone seven-bone steak that Zee promptly removed to the kitchen to steam. He then confided to Charley, “Her cooking always has been a scandal. Cut her meat and the table moves.”

He passed the evening simply enough, sitting with Mary and Tim on the sofa and reading from
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew:
“The little kitchen had quieted down from the bustle and confusion of midday, and now with its afternoon manners on, presented a holiday aspect that, as the principal room in the brown house, it was eminently proper it should have.”

Charley took apart his pistol, squinting away from cigarette smoke and chugging slight coughs as he twisted a screwdriver; Bob catnapped on the sitting room bed and didn’t awaken until he heard Jesse swat Charley’s foot with his hat and say, “Come on, Cousin; let’s go for a ride.”

Charley shot a scared look at Bob and then said, “Sorry, but I’m not much in the mood.”

“Stomach ache?”

“Sort of.”

“The night air will cure it,” Jesse said and crushed Charley’s wrist in his seizing hand as he yanked him to his feet.

Charley climbed sluggishly into a coat and boots and glanced again at his brother. “Don’t you want to come along too?”

Jesse said, “Bob stays,” and the two men walked out to saddle their horses.

They rode east near Pigeon Hill under a moonshade of interlaced shagbark trees. Jesse rambled to the right or left of Charley, riding the creeksides and cowpaths, rising into the woods, reconnecting with the road many yards behind Charley and then creeping up alongside.

He asked, “Do you ever count the stars?”

Charley looked overhead at the pinpricks of light. It reminded him of his father’s badly shingled barn roof when the cat he was shooting at crouched on the rafters and everywhere else it was noontime but it was midnight whenever he sighted his gun.

Jesse said, “I can’t ever get the same number; they keep changing on me.”

“I don’t even know what a star is exactly.”

“Your body knows; it’s your mind that forgot.”

Charley slid an eye toward Jesse and said, “Riding was a good idea. I wonder if we could go back?”

“So early?”

“I don’t know why but I’ve been poorly lately and the rocking makes my gut want to jump.”

“You need to correct your way of living.”

“Well; like I say, I’ve been poorly.”

Jesse didn’t say anything more. His horse nickered and clicked its bit and its rider dangled his legs off the stirrups and squirmed around with soreness. He turned up his collar and lowered his chin as if the wind was mean and then reined back slightly so that he slipped four feet to the rear and with grim foreboding and fright Charley tried to guess if Jesse’s gun was already out. Greenery was high all around them as they climbed a grade and Charley began the only prayer he knew, getting to the words “my soul to keep” when a comet of golden fire careered down the road. It was the size of a cannon ball and instantly, spookily reeling at them, singeing the animals’ legs, causing them to skirt aside and whinny. And then it was not there but gone. Smoke rose to the horses’ noses and they jerked their heads at the smell.

Charley recollected the marvel to Bob and in the April 21st Liberty
Tribune
and was still not over his mystification, couldn’t tell if it was lightning or a meteor or tumbleweed that a practical joker set a match to and rolled down the hill. But he said Jesse reacted with calm acceptance, with no more man a scolding look, and claimed that it was an omen, that fire had come to him many times in the past in various manifestations and each visitation was followed by an affliction.

Charley had grown accustomed to the man’s grand manner of lying, so he did not challenge the statement but only glanced to see that he’d misjudged his plight, for Jesse’s greatcoat still covered his guns.

Jesse swung his horse around to the west and on the ride to the cottage swore, “I’ve seen visions that would make Daniel swoon; I’ve been warned as often as Israel.” Then he grinned at Charley as if it were a good wrench or rope pulley that they were talking about. “It’s mighty handy,” Jesse said.

SATURDAY INTRODUCED
summer weather to the state: the skies were blue, the sun insistent, the temperature close to eighty at noon. The river flashed light from its rills and currents, and Zee could look up from her scullery work and see Kansas shimmer like a reflection in water. The Fords removed the storm windows and Jesse raised each sash so that sweet air could stir through the rooms, but they were too lazy or lumpish to attach screens, so flies crawled over the rising loaves and birds flew into the rooms.

Jesse went to the market with Tim and Mary and came back home at four with a crate of groceries and a black box clamped under his right arm. He kissed Zee and rubbed her fanny and asked her how she was feeling. She saw that he’d subjected his skull to a barber: a smear of white talcum powder was on his neck and his chestnut hair smelled of lilac water; but he looked much handsomer now than when she married him, a quality of aging that she’d often envied in men. Jesse sought Cousin Bob and she told him she thought Bob was resting in the children’s room.

Sunshine was diagonal in the room and curtains flirted in the air. Bob wasn’t sure what woke him. He pivoted in the child’s bed and saw Jesse in a spindle chair, peering at him with great interest. Jesse said, “I never learned what your nationality was.”

“How long’ve you been studying me?”

“You look French.”

Bob rolled to a sitting position. “My grandfather married a French girl in New Orleans. He was with the Virginia volunteers in the War of Eighteen Twelve. I guess I take after my grandmom.”

“You’re gonna break a lot of hearts.”

Bob arched an eyebrow. “How do you mean?”

Jesse revealed the black box from behind his back and reached it over to Bob. “It’s a present.”

Bob raised it and reckoned what it was. “Heavy,” he said.

“You going to look inside?”

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

“You gave me that bawdy bootjack; this is my Christmas gift to you.”

The wooden lid was nailed shut. Bob crammed a coin into the interstices and twisted it until the lid released. “It’s April Fool’s Day, you know.”

“Isn’t a joke,” said Jesse.

Inside the box, nestled in red velvet, was a pearl-handled .44 caliber revolver, a New Model Smith and Wesson number 3, with a six-and-a-half-inch nickel barrel. Bob beamed at Jesse and said, “Such extravagance!” and then turned the revolver to admire it.

“Doesn’t that nickel shine though?”

“It’s more than I could hope for!” said Bob. He clicked the chamber around, cocked and released the hammer, cocked the hammer and aimed the revolver at a red ball on the floor, investigated the play in the trigger, squeezed the trigger until the steel hammer snapped forward, listened to the mechanisms as he recocked the revolver at his ear, straightened his right arm and shut his left eye, skated his thumb across the serial number (3766), measured the full length: twelve inches. “I want a gunsmith to engrave this; some sentence with our two names and the city and the year of presentation. It’ll be a prize that can be passed on from one generation to the next.”