The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (34 page)

Jesse shut his eyes and recited, “ ‘For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.’ ”

Jesse said, “A good preacher will match that up with Matthew twenty-six.” He coughed meanly and spat to the right. He squeezed his mouth with his palm. “Sometimes I get so forlorn and melancholy. Do you ever get that way?”

Bob shrugged.

“Do you know what it is you’re most afraid of?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I’m afraid of being forgotten,” Bob said, and having admitted that, wondered if it was true. He said, “I’m afraid I’ll end up living a life like everyone else’s and me being Bob Ford won’t matter one way or the other.”

“It isn’t always up to you, Bob. It may not be in the cards for ya.” Jesse looked over to Kansas and leaned on his knees for a minute. “Do you ever get surprised when you see yourself in a mirror? Do you ever find yourself saying, ‘Why do they call him by my name?’ ”

It seemed to Bob that Jesse expected no response.

“You’re wrapped in a ragged coat for your three score and ten and nobody gets to see who’s inside it.”

“It’s getting chilly,” Bob said.

Jesse’s thoughts seemed to fly and he concentrated on something that Bob couldn’t see. “His voice is like a waterfall.”

“Whose voice?”

“If I could stand in it for a second or two, all my sins would be washed away.”

“I honestly can’t follow this conversation.”

Jesse approximated a smile. “Do you know who I’m jealous of? You. If I could change lives with you right now, I would.”

Bob said, “I guess this must be a case of the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence.”

“You can go away right now if you want. You can say, ‘Jesse, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the Good Lord didn’t put me here to rob the Platte City Bank.’ You can go inside and get your gatherings and begin a lifetime of grocery work. I’m roped in already; I don’t have my pick of things; but you can act one way or another. You’ve still got the vote. That’s a gift I’d give plenty for.”

Bob thought negligently, as a young man might—totally within his body and his own history, without etiquette or any influence other than his hunger and green yearning. He gripped the tattersall quilt at his neck, smelling borax in it. He said, “I don’t know. I’m not acting according to any plan. I’m just getting myself out of spots and pressing for my best advantage.”

“You can’t always make things happen, Bob.”

“Well, like I say, I’m just taking what comes my way.”

Jesse rose up and crimped his fingers over the metal clothesline, sagging a little on it, looking at the ground. “You Fords show your teeth like apes.”

Bob couldn’t imagine where their dialogue was going but the man’s gloom seemed vaguely dangerous, so he decided to go back inside. He threw the tattersall quilt over a raspberry bush and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m going to call it a night.”

Jesse was slumped forward dismally, swinging his weight on the clothesline, making the metal hooks complain. He asked, “Why don’t you stay with me a little longer?”

“I’m sort of sleepy, Jess.”

“Go ahead then,” he said.

Bob was perplexed by the man’s despondency. He walked to the screen door and then said, “I appreciate your frankness with me. This has been illuminating. I’m going to ponder all you said.”

Jesse moved off into the darkness. “Don’t make anything out of it,” he said. “I was only passing the time.”

MUCH LATER
Bob would remember that he woke at sunrise on April 3rd looking at the racehorse named Skyrocket. Charley was climbing into a rough wool shirt that he wore whenever he worked with the animals. Bob dangled his fingers to the floor and walked them over his gun. Zee was already at the stove and Bob could see steam escape from a covered saucepan in shy phrases of smoke. Tim was in the children’s room annoying his little sister.

Bob would recall that Jesse then came out of the master bedroom and scolded the children for pestering each other when it wasn’t more than seven. He wore the crisp celluloid collar and the dazzlingly white linen shirt that he stole from the Kansas hotel highboy, and he adjusted the silk cravat in a looking-glass that revealed a section of shut door, a chair woven with rushes, a marred wall with the heights of Tim and Mary designated in crayon. Bob slithered from under the covers in order to conceal an erection and struggled his legs into nut brown trousers, then struggled his stockinged feet into boots that were so worn in the heels that his ankles caved out. Charley clomped to the stables via the front door and the screen door clapped off a sinking mist of street dust. Jesse buttoned a black cashmere Prince Albert coat over a vest and over his two crossed holsters and guns. He informed Bob without nastiness that he could stay inside and sleep some more, and he walked out into sunlight just as Zee angrily banged shut the oven door, muttering, “Oh, shoot!”

Bob tucked in a yellow shirt and called, “Is that you making all that smoke?”

He saw Zee flip some burnt cottage biscuits from a blackened baking pan and say to no one, “This ornery stove!” He fingercombed his ginger brown hair in the looking-glass and slipped through gray oven smoke to go out to the privy.

He stepped over puddles that an overnight rain had put in the yard and he closed the privy door behind him. The temperature forecast was eighty degrees and already the April morning seemed as warm and moist as cooking vapors. Mary crouched outside with a coffee grinder that she’d ruined with sand; Tim propelled himself on a rope swing that rasped against a sycamore bough. Bob walked over to the backyard cistern, buttoning his fly, and the cistern pump brayed mulishly when he worked the iron handle. Charley came up from the stables and scraped off manure on a rusted rake that was forgotten in the grass, and though Bob said good morning to him, his only gesture of recognition was to slouch down the slope of the yard a ways and squat for some time inside cigarette smoke.

Jesse caught the swing set and gentled Tim down to a stop and then the two strolled down Confusion Hill for the subscription newspapers. Cold water that was slightly orange splashed into Bob’s lifted white enamel bowl and spotted his trouser cuffs and boots. He brought the water to his face gratefully, as a man might a sweetheart’s fingers, and he imagined without willing it the gruesome fish he’d caught in September. When he looked up Zee was peering at him through the porch screen.

“How much do you want to eat?” she asked.

“Just a smidgen,” Bob said, and got up on his legs. “I’m feeling sort of peculiar.” He pushed Mary in the swing for a while, responding to a two-year-old’s questions, and then grew weary of that, flung her higher than before, and straggled into the front yard, where he leaned over the white picket fence to look down Lafayette Street. Sunlight flashed off the city’s windows. The railroad yards to the west were ceilinged with smoke. The river moved with the slow advancement of blood. He lingered there for five minutes or so, his thumbs cocked by his pockets. He could have been a man at the races, a gambler with money on Skyrocket. Craig and Timberlake would be sitting at breakfast perhaps, making preparations for Tuesday, eating sweet croissants. Craig would enrich his coffee with cream. A crew would be in the freight cars strewing straw for the deputies’ animals.

Bob watched the great man and his child climb the steep ascent of the sidewalk with shoes on their feet and grand aspirations and a common language between them, but Bob figured that only meant they were slightly more intricate animals. It meant they were given more mechanisms than guns. Bob saw Jesse move a cigar in his mouth and squint his eyes from the smoke. He said, “How come you’re looking so interested?”

Bob asked, “Do you think it’s intelligent to go outside like that, so all creation can see your guns?”

Jesse ignored him and threw the cigar so that it sparked and rolled, screwing smoke. And then he rushed his daughter, monstering, catching Mary as she ran squealingly to the screen door and swinging the girl around so wildly her right stockinged foot lost its shoe.

Zee called everyone in to a breakfast that was cooling and Mary hugged her father’s neck as he gracefully walked to the dining room. Tim carelessly threw down the rolled newspapers in the sitting room and climbed up next to his sister’s highchair. Bob slit open a brown paper sleeve and spilled out the Kansas City
Times
, seeing instantly a story about the arrest and confession of Dick Liddil. Charley slouched into the dining room late, looking meek and afflicted, lying about some complaint with the horses to which Jesse paid scant attention. Bob slipped the newspaper under a shawl and strapped on the gun he had been given, tying the leather holster to his thigh with a string. Zee called Bob again, slightly irritably, saying everything was getting cold, and Bob seated himself across from Jesse, accidentally scarring the chair with his gun.

Zee jellied a biscuit for Mary and mentioned she’d invited a girl from across the street to go shopping with her for Easter clothes that afternoon. She asked Jesse to give her some money and he removed two five-dollar bills from a small roll secured with a rubber band. She asked if Jesse wanted some sandwiches for his journey. She asked if he’d come back for the Holy Thursday services.

Jesse frowned at his six-year-old son, who was staring blankly at the sunshine, woolgathering, his oatmeal spoon in his mouth. “What do you think goes on in that noggin of his?”

“Nothing,” said Charley Ford.

Jesse laughed. “I was referring to
his
mind, not yours.”

Bob snickered cravenly and Jesse looked askance at him. He then stood from his chair and fetched the newspapers that Tim had abandoned on the sofa, almost missing the Kansas City
Times
that was incompletely concealed by a shawl. He sat again with solemnity and stirred a spoon in his cup, swirling ghosts from the coffee.

Bob noticed every motion, every physical event: the crease in the man’s brow, the fret in his reading eyes, the stain on a finger from the cigars he smoked. Bob slid the second newspaper around and scanned the items on its front page: legislation and politics, advertisements for curatives and clothes, the outrages visited on a young woman in Memphis, the shedding of innocent blood. A man in Grandview was ruled insane; a farm was lost to incendiaries; it was the twenty-second anniversary of the start of the Pony Express.

Jesse unfastened his Prince Albert coat and snared it over his guns. Tim excused himself from the table with a rasher of bacon in his mouth and Mary climbed down from her highchair after him. Jesse flattened the Kansas City
Times
over the newspaper he’d finished and lowered his crossed arms to scour the articles. “Hello now!” he said. “The surrender of Dick Liddil.”

Charley said, perhaps too urgently, “You don’t say so!”

Jesse lifted a coffee cup close to his mouth and stared at Bob through the vapors. “Young man, I asked you yesterday and you said you didn’t know anything about Dick.”

“And I don’t.”

Jesse moved his finger down the page, guiding his eyes as he read. “It’s very strange,” he said and made no other comment as he continued to the conclusion. Zee was scraping the children’s breakfast plates in the kitchen and immersing them in soaped dishwater. They thudded together with the wooden sound of a muscular heart pumping blood. Jesse sipped some coffee without looking up from the newspaper. He said, “It says here Dick surrendered three weeks ago.” He glanced at Bob with misgivings. “You must’ve been right there in the neighborhood.”

“Apparently they kept it secret.”

Jesse slumped back in the chair with his fingers knitted over his stomach and glared at Bob and then Charley. “It looks sort of fishy to me.”

Bob said, “If I get to Kansas City soon, I’m going to ask somebody about it.” And then he left the dining room with his right hand on his gun. He raised the Venetian blinds and the screenless sitting room windows and reacquainted himself with the rocking chair, his body fidgeting. Tim hunkered down on the stoop outside, coercing the crank on the coffee grinder. His little sister squatted beside him, pushing her pale dress down between her thighs, stabbing at the earth with a crooked spoon, and repeating, for some reason, “Don’t.”

Jesse retrieved some remedy from the medicine cabinet in the pantry and murmured privately with his wife. Charley walked into the sitting room and remarked on the sultry weather, said the afternoon would be hot as a pistol. He sat on the mattress and looped his holster off the bedpost, looking significantly at Bob as he put it on.

Jesse paused at the sitting room entrance as if to reconsider a scheme and then proceeded across the tasseled green rug with a long linen duster over one forearm, the other cradling packed saddlebags and a folded newspaper that carried a gun. Bob jumped up from the rocker and it reared and rowed, clubbing the floor, until he could still the chair with his hand. Jesse asked, “You two ready?”

And Charley said, “I will be by noon.”

Bob strode over to the hanging straw portfolio, and as he snatched out a children’s book he could feel Jesse glare at his gun. Bob shouldered into the floral wallpaper and vagrantly read to himself the first sentence of chapter one: “The little kitchen had quieted down from the bustle and confusion of midday.” Jesse rammed a raised window sash higher, making the snug fittings moan.

Clouds were shipping in and accumulating and most of the eastern sky was the color of nails. “It’s an awfully hot day,” Jesse James said, and Charley thought so much of his earlier statement that he said once again it was going to be hot as a pistol. Jesse took off his Prince Albert coat and Bob concentrated on the man, stowing
Five Little Peppers and How They Grew
among some magazines. Jesse folded the fine black coat on the oak bed and then removed a six-button black vest that was extravagantly brocaded with red stitching. Charley shambled over to the screen door to scan Lafayette Street.