The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (35 page)

Sunlight streaked off Jesse’s two revolvers. He leaned on the windowsill and gazed at the skittish weather. A suspender was twisted once across the back of an ironed shirt that coins of sweat made the color of smoke. He proclaimed in a sentence that seemed composed just for Bob, “I guess I’ll take off my pistols for fear the neighbors will spy them if I walk out into the yard.”

Charley instantly turned from the screen door with vexation in his face and saw his kid brother’s right thumb twitch as Bob lowered his hand to his gun.

Jesse unbuckled the two crossed holsters with their two unmatched revolvers and carefully placed them on the mattress, as if creating some exhibit, and it seemed to Bob that the man was pretending: each motion seemed stressed, adorned, theatrical, an unpolished actor’s version of calm and nonchalance. Jesse lent his attention to the racehorse named Skyrocket and said, “That picture’s awful dusty,” and withdrew from a wicker sewing basket a furniture duster that was made from the blue-eyed feathers of peacocks. He could easily reach the picture by standing, but he skidded the rush-bottomed chair across the rug and climbed onto it as if the floor were inclined and uncertain.

Bob slunk from the wall in order to stand between Jesse and the two revolvers. He shook loose his fingers like a gunfighter and instructed his brother with scared eyes as Jesse stood above them and feathered the walnut frame. Charley winked and the two Fords slipped out their guns. Bob was the speedier and had his .44 extended straight out from his right eye as Charley was still raising his and Jesse appeared to hear the three clicks as the Smith and Wesson was cocked because he slightly swiveled his head with authentic surprise, straying his left hand toward a gun that he’d forgotten was gone.

Then Robert Ford’s .44 ignited and a red stamp seemed to paste against the outlaw’s chestnut brown hair one inch to the rear of his right ear, and his left eyebrow socked into the glassed watercolor of Skyrocket. Gunpowder and gun noise filled the room and Jesse groaned as a man does in his sleep and then sagged from his knees and tilted over and smacked the floor like a great animal, shaking the house with his fall.

He looked at the ceiling, his fingers curled and uncurled, his mouth worked at making words, and the two Ford brothers saw he was dying. Charley leaped out the window and into the yard and as Zee rushed into a room that was blue with smoke, Bob slowly retreated and straddled the sill.

She screamed, “What have you done?” and the boy looked as if he wanted to apologize but couldn’t. Zee knelt and cried, “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse,” and cradled his skull in her apron and smothered his right ear in petticoats that soaked red with his blood. Tim was at the screen door, seeing everything, and Bob was still crouched at the sitting room window, gawking at the man. She asked with anguish, “Bob, have you done this?”

And he answered, “I swear to God that I didn’t.”

The man sighed and grew heavy on her legs. His eyes seemed yellow, his muscles slack; the blood was wide as a table. He made a syllable like “God” and then everything inside him stopped.

Charley skulked inside the cottage to collect the Fords’ two hats and riding coats and to look again at the man they’d shot. He told Zee James, “The pistol went off accidentally.”

Then Charley was outside again and the two Fords ran down Confusion Hill, their coats flying, cutting through yards and down alleys until they achieved the American Telegraph office, whence was sent to Sheriff Timberlake, Henry H. Craig, and Governor Thomas Crittenden an abbreviated message that read: “
I HAVE KILLED JESSE JAMES. BOB FORD.”

APRIL 1882–APRIL 1884

Outside my window about a quarter mile to the west stands a little yellow house and a crowd of people are pulling it all down. It is the house of the great train robber and murderer, Jesse James, who was shot by his pal last week, and the people are relic hunters. They sold his dust-bin and foot scraper yesterday by public auction, his doorknocker is to be offered for sale this afternoon, the reserve price being about the income of an English bishop….The Americans are certainly great hero worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.

OSCAR WILDE

in a letter mailed from St. Joseph and dated April 19th, 1882

T
HEN THE FORD BROTHERS
ran over to City Marshal Enos Craig’s office in order to surrender, but a man there told them Craig was at coffee and that a deputy marshal had just left for Confusion Hill, that a woman had called on the telephone to report a gunfight on Lafayette Street. The man was going to begin interrogating them about their intentions with Craig but the two were already running east, and they caught up with Deputy Marshal James Finley as he commenced his search for the slain man’s two cousins.

Charley was coughing from his exertions, so it was Bob who gathered his wind and made introductions, saying next, “I’m the man who killed the person in that house. He’s the notorious outlaw Jesse James, or I am mistaken.”

The confession was so cold and conceited, with nothing in it extenuated or softened by excuse, that Finley suspected it as a stupid prank or as a calculated interruption of his pursuit. And yet Bob persisted with his claims, specifying the articles in the cottage that would signify the owner’s name or initials, depicting physical scars and appearances that Bob incorrectly thought most people would recognize as characteristics of Jesse James.

Just then Marshal Enos Craig was climbing Lafayette Street with Dr. James W. Heddens, the Buchanan County coroner, and with John H. Leonard, a police reporter for the St. Joseph
Gazette
, so Bob Ford forsook the deputy marshal, running down to meet Craig. Bob asked him if they could talk privately and the city marshal lingered on the sidewalk as the coroner and reporter walked on to the cottage.

Rubberneckers, neighbors, and children were collected in twos and threes in the yard or were peering through the sitting room windows when Heddens and Leonard arrived. The two men went inside the cottage and saw the body on a green carpet, the left eyelid closed, the right blue eye asleep, the mouth slightly ajar. A coat and vest and two revolvers were on an oak bed; the room smelled of gunpowder. Dr. Heddens knelt to listen to the man’s chest and lifted his wrist to check for a pulse. He examined some mean lacerations on the man’s left brow and then removed the soaked swaddling and examined a nickel-sized hole in the skull. He asked, “Do you know who it is, John?”

The reporter was making notes about the contents of the sitting room. He said, “Haven’t the slightest idea,” and then saw a pretty girl of sixteen come out of a sideroom.

The girl said, “His wife’s in here.”

Zee was sitting on the wide bed and crying in her hands. Her calico dress was streaked with blood and was redly saturated in the middle and hem. A fat woman sat with a sweatered arm over the widow’s shoulders, and a girl of twelve was crouched with the children. Zee looked to John Leonard and realized he was recording whatever he saw. She pleaded, “Oh, please don’t put this in the paper,” and Leonard said, “I’m afraid that’s my job.”

The coroner came to the door and asked, “What’s your name, madame?”

“Mrs. Howard,” she said.

“Is the body that of your husband?”

She nodded.

The
Gazette
reporter turned to the sitting room to see Enos Craig and the two Fords come inside. The coroner asked Zee, “Do you know who killed him?” and Leonard could hear the widow answer, “Our two cousins, the Johnsons.”

City Marshal Craig stared at the strong, spiffily outfitted body on the floor and sidled over to Leonard. “Do you know who they say that man is?”

“Someone named Howard.”

Craig shook his head. “The boys claim it’s Jesse James.”

“Goon!”

The city marshal spied the widow in the sideroom and slipped off his broad white hat as he approached her. Enos Craig was a skinny and very stern man of fifty-three, with a crossed left eye and a vast gray mustache that he continually petted with a red handkerchief. He was not at all related to Henry Craig but
was
the younger brother of Brigadier General James Craig, a United States congressman, and he could exert in special circumstances the mellifluence that his brother made customary. He glared at the fat woman and the girl until they left the room, and then sat on the mattress with Zee. He remarked in an amenable, soothing voice, “Mrs. Howard? It is said that your name is not Howard but James and that you are the wife of the notorious Jesse James.”

Zee frowned at him. “I certainly can’t help what they say.”

“The boys who have killed your husband are here. It’s they who tell me your husband is Jesse James.”

She looked at him with consternation. “You don’t mean they’ve come
back?
”

Craig let the widow slump against his shoulder and weep rackingly as he stroked her fine blond hair. He crooned some comforting words and then said, “You know, it would be a lot more restful for your soul if you’d speak the truth. The public would think mighty highly of you; your children wouldn’t ever again want for anything.”

She nibbed her eyes with her sleeve, like a child. “I want to go see him.”

“How’s that?”

“I want to see my husband.”

“Just lean your weight on me,” Craig said, and the two walked into the sitting room.

Bob shrank back when he saw Zee and Charley moved to the screen door. She screamed, “You cowards! You snakes!” She surged at them but was restrained by the city marshal and, struggling, she cried, “How could you kill your friend?”

Charley slouched outside and Bob followed him, slapping the screen door shut. John Leonard scurried after them and went over to the sickly brother with the smudge of a mustache who was then squatting against the white picket fence, making a cigarette. Leonard asked, “You mean that really is Jesse James?”

“Isn’t that what we’ve been saying since we come?”

The crowd ogled them and a small boy ran down the street, shouting what he’d overheard about Jesse James to whomever he encountered. Bob strolled over, slapping his palm with a stick. He said, “Have someone twist off that gold ring on his finger. You’ll find a script with the name Jesse James inside.”

Leonard jotted that down and then asked Charley, “Why’d you kill him?”

Bob intervened, “Say: we wanted to rid the country of a vicious and bloodthirsty outlaw.”

Charley smiled in agreement and craned his neck to see the flight of the reporter’s scribbled shorthand. He said to Leonard, “You should mention the reward too.”

“You shot him for money?”

“Only ten thousand dollars!”

Leonard looked at Bob and saw that the young man was scowling. He said, “I’ll mention that you are young but gritty.”

Charley grinned. “We are
all
grit.” He licked a cigarette paper and said, “You never expected to see Jesse’s carcass in Saint Joe, did you? We always thought we’d create a sensation by putting him out of the way.”

Zee gave in to Craig’s gentle interrogation and admitted the truth. She wished she were in Death’s cold embrace; she wondered what would become of the children; she talked about Jesse’s love and kindliness and promised to speak further if the city marshal would guarantee no entrepreneur could get at the body and drag it all over the country.

Shortly after ten o’clock the body was carried to the Seidenfaden Undertaking Morgue in a black, glass-sided carriage that was followed by a procession of mourners, including Mrs. James. Snoops and onlookers swarmed around the cottage, viewing what they could through the windows, appraising the horses in the stables, swapping stories about the James gang, stealing whatever would slide up their sleeves, so that the cottage was soon closed, the sashes nailed shut, and a policeman stationed on the sidewalk to scare off looters.

Removed as evidence by Enos Craig were a gold ring with the name of the gunman inside, a one-dollar gold coin made into a scarf pin and cut with the initials J.W.J., a set of pink coral cufflinks, a Winchester rifle that Jesse called Old Faithful, a shotgun that was nicknamed Big Thunder, four revolvers (Pet, Baby, Daisy, and Beauty), an eighteen-karat-gold stem-winder watch stolen from John A. Burbank in the Hot Springs stage robbery in Arkansas, and a Waltham watch in a gold hunting case stolen from Judge R. H. Rountree when the Mammoth Cave sightseers’ stagecoach was robbed in 1880. Mrs. James was not relieved of a resized diamond ring that was owned by Rountree’s daughter, Lizzie.

An onlooker came over to the boy Tim and smiled as if they knew each other. “So you’re Jesse Edwards James.”

The boy frowned at the man.

“Do you know who Jesse James is?”

The boy shook his head.

“Do you know what your father’s name was?”

Young Jesse was mystified. “Daddy.”

The man laughed as hugely as he would have if Jesse James had joked with him and tried to get the gathering reporters to jot down the story along with his name, spelled out.

Jesse Edwards James and Mary were sent to stay with a woman named Mrs. Lurnal, and the manager of the World Hotel gave Mrs. James accommodations there. She displaced her grief by fretting a great deal about finances, so an auction of unnecessary household items was suggested. Zee’s uncle, Thomas Mimms, sent telegrams to Mrs. Samuels and the family; the girl she was to shop with for Easter clothes packed a suitcase. Alex Green informed Zee that she was an accessory-after-the-fact in the multiple crimes that her husband committed but consented to represent the widow for a retainer of five hundred dollars; then R. J. Haire ruined Green’s scheme by volunteering his services as an attorney in loving remembrance of a much-maligned and magnificent man.

POLICE COMMISSIONER
Henry Craig received Bob Ford’s telegram at his law office in the Kansas City
Times
building, but made no effort to inform the newspaper staff of the assassination; he merely sent a return message to Bob that read: “Will come on the first train. Hurrah for you,” and then notified William H. Wallace, the Jackson County prosecuting attorney, of the extraordinary news. And since the wait for a regular run would have been many hours, Craig rushed north in the readied Hannibal and St. Joseph locomotive and coaches, stopping once, in Liberty, to collect Sheriff Timberlake and a stunned and saddened Dick Liddil.