The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (39 page)

Some reporters were annoyed by the prim and politic tack the minister had taken, recognizing that there’d be no story in it, and they audibly sighed and sank deeper in the pews as Martin peered into his Good Book. “The text which I have chosen today is the twenty-fourth chapter of Matthew, forty-fourth verse: “Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not, the Son of man cometh.’ ”

It was a sleepy, unimaginative, uninspired sermon that concentrated on the certainty of the grave, the need for repentance, the salvation of the righteous. Zee James no more than sniffed as Martin spoke, but Mrs. Samuels sobbed and swayed and rolled her eyes to the roof-beams, swoonily repining, then made the smaller Dr. Samuels crutch her flamboyant, chest-striking exit from the church at the conclusion of the service.

Only those closest to the James-Samuels clan were invited to the hundred-fifty-acre farm three miles northeast of Kearney, for Mrs. Samuels was afraid that the commotion would be a vexation to her boy Johnny. In spite of the minister’s instructions to the contrary, however, more than eighty followed the casket on the Greenville road and another vast number from the countryside was encountered in the yard.

Confederate Army soldiers had cut a grave into seven feet of loam and roots beneath the giant coffee bean tree in which Yankee soldiers had hanged Dr. Reuben Samuels by the neck. It was close enough to the kitchen window that the apprehensive mother could easily look out for body snatchers. The cadaver was shown one last time to Johnny and then was carried out into the shade where it was rested on chairs so that the company could see Jesse Woodson James in the sleep of peace.

Mother and wife were then overmastered by grief and hysteria and they cast themselves upon the casket, screaming for God to avenge the man slain by a coward for money. The two women were gently encouraged from the ground but Zerelda Samuels wrenched away from constraining hands and, having become convinced of some skullduggery, insisted that the casket be reopened in order to make certain that her son’s arms and legs had not been sawed off and replaced with limbs made of wax. Sheriff Timberlake went dutifully for a screwdriver but was called back after Reverend Martin soothed the woman with practiced words about a calculus in Heaven that adjusts for our privations and compensates for our losses. And as those gathered sang “We Will Wait Till Jesus Comes,” the casket was jarringly lowered on ropes and gradually covered with earth.

MEANWHILE LIFE WAS BEGINNING
to be glorious for Charley and Bob. The manager of the Theatre Comique in Kansas City proffered one hundred dollars per night to them for presenting their interpretations of the assassination. Sojourners in the city, who might only have visited the Pony Express station previously, now patiently lingered outside the jail for Sheriff Thomas to show them to “the man who shot Jesse James.” They peered at Bob as if he were an anomaly from P. T. Barnum’s Grand Hippodrome, and they were inordinately pleased if the young man raised his eyes from his reading or spoke unimportantly to them.

It was even considered good advertising to capitalize on Bob’s patronage, as in this newspaper item from that week: “It may not be developed in the evidence, but it is no less a fact that Ford, the slayer of Jesse James, while under the assumed name of Johnson, only a few days ago purchased a genteel suit at the Famous Boston One-Price Clothing House, 510 Main Street. This is not mentioned to indicate that this has anything to do with the capture, but merely to suggest that when anyone wishes to personate a gentleman or wear good clothes of any kind, they are sure to buy them at the Boston.”

The Fords stayed in their jail cell until Easter, accepting no gawkers at all on the day that Jesse was interred in the grave. They spent their time chatting with Sheriff Thomas and Corydon Craig, the city marshal’s son, or they played cards or tiddlywinks and read the many newspaper recapitulations of past meetings with them. Charley’s lung congestion and stomach complaints seemed to have been aggravated by the week’s excitement, for he coughed persistently in the night, recurrently vomited his suppers into a bedpan, and pitifully informed the reporters that he hadn’t enjoyed a single day of good health in all the preceding five years.

Whereas Bob was learning to thrive on the attention, even to be thrilled by it. He began smoking cigarettes in order to appear more experienced and dangerous and cosmopolitan. He weighed the advantages of growing a mustache. He smelled gunpowder on his fingers. He could still feel the jolt of the gun going off, could still hear the groan as Jesse sagged from the chair, but that was all, he’d seen no phantoms, listened to no incorporeal voices, was not subjected to nightmares. He would ask on second thought, as a passing fancy, if anyone had yet sighted Frank James, but revenge was not a worry really, it was as if no person could physically harm him once Jesse was underground.

In order to satisfy the many requests for his picture, Bob agreed to sit for a studio photograph in the second week of April. He wore green wool trousers and a gray tweed coat that was buttoned just once at the short lapels and then curtained away from a green vest. He resisted sitting on a chair and suggested instead a gracefully scrolled and sculpted staircase, seating himself on the fifth step, his right hand dangling slackly off his right knee as his left grasped a gleaming Peacemaker, a photographer’s prop, that was artificially rested on his left thigh and calling attention to itself. He looked like a grocery clerk accidentally caught with a long gun in his hand. A correspondent asked why, if Bob was right-handed, he’d gripped the gun with his left, and Bob answered, as if nothing further needed saying, “Jesse was left-handed.”

And it was also in early April that the Fords rode to Kansas City with two deputies as chaperones, and they stood in the wing of the Theatre Comique, next to the fly lines and counterweight pulleys, rephrasing the tragedy in their minds and watching a Russian in opera clothes fling daggers at playing cards poised by a pretty woman. Charley was agitated and sick and smoked cigarettes so continuously that he used one to light another; but Bob was beguiled and delighted—the atmosphere was exciting, sympathetic, eccentric, provocative; it seemed precisely the sort of place that would bring him happiness. He chatted with the stage manager, regarded a man juggling white supper plates inside his dressing room, got a crick in his neck from looking into the loft at the curtains and teasers and scenery suspended from the overhead gridiron. An elderly woman highlighted his eyelashes with the licked point of a charcoal pencil and then smeared red coloring onto his lips with her little finger. Charley endured the same cosmetics and said, “I don’t know what we’re doing here.” Bob combed his ginger brown hair in a mirror and said, “Educating.”

The deputies let the Fords strap on their holsters and emptied pistols and then took seats in the orchestra pit with shotguns cradled across their chests. And a comedian with a spiraled mustache and waxed goatee rounded out his waggish stories about a baffled and bamboozled visitor from Boston by grandly indicating, “It is now a singular privilege to welcome to this performance hall the two courageous young men who brought to justice that wild beast to society, the notorious Jesse James.” He checked the wing and saw Charley woozily clutching the curtain but saw too that Bob was readied and impatient to go on. He swept off his top hat and swung it stage right, saying, “I therefore urge you to give your undivided attention to the report of their daring exploit, and I present to you in their premier public appearance, Charles and Robert Ford!”

Bob strode onto the gray stage apron and Charley sluggishly followed as a man at the piano accompanied them with processional music that wasn’t meant as sarcasm. The balcony and mezzanine were vacant and the main floor was only spottily filled with an audience that was principally couples in evening clothes and smoking them in the lobby. Some peered at their playbills to read if the act was explained (it was not even mentioned), but most gaped at the Ford brothers, getting their measure, gossiping, audibly recalling what they’d read.

Charley’s eyes slid shyly to Bob and then to the deputies in the orchestra pit who progressively slumped down in chagrin at the Fords’ prolonged aphasia. Stagefright stripped Charley’s language away and he wondered rather hopelessly if it would be enough to just stand there and be seen. Then he was caught by surprise upon hearing words easily come from Bob, astonished at seeing his younger brother enjoying the presentation, pronouncing a speech for which there was no script, gesturing gently in the air, portraying himself with apologies and subtle immodesty, and then inviting questions.

A man stood and asked, “Why did you decide on April third instead of any other time?”

Bob said, “Ever since Charley and I were with Jesse, we’d been watching for an opportunity to shoot him, but Jesse was always heavily armed, guns everywhere on his person, and it was getting to be impossible to even look to our weapons without him noticing. Then the chance we had long wished for came that Monday morning.”

Another man stood and Bob shaded his eyes from the stage lights to see him. The man asked, “What were Jesse’s last words?”

Bob glanced at Charley and signified it was Charley’s turn at answering, but Charley stammered inconsequentially and glowered at the footlights as he pursued words and impressions that kept disappearing. Bob spared him further hardship by surging on with the story he’d already related to many correspondents, except that this time he spoke Jesse’s comments with compelling accentuation, physically representing the great man’s stroll into the sitting room, his painstaking removal of coat and vest, the imprudent removal of his pistols on the mattress, the featherdusting of the picture of Skyrocket. “Getting back to the subject,” Bob said, “I guess his last words were ‘That picture’s awful dusty.’ ”

Some of the audience laughed.

A woman asked where Mrs. James was at the time; another asked the children’s ages; a gunsmith wanted to know the makes of all the guns in the cottage and Bob’s opinion of their accuracy and ease of operation, only to argue with him about his prejudices; the master of ceremonies came on stage and suggested that it would be fitting to conclude with Bob’s interpretation of the fatal shot.

Bob transfigured his expression into something hard and sepulchral and slapped the deputy’s gun from his hip, slowly crossing the audience from left to right with it, closing his left eye as he sighted the muzzle on the most appalled and upset faces. Then the gun’s hammer snapped forward and pinged into a cleared chamber. Someone in the audience gasped and others edgily laughed, for Bob was grim-visaged and villainous, with scorn in the sour set of his mouth and mean spite in his eyes. He relaxed his right arm and the crowd’s anxiety left; he shoved the gun into its holster and lingered next to the footlights, looking stonily at as many in the audience as he could, and the comedian said, “How about a big round of applause for these two courageous young men?” And Bob and Charley walked off the stage to the gratifying sound of clapping hands.

Charley said, “You surprise me, Bob.”

Bob collapsed onto a chair and grinned with ecstasy. “I was really good, wasn’t I?”

Some professionals who saw Bob play the slayer thought the boy showed an aptitude for acting and encouraged him to study stagecraft. So he begged release from jail to attend matinee performances at Tootle’s Opera House, pantomiming the leading man’s style, incorporating his gesticulations even if not appropriate. It was generally acknowledged that he ought to have been preoccupied with the impending court trial in Buchanan County and the coroner’s inquest into the death of Wood Hite, but Bob was instead becoming starstruck by Miss Fanny Davenport in her role as Lady Teazle in a comedy of manners called
The School for Scandal
.

ON FRIDAY, APRIL 14TH
, Henry Craig arrived from Kansas City with Colonel John Doniphan, a powerful attorney and orator who’d recently completed the Burgess trial in Platte City (getting the gunfighter off on a five-year sentence). Doniphan was an austere, misanthropic man with no generosity or high regard for the Ford brothers, whom he’d agreed to defend. He sat with Charley on a cot in the jail cell and listened intently as Craig conducted Bob through a recapitulation of his conversation with the governor during their meeting in the St. James Hotel, and then through the peregrinations that resulted in the killing of Jesse James and a charge of first-degree murder. Craig completed his orientation and sat back; Doniphan crossed his long legs and asked, “How do you two feel about your situation?”

Bob looked at Charley and then replied, “I sleep fine.”

Doniphan then indicated what their problems were: that they had no written agreement with the governor, that Crittenden himself was susceptible to charges of conspiracy to commit murder, that public sentiment could coerce the governor into changing his mind about his pledge to the Fords. Suppose Crittenden denied ever making a promise of pardon, as he repeatedly had to the press? Were they not public nuisances on whom no pity should be squandered? Will the claims of two gunslingers and petty thieves carry much weight in a jury trial? What could the disposition of even their supporters be once the corrupted body of Mr. Hite had been discovered on their property?

Charley glared at Doniphan through the cataloging, and when the attorney was finished, asked, “Do you want me to answer those questions?”

Doniphan said nothing.

Charley said, “I’ll wager the governor does what’s right.”

Colonel Doniphan put his pencil away. “You’d better hope he does not.”

On Monday, April 17th, O. M. Spencer took his case to trial. The second-floor courtroom was as crowded then as it was on April 3rd, but there was little grandeur in the Fords’ progress through the gathered spectators now. Charley was angry and banged out of his way anyone who pressed close to him; Bob was grinning but fidgety and though he worked at aplomb and courage, it was read as arrogance.

For reasons of politics and prestige, Colonel Doniphan was unwilling to be the sole counsel to the Ford brothers, so he invited William Warner and W. A. Reed to collaborate with him, and they congregated with four deputies around the Fords in order to prevent any violence against the two who were sitting at the defendants’ table.