The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (43 page)

On New Year’s Eve in the Horticultural Building in Boston, a rough who’d argued with Charley that afternoon (calling him a barbarian), came to the Fords’ evening show and guyed them throughout the act, yelling so many insults that Bob eventually sprang from the stage, jolting the wind from the man, swinging punches at his skull, maybe socking him a dozen times before others yanked him off. And then Bob smashed into them as well, his fists striking blood from the lips and noses of gentlemen who tried to discourage his rage, as Charley pitched into a second group, misapplying his pistols until a policeman finally appeared, fetching a lump from Charley’s head with a single swipe of his billyclub.

Only sixteen from an original audience of over three hundred had stayed in the Horticultural Building; the rest had stampeded outside, some even crashing through windowglass as if the place were on fire. Five men were lying on the floor, cupping their mouths or noses, their starched shirt fronts crinkled and spotted red. The policeman said as he shackled Bob, “You may be the Ford brothers or the James brothers, but you cahn’t drink blood in Boston.”

Articles about the fight appeared in many newspapers. Over the next week, inspiring the St. Joseph
Gazette
to comment: “Since one of them acquired notoriety by shooting another assassin in the back, the pestiferous pair has traveled the country under the apparent assumption that they were protégés of the state of Missouri. These fellows ought to be locked up in the interest of public morals or put under bonds to keep the peace by holding their tongues.”

George Bunnell coincidentally came to a like opinion that the slayers of Jesse James had lost their stage appeal and he called in their repertory company, claiming the competition for shows like theirs was already too plentiful. J. J. McCloskey’s
Jesse James, the Bandit King
was still in New York; Charles W. Chase brought his
Mammoth James Boys’ Combination
to the West, playing Mosby’s Grand Opera House in Richmond in May 1883; another company stayed for a two-night engagement at Tootle’s Opera House in St. Joseph; and a show called
The Missouri Outlaws
was being reviewed by P. T. Barnum. And yet the Fords continued on the road with their own company, The Great Western Novelty Troupe, presenting seven thespians and a composition called
Jesse James
throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, upstate New York, and New Jersey.

The playwright was a glamorous actor from Buffalo who gave himself the title role and rearranged American history to gain an enlarged arena for his gifts. The makeshift story commenced with an archetypal robbery with many killings, jumped rapidly to the cottage in St. Joseph where the swag was apportioned to the gang, the greatest amount going to Jesse. Angered by that, Bob shot the outlaw after supper on a Saturday night, but only now, on this stage in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Newark, New Jersey, did gallant and gritty Robert Ford see that he’d slain an impostor, for striding from the wings was the genuine Jesse James, and following a vainglorious dialogue, the two desperadoes met in a gunfight and Bob again vanquished the lion. Bob was then congratulated on his courage and accuracy with a gun and the tragedy was strangely forgotten as Bob began a shooting exhibition, firing many blank cartridges at apples that were jerked from Charley’s mouth with strings.

Charley called the road shows “a regular picnic” and claimed weekly receipts of nine hundred dollars, but they actually made only a fraction of that, and as they journeyed west they played to apathetic or antagonistic crowds. On September 26th, 1883,
Jesse James
played Louisville, Kentucky, and the management of The Great Western Novelty Troupe was agreeably surprised upon learning the Buckingham Theatre was completely sold out and that sitting rights to the aisles and galleries cost as much as regular box seats might. Only when the curtain was raised did Bob recognize that the great crowd was there to hiss and jeer at his every sentence and fling garbage onto the stage, and when he uneasily raised his gun at Jesse the audience rioted, according to Bob’s recollection, surging to the footlights, calling him a cur and a murderer, children scrabbling onto the stage to destroy the set and sneer at Bob in the sing-song of playgrounds.

And when Bob returned to his hotel that night he was given an unsigned letter that conveyed an account of Judas that was never accepted into the gospels. It said the disciple lived on after his attempt to hang himself, providing an example of impiety in this world. He grew huge and grotesque, his face became like a goatskin swollen with wine, his eyes could not be perceived even by an examining physician, to such a depth had they retreated from the sunlight, and his penis grew large, gruesome, a cause for loathing, yellow pus and worms coming out of it along with such a stink that he could stay in no village for long before he was chased away. After much pain and many punishments, Judas died in the place he belonged and, according to the account, the region still permitted no approach, so great was the stench that progressed from the apostate’s body to the ground.

EXCEPT FOR A MONTH
as sideshow attractions with P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth, the Ford brothers stopped performing in 1883 and their company dispersed into other productions as Bob and Charley sought more private lives, though that was problematical, even impossible, for many of those who’d once been in the presence of Jesse James.

Bob was going on twenty-two when he went back to Kansas City to gamble for a living. He was dapper, glamorous, physically strong, comparatively rich, and psychologically injured. By his own approximation, Bob had by then assassinated Jesse over eight hundred times, and each repetition was much like the principal occasion: he suspected no one in history had ever so often or so publicly recapitulated an act of betrayal, and he imagined that no degree of grief or penitence could change the country’s ill-regard for him.

He thought he might have committed suicide in the cottage on April 3rd, gripped the smoking gun barrel in his teeth and triggered his skull into fragments, painting his red regrets on spattered wallpaper he gruesomely staggered against, but even that might have been judged just one more act of cowardice. He thought he might have begged no clemency from the governor and been hanged on May 19th, but even with his own strangling descent to the grave, Bob guessed he would not be any more forgiven than Judas was long ago. So Bob played the renegade and rogue, stooping to no repentance, struggling with no phantoms, expecting no compassion, accepting no responsibilities, no pressures, no contempt. He was smug and disagreeable, arrogant and dangerous, as aggressive as a gun.

He thought, at his angriest, about visiting Mrs. William Westfall in Plattsburg, the McMillans in Wilton, Iowa, the Wymore family in Clay County, Mrs. Berry Griffin in Richmond, Mrs. John Sheets in Gallatin, perhaps even Mrs. Joseph Heywood in Northfield, Minnesota. He would go to their homes and give his name as Robert Ford, “the man who killed Jesse James.” He imagined they would be grateful to him. They would graciously invite him in and urge him to accept extravagant gifts in exchange for his having made their grief a little lighter. But in actuality Bob made only one irregular journey and that one was to Kearney, Missouri, under the cover of night when even dogs were asleep. He crept up to a nine-foot-high marble grave monument beneath a huge coffee bean tree and glided his fingers over an inscription reading:

In Loving Remembrance

JESSE W. JAMES

Died April 3, 1882

Aged 34 Years, 6 Months, 28 Days

Murdered By a Traitor and Coward

Whose Name Is Not Worthy to

Appear Here.

BOB JOURNEYED
into Kansas and the Indian Territories in 1885, gambling with cowboys in saloons, sleeping on ground that still remembered the sun, riding west without maps. A rattlesnake once snapped at his spur and then slithered gracefully away. Bob crept after it with a machete, chopping off the snake’s head and giving the body to a gunnysack until he could cook the meat that night. Hours later when Bob stripped off the gunnysack, the snake slashed out and socked Bob’s neck, striking hard as a strong man’s fist, only then spilling onto the sand, its spirit spent and at peace.

MAY 1884–JUNE 1892

Some may think different but all the men I know who’ve killed anybody would give all they’re worth to get away from their reputation.

BOB FORD

in the Creede
Candle,
1892

C
HARLEY FORD WAS ALL
that his countrymen wanted an assassin of Jesse James to be: agitated, frightened, groveling, his melancholy unmanageable, his sicknesses so actual and so imagined that days would pass when he could do no more than nap under smothering coats and catch spiders with his glances. He had married in May 1883, a Miss O’Hara from St. Louis, but by April 1884, her peevishness and disappointment with her pale, phthisic, and ghost-ridden groom had separated the two and Charley was staying with his parents in order to cure his consumption with some good country air. Though he was only twenty-six years old, he was given to the fatigue and fragility of the aged; he weighed just ninety-eight pounds, he complained of the cold, the outcries of children, the plots against him by Martha and Bob, the purloining that kept him impoverished. He would shrink into a rocking chair on the roadside porch in May, his skeleton covered with woolens and shawls, his skull made idiotically jolly with a purple and gold stocking cap. He had by then developed secondary infections to his alimentary tract and in order to calm the searing pain in his lungs and organs, Charley ate ten or twelve grains of morphine per day, with the result that a stupid and sprightly playfulness could give way to deep sleep and then sleepless depression in which he wept and whispered plainsongs of remorse to Jesse.

But on May 6th, 1884, Charley was merry enough to go hunting with Tom Jacobs, the boy who’d chanced upon the body of Robert Woodson Hite two years earlier. Quail were startled from the weeds of the Jacobs farm, their wings chattering in flight like the sound of riffled pages, but Charley would only gape at the sky as the birds disappeared, as if sight were as tardy as description and their presence had not yet pierced his eyes. He lingered over ordinary things—a gnarled finger of Dutch elm root emerging from the earth, the spade marks of a plowhorse’s shoes in a muddy cornfield, a clearing peppered with the pawprints of rabbits, a crow that sliced down near his ear. Tom lost the sickly man in the woods and after a prolonged absence saw Charley again with his shotgun hinged open over his arm, slouching back toward home, his clubfoot jerking his walk. Tom cried out if anything was wrong, but Charley gave no answer.

He angled the shotgun against a staircase and gave his mother a smile as he climbed to the upstairs room where he slept. He hung his heavy chinchilla coat on a closet nail and snagged his slouch hat over it. Though there were scraps of paper and pencils in the room, he composed no apology or goodbye. He removed a .45 caliber Colt revolver from a frayed holster looped over the bedpost and reclined on a duck feather mattress, crossing his calf-high boots at the ankles, fingercombing his dark brown hair. He twinged as he pressed the gunsight against his chest, then quelled his heart with a single shot, the gun sliding to the floor as the singe mark on his shirt lightly smoked.

The suicide was reported in a great many newspapers and the private ceremony that the Fords preferred was changed by circumstance to a large public gathering. No government official paid his respects, but Henry Craig and Sheriff Timberlake attended, as did Dick Liddil, whose release from jail had just been arranged.

Bob was plagued by questions from people seeking the reasons why Charley killed himself, some appraising the victim’s kid brother as he spoke, trying to anticipate if Bob would make his escape from shame and reproach by employing the same procedure. Bob responded to the pressures imprudently, by pushing away from the reception crowd and going into the woods with his gun and shooting the shagbark off a tree.

And yet he stayed on the Ray County farm for another year, playing cards with his sister and Dick, making Ida his audience for acts of prestidigitation, puttering around the house, mowing hay, corn-husking with his brother Wilbur, slaughtering pigs and chickens. But by the summer of 1885, the scrutiny of passersby and the contempt of the Richmond community were all too persistent, and Bob journeyed west in order to make a new reputation.

Elias Ford sold the grocery store and purchased a farm near Blue Springs that he worked on with Wilbur in the plain and simple way of ordinary people. Martha gave up the Harbison place soon after Bob departed and moved over to Excelsior Springs to be with her twin sister, Amanda. Dick Liddil was still Martha’s paramour but the spell was beginning to wear off for her. His appearance was no longer exemplary, his skewed right eye was going blind and was sometimes red as a radish, and he whispered, when alone with her, that Jesse had put a hex on them, that everything they attempted from then on was predestined to fail. So Martha separated from him in the late eighties and accepted a marriage proposal from a man whose occupation and personality were unimpressive but sustaining. Except for Bob, the Fords were alike in that: they completed their lifetimes peacefully and disappeared from history.

JOHN SAMUELS,
who’d lingered on the brink of death for more than four months in 1882, got better as soon as his stepbrother Jesse was sent to the grave, and he gave the world an undistinguished life until his dying at seventy-one, in 1932.

Dr. Reuben Samuels grew progressively more affected by the mental injuries he’d suffered when strangled in the coffee bean tree during the Civil War. By 1900 the man was so violent that he was finally confined in a straitjacket and conveyed to the state asylum, where he spent the last eight years of his life in a condition of childishness and rage.

His wife, Zerelda, remained on the Kearney farm, which she subdivided among her surviving children until it was little more than a two-storey house, slave quarters, ramshackle barn, and garden. Her greatest source of income began to be the twenty-five-cent tours of the grounds and rooms, in which she perorated against the government and the courts, and gave gasconades about her slaughtered sons, Archie and Jesse, gladly showing her amputated right wrist or the combination steel knife and fork she’d made so that she could eat left-handed.