The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (45 page)

Frank James, however, evinced dignity, intelligence, rectitude, and sobriety. He represented every quality that gentlemen then were eager to possess. He could speak passable German and French; he could recite one thousand lines of Shakespeare; he was not suspiciously attractive; he had fought for the right side in the Civil War.

A jury that was already partial to James when first impaneled moved to acquit the defendant and the courtroom erupted into prolonged applause.

Frank wasn’t free for more than a year when he was arraigned in Alabama for the robbery of a paymaster at Muscle Shoals, and again the verdict was not guilty, but right after the announcement a sheriff arrested the man for the robbery of the Missouri Pacific Railroad at Otterville in 1876. The charge was dismissed in February 1885 because the principal witness died two days before the case went to trial.

So it was that in spite of more than circumstantial evidence linking Frank James to a great many crimes, the man never served a day in the penitentiary.

What he did was act as a race starter at county fairs, increasing attendance with each appearance; he worked in a shoe store in Nevada, Missouri, and in the Mittenthal Clothing Company in Dallas, Texas, until monotony or annoyance with the overawed customers goaded Frank into leaving. He curried and cared for the racehorses of a rich man in New Jersey until his generous paychecks seemed too much like philanthropy. Then for seventy dollars a month, he accepted tickets at the Standard Theatre in St. Louis, refusing all invitations to see the saucy burlesque show inside.

He was mentioned as the new sergeant-at-arms for the Missouri legislature in 1901, a post that he anticipated would be a reprieve and an open display of his reformation, but the Democrats who recommended Frank foresaw his presence in the assembly as a political handicap, and the offer was retracted. So it was with regret and resentment that Frank capitulated to some of the many propositions from stock companies and performed, with chagrin and great nervousness, secondary roles in the plays
Across the Desert
and
The Fatal Scar
.

He was a survivor and it made him feel slightly guilty. It seemed to Frank that grace had come upon him without merit, that he’d been pardoned without justification or purpose. He once visited the scene of the 1864 Centralia massacre with a
Missouri Herald
reporter and strolled the Pleasant Grove cemetery looking for names he recognized. He gardened around an ill-kept grave and said, “The marvel to me is that I am not sleeping in a place like this. What have I been spared for when so many of my comrades were taken?” He straightened and roughed the earth from his hands, quoting from the Gospel according to Matthew: “ ‘Then shall two be in the field; the one shall be taken, and the other left.’ ”

When Cole Younger came back to Missouri in 1903, the two sick, aging men became reacquainted. Cole was pious, penitent, overweight, aching from the twenty-six gunshots he’d subjected his body to. Frank was sour and skinny and gray-haired, a chain-smoker and teetotaler with a minor heart condition. A Chicago circus management company signed the two to appear together in a Wild West show called
Hell on the Border
, in which Cole mixed with the audience and signed autographs and waved a white hat when his celebrated name was announced. Frank sat grumpily in a stagecoach that was robbed by city boys playing the James-Younger gang and then rode on an ornate spangled saddle and Arabian horse in the grand finale alongside Sioux Indians and ex-cavalry men and bronc riders and girls who did rope tricks.

Frank considered it crooked, silly, and unmanly and he moved on within months, settling once again on the Kearney farm. His son, Rob, was by then an auditor for the Wabash Railway in St. Louis; his wife, Anne, provided Mrs. Samuels with company and went into angry seclusion whenever gawkers stopped by. Frank raised cattle, rode in a buggy pulled by a plow horse named Dan, shot at paper targets in the woods, and taciturnly walked from room to room with tourists who now paid fifty cents to see Reverend James’s diploma from Georgetown College, a sampler stitched by Zerelda Cole at St. Catherine’s Academy, the Holy Bible that Jesse read, one of the guns he shot. If asked about Jesse, Frank would recite from
Julius Caesar:
“The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones.”

Alexander Franklin James died of a heart attack on February 18th, 1915, at the age of seventy-two. As he grew older he’d become plagued by visions of scientists making judgments about the configurations and weight of his brain, so Annie granted his wish that his body be cremated and the ashes stored until they could be interred with her own, which they were, in 1944, when she died at age ninety-one.

Thomas Coleman Younger died, unmarried, at age seventy-two, and was survived by one daughter, Pearl, a prostitute whose mother was Myra Belle Starr. After leaving the Wild West show, Cole returned to his birthplace in Lee’s Summit, Missouri, and continued making public appearances, speaking at churches, tent meetings, and ice cream socials on the evils of whiskey,
What Life Has Taught Me
, or simply
Crime Does Not Pay
.

ROBERT NEWTON FORD
meandered southwest to the Las Vegas hot springs in the late eighties, having recollected that Jesse once thought about going straight in that region. He was a professional gambler then and owned a plug horse, the clothes he’d rolled into a green tarpaulin, and the shaggy chinchilla coat that had belonged to Charley, with eight hundred dollars in poker winnings sewn into the coat’s sagging skirts. He registered in the Old Adobe Hotel, then made a sightseer of himself for a week, playing cards for pennies, gathering information about the town and Billy the Kid and Pat Garrett, going to the hot springs to cogitate and get clean.

On a sashay along Bridge Street one evening, he saw a stooped man gum to a saloon window a sign saying the place was being sold and the owner going back East. Bob spent the night on a stool there, counting the sales that were rung up, figuring out what he’d change, and the next morning negotiated an outright purchase of the inventory and a year’s lease of the property, putting down a fifty-dollar deposit. He then sent a telegram to Dick Liddil in Richmond, and a month later, when Dick jumped off the train, Bob was happily at the depot, looking groomed and genial in a crisp white shirt and buttoned gray vest, a long white apron concealing his legs and angling off his gun. He grinned at Dick and said, “Say hello to prosperity,” and hung an arm over Dick’s shoulders as Jesse might have as he guided him on a ramble through the Mexican vegetable and poultry market and then across Old Town’s plaza with its gazebo and gardens to a street of orange-colored clay.

Bob Ford’s saloon was advantageously located in Las Vegas, on the major east-west thoroughfare over the Gallinas River, and it might have gathered commercial men of San Miguel County as well as those going west forty miles to Santa Fe, but gossip about the proprietors was circulated,
The Daily Optic
even reminded its readers of their inglorious careers, and though a few shepherds and miners straggled in to gawk at the renegades of the James gang, a large contingent, under the outraged influence of Scott Moore (Jesse’s boyhood friend), boycotted the place in fury over the assassination.

Bob paid boys to pass out fliers to people crossing the bridge and even went into the street himself in order to prevail upon pedestrians to appease themselves inside. He ordered an upright piano shipped over from Albuquerque, gave away boiled eggs and sweet pickles and crackling pig skins painted with red chili sauce; he persuaded the governor’s son, Miguel Antonio Otero—who was just about his age and grew up in Missouri—to give a Saturday night party there; he even sought singers and dancing girls through advertisements in Colorado newspapers; and yet the saloon was bypassed, signs were ripped down, gentlemen crossed to the southside sidewalk in order to get to the plaza.

Bob was spending capital accumulated over five years on weekly expenses and saw poverty approaching with each payment to a supplier, so when Dick presented Bob with Lynch’s proposal that Dick run St. John and some other racehorses on the Eastern and Southern circuits, Bob gave up and without pain cooperated in pushing the animals into a Santa Fe freight car and in packing the inventory into a Studebaker wagon. Dick went East and got lucky again; Bob went north to Walsenburg, Colorado, and began another sorry saloon, bringing in a meager number of customers with sideshow bragging about himself: the man who killed Jesse James. He moved on again, going forty-five miles further north to Pueblo, where he earned some recognition as a wily professional gambler and then managed to get together the capital for a “pretty waiter saloon” in a section of town called the Mesa. He invested all his savings in gambling equipment that was shipped south from Denver and spent many hours in the countryside or at the railroad depot meeting sixteen-to twenty-one-year-old girls who looked poor or put upon or in flight from mail-order marriages and jobs in the cantaloupe fields: He promised them an eight-by-four room, three meals a day, and clean white dresses that were cut so short they showed their white bloomers and thigh-length black stockings. He guaranteed them protection and pleasant society, quietly giving them the option of prostitution without really requiring it—they were only expected to speak gladly with the patrons and persuade them to purchase liquor and beer at outrageously increased prices.

The gambling and the pretty waiter girls in Bob’s third saloon made all the difference. Bob flourished in Pueblo as he hadn’t since his years as an actor with George Bunnell. And his life in Pueblo
was
by then in great part a performance; his personality was compressed to that peculiar emptiness of a man whose public appearance is only a collection of gestures and posturings, of practiced words and affectation. He was a peacock, a swain, a swaggerer: one account of Bob accused him of “running off at the mouth” and of playing gunfighter around the Mesa, another reported his belligerence and umbrage, and yet another account mentioned his jumpiness and unhappiness and a panicky desperation that could make him seem possessed. His mean and cowardly reputation preceded him, of course, but there were plenty of other stories that could explain, at least, his uneasiness and suspicion. It was at this time, for example, that a man who owned a barbershop ingratiated himself and cringed around Bob for a month or so before letting on to a companion that he planned to avenge Mr. Jesse James by killing Robert Ford. The companion whispered the news to Bob, who approached the barber in his shop, jostled him out into the yard, and supplied him with a pistol. “Go ahead,” Bob yelled. “Draw your gun and let her fly!” Instead the man got down on his knees and begged to stay alive. Bob chopped his pistol into the barber’s nose, crushing cartilage and bone, and as the man gushed blood over his mouth, chin, and belly, Bob dragged him over to his saloon, where the barber was compelled to beg again for pardon in the presence of Bob’s pitiless cronies.

On another occasion Bob happened into the Bucket of Blood saloon in Pueblo and sipped whiskey at the bar in order to oversee the gambling operations and compare their gross income with his own. A boy with a guitar was singing anything suggested and it wasn’t long before a man in the audience sought to anger Bob Ford by calling for Billy Gashade’s song. The boy began “The Ballad of Jesse James” and according to an eyewitness named Norval Jennings every gaze attached to the dirty little coward in their midst. As the song went on it seemed Bob would not react to its jeering, but he gradually grew indignant enough to swing around on his high stool and sweep the right side of his coat over his gun, scowling at the singer as the boy ignorantly continued. According to Jennings, Bob then jerked up his Colt and shot at the guitar with miraculous accuracy, cutting through the catgut strings and stinging the boy’s playing fingers as the tightened strings sprang free. The boy yowled and gathered his right hand to his chest and Bob swaggered out through gunsmoke, inviting disgust with a grin.

He was regarded as arrogant, dangerous, pigheaded, savage, with no redeeming qualities beyond a capacity for liquor and a scary gift in handling guns. Yarns were relayed around town in which Robert Ford was gallant or magnanimous—yarns about his giving Christmas suppers to the indigent, about his slipping fifty dollars into the pocket of a Mexican with a poor family, about his chasing off a gang of toughs on a sidewalk merely by menacing them with his cane—but anything congratulatory was judged to be bogus by those who thought they knew him and the accounts were forgotten in favor of disparaging tales that seemed more fitting.

He brought much of their antagonism on himself: he way argumentative, garrulous, haughty, intoxicated more than often, petty about anything that involved money, perturbed only by injuries to his property and reputation, and pestered by an everlasting fear of assassination. In his private life, however, he was agreeable, forgiving, even loving, a gentleman of means and intelligence who was plagued by a guilt that he could not acknowledge.

He had given work to a nightwalker named Dorothy Evans and gradually became beguiled by her. She was a plump, pretty, cattleman’s daughter, pale as a cameo, with the sort of overripe body that always seems four months pregnant. Her long brown hair was braided into figure eights and pinned up over her ears in the English country-girl style. Grim experience was in her eyes, many years of pouting shaped her lips, but everything else about her expression seemed to evince an appealing cupidity, as if she could accept anything as long as it was pleasing. She was canny, practical, sympathetic, purposeful, with a ready tally of the profit and loss she made on each hour she passed with her employer; and Bob was willing to pay for her attention, her pity, her open displays of high feeling and respect.

Dorothy had initially appeared at his saloon in response to a newspaper advertisement that read:

GOOD STEPPERS
, make yourselves some money.

FUN GALORE
!
FINE CLOTHING
!

The wages of sin are not death, but wealth,

fame, and the chance of a proper marriage.