The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (49 page)

And yet he did not change his name, camouflage his identity, dodge the press, go off to a foreign country, or seek refuge in the wilderness. Instead he played the scapegrace and rogue, pretended that he was appreciated by many, professed that he knew just when and how he would die and did not feel imperiled.

ON THE NIGHT
of June 5th, some persons unknown (perhaps inspired by Soapy Smith) spilled coal-oil around the Exchange Club and put a match to it. The fire grew like ivy over the wooden walls and gained entrance to the gambling room, peeling the wallcoverings up from the floor, exploding the glassware, and mangling iron until it got out again and joined itself to the wood around the club. It soon became a conflagration, eating not only Bob Ford’s place but every canvas, clapboard, and pinewood building in the gulch, ravaging much of Creede and creating such great heat that men gave up pitching their pails of Willow Creek water on the fire itself, instead cooling their panicky animals by splashing their steaming hides.

Bob managed to preserve only a few cases of liquor and his upright piano, and yet he persisted with the doggedness and incorrigibility that were typical of him throughout his life. He prospected the unincinerated sections of Willow Creek gully and purchased in Jimtown a big canvas tent shored up by scantlings, with a long wooden floor and a ceiling eighteen feet high, a onetime inn between a mining office called Leadville Headquarters and an eating cabin called The Cafe. Bob then salvaged a good length of his Eastlake bar and a mule team dragged it up Rio Grande Avenue and into the tent, the greater area of it being given to dancing, the one activity not available in the Orleans Club or the Gunnison Club and Exchange.

Bob called his fifth saloon the Omaha Club and the grand opening was on Tuesday, June 7th. He engaged two musicians to play violin along with the piano man and charged his eager and agog patrons one dollar to dance a five-minute mazourka, schottische, or waltz with pretty girls they’d only gaped at with longing in the past. An intermission followed each song, during which the girls were encouraged to get their partners up to the bar or go back with them to private tents, splitting the receipts of each enterprise with Bob. So many yearning men crowded into the Omaha Club by eight o’clock that a good deal of the dancing took place on the streets, and it looked so much as if Bob and his girls would be getting rich that Nellie Russell sought Mr. Ford out, saying she’d accept any job with him, even one as a prostitute.

They strolled together up Rio Grande Avenue and Bob made the usual interrogations, learning that Miss Russell grew up in St. Joseph, Missouri, and would have been a girl of ten when Bob was living there in the cottage. She said at night children would crouch by the sitting room windows of 1318 Lafayette in order to frighten themselves by seeing the ghost of Jesse James. She’d never seen it but a boyfriend said the apparition once spooked him, appearing near a looking-glass, like vapor from a teapot except for his scowling and piercing blue eyes. She said the place had been such an upsetting experience for the people who’d rented it over the past ten years that the cost had dropped from the fourteen dollars per month that Thomas Howard had paid to the bargain price of eight, and still no one would stay there. It was being sold for taxes when she left to come West.

Bob used that advantage to change the subject and ask why she’d come to Creede.

Nellie shrugged. “You go down any street in America and you’ll see signs about folks getting rich in Creede. And I guess I liked the sound of it; I mean the word Creede. Don’t you?”

Bob guffawed at her ignorance and said, “It isn’t even the man’s actual name! His real name was William Harvey! Only reason. N.C. came West was his girlfriend jilted him and married his older brother. Shouldn’t make it religious or anything.”

“Still. You get a good feeling from it.”

“You don’t always,” he said.

The canyon’s cliffs and buttes castled over them, deep black against a deep blue sky. The conflagration had gutted a good many lodgings in Creede and the uprooted had been transplanted into Jimtown, where they slept on the ground like island people, like serfs. Bob could see the lights of cooking fires and cigarettes in the foothills, and as they strolled along with their practical conversation, he could hear the happy uproar of the Omaha Club as the musicians played “Pop Goes the Weasel,” but under that he could pick out the hopeful talk of shopkeepers, prospectors, workers, and clerks who’d lost what few things they had.

She angled her head to regard him. “I could’ve recognized you anywhere. You’re just like your photograph.”

He glanced at her with slight annoyance. “I’m not just like the boy in that photograph though. I’ve aged.”

“I thought you were so daring and romantic. I thought you were the most glamorous man alive.”

“I get along fine with girls of ten, it’s when they grow to be eleven or twelve that I’m a goner.”

She giggled and then her thoughts must have anguished her for she grew taciturn, her gray eyes looked at something remote in the night, she gripped a shawl around her with a pale fist at her breasts. Two minutes passed and then she became embarrassed by her own silence. “I guess an angel must be flying over us.”

Bob made no comment.

She said, “The mountains are so steep everywhere! It’s like you’re inside an envelope!”

Bob spied her profile and her especially pretty smile. He said, “You were going to ask me about what Jesse was like.”

“How’d you know?”

“They always do.” Bob gentled Miss Russell’s elbow to guide her around for the descending walk to the Omaha Club, and then he glided his right hand to her lower back, feeling the girl’s letting through her cool gown. He said, “He was bigger than you can imagine, and he couldn’t get enough to eat. He was hungry all the time. He ate all the food in the dining room and then he ate all the plates and the glasses and the light off the candles; he ate all the air in your lungs and the thoughts right out of your mind. You’d go to him, wanting to be with him, wanting to be like him, and you’d always come away missing something.” Bob looked at the girl with anger and of course she was looking peculiarly at him. He said, “So now you know why I shot him.”

Miss Russell sighted the ground as they walked, and when she spoke again there was grief in her voice. “My father would read to us about it from the newspapers he bought. He said we were living through a great moment in history. He thought you’d done the world a big favor.”

Bob said, “On your right is the Leadville Headquarters. Over there is the smithy’s shop. You can’t see them from here but I’ve got four green tents behind the club and men go in and out all night.”

She said, “You’re making me sad.”

He could see by the lights in her eyes that the girl was crying. “You ought to go back.”

She shook her head in the negative but wouldn’t say anything.

He said, “Don’t work for me.”

“No?”

“You’ve got your dignity yet; I wouldn’t give it away for money.”

Dancing had given way to an intermission and groomed men in ugly brown clothes were lingering around the club and standing on Rio Grande, smoking cigarettes, spitting juice, glowering at Bob and the girl.

She said, “Maybe I’ll go then,” and Bob suggested she might find other work in Jimtown. And though she said she might try some stores in the morning and even seemed grateful to Bob, Miss Nellie Russell of St. Joseph, Missouri, instead purchased whiskey and some grains of morphine and that night committed suicide.

IT WAS MIDNIGHT
when Deputy Sheriff Ed Kelly righted himself from his cot and gave an ear to the nickering of a horse. He sought out his gun and scurried across the earthen floor of his cabin, getting to the rough board door just as it was rapped. He opened it with his gun cocked and peered out at a man he didn’t recognize, with a brown jawbeard and mustache and orange beaver coat. The man grinned at Kelly’s longjohns and said in a high Southern voice, “You and wash soap ought to meet once or twice.”

“Do I know you?”

“You got your eyes open?”

“You woke me.”

The man sagged against the cabin logs and looked down Bachelor mountain into the gulch and the fog of light that was all they could see of Jimtown. “You hear that music?”

Kelly stepped out with his pistol by his hip. He could just make out a piano.

The man lighted a cigar and said, “It’s the Omaha Club. Bob Ford’s having his grand opening tonight.”

Kelly spit to his right. “I’ll give him a grand opening one of these days.”

The man ticked his head. “I come to tell ya regarding that. He’s got on one of his periodicals and he’s puffed himself up to say he’s going to kill Ed Kelly on sight.”

“Why, that son of a bitch!”

“And Bob’s one of the most plausible talkers I ever seen.”

“I expect he’ll ask me to turn my back first.”

The man sucked on his cigar and looked at it as he blew smoke. “You oughta do something.”

Kelly agreed. “I’ll go down there now and give him a straightening.”

“I’d give it till around afternoon if I was you.” He then put the cigar in his mouth and soon thereafter disappeared.

ON THE MORNING
of June 8th, 1892, the body of Miss Nellie Russell was brought in by railroad crewmen and on the instigation of Dorothy Evans a subscription paper was made up to cover her funeral expenses. The Omaha Club prostitutes accepted the responsibility of collecting the philanthropies, and Dorothy went upstairs to raise Bob from sleep.

She said, “You know that girl you were talking to about a job? She went and killed herself.”

Bob sighed, “Oh God!” and gazed at nothing for some time.

Dorothy could find nothing to say that would subtract from his grief, so she only read a distillery’s mail-order form out loud to Bob as he dressed in his gentleman’s clothes. He flexed a stiff celluloid collar around his neck and closed it with a gold collar button that Soapy Smith would eventually carry as a good luck charm; then he adjusted a yellow cravat around the collar and affixed the cravat with a milk white opal pin. He asked Dorothy, “How do I look?” and she answered, “Very distinguished,” without lifting her eyes.

He ate a segment of her sugar doughnut and checked his mustache in a looking-glass and he slumped against a closet door as he thought about Miss Russell. Sunlight was coming in around the green window shades and a light breeze made them angle inside the room and subside again, lightly tapping the sill. Bob said he thought he would go for the mail; Dorothy thought she would stay inside with her sewing and magazines. She said, “You were right not to give her a job,” and Bob went out without saying goodbye.

Dorothy Evans would be married in 1900 to a Mr. James Feeney of Durango, Colorado. She would adopt two daughters, one of them nearly deaf, and, according to gossip, she would mistreat them. Her legal marriage would be no more joyous than her common-law marriage was and Mr. Feeney would leave her to make book at the races in Trinidad and Pueblo. She told a neighbor in June 1902, “My husband is gone, my health is miserable, I’ve mortgaged all the furniture, we scarcely have anything of our own,” and on Friday the 13th she sent a daughter to a drugstore with a note asking for fifty cents’ worth of chloroform. On Sunday morning she got into her green silk wedding dress, telling her daughters she was going to take a nap. She then poured the chloroform into a cloth and pressed it to her nose until she slept so deeply that she perished.

Bob skimmed the mail and then collected his subscription newspapers and rode a mare down to the Rio Grande River to read them. He hung his suit coat on a limb and sat on the brown paper sleeve that the Denver newspaper was mailed in. Shade dappled him; the grass whispered. Sunlight glinted on a river that would still be cold with snow. Boys with fishing poles were near the water, plunking out hooks that were yellow with corn. The Republican National Convention was meeting in Minneapolis. President Benjamin Harrison was expected to be renominated. The Dalton gang robbed the Santa Fe Railroad at Red Rock in the Indian Territories and a manhunt was under way. Bob smiled and said, “Good luck.” He got an apple from his coat pocket and ate it as he flipped pages. He saw a stick-float spin in the water and then dip and he sat up to watch a boy pull the fish to land. It curled out of the water once and then splashed wildly and abruptly disappeared. The boy complained and Bob put on his coat, giving the apple core to his mare before he rode back to Jimtown.

Deputy Sheriff Edward O. Kelly came down from Bachelor at 1 p.m. on the 8th. He had no grand scheme, no strategy, no agreement with higher authorities, nothing beyond a vague longing for glory and a generalized wish for revenge against Robert Ford. He ate a sandwich and soup at Newman Vidal’s restaurant and was joined by a French Canadian named Joe Duval. Duval would later maintain that Kelly informed him then about a message he’d been given, Kelly saying, “I’m not gonna give the dirty cur a chance to shoot me like he did his cousin, Jesse James.” The two acted accordingly. They walked to a machinist’s shop and there sawed a lead pipe into eighth-inch sections that French Joe chiseled in half. Duval was carrying with him a ten-gauge shotgun with twin barrels. Kelly removed the shells, cut off the paper tops, and emptied the shot pellets onto the ground, repacking the shells with extra gunpowder before reinserting them into the gun. He made a paper funnel and poured the pipe shrapnel through it into the right shotgun barrel and then the left. Duval shut his long coat around the shotgun and walked away with the walnut stock against the leggings of his right boot.

Edward O. Kelly would be ordered to serve a life sentence in the Colorado penitentiary for second-degree murder and French Joe Duval, his accomplice, would be given a term of two years. Over seven thousand signatures would eventually be gathered on a petition asking for Kelly’s release, and in 1902 Governor James B. Orman would pardon the man. Kelly began writing gruesome letters to Bob Ford’s widow in Durango but otherwise did nothing except get arrested on charges of vagrancy and ramble from one insignificant town to the next. He begged Jesse James, Jr., for room and board and the young attorney obliged Kelly for more than a month, but then the man strayed off again, going at last to Oklahoma City. And there, in January 1904 Kelly tangled with a policeman arresting him for burglary, chewing on the policeman’s ears as they fought until the man got out his pistol and shot Kelly through the head. His body was put in a potter’s field without rites or ceremony.