The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (50 page)

Robert Newton Ford worked in the Omaha Club on the afternoon of June 8th, stocking the bar with his overnight whiskey and getting jiggers of it for some of the Cornish miners sitting there. He removed his suit coat and hung it on a nail and then unfastened his cartridge belt, winding it around his gun and snugging it against the cash register. A man named Walter Thomson from Kansas City commented on Bob’s opal stickpin, saying opals brought bad luck.

Bob said, “My luck isn’t very good as it is. I guess an opal couldn’t change it much.”

The man said he knew what Bob meant.

The sun was high and the day growing hot. Some men had given a burro a pan of beer rather than water and they were laughing as the pack animal staggered down San Luis Avenue. Deputy Sheriff Plunket saw Ed Kelly crouched in an alley’s shade, looking at the Omaha Club, but considered it only another example of the man’s peculiarity.

A pretty entertainer named Ella Mae Waterson crossed into the Omaha Club with the completed subscription papers for Miss Nellie Russell and Bob perused the list of contributors, giving his opinion of each. She said Soapy Smith signed up just before going off to Denver that morning. Bob ascertained that Smith had pledged five dollars, so just below that line Bob printed his own name along with a pledge of twice that. And, paraphrasing from an epistle of Peter, he appended the inscription “Charity covereth a multitude of sins.”

It was twenty minutes to four when French Joe Duval, with whiskey in him, lunged around the corner of The Cafe and up toward the Omaha Club, struggling a shotgun out from under his long coat. A boy named Albert Lord scooted from the smithy’s shop to the club in order to change a twenty-dollar bill for his father and Edward O. Kelly was right behind him, slowing only long enough to grab the shotgun from French Joe and then pressing the cold metal to the boy’s neck like a kiss as he whispered, “Step aside, Albert.”

The deputy sheriff of Bachelor crossed from sunlight into the yellow light of the tent and caught the man who shot Jesse James laughing with Ella Mae Waterson, giving his back to the street. Kelly sighted down the shotgun and said, “Hello, Bob!” And as Bob was turning as a gentleman might to a greeting he recognized, the shotgun ignited once and again from five feet away, clumped sprays of shrapnel ripping into the man’s neck and jawbone, ripping though his carotid artery and jugular vein, stripping skin away, and nailing the gold collar button into scantling wood. His body jolted backward, jolted the floorboards, and Ella Mae Waterson screamed, but Robert Ford only looked at the ceiling, the light going out of his eyes before he could say the right words.

M
Y SOURCES FOR THIS
novel have principally been the Missouri newspapers of the period and the following:
The Man Who Shot Jesse James
by Carl W Breihan,
The Crittenden Memoirs
by H. H. Crittenden,
Jesse James Was My Neighbor
by Homer Cray,
The New Eldorado
by Phyllis Flanders Dorset, and
Jesse James Was His Name
by William A. Settle. I would like to express my gratitude to those authors for their information and guidance, and to the National Endowment for the Arts and the University of Michigan Society of Fellows for grants that helped me complete this novel.

R.H.

Ron Hansen is the author of eight novels, two collections of stories, and a book of essays. He graduated from Creighton University in Omaha and went on to study at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University. His novel
Atticus
was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His novel
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
, also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, was adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. Hansen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives with his wife, novelist Bo Caldwell, in Northern California, and teaches at Santa Clara University.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1983 by Ron Hansen

Cover design by Mauricio Diaz

978-1-4804-2388-6

This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media

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