The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel (5 page)

Jesse squeezed past the porter, Williams, who had already been frisked, and pushed into the sleeping car, flinging green velvet drapes aside as he passed each berth. He shocked a yellow old woman whose hair was braided, whose frail hands were in prayer; otherwise the sleeper seemed empty until he parted the exit drapes and saw in the foyer two women in nightgowns and a piano of a fat man all huddled around the conductor. Something in the group’s timidity dispirited Jesse and he exited onto the platform, where he saw that Frank and some of the others were on the cinder bed shedding loot into a flour sack. Near the caboose were workers on the freight train who’d slunk forward to innocuously watch and whisper about the activities. Horses had been fetched and they nickered and fussed in the attic of weeds and timber over the cut. Wood Hite and Ed Miller had entered the sleeper with fire axes that they used to rip bedding off and snag mattresses from their boxes. The gang’s visitation on the Chicago and Alton had now lasted nearly forty-five minutes and was beginning to deteriorate into carousal. Jesse went back inside the sleeping car and shouted, “Okay! Let’s vamoose!” Then he twisted the neck of his grain sack and limped forward outside the sleeper and ladies’ coach, exaggerating the heft of the valuables as the victims peeked under the curtains. He saw Frank Burton sitting on a platform, looking bankrupt, and asked how much was stolen from him. The young brakeman answered that he’d given up fifty cents and that was all he had.

It was later recorded that Jesse dug into the grain sack and gave Burton a dollar and fifty cents, saying, “This is principal and interest on your money.”

Jesse delivered the loot to Jim Cummins, who’d reappeared after one of his typical evaporations, and he uttered a kindness to Henry Fox, who was looking scalped and catatonic, his ears sirening. (He resigned from his job within the month and sued the express company for damages, without luck.) Having been relieved of his assignment, Bob Ford scrabbled up the bank to the woods and scuttled through bracken, nettles, and thorns to the gathered horses, where he removed the white mask with the cut-out eyes. Charley Ford sidled over to his kid brother and said, “I was in top form tonight.”

“That messenger, he’s going to have trouble recalling his
name!
”

Charley leered. “Surely gave him a goose-egg, didn’t I?”

“Goodness!”

Charley asked, “Did you see me roast that one gent for standing on his cash?”

“No,” Bob said, “I missed that. I was outside, y’see.”

“He kind of skidded when he walked was how I knew. Must’ve had his shoe atop fifty dollars. And his wife, she was in a state, her beady little eyes all squinched up.”

“Really took the cake, did she?”

“Oh my, yes,” said Charley. “Jesse’s gonna be satisfied with me.”

Jesse James was then walking the engineer to a locomotive that was slowly susurrating, his right arm slung over Foote’s shoulders, his manner affectionate and delighted, his mood invigorating. At the cab Jesse athletically shook the man’s hand, leaving a silver coin in the engineer’s palm like a sidewalk magician. Chappy Foote later claimed he said, “You are a valiant man and I am a little stuck on you. Here’s a dollar so you can drink to the health of Jesse James tomorrow morning.”

“Obliged” was all that Foote could think to mutter.

“Now, what about that roadblock? Shall I have the gang remove those stones? I could hitch a team to that cottonwood and tow it right off the rails.”

“No, don’t bother. To tell you the truth, about the best thing you could do for me is take yourself and your party far away from here.”

Jesse said, “All right, partner. Good night,” and clambered up the bank in his billowing gray coat, reducing into darkness.

THE JAMES GANG
walked their horses south through scrub brush and over fire ash that was no warmer than a morning bed. They loped onto a road and into a gully and threshed through a cornfield with tassels high as the saddle cantles. There Frank moved among the veterans, distributing each man’s allotment of cash and luxuries, auctioning off the gold watches and Mexican jewels, burning the securities and non-negotiable papers. Clarence Hite would later confess that each share was one hundred forty dollars but he was wretched at sums and unlikely to suspect chicanery, so it is probable that he was cheated, as were Andy Ryan, John Bugler, John Land, and Matt and Creed Chapman. Jesse had already piloted them over to a cowpath by a creek and, according to John Land, explained, “Boys, we just haven’t got time to divide the loot now—they’re too hot for us—and we didn’t get the money we expected to anyhow, but we’ll all meet on the right fork of the Blue River a week from tonight and you’ll get your cut there.” He never really intended to meet them again; the country boys were only meant to provide security during the robbery and easy prey for the sheriff afterward. On the night of the 7th, they rode off in five directions, feeling rather pleased with themselves, but by the evening of September 10th, Andy Ryan and John Land had been arrested in shacks near Glendale, Matt Chapman and John Bugler had been jailed, and Creed Chapman was only weeks away from a six-month imprisonment in which he lost forty-two pounds.

The James gang segregated into three groups before riding out of the cornfield. Jim Cummins and Ed Miller navigated eastward for Miller’s house in Saline County; Dick Liddil and Wood Hite crossed the river near Blue Mills in order to rusticate on the rented farm of Martha Bolton, the widowed sister of the Fords, whom they were both trying to romance; the James brothers, the Ford brothers, and Clarence Hite rode west into Kansas City under a cold rain that moved over them from the north and knuckled their hats and sank their horses inches deep in the mire of wide, empty streets.

Zee James was asleep on the sofa when her husband creaked the kitchen door and surprised her awake with a kiss, and she boiled water in a saucepan as Jesse chaired himself in his soaked coat and lied unnecessarily about a cattle auction in Independence where he’d purchased twenty steers at below market price and right away sold them by an exchange of telegrams with a livestock buyer in Omaha.

Zee didn’t raise her eyes from the saucepan. “So you’ve got money again?”

“Come out of it real satisfactory.” He was jubilant and still energized by adrenaline, an excitement he had come to crave like caffeine. He jumped up from his chair and gandered out at the red barn. He said, “Guess who I ran into.”

She gave Jesse a wifely look and got a jar down from a pantry shelf.

He said, “Buck, for one. Then Clarence Hite and two coves of his. They’re with the animals right now.”

“They do satisfactory at the auction too?”

He grinned. “About the most they ask is that they come out of a swap with all their toes and fingers.” He then adjusted a dry hat on his head and without justifying his exit went out to the stables.

Red coal-oil lanterns gladdened the interior of the barn but Frank James was glooming about and glaring at the younger men’s slipshod management of their horses. He saw Jesse at the Dutch door and sat on a long bench, his legs wide and his forearms on them, his rough hands joined around a yellow cigarette. The James brothers were not exceptionally close as boys and as they grew older were scarcely a pair—more than occasionally they were not even on speaking terms—so it was not particularly surprising that Jesse preferred not to seek out Frank’s company but stood just inside the sloshing eave and peered at his melancholy and peaked cousin Clarence and then at Charley Ford, who gave up wiping the waxy coat of his mare to attempt juggling the weighted pins that Jesse had dropped in the stall. Then Jesse abruptly perceived that the stripling Bob Ford had approached from his right. “You must’ve creeped up on cat’s paws.”

Bob smiled. “I’ll wager that’s the first and last time you’ll ever be caught off-guard.” He no longer wore the overlarge coat or stovepipe hat, only green trousers with light green stripes and a collarless, yellowed shirt that plainly itched. He looked European, principally French, in spite of his blue eyes, and was not as scrawny as he initially appeared to be, but was muscular in a nuggety way, each sinew strapped to its bone as clearly as shoelaces on a shoe. Jesse could smell Mrs. S. A. Allen’s Zylo Balsamum Hair Dressing (which he too favored) on the boy’s ginger brown hair. They were exactly the same height.

“How old are you, kid?”

“Twenty,” he said, and then corrected himself. “Except I won’t really be twenty until January.” He scratched his sleeve apologetically and answered again, “I’m nineteen.”

“You
feel
older than that though, don’t you?”

Bob acknowledged that he did. A pigeon stirred on a rafter and cocked its head at a man flinging wooden objects into the air.

“You enjoy yourself this evening?” Jesse asked.

“I was strung too high for much pleasure.”

Jesse seemed to think that was an appropriate remark and something in the boy’s manner of speaking inspired Jesse to ask, “Do you like tea?” And when Bob said he did (though he didn’t), Jesse invited him up to the bungalow without saying goodbye to the others. They were then gathering around a clove cake on which orange gumdrops spelled Grampa, part of the loot that Clarence Hite had pilfered on the coach. The younger men sat on the ground around Frank, and Clarence recapitulated some of the robbery’s disputes and amusements, emphasizing his valor, fabricating badly, boring both Charley and Frank in such a thoroughgoing way that they beguiled themselves by eating the gumdrops and cake, Frank ripping out large segments that he carefully squeezed into his palm until they were roundly packed, only then popping them into his mouth.

Charley listened to Hite with impatience, almost petulance, a smile tucked like licorice in his mouth, his eyes glazed. When his ear at last learned of a stillness, he awoke and lurched into long and wearying stories about the Fords. He talked about their childhood in Fairfax County, Virginia, in rented rooms in George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. He talked about sailing paper boats on the Potomac River, clambakes on the Atlantic coast, or playing doctor with the late president’s great-granddaughters while guests from foreign countries walked the grounds. He talked about the Moore School near Excelsior Springs and about Seybold’s Tavern and its sleeping rooms, in which the roughneck and frightening Younger gang retired on more than one occasion while the owner and his nephews, Bob and Charley Ford, looked on with reverence.

He said Bob once shot a milk cow because it kicked him in the shin during chores, that as kids they chased cats with meat cleavers and chopped off their ears and tails, that ten children once swarmed over Bob and almost choked him to death with a grapevine because he so often bullied them, that he and Bob were horse thieves in high school, rustling colts and fillies for Dutch Henry Born, who was arrested in Trinidad, Colorado, by none other than Sheriff Bat Masterson.

Frank James paid attention to the stories but didn’t pretend much fascination. Charley said, “It sounds like maybe it’s made up, but it’s history, top to bottom.”

Clarence said, “Funny things happen in Colorado. I once saw a cat eat a pickle.”

Frank and Charley regarded him dully and then Frank got together two horse blankets and haggardly walked to an empty stall. “If you two are going to stay up all night, I guess I don’t have to stand guard.”

Clarence asked, “Do you think the sheriff’s out already?”

“Generally is.”

Charley worried that he might have thoughtlessly wronged Frank James or done his own cause some damage, so he slunk over to the stall and gawked as the grim man hung his coat and scraped straw into the shape of a pallet. He said, “I wasn’t just flapping my lips when I spun out those yarns about my kid brother and me. What I figured was if you and Jesse could gauge our courage and daring, why, you just might make us your regular sidekicks.”

Frank jerked a look of umbrage toward Charley and then spread out a wool blanket with his stockinged foot. “You’re beginning to sound like Bob.”

“I’ll be square with you: it was Bob who put me up to it. He’s sharper than I am; he’s smart as a whip. And he’s got plans for the James boys that I can’t even get the hang of, they’re that complicated.”

As he settled achingly into repose, Frank wrapped a horse blanket over his cardigan sweater and supported his head with his right forearm. He said, “You might as well forget everything about that because there’ll be no more monkey business after tonight. You can jot it down in your diary: September seventh, eighteen eighty-one; the James gang robbed one last train at Blue Cut and gave up their nightriding for good.”

Charley hung his biceps over the topmost stall board, disappointed and skeptical. “How will you make your living?”

Frank was smoking a cigarette with his eyes shut. “Maybe I’ll sell shoes.”

JESSE AND BOB
were by then at the round dining room table, letting Zee read the green tea leaves in their mugs. A big candle was the only light and the men’s rapt faces were vaguely orange in the glow as Zee made the prescribed suggestions. They each up-ended their mugs and clocked them around three times as Zee, with a slight giggle, recited, “Tell me faithful, tell me well, the secrets that the leaves foretell.” She then requested that Bob give her his mug and gazed at the green dregs still clinging to the murky bottom. “It looks like a snake.”

Bob got up from his chair and gaped with puzzlement as she obligingly tilted the mug. “You mean that squiggle there?”

“They call it a snake. It’s a sign of antagonism.”

Jesse grinned and slid his own mug across to his wife. “She gets all the fancy talk straight out of
Lorna Doone
.”

Zee peered at her husband’s cup and said, “Yours is no happier, Dave.”

Bob looked interrogatively at a man who was massaging his gums with a finger. “Dave?”

He said, “You know your Good Book? David is the begotten of Jesse.” He winked for reasons that Bob couldn’t intuit. “You might call it my alias. Give me my sorry prophecy, sweetheart.”

Zee gave back the mug. “It looks like an M. It means someone has evil intentions toward you.”