by Ron Hansen
Frank slimed the cigarette he’d made and struck a match off his boot sole. “You’re not so special, Mr. Ford.” He inhaled tobacco smoke and let it crawl from his mouth before he blew it. “You’re just like any other tyro who’s prinked himself up for an escapade; You’re hoping to be a gunslinger like those nickel books are about, but you may as well quench your mind of it. You don’t have the ingredients.”
“I’m sorry to hear you feel that way,” said Bob, “since I put such stock in your opinions.” He slapped a mosquito and looked at his blood-freckled palm and stood, rehatting his short, baby-fine hair. “As for me being a gunslinger, I’ve just got this one granddaddy Patterson Colt and a borrowed belt to stick it in. But I’ve also got an appetite for greater things. I hoped joining up with you would put me that much closer to getting them. And that’s the plain and simple truth of the matter.”
“So what do you want me to say?”
“You’ll let me be your sidekick tonight.”
“Sidekick?” said Frank. He’d heard the term applied solely to matched horses in a team-span.
“So you can see my grit and intelligence.”
Frank examined his cigarette, sucked it once more, and flipped it onto a roadbed tie where the butt was later shredded under a railroad detective’s laced shoe. He said, “I don’t know what it is about you, but the more you talk, the more you give me the willies. I don’t believe I even want you as close as earshot this evening.”
“I’m sorry—”
“Why don’t you go?” Frank said and the boy tramped up the hill, slapping weeds aside.
THE LATE CLELL MILLER’S kid brother Ed had imposed a large iron pot in the hoop of his saddle lariat, and he and Dick Liddil scrounged for wild onions and scarecrowed vegetables as Jesse gardened his rant into a second hour. He cut and rooted and cultivated until he’d worked on Shelby in the Civil War and the might of iron submarines and Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln’s hysterics. Often he was facetious, but no one adventured a smile until Jesse did. His audience varied according to jobs they were expected to perform—steeds needed tending, roads needed watching, rookies were bossed into cooking chores—and each vacated seat was bullied over as Jesse continued what he liked to call wabash.
His cousin Robert Woodson Hite remained on his left, sulking and mooning the afternoon through over some imagined slight. Next to Wood was his nineteen-year-old brother, Clarence, who was stooped and consumptive and slack-jawed, and as void of calculation as a sponge. Persevering too was Charley Ford, who snorkled mucus and spit it, who chuckled and hee-hawed soon after the others did, continuing on with his bray seconds after the others had ceased, and who covered his left boot with a corrupted coat in order to conceal a clubfoot that practiced walking had made practically imperceptible. He had abetted the ransacking of the express car on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway, which the James gang had boarded on July 15th, and gave accommodations to the outlaws afterward at his sister’s place near Richmond. So he was in good favor. His brother William had married the sister of Jim Cummins, which was how Charley was initially noticed, and he hunted pigeons and turtledoves with Ed Miller, who had recruited him into the James gang by introducing him to Jesse on a gambling night in 1879—he had impressed Jesse as a savvy, sporting man then; just how Charley never could fathom.
Charles Wilson Ford was a rail-thin, rough, and likeably ignorant country boy who apologized for his failings before they could be found out: there was something of a good-natured dog about him, something hungry and grateful and vulnerable that made up for his general vulgarity. His lackluster brown eyes were sunk in his skull and his right eye was slanted enough to look akilter and borrowed and slapdash. Mismatched also were his ears (the right appeared to have taken wing), and his teeth (his overbite made it seem as if he were incessantly sucking his lower lip). He had heavy black eyebrows and a black mustache no coarser than body hair, that never seemed more than a random smear of newsprint under his nose. His complexion was pestered with acne, his fingers often looked shoe-grimed, he spoke with a paltry lisp that somehow made him seem younger than twenty-four.
Jesse was on the subject of the first electric power plant, which Thomas A. Edison was constructing on Pearl Street in New York City. He explained, incorrectly, how the incandescent lamp worked, and Charley stabbed at the dirt with a stick or pinched scarlet eruptions on his shoulder and neck or measured the others with sidelong glances. Then a boy in a gray stovepipe hat emerged from the snaggles and claws of the woods and reached into the blue smoke of the fire and praised the miscellaneous stew and principally slouched about doing fraudulent chores in order to eavesdrop on Jesse. At last Clarence Hite relinquished his seat and the boy pushed John Bugler aside and capered over boots and legs and wormed down next to Charley Ford with the incivility and intrusion that bespoke brotherhood. The boy had been introduced to Jesse more than once but the outlaw saw no reason then to store the kid’s name, and now, as he culled a list that Frank had read aloud Monday night, he kept returning to the name Bunny. The boy nodded like a horse whenever Jesse’s words seemed to want affirmation; whenever Jesse leavened his chat with humor the younger Ford boy laughed overloudly and infectiously with whoops and idiotic rises, like a knuckle-run on a piano. His were the light-checkered blue eyes that never strayed, the ears that picked up each nuance and joke, the amen looks that suggested he understood Jesse as no one else could.
Frank returned from his reconnaissance and scowled at the loiterers even as he drank black coffee with a carefree Jim Cummins. Dick Liddil rattled a wooden kitchen tool around inside the iron pot and sang “Chowtime!” and the gang filed by the fire with invented spoons and bowls. The Ford boy was the last to get up, finding his legs only when Jesse stood and closing on him like a valet.
“Am I too late to wish you Happy Birthday?”
Jesse grinned. “How’d you know?”
Bob Ford ticked his head. “You’d be surprised at what I’ve got stored away. I’m an authority on the James boys.”
Jesse asked, “Your name isn’t Bunny Ford, is it?”
The boy was so avid to second whatever Jesse said that he nearly admitted it was, but checked himself and corrected, “Why no. It’s Robert Ford.”
“Of course it is.”
“Bob.”
Jesse simpered a little and walked to the fire; Bob sidled and hopped to keep in stride with him. Jesse said, “I don’t recollect: you’ve never been with the gang before, have you?”
“Oh no sirree. I’m a virgin.” Bob thumbed back his stovepipe hat and grinned just as Jesse might. “At least in that one respect, if you get my meaning.”
“Yes?”
“I’ve been fretting and fidgeting like I had ants down my pants the entire afternoon. Your brother and I had a real nice visit over toward the railroad, chatting about this and that, enjoying each other’s company, but otherwise I’ve been organizing my mind and working at calming my innards.”
“Cook alum,” Jesse said, and took a heaped bowl and spoon from a man in a gunnysack apron. Jesse lowered onto a stump in his vast gray coat and Bob sat on the earth at his feet with his holster removed and his own coat opened for rather overdue ventilation. Jesse chewed and wiped his mouth on his hand. “Do you know what this stew needs?”
“Dumplings?”
“Noodles. You eat yourself some noodle stew and your clock will tick all night. You ever see that woman over in Fayette could suck noodles up her nose?”
“Don’t believe I have,” said Bob.
“You’ve got canals in your head you never dreamed of.”
Bob was scraping his stew out of a blue envelope. Juice broke from a corner and spoiled his trouser fly in a manner that suggested incontinence. He would not notice this until later. He flapped the envelope into the fire and licked his spoon with a hound’s care before submerging it in his pocket. He said, “Your brother Frank and I had just a real nice visit this afternoon. Must’ve been a hundred subjects entertained, having
to do with the Chicago and Alton Railroad and the U.S. Express Company and assignments on board the cars.”
Jesse had closed his eyes but kept the spoon in his mouth. He exercised a crick in his neck.
Bob went on. “Well, the upshot of our visit together was we sort of mutually agreed that the best thing for all parties concerned would be if I could use my huge abilities as your helper and, you know, apprentice. So we could be confederates together and come out of this unscathed. That was the upshot.”
“Well, Buck does the figuring.” Jesse looked at his bowl of stew. “Do you want the rest of this?”
“I’m sorta off my feed.”
“Hate to waste it.”
“My innards are riled as it is.”
Jesse arose and dumped his leftovers into the iron pot and gave over his bowl and spoon to a boy for washing. He said to Bob, “If you order a beefsteak in a restaurant and they don’t broil it long enough? Don’t ever send it back, because if you do the cook spits all over your food; tinctures it something putrid.”
Bob was dumbfounded. He said, “I don’t like to harp on a subject but—”
“I don’t care who comes with me,” Jesse said. “Never have. I’m what they call gregarious.”
Bob smiled in his never-quit way. Frank was drinking coffee and scowling again as he walked over from the far side of the fire. Jesse raised his voice. “I hear tell you and young Stovepipe here had a real nice visit.”
Frank looked askance at Robert Ford and flung on the ground the remains of his coffee. He dried the tin cup with his elbow. “Your boys have about an acre of rock to haul, Dingus. You’d better goose them down yonder.”
THEY SKIDDED a rain-surrendered cottonwood tree down the bank and horsed it over the polished steel rails, ripping bark away from the bone-colored wood. They carried limestone and sandstone and earth-sprinkling rocks that were the sizes of infants and milk cans and sleeping cats, and these they hilled and forted about the tree as shovels sang and picks splintered and inveigling footpaths caved in along the vertical Blue Cut excavations. Jesse supervised the rock-piling, recommending land to be mined for stone, dedicating his men to various jobs once the locomotive was shut down, chewing a green cigar black. Shadows grew into giants and died as the sun burned orange and sank. Mosquitoes flitted from hand to cheek until a night wind channeled east on the tracks and carried the insects away, even tore the ash of cigarettes and battened light coats over backs on the higher exposures. Clouds bricked overhead and were brindled pink, then crimson and violet; leaves sailed like paper darts and the air carried the tang of cattle and hogs and chimney smoke.
Frank was a solemn sentinel on the southern ridge, big as a park bronze of the honored dead, two inches taller than most of his men and majestic with confidence and dignity and legend. Bob Ford heaved rock and yanked the horses to creek water and stirred the camp fire out, and each time he passed Frank James he said “Hello” or “How do you do?” until Dick Liddil indicated that robbers crossed paths with each other many times in the course of an evening to-do and Frank considered it silly to even once exchange pleasantries.
Jesse, on the other hand, was the soul of friendliness and commerce, acknowledging each of Bob’s remarks, letting the boy ingratiate himself, rewarding him with trivial tasks that Bob executed with zeal. Then he asked Bob to strike a match as he read the dial of a pocket watch in a gold hunting case, stolen from a judge near Mammoth Cave. The clock instructed him and he retreated into the dark and after some minutes returned with a kerosene lantern and with a burlap grain sack over his arm like a waiter’s towel. “You can stick with me but don’t heel. I don’t want to bust into you every time I have the notion to change direction.”
Bob muttered, “I’m not a moron, for Heaven’s sake,” but his irritation was quiet and his head down—one might have thought his boots had ears.
Jesse wasn’t listening anyway. He scrubbed his teeth with his linen shirt collar and bulged his lips and cheeks with his cleansing tongue. He curtained his coat halves over his unmatched, pearl-handled pistols (a .44 caliber Smith and Wesson and a Colt .45 in crossed holsters), but he kept his gray suit jacket buttoned at the lapels in accordance with fashion. He told the boy, “They’re supposed to have a hundred thousand dollars in that express car; at least that’s what the gossip is.”
Bob smiled, but there was something incorrect and tortured about it. He said, “My fingers are already starting to itch.”
Jesse squatted and struck a match and turned up the flame on the lantern, then wadded a red flannel sleeve around the glass chimney under the curled wire protectors. The yellow light rubied.
“That’s ideal,” Frank called. He was on the south ridge above Jesse and the railroad tracks, up where the grade increased and horseshoed to the right, about twenty yards east of the rock accumulation on the rails. Dick Liddil, Wood Hite, Jim Cummins, Ed Miller, and Charley Ford were near Frank, murmuring and smoking and sitting or squatting with rifles erect on their thighs, their fingers inside the trigger housings. The Cracker Neck boys, the sickly sharecroppers and have-nots, had congregated with Jesse and been instructed to range along Blue Cut’s northern ridge, which they did in a lackadaisical fashion: they rambled far down the tracks, grew lonesome, rejoined, huddled, bummed cigarettes, strewed out again and perilously crossed paths with each other in the night of the woods. Frank commented, “They’re going to trip and shoot each other into females.”
Dick Liddil said, “I bet I can find them husbands if they do,” and that jollied even Frank.
Jesse held the lantern over his pocket watch. Both hands were near the IX. He said, “About two years ago we robbed the same railroad, only it was right in Glendale we boarded her.”
“I know that,” said Bob, a little peeved and superior. “You may not realize it yet but I’m a storehouse of information about the James gang. I mean, I’ve followed your careers.” Bob had snipped two eyeholes from a white handkerchief and this he stuffed under his stovepipe hat so that it concealed all but his mouth and chin. However, he had cut one hole slightly low and inside of where it should have been, resulting in a mask that gave the impression he was cock-eyed and pitiable, which was not at all what he had in mind.
Jesse looked at him curiously but recommended no alterations. His concerns were apparently historical. “Do you know what happened five years ago to the day? To the day? What happened on September seventh in eighteen seventy-six?”
“You made an attempt on a Northfield, Minnesota, bank.” Bob rummaged in his memory and asked, “Was it owned by General Ben Butler? The Scourge of New Orleans?”
“That’s right,” said Jesse.
“Knew it.”
Jesse said, “Bill Chadwell, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts—they were killed outright. The Youngers have been in prison ever since. It’s painful to recall.”
Bob added unnecessarily, “And you never got a plug nickel from that bank.”
Jesse failed to register a facial reaction; he merely replied, “So you can see how this date would have an aroma for me.”
Then Jesse seemed to pick up a sound as a receptive animal might, twisting sharply to the east, specifying and assessing and then grasping his lantern to walk off the cliff, hopping down ten feet in three plunging, dirt-sloshing steps. He stamped his boots (a pain shooting up his injured ankle) and shook out his trouser cuffs, then knelt to hear locomotive noise translate through the rails. The steel was warm and burnished with wear and smooth as a spoon to his ear. The hum was like insects in a jar. He called to his older brother, “She’s right on schedule, Buck.”
Frank was smoking another cigarette and beguiling Dick Liddil and Charley Ford with long passages from The Life of King Henry the Fifth, ending with, “ ‘But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.’ ”
Dick Liddil asked, “How much of that you got memorized?”
“Over a thousand lines.”
“You’re a man of learning.”
“Yes, I am.” Frank rubbed his cigarette out against the rough bark of a tree. “You’d better go down to Jesse.”
Jesse raised his blue bandana over his nose as soon as he could make out the boiler cadence, and he placed his right boot on the rail as Dick Liddil slid down the southern cliff, ouching and cussing and clutching weed brakes. Dick then tied a red bandana over his nose and ambled over, shaking dust from a beige shirt and from brown pants that were so long for his legs and were so creased with constant use that they looked like concertinas.
The locomotive’s chuffing was growing loud. Jesse’s right foot tickled with rail vibrations. He looked around and saw Liddil to his right with his Navy Colt hung in his hand, the Hites and Ed Miller to the east, preparing to strongarm the passengers, many other boys ranged along the cut with Henry rifles slung over their wrists, Bob Ford on the cliff behind him, looking like a gunfighter.
Jesse could hear the locomotive decelerate on the grade, hear the creaks and complaints as the carriages listed north on the curve. The brass headlamp’s aisle of white light filled the passage called Blue Cut and streaked across scrub brush and into the forest, causing Charley Ford to blind his eyes, and then the light bent and flooded toward Jesse. The cowcatcher hunted the tracks and the black smoke billowed into hillocks and mountains over the smokestack and train, and Jesse swung his flannel-red lantern over the rails in a yardmaster’s signal to stop.
The engineer was Chappy Foote. He had his elbow and goggled head out the cab window and his left fingers on the handle for the steam brake valve. On seeing the lantern, he leaned his body out and concluded that a freight train had stalled on the grade until he saw the man’s bandana and ten yards behind him the high rubble on the rails. He turned to his fireman as he yanked the valve handle and yelled, “Looks like we’re going to be robbed!”