The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel

by Ron Hansen

  Perry Jacobs stopped by the Harbison place at noon on the 20th to pass along that telegraphed news and he sipped coffee with Martha and Bob as Wood Hite and Dick Liddil packed for a trip east to Kentucky. When Dick came downstairs with his coat and bags, Martha kissed him on the lips and whispered something to his ear. He smiled and said, “Oh, goodness! Maybe I’ll change my mind.” But then Wood was behind Dick and bumping him toward the door and after some speedy farewells they were off.

  They rode east sullenly, rarely speaking, rocking on their horses. Wood read a penny newspaper four inches from his nose under the brim shade of his hat; Dick counted crows and chewed sunflower seeds and watched the geography snail by. Brittle weeds slashed away from the horses; children clattered down cornrows with gunnysacks after school, jerking orange ears from the stalks; a young brakeman in a mackinaw sat on a freight car with a slingshot that knocked on far-off barn doors. “Cecil?” someone called out. It took them a week to reach St. Louis, where Dick caroused with someone named Lola who danced on a grand piano. Then the two ramped up onto a Mississippi River barge and worried throughout the long slide south to Cairo. The outlaws couldn’t swim and their water fright contaminated the animals so that they reared and bucked and showed their teeth with each crabbed movement on the current.

  Then as the two outlaws crossed southwest Kentucky from Cairo, Wood began nagging and carping at Dick for his pettiness, his chicanery, and his philandering with Martha, pushing on to an imaginary problem with the divvy at Blue Cut. It was Wood’s contention that Dick stole one hundred dollars from his grain sack in the second-class coach and that he’d never turned it over to Frank when they apportioned the loot afterward. But that was all a smokescreen for his trepidation that Dick would try to romance Wood’s stepmother, Sarah, who was known to be susceptible to passionate attentions.

  Wood’s father was Major George V. Hite, once the richest man in Logan County, Kentucky. He owned a grocery store, a mansion, and six hundred acres eleven miles south of Russellville, close to the Tennessee border, and was said to be worth one hundred thousand dollars when just one dollar represented a man’s daily wage. But he’d invested in the commodities market and lost so much on tobacco and cotton that he filed for bankruptcy in 1877. His first wife, Nancy James Hite, died a year later and he was sundered. After a suitable period of mourning, however, he began to consort with and court Sarah Peck, who was referred to by a newspaper reporter as “the pertest and prettiest widow in all this whole country.” And yet the community was scandalized by their eventual engagement, and the Hite clan was incensed, for Sarah was considered carnal and licentious and was even rumored to have been enjoyed by Jim Cummins in the course of an Easter visit. When Major Hite married the widow, most of his children left the mansion in anger, but the James gang would return whenever they needed seclusion and Jim Cummins made a second career of boasting that he’d tampered with Sarah in a pantry as pork chops burned in a skillet. And by the time Wood skidded the main gate aside and rode onto the Hite property, his case against Dick was so repeatedly and tempestuously made that the two were not speaking at all and only Dick’s promise not to toy with her feelings kept him from being prohibited from the grounds.

  Beautiful thoroughbred horses milled about on the green pasture, colts dashed along the fence and cut away for no particular reason. Two ex-slaves threshed in a golden field a quarter-mile off, a black woman pinned laundry on a clothesline, and Mrs. Sarah Hite was weeding among the withered remains of a vegetable garden, five acorn squash sacked in her apron. One rolled out and dropped to the earth when she waved.

  Wood said, “She eats men alive.”

  Dick licked sunflower seeds from his palm and never paid attention to her; nor did he look at Sarah much at supper when she sat next to her emaciated husband, speaking wifely courtesies into his black ear trumpet. And because his shyness and silence were beginning to show, Dick leaned over his pot roast and asked, “You cook this, ma’am?”

  She shook her head and said, “I’ve got a nigger woman.”

  Hite inclined toward his wife with the trumpet. “Hmmm?”

  “Dick asked if I cooked this.”

  “Did you?”

  “No.”

  Major Hite picked up Sarah’s white hand, which was wristed with lace, and showed it to the assembled like a lovely greeting card. “You boys ever seen such dainty nubbins?” He grinned at her red-faced resentment and said, “Sarah’s my plump little plum.”

  Dick looked at his knife and fork and Wood said, “She knew what he was like when she married him.”

  After dessert the Hites and Dick repaired to the broad porch, where they were seated on chairs that the butler, John Tabor, skidded across the floor. The talk was dull and void of thought, consisting almost entirely of observations that were manifestly true—the railroads make money going each way; it’s no fun being sick; sometimes you don’t know you’ve eaten too much until you get up from the table. At eight-thirty the old man stood with pain and yawned until his body shuddered and said, “Morning comes awful early.” But Sarah said she wasn’t sleepy and stayed with a wicker rocker and embroidered daisies on a kitchen hot pad as the men chatted—Wood and Dick and George Hite, Jr., the grocery store manager, who was grotesquely hunchbacked and lame. Wood prevailed upon Dick to sing Confederate Army ballads and Dick complied in a tenor voice that was so tragic and piercing that Sarah momentarily put down her needlework. Then a stillness came and there was only the creak of the chairs and the Hite brothers retired, and though Wood scowled at his young stepmother, she obstinately remained in her rocker with her stitching, a squat candle between her black, buttoned shoes, a silver thimble clinking whenever she drove the needle.

  Sarah was buxom and broad as a stove and was considered voluptuous. Her eyes were bright blue, the sort that can seem a mosaic of silver and white, and her hair was the color that was then called nut brown, and it curtained her cheeks as she concentrated on the flower’s yellow disk.

  Finally, Dick said, “I guess we’re the night owls, you and me.”

  She simpered but did not look up. “I’m glad.”

  “Oh?” Dick asked, as if he were Clarence. “How come?”

  She made an ambiguous motion with her shoulders and smiled at her shoes. “I could listen to you sing and carry on until sunrise. You have a real pleasant disposition; and you’re interesting to look at; and, I don’t know, you sort of make me warm all over.”

  “I’m what they call a worldling.”

  “Well, I knew there had to be a name for it.”

  “You and the Hite family don’t get along, if I’m to trust Wood and his version of the situation.”

  She let her hands and sewing sink in the navy blue lap of her dress. Orange candlelight raised and lowered on her face and she tucked her bottom lip with her teeth. “We hate each other like poison, if you want to know the truth. Most of the Hites wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire.”

  Dick never missed even the most concealed insinuation. He said with a wink of his skewed right eye, “They say when a woman catches fire you’re supposed to roll her around on the ground and cover her with your body.” And Sarah laughed so loudly she clamped her mouth, and then called him a naughty tease and said he tickled her to such an extent her cheeks were burning up. And then Wood was at the screen door in a nightshirt, his hair as sprigged as a houseplant. “Isn’t it just about bedtime?” he asked, and Dick kissed Sarah’s dainty nubbins as he exited for the second-floor bedroom.

  Dick took off his boots and clothes and tucked himself under the bedsheet. He wacked the pillow, he rustled and stirred, he announced that he’d drunk too much coffee. He saw Wood in the bunk across from him as he arose in his longjohns and woolen socks. Wood’s eyes glared at him. “I need to visit the privy something terrible,” Dick said.

  What he did was sneak down the first-floor hallway and touch the master bedroom door two inches inward to see Major George Hite alone in the room, puttering a snore. Dick d
id not allow the screen door to clap as he went outside. He walked around the rocking chair and across a cold lawn to a two-hole outhouse in back. The board walls showed interior candlelight at each severance and crack. Dick paused and looked around at the night, then slid into the outhouse and shut the door carefully behind him.

  The candle was tilted in a tin cup that was nailed below a small side window and Sarah sat next to it, prim as a child, her dress hiked up and collected like laundry, her pale thighs squeezed and puckered a little with fat, her ankles thin above her shoes. He could see her blush and her downcast eyes were a maiden’s, but she seemed less shocked than amused. She said, “This is embarrassing.”

  “You can go ahead and do your duty; I don’t mind.”

  “Well now, I’ve sort of got stagefright with a strange man in the commode with me.”

  “You look awful pretty.”

  “Do I?”

  “I’ve never seen such well-shaped limbs.”

  She glanced fleetingly at the bent pronouncement at his crotch and then at his chill blue eyes. “Is Wood awake?”

  “Just me.”

  She contemplated her knees for a moment and then blew out the candle. She rose with her navy blue dress still bunched at her waist and shyly moved toward Dick. She said, “I bet you thought I was a lady.”

  DICK LIDDIL stole into the house at eleven o’clock, crawled up the stairs so that the footboards wouldn’t creak, and saw that Wood’s bunk was empty. He reclined on the mattress for a minute or two, contemplating causes and effects, then sat up and removed his revolver from its scabbard and slid it under the woolen blanket like something pleasurable. And he awoke at sunrise to the calm voice of Wood Hite in middle sentence: “—moonlight and held a conversation with myself over what I should and shouldn’t do. Should I blow the sidewinder to kingdom come? Should I chop his perty face into hash? Maybe I could cut his oysters off like a steer.”

  He sat on the bunk across from Dick, his eyes pouched and green with sleeplessness, his nose colossal beneath the strip of daylight allowed by a window shade. Dick’s pistol had somehow been fished from its place and was squashed under Wood’s thigh. Wood continued, “But I took into account our months together on the wrong side of the law and what I come up with is you and me should duel; and may the best man win.”

  “You’re making this more grievous than you oughta, Wood.”

  Wood smacked him with a pillow. “The honor of the entire Hite family is at stake!”

  So the two accordingly stood back to back on the cold, dew-white lawn, revolvers raised like ear contraptions, Dick in his longjohns and boots. Wood created gentlemen’s rules for the duel as Dick kidded and negotiated and finally counseled Hite about the jeopardy to his very being that was forthcoming. Nevertheless, Wood counted out numbers in a stately, funereal measure and the two marked each word with a stride, greening the grass with their boot tracks. But Dick was a man who left nothing to chance; not only did he angle toward a broad ash tree as he walked, but he turned at nine instead of ten and fired at Wood’s left ear.

  Wood ducked in reaction to the gunshot and the sizzle of a miss that veered wide of his skull, then he crouched and spun around to see the green lawn in streaks that slewed toward the ash and a flicker of yellow hair next to the gray bark. He clutched at his trigger and the revolver jumped so violently it sprained his wrist and a chunk of ash tree exploded. Dick bent out and shot at Wood a second time—his arm kicked up, there was a noise akin to a window that has crashed down in its sash, blue gunsmoke ballooned and then dwindled, and another noise like the snare of a saw cut the air near Wood’s neck.

  The gunpowder noise surprised Wood’s relatives and servants from sleep and they rushed down the hallway to the screen door, closing robes around their nightshirts and nightgowns, as Dick discharged his last round and crackled branches in a woodrow next to the road. He snapped the hammer into three detonated cartridges, saw the Hites behind the screen door, and ran to them in the clomping, clumsy way of a cowhand unused to his legs as Wood shot at his back twice, neglecting to lead Dick each time.

  Dick struck the last riser on the stairs with his toe and walloped into a slide across the porch. Major Hite flattened his nose to the screen as he hollered, “Here now! Stop this! Wood? Wood! I won’t have any gunplay on my property! I’ve told you a thousand times.”

  Dick slithered toward the old man’s bare feet and Wood shot another time. It shattered a chair strut and nailed a dark hole in the windowsill. Major Hite stamped down on a throw rug and yelled, “Wood! You listen to me! No more!”

  Wood looked down the revolver muzzle and clicked the chamber around. “That was my last bullet anyways.” He eyed the revolver at a bird feeder. “Something must be wrong with the sight on this thing.”

  George Hite, Jr., was bent next to his father. He said, “You’ll notice I wasn’t in on it, Daddy. Don’t even own a shooting iron.”

  Major Hite looked down at the man cowering near his white calves. “What’s the reason for this ruckus? Huh?”

  Dick saw Sarah slink over to her husband, pink slippers on her feet and a patchwork quilt shut around her. Dick arose and said, “Me and Wood, we woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, is all.”

  Major Hite showed no signs of hearing Dick; he merely waited for the man’s mouth to stop moving and then said, “You know what? You’ve worn out your welcome, young fellow.”

  DICK LEFT AT ONCE and rode north as far as Russellville, where he rented a room with a concealed stairway above a blacksmith’s shop and worked infrequently for ten cents per hour and chewed tobacco on a store bench with veterans of the Mexican-American War. Afternoons he roistered with Mrs. Sarah Hite when she could visit town, or she arranged strange venues with Dick, sunrise on Mud River, or midnight near a revival tent, or noon underneath a railroad trestle, where she smeared a bedsheet flat over the weeds.

  Her go-between in arranging these meetings was the ex-slave, John Tabor. He’d stand in the alley as the blacksmith rammed the ceiling overhead with a rod and Dick would skip downstairs in his socks; he’d throw twigs at Dick’s window, announce a time and location when the sash was raised, and then slip off into darkness.

  One Thursday at nightfall, John Tabor lightly rapped a restaurant’s window near the table where Dick swabbed stew from his dish with pumpernickel bread. Dick went outside and the butler gave him a come hither look that lured him into an alley. John Tabor was reed thin, close to fifty, the brown of saddle leather, and he liked to claim a resemblance to the Great Pacificator, Senator Henry Clay. He twisted his coat collar up and blew in his fists and invented Alaska out of the nip of the air. “I won’t be delivering no more notes,” he said. “I won’t be fetching Sarah no more for you, neither.”

  Dick saw that his checkered dinner napkin was still tucked under his belt. He removed it and stroked his wide mustache with a corner. “You in a snit, John?”

  “Yeah. Uh huh.” He looked over his shoulder into the empty street and then he bowed closer to Dick. “Wood seen me and it don’t make him happy, a colored man owning a white lady’s secrets, setting her onto a backdoor man which ain’t her husband. He don’t know much yet but he suspects. That’s more than plenty right there. He’ll cut me dead, I don’t be careful.”

  “Naw.”

  “Said he would. Said he’d stick an axe betwixt my eyes.”

  “She does want to meet me though, doesn’t she? You’ve come so far, you may as well tell me where she’ll be and make them your last words.”

  Tabor gripped his coat and walked into the wind but as Dick hunched next to him the butler said, “At creekside, over near the pigsty; tomorrow evening, about nine. Now my mouth’s gonna be shut, as far as you’re concerned. You ain’t gonna hear no more from John Tabor.”

  Dick Liddil saddled his bay mare at seven the next evening and rode south in a slow walk, his stomach so queasy that he submitted to one of Jesse’s prescriptions and ate salts of tartar and powdered gum ara
bic. And as he crossed onto the Hite acres, panic overtook him; he sometimes circled his horse around to check the night woods, to decipher the crackle of autumn leaves, to cock his Navy Colt at a raccoon that truckled into the creek. Trees groaned and sighed as the wind pressed against them; grasses rolled with the soft susurration of mourners whispering in a candled parlor; and Dick was conjuring phantoms, he was as spooked as a man alone in a room who watches a closet doorknob turn and the door ever so slowly open.

  He crossed a meadow and motivated his mare down the creek bank, where she sloshed in water that was as shallow as the coronets of her hooves. The pigsty was a low barn with a roof over the feedboxes and the rest a mud roll-around inside an ill-made slat fence. Dick creaked his saddle and read his pocket watch with a matchstick and looked around for Sarah. He slid off the mare and let her drag her reins over to leafmeal as he walked to the brow of the hill.

  Hogs oinked and grunted and climbed over each other for corner food. Weeds lowered under the wind and apprehensions spidered his back. He wandered about and broke sticks in his fists. The hogs snorted and crowded and there was a sound like pages being torn from a book and pigs screeched around a sow that was greedily wolfing something down as she trotted away from the corner. Dick leaned on the sty’s fence like a slow country boy and asked, “What the heck are you critters chewing on?”

  Then Dick saw a shoe and ankle wobble as the hogs shoved and scuffled above a muddied wool coat. His skin nettled cold and water came to his eyes and he screamed at the animals as he swatted them in the hocks with his hat. They scampered and squealed and snorted the earth. A sow remained and wrenched at a cord of sinew that made the body jerk but Dick shot a bullet that punched into the mud and the sow scurried back with the others.