by Ron Hansen
Jesse smiled and said, “At least if you get weary of climbing this hill you can always lean against it.”
Aylesbury shook his head and respirated, his gloved hands on his hips. “I don’t know if I want stairs or a block and tackle.”
Charley reached the crest at 1318 Lafayette Street and there slouched around a one-storey, green-shuttered white cottage that was called the House on the Hill. He counted two scantily furnished bedrooms, a sitting room and a dining room, and a recently attached kitchen with a shaded rear porch that looked eastward over a ravine into wilderness. He could see fifty miles of countryside to the north, east, and west, and if he walked onto a neighbor’s corner lot, Charley could see Kansas, the brown Missouri River, an iron bridge that was the color of rust, the shuttle and steam and collision of boxcars at the railroad yard, and brick stores and downtown businesses with their streets of mud and brown snow and with a roof of coal smoke overhead.
Charley saw Aylesbury skid a shoe in the snow to reveal the loess soil underneath and he slunk after the two men as they clambered through snowdrifts to a smokehouse, to a stable that was cut into the earth, to a shed for “garden tools and what-have-yous,” and a warm outhouse that could seat two.
“You can see into next week from here,” Charley said. “You won’t never be surprised by company again.”
Jesse did not acknowledge the remark.
The city councilman walked from room to room in the cottage, his arms wide, his voice dwindling in closets. He shut doors, he raised and lowered windows, he sat on mattresses and sofa cushions, he informed Mr. Howard that across the street was Thomas Turner and his wife, along with a niece named Metta, who was three.
Jesse seemed lost in reveries. “So my little girl will have a playmate.”
“And it’s romantically situated, isn’t it? Here on this lofty eminence?”
Charley said, “I like the address most. Lafayette Street. When I was a kid I used to tinker with a French music box that the Marquis de Lafayette gave the father of our country.”
This was such a startling bit of information from such an improbable source that Aylesbury only looked over his nose to evaluate Charley for a moment, and then returned to the man he knew as a cattle buyer named Thomas Howard. “The rent is fourteen dollars a month.”
Jesse squinted at the councilman and slowly walked to the kitchen.
Aylesbury said, “I’ve priced about twenty places in town and that’s what a cottage goes for these days. I may even be a little low.” Jesse leaned on a kitchen window sash in a black mood, looking out. His coat shadowed the room like shutters. Aylesbury called, “How much is comfort and contentment worth?”
THE THOMAS HOWARD CLAN moved into The House on the Hill on December 24th, and in the late afternoon Jesse and Charley strolled downtown St. Joseph with a list Zee had written out: candies and chocolates and peppermint canes, a cloth hand puppet with a porcelain head, ivory barrettes carved to represent angels, and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, a children’s book by Margaret Sidney. Jesse bought what he could with the little cash he had, then Charley saw a notice that said the Second Presbyterian Church was holding its annual Christmas party that evening, and the two walked over to Twelfth Street, slipped into the unlocked basement, and stole a game of feathered darts, a green metal hoop and stick, a rubber ball and six jacks, a sack of popcorn balls that were covered with molasses, a reed whistle, and a red Santa Claus suit and a white whisker set that was constructed from baling wire and painted binder twine.
At nightfall Charley cleaned the snow off his boots and softly knocked on the cottage door. Zee opened it in her apron, a streak of flour on her cheek. She asked where Jesse was and Charley answered that the Turners had invited their new neighbor over for an eggnog. Then he sat with Tim and Mary on the twin bed in the sitting room. He said, “Don’t you wish Santa would come now instead of midnight when you’re asleep?”
Tim looked at Charley with mistrust. “Yes.”
“Let’s squinch our eyes shut and wish that Santa would come right now.”
Charley and Tim squinched their eyes and Mary sucked her thumb and then the kitchen door was slugged in and sleigh bells jingled and Santa Claus jollied into the sitting room, his red coat made fat with straw. He shouted, “Ho ho ho,” in a voice that was low as a kettledrum and he seated himself on a wicker chair and bestowed sweets and toys to the children as Zee reminded them of their manners and smiled.
Tim collected his gifts within the metal hoop and then pestered Santa for more, investigating pockets, sticking his hands into straw, lifting the sides of the red coat until he contacted a Smith and Wesson revolver. The boy snatched his hand back as if it were burnt and scowled at the man in the red suit. “You’re not Santa Claus; you’re Daddy.”
Charley called across the room, “He’s one of Santa’s helpers!”
Jesse sat low in the chair with his boots kicked out, drew off the soft red cap by its cotton ball, then reached out and snuggled Tim close to his chest. He said, “Let me tell you a secret, son: there’s always a mean old wolf in Grandma’s bed, and a worm inside the apple. There’s always a daddy inside the Santa suit. It’s a world of trickery.”
THE FAMILY ATTENDED a Christmas service at the Second Presbyterian Church, at which time the Santa suit was returned before it could be missed. Afterward Jesse showed Tim how to roll his hoop on the cottage floor, Charley played jacks with Mary, Zee served an extravagant breakfast in a gift dress of black satin that was slightly too small and was unbuttoned beneath her apron. Then Jesse and Charley rode a noon train forty miles southeast to Kearney and visited the Samuels farm, an occurrence that was so inconceivable to Sheriff Timberlake and his deputies that no men were stationed on the road.
Mrs. Samuels cooked a goose and presented it with browned whole onions and candied yams and biscuits and turnips and cucumber pickles. A green rag carpet covered the floor, a wood heating stove was connected to the screened fireplace, a glassed case of yellow waxed flowers was on the cherrywood mantel; a scriptural engraving, a picture of “The Death of Stonewall Jackson,” and a sampler stitched by Zerelda Cole as a girl at St. Catherine’s Academy were nailed up on the plastered walls. Dr. Reuben Samuels sat dopily at the long table’s head, admiring his huge congregation: his eldest daughter, Sallie, her husband, William Nicholson, and child, Jesse James Nicholson; his eighteen-year-old daughter, Fannie, and her husband, Joseph Hall; his son, Johnny, who was twenty years old and the only child who still lived with them; Jesse’s younger sister, Susie, and her husband, Allan Parmer; Charley Ford, who shocked corn for him once; and none other than Jesse Woodson James. According to custom, a chair was left empty in memorial to Archie, the son accidentally slain by the Pinkerton Agency in 1875; and at the foot of the table, ruling it like Queen Zenobia, was the doctor’s overbearing and refractory wife.
A girl brought in a gravy boat that she’d allowed to cool so long the gravy curdled and Zerelda flew into a rage, clubbing the girl with her mangled right arm and yelling that she was an ignoramus. Jesse appealed to Dr. Samuels, “Pappy?” and the man grinned benignly at his stepson. Jesse said, “She’s acting up.”
Reuben looked to his wife and called, “Mother? She’s got to bring the goose in yet.”
“You shut up, Pappy,” Zerelda said. “She’s been snappish and peppery with me all day.”
Reuben simply commenced to ask for the Good Lord’s blessing on all the good food that had been prepared and brung over and Zerelda gave an amen to the prayer, permitting the girl to go back to the kitchen. Then Zerelda began talking about a Christmas letter she’d received from Frank that she was sure had been steamed open in Kansas City and only then sent on to Kearney. Annie and Rob were fine, the letter said; Baltimore was gloomy and crowded; Buck had seen Shakespeare performed in an opera house and nearly wept with joy. Zerelda talked about the nightwatchers, the town criers, the gossips, and many black-suited men, each thin as a coffin nail, who lurked in alleys and atop shop r
oofs in order to spy on her. She said she consistently claimed she hadn’t seen Frank for seven years and was scared he’d died of consumption. And as for Jesse, she’d initiated the misleading rumor that her third-born had passed away from this vale of tears too and was now planted under the gladiolas. Zerelda then ceased in mid-sentence and Charley turned from his victuals to see her mouth tremble and her white head gravely lower.
Reuben suggested, “Don’t get started again, Mother.”
But Zerelda flamboyantly covered her eyes with her coarse left palm and cried, “Doomed! Hunted down and shot at like coons in a tree! Soon every one of my boys will be killed and, oh, how will I endure it? My heart will crack in two!”
Charley chewed deliberately and swallowed; Jesse studied his plate; his half-sister Fannie said with annoyance, “Momma! You’ve embarrassed every single person at this table. You quit your ranting and raving. It’s Christmas.”
Mrs. Samuels reached out the stub of her right wrist to touch Jesse’s cuff and she looked at her son with red eyes and unflinching melodrama as she asked, “How can I continue without you? How can I bear to let you go?”
Jesse was so abashed and perplexed by his mother’s mawkishness that as the supper continued he refrained from anything other than a jocose comment or two over the butter dish, and after the four o’clock exchange of Christmas presents—receiving a cruet of elegantly scented hair oil and a red cravat made of silk—Jesse convinced the Samuels family that the Fords had an evening celebration prepared, and he’d promised Charley that they’d attend.
Charley took up the invention and inquired, “You think you can eat another goose?”
Jesse ticked his head and said, “Don’t know. My pants are getting sort of personal with me already.”
Everyone yelled goodbyes back and forth outside for several minutes, then Jesse and Charley climbed into a two-horse phaeton and steered it east at a trot. Jesse sighed, “Mercy!” and then was mute for a mile. He said at last, “She wonders why Frank’s in Baltimore and I wonder why I’m not.”
Charley complimented Jesse on all the pretty things in the house and Jesse said, “You can have a palace of carpets and gold and expensive paintings but they aren’t worth the mud off your feet if it isn’t full of God’s peace.”
“I suppose,” Charley said, and then he found silence practical, and he practiced it for most of the trip to Richmond. But as they neared Martha’s rented farm, he remembered Wood Hite mouldering in the creek bed and imagined a yellow cadaver, its withered skin retracted from inch-long teeth, its mouth in a scream, cavities in its skull where the eyes once were, and sitting, for some reason, on the sofa, like a circuit rider at Saturday tea. They rattled onto the road to the barn, slewing aside in the snow, and Jesse clucked the two horses toward the stables.
Charley moved off the seat, letting a lap blanket slide to his boots, and Jesse slowed the team. “What’s made you so jittery?”
“I better go ahead in case my sister’s in the altogether.”
Jesse smiled. “That’d be just dandy!”
“And there’s Ida to think about. You know how young girls are with gentlemen; how they’re so modest and everything.” And before Jesse could contradict him, Charley jumped off the carriage and fell to his knees in the snow, then violently brushed himself and galumphed to the kitchen door.
Bob was in a chair, wan and shyly startled, his arms beneath the oak table like a schoolboy sticking gum.
Charley asked, “Is Dick still here?”
“Kansas City.”
“Anything you should hide?”
“Jesse?”
Charley nodded and removed his coat. “Don’t let him see us so much as wink at each other. He’s suspicious as a danged coyote, and he don’t trust you one iota.”
Bob lifted a cocked revolver from under the table and carefully let the hammer click forward. “I guess that makes us even.”
Then Jesse came inside in his reddish brown beaver coat, frost on his dark brown mustache and beard, moisture in his eyes from the cold, and communicated amicably with Bob, joshing as he jigged at the stove fire, creating Christmas cheer. Then as Charley vagrantly talked about the weather, Jesse played truant and roamed the second floor of the house, nosing into closets and cabinets seeking evidence. His footfalls overhead were faint: Bob presumed that Jesse gently pushed the shut doors so that they swung ever so gracefully into the night of the rooms.
Bob touched his own lips to stop Charley from speaking and the two brothers listened as Jesse knocked a chair akilter and carefully righted it. Bob said, “Dick might be making arrangements with Henry H. Craig.”
“Oh? And who would that be?”
Martha came into the kitchen fastening a yellow robe around herself. Her auburn hair was wrecked with sleep and her complexion was very pale. She murmured, “Are you telling him?”
“Maybe you better,” said Bob. “I’ll stand at the door.”
Charley said in a constrained voice, “This is mysterious.”
Martha poured water into a tumbler and turned with it near her mouth. “It’s just a guess on my part.” She sipped water and put the tumbler down. “Mr. Craig is an attorney and a Kansas City police commissioner; has an office in the Times Building. Dick said he was going to give Mattie a Christmas gift, but my guess is he’s actually going to see Mr. Craig and give him you two for the reward.”
Bob bent into the sitting room and craned to see the stairs. Jesse was apparently motionless somewhere above them, letting his fancies run like red-eyed ferrets, letting the experienced air educate his senses. Bob could just make out his sister’s words as she informed Charley about the governor’s reward, about plea bargaining and immunity, about exoneration. She sipped water and told him Craig could only negotiate for Jackson County, so she and Bob were considering a visit with Governor Crittenden to see if he couldn’t guarantee the Ford brothers wouldn’t be prosecuted—in exchange for that they’d promise the governor to help him capture Jesse James.
Bob leaned his back against the kitchen doorframe and saw Charley contemplating his toes, his face temporarily sixty years old. “Charley?” Bob whispered.
His brother raised his brown eyes.
“You can forget about Wood Hite and about Jesse getting back at us. You won’t go to jail for your train robberies. And you’ll be a rich man come spring.”
“You’re both talking too fast for me. I can’t get it straight in my mind.”
Martha said, “Just let us take care of it then.”
They listened to the crump of Jesse’s slow descent on the staircase and Bob started to move out of the kitchen.
Charley said, “He’ll kill us if he catches wind of it. He’ll cut our throats in our sleep. He’s already put away Ed Miller. Said so like it was something piddly he’d done.”
Bob sauntered into the sitting room and saw Jesse crouched on the stairs, scratching his thumbnail on a riser. Jesse considered the nail and then sniffed it. “Is this blood?”
Bob sat nonchalantly in the rocker. “Could be. Clarence Hite was here for a week and never could get the best of that miserable cough; could be he was spitting blood and had himself an accident.”
Jesse rubbed his thumb on the seat of his trousers. “You don’t suppose it’s consumption, do you?”
“Oh, Lord; I hope not. I never gave it a thought.”
“In England they eat lemons. Twelve per day isn’t too few.” Jesse removed his broad hat and attended to the almost inaudible conference near the kitchen stove. “And they sip boiled water at bedtime.” He turned to Bob. “They talking about me?”
Bob rocked and smiled. “Probably. You’re the topic of conversation in every part of the country.”
Jesse extricated himself from his heavy coat and laid it on the sofa with his hat. “Did I ever tell you about meeting Mark Twain?”
“No.”
“He was in this country store and I recognized him, of course, and went over to shake the man’s hand and c
ongratulate him on his good writing. I said, ‘You’re Mark Twain, ain’t you?’ and he nodded yes he was, and I said, ‘Guess you and I are about the greatest in our line.’ He couldn’t very well agree since he didn’t know who I was, so he asks and I say, ‘Jesse James,’ and scoot on out of there. Hear tell he still talks about that. They say you go over to Europe and the only Americans they all know for certain are Mark Twain and yours truly.”
“I’m not surprised.”
Jesse seemed to peer at Bob through a jeweler’s bifocals. “You’ve got a bullet hole in your bedroom door.”
“Oh?”
“Could’ve been put there when old man Harbison ran the place.”
“You never can tell. If you look you’ll find holes in the kitchen too. Gun-cleaning accidents, maybe.”
Jesse batted the Christmas ornaments on a measly spruce that was wired into a tin bucket, and Wilbur came in from the privy, rigorously abrading his sleeves. Jesse asked, “Dick Liddil come by yet?”
“Nope.”
“You know why he hasn’t?”
“Maybe Mattie’s got him on a short leash these days.”
“I’ve got my own theory. I say it’s on account of him and Wood having a run-in like they did in Kentucky. It’s my theory he killed my cousin and he’s scared he’ll meet me here.”
Bob gripped the rocking chair arms and tried to appear simply inquisitive.
Jesse said, “I’d appreciate it if you’d spread the word that I’m offering a reward for Dick. One thousand dollars, dead or alive. And let people know I’d prefer him dead.”
“You’re saying that in the heat of passion.”
Big Wilbur came in with a jar of honey and a finger in his mouth. “Merry Christmas, Jess!”
“One thousand dollars,” Jesse said.
Bob indicated the sheet that skirted the Christmas tree and asked, “Did you notice there was a present under there for you?”