by Ron Hansen
He heard the room’s door creak and click shut and turned to see a stern man in his late forties with his suit coat off and circular bifocals on. His left eyebrow was cocked in a manner that made him look quizzical; his wide brown mustache was streaked with gray and covered his mouth and chin with shadow, so that he seemed even more severe than he was. “My assistant mentioned something about you and the James gang.”
“Yes sir. I want to bring them to justice.”
“The James gang,” Craig said.
“Well, not each and every one all at once. Maybe I’d start out with the lowlier culprits and that would give me the opportunities I need to capture Jesse and Frank.”
Craig squinted at Bob. “Who sent you here?”
“Sheriff James Timberlake of Clay County. Sort of indirectly. By that I mean he mentioned you but didn’t know I was coming.”
Craig hooked a finger inside his cheek and flicked a smidgen of chewing tobacco into a brass cuspidor. He moved his tongue around inside his mouth, then bent over and spit. He asked, “How do you know the James brothers?”
Bob foresaw the snarls of cross-examination and answered, “Did I say that I did?”
“Do you spy on them?”
“You’ll excuse me for saying so, but isn’t what matters the fact that I can round these culprits up?”
“I get told that once a week, and they’re still uncaught. You can see how I’d be skeptical.”
Bob lowered into a magisterial chair and rested his bowler hat in his lap. He let his palms appreciate the sculpted mahogany armrests. “Just lately?” he asked.
“Just lately what?”
“Anybody come to you lately saying he could bring in one or two of the James gang?”
Craig cleaned his eyeglasses with a white handkerchief. “Why do you want to know?”
“I just sort of thought they might’ve.”
“It was a woman.”
“She give her name as Mattie?”
Craig moved a chair over and sat across from Bob, shrugged forward like a rowing coach, his elbows on his knees. “You tell me. Her name was Mattie. Mattie what? Who was she acting for? Who were they going to bring in? You in Dutch with Jesse? Or is it only the reward money? You’ve got to give me something. I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s Bob.”
“Just Bob?”
“Right now, yes; for the time being.”
Craig flickered a smile and combed the broad wings of his mustache with his thumb. “What’s the first name on your list, Bob?”
Bob rose from the green chintz chair and walked over to the telephone. He could see that copper wires were attached to brass screws at the rear but couldn’t fathom what they were for. He flicked one with his index finger and a stab of electricity twitched into his wrist.
“Did it nip you?” Craig asked.
Bob shook his hand and smiled with embarrassment. “I never knew these contraptions had teeth before.” Bob looked down at it. “How’s it work?”
Craig sinuated his right hand. “Your voice moves on undulating electrical currents. You scream into that mouthpiece to talk and then stick your ear next to it to listen. Most times you feel like a damned fool.”
“What was the joke I read in the newspaper? Oh yes: “The telephone has developed an entirely new school of hello-cution.’ Do you get it? Hello-cution? Like elocution?”
The commissioner stared at Bob without a word. A streetcar outside rattled and clanked. Girls screamed with laughter in the corridor. Bob said, “He’s a friend. I don’t look on it like I’m betraying him though. Jesse means to kill him, even offered a thousand-dollar reward for his carcass. I look on it like I’m saving him from injury.”
Craig remained as he was.
“Dick Liddil,” said Bob.
Craig was unmoved. “Do you know where we can find him?”
“The reason is, Dick’s a conniver and I can’t figure out what his plans are, I just know he’s got some fancy tricks up his sleeve and he won’t pity me.”
Craig walked to a chest-high accountant’s desk and flipped open an inkstand to scratch Bob’s information into a journal ledger.
Bob said, “He can’t know it was me.”
Craig attended to his notes. “You give me an exact time and location where we can catch him, and I’ll guarantee your name will never get out. You’ll be cited as an anonymous spy; not even Timberlake will know. If there’s a reward, you’ll get it, but beyond that I can’t offer you any legal or physical protections.” Craig looked over his shoulder and saw that Bob’s brow was stitched, his mind in a careen. “Do you get the gist of what I’m saying?”
“Absolutely.”
“Do you know where Jesse’s living?”
“He was in Kansas City.”
Craig registered incredulity and said, “You’re pulling my leg.”
“Over on Woodland Avenue; and then Troost. He’s moved again though. My brother knows where but he’s been and gone before I could ask.”
Craig inscribed something in the journal and Bob walked over to study the entry. “Does the name Bob Ford mean anything to you?”
Craig dipped his quill in the ink bottle and scripted cursively on a brown blotter. “Is that your actual name or your alias?”
“Actual,” said Bob, and he grinned with delight when he saw the name recorded in Craig’s elegant calligraphy. “Pretty soon all of America will know who Bob Ford is.”
BOB TOLD THE COMMISSIONER that Dick Liddil was sleeping over at their rented farmhouse while his maimed leg mended and then created a crude map of the Harbison property, leaving out the creek where Wood Hite’s remains now mouldered but including Richmond and country roads and nearby railroad tracks.
That afternoon Commissioner Craig activated a special unit of the Kansas City Police, a company of twelve that included himself and Sheriff Timberlake, a Sergeant Ditsch, two detectives, a constable, and six city policemen. They were called to the central station at nine that same evening, received instructions and coffee, were issued revolvers and rifles and cold weather gear, and after midnight on January 6th, climbed aboard a chartered train that consisted of a locomotive and two blackened smoking cars. The locomotive accelerated to a speed approaching fifty miles per hour until Lexington Junction, where it was switched to tracks that carried the men beyond Richmond to a crossroads a short walk away from the Harbison farm. They came without horses and that would matter later—Craig wanted no noise.
The January thaw lasted only two days; by late afternoon on the 5th the sun was cast over by a latticework of clouds, by evening it had started to rain, and by the time the twelve moved into the woodrows the rain had turned to sleet that made tree branches clatter and iced the snow so that it was like saltines. The company circumnavigated a white, ramshackle house with oil-paper windows and a buckled roof and an elm tree that scratched at the shingles, and for a time some men tilted along a ravine that might have introduced them to the orange and petrified cadaver of Robert Woodson Hite, but the moment never came; instead of continuing on that route, the men circled close to the cattle lots and made a reconnaissance of the brown, leaning barn, then scuttled back to the fruit trees where Sheriff Timberlake and Commissioner Craig were in anxious consultation.
It was about 3 a.m. and every vista was blue or black and the sleet scored their cheeks like a cat scratch. No one could tell if any were awake inside, if rifles rested on the windowsills, if the communication with Ford were merely a preposterous bluff made to lure them into a skirmish and counterattack from the James gang. And it was the if of Jesse’s being there, the maybe, the perchance, that persuaded Commissioner Craig and Sheriff Timberlake to practice care and prudence and to wait in the cold until sunrise.
So they remained in the woodrows and neither talked nor smoked nor stamped their boots to the earth. Cold watered their eyes and cemented their mittens to their rifle stocks and turned their feet into flatirons. Craig looked at his vest watch and clicked it shut and
minutes later checked the vest watch again. Then the night lessened, the clouds ashened slightly, and the men became starkly black and brown against the gray of the snow. Craig walked out to scan the east and saw pink in the mile-off woods and he turned connotatively to Sheriff Timberlake.
The sheriff whistled succinctly and motioned forward for the deputies to move on the farmhouse and the twelve crept forward. Craig sucked on his index finger to thaw it, then nestled it next to the rifle’s trigger. Timberlake waved the company in a circle around the house and saw a boy wipe an upstairs windowpane with his fist, peer out sleepily, and withdraw into the room.
That was Bob. He woke without really knowing why and listened for a clue, which came as a clink and then as the crunch of boots in rain-iced snow. He scurried from bed in his nightshirt with one name only on his mind and with a cavity inside his chest, and at the window he made out six armed men and maybe more, as rounded-over as hedgehogs, coming out of the woods as if they were created there. “Dick!” he insisted, and swatted the sleeping man’s foot.
Dick inclined on an elbow, rubbing his eyes, then slanted over just enough to see a man in a city coat slugging his legs through a knee-deep snowdrift, a rifle crossed at his chest. Dick shot from bed, collapsed a little on his wounded leg, and hopped on the good one to the clothes he’d thrown over a chair. “Who is it?”
Bob climbed into cold woolen trousers and hooked suspenders over his nightshirt. “I saw a tin star on someone’s pocket; that’s all the information I need.”
Dick said, “God damn Mattie anyhow,” and buckled on his gunbelt.
Bob looked down into the sidelot. A young deputy genuflected into the snow and steadied his arm and rifle with a raised knee. If he fired, glass would crash across Martha’s four-poster bed. A big voice in the yard called, “Jesse!”
Dick was in his knee boots and corduroy trousers, one suspender twisted on his shoulder. He bundled his coat and gloves at his stomach and asked, “How do I find the attic?”
“We know you’re in there!” Timberlake cried out. “Come on outside with your hands up!”
Sheriff Timberlake was near the iron well-pump in the dooryard. His eyes watered in the wind, his iced mustache was like an ivory comb, and though he may have been mortally afraid at that moment, he looked austere and authoritative. He bracketed his mouth with his mittens and shouted, “You boys are cornered! If you know what’s good for you, well, you’ll come out peaceably and no one will get shot up!”
Timberlake saw the kitchen door suck inward and he crouched down. The storm door misted with the inside warmth and then it was pushed open and Bob Ford leaned outside. “Don’t shoot!”
Timberlake turned to Craig. “You know who that is, don’t you?”
Craig claimed he hadn’t an inkling.
“Bob Ford. He lives here with his sister.” The sheriff called, “Come on out and show yourself!”
Bob took a probationary step out onto the porch and then rooted there with his hands squeezed under his arms. He rubbed a stockinged foot on his calf. “If this isn’t a surprise!” he said.
“That’s how we intended it,” the sheriff said, and slogged forward with Commissioner Craig and two Kansas City policemen as Bob Ford courteously butlered at the door.
Martha was at the oaken table, a frayed blue bathrobe clutched at her throat, her feet in scruffy white stockings. Craig withdrew circular eyeglasses and hooded them over his ears but resisted looking at Bob. He tilted his head to listen for footfalls overhead.
The sheriff asked if Jesse James, Jim Cummins, or Ed Miller was in the house and Bob said no, they weren’t. Craig asked if Dick Liddil was perchance there and Bob responded in like manner. “Your friend, Charles Siderwood,” the sheriff said. “Is that actually Dick Liddil?”
“No; that’s Charles Siderwood.”
“Is he here?”
Bob said, “You can look around if you want, but you won’t find whoever it is you’re after. It’s just me and my kin here.”
Craig instructed the sheriff to stay with the boy and took Sergeant Ditsch and two policemen with him to the second floor. Timberlake stood Bob in a corner and then poked charred stovewood with a fork, seeking red ash or embers.
Martha consented to start a fire and Timberlake invited the rest of the company inside out of the cold, which, as it turned out, was a compassionate but careless action to take. The sheriff moved around in the sitting room and kitchen and occasionally pulled out a counter drawer. Ida sleepily walked in with a wool coat over her nightgown and stared at the many policemen with big-eyed bewilderment. Martha set a coffee kettle on the stove and a coal-oil lamp on the sideboard. Smoke fluttered two feet above it. She kept trying to interpret Bob but couldn’t tell if he was pretending innocence or if he’d caused the posse to come. She remembered how Bob used to lick sugar from his palm; he used to throw apples on the roof when she had girlfriends over; she’d once chased him into the creek because he dumped mustard powder into her cake pan.
Bob could hear the party moving through rooms on the second floor, yanking and overturning drawers, rummaging through clothes. “Come on,” he muttered and the sheriff scowled at him. Martha carried empty coffee cups to the men. The kitchen was still so cold that their breaths steamed before them when they chatted. Martha came around with a coffee kettle and filled the cups and though Timberlake meant to smile at the widow, he sneered and then returned his glower to Bob Ford. He was six inches taller than Bob and sixty pounds his better, and Bob didn’t risk a sip of his sister’s coffee for fear the sheriff would punch the cup into his mouth.
Sergeant Ditsch came down to summon Bob to the second floor and Timberlake followed them upstairs. Bob said, “You’re not going to find anything. My momma and daddy brought us Ford children up right. I sleep in the presence of angels.”
The sergeant frowned at Bob and at Timberlake as he unclosed the bedroom door. Timberlake shoved past Bob into the room, saying, “Don’t mind what the boy says. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth.”
Commissioner Craig was sitting on a mattress with Bob’s shoebox in his lap. He said, “You’re quite the packrat.”
And Ditsch said, “Show us how to get to the attic.”
“You mean you haven’t been there already?”
Craig looked over his round eyeglasses and squinted sourly at Bob. “I don’t think we’re going to find much in the attic. I think our spy sent us on a wild goose chase.”
Bob said, “You need to move the boxes on the closet shelf. They left off the stairs to the attic and cut out a cubbyhole in that closet.”
Timberlake slid the boxes off the shelf and threw them, casting black dresses and crinolines across the floorboards where Wood Hite left the world. Bob sat down on the cot and rested his skull against the newspaper corset advertisements on the wall. He didn’t care if Dick shot at the men when they entered the attic; he didn’t care if Dick surrendered and confessed all and he himself was convicted for murder. He was shivering and sick to his stomach and wished only to lie down. The lady’s white dresser that was next to the closet now lacked its three drawers; coats and trousers rugged the floor; books had been tossed like cow chips.
As Craig and Ditsch looked on, Timberlake climbed on a chair and whammed at the ceiling cover with his elbow until it skipped up off its wooden frame and the sheriff could slide it aside. He then drew his revolver and raised it and called, “You there! Give yourself up!” He looked to his knees as he waited for some sort of answer, then received a lit candle from Sergeant Ditsch and rested it inside the attic.
Craig scowled at Bob and Bob confidentially nodded and Craig said, “Go on in, Jim.”
So the sheriff boosted himself over the frame and they could see his legs swivel as he looked around the attic but there were no shots, no sounds at all. “Sparrows,” he said once, then, after a movement, “You’ve got a window open, you know that?”
Craig said, “Come on down, Jim,” and took his eyeglasses off to clean them. “
Looks like our spy was playing games.”
Martha was in the corridor in a blue gingham dress and white sweater. She saw the chaos in the room and with sarcasm said, “I thought a man’s home was his castle.”
Craig smiled inauthentically and made some notes in the journal and closed it. “Why don’t you show us the stable and barn, Mr. Ford?”
Bob buttoned on a coat and circled a wool scarf around his neck and Timberlake accompanied him across the snow as if they were two chums out on a skate. The sheriff said, “They’re going to love a pretty boy like you in the penitentiary. You won’t never be lonely again.”
It was then about twenty minutes after sunrise. Wilbur came forth from his shack accoutered for chores and the sheriff and two detectives searched the lofts and crannies of the barn.
Bob remained outside in the cold with his fists in his coat and squinted at the attic’s north window. He could see it had been jimmied open. A strip of white cloth blew from the sliver that snagged it; a sparrow was on the sill; shingles showed in the snow rut that Dick had cleared away as he silently skittered down off the roof. His boots made buckets in the snow. The left veered a little, like a comet’s tail, as if he’d hurt his ankle on the considerable drop to the earth.
The two detectives had by then discovered the snow destruction of a mounted horse running north into the orchard, but since they were on foot they couldn’t chase after Dick, so they merely cussed their luck.
Bob listened to them and closed his eyes. The stable door creaked and Bob smelled chewing tobacco and looked to see Commissioner Craig there next to him, considering everything. Craig said, with some irritation, “God takes care of fools and children.”
And Bob said, “Not all the time He doesn’t. I think this is an exception.”