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

by Ron Hansen

  Omaha Charlie stalled for a minute and apprehensively reconsidered, then clapped the cue down on the pool table, slouched back to a corner chair, and occupied himself with his boot socks. Jesse James and Charley Ford merely lingered over their steamed beers, voted against inspecting the Maryville bank, and walked out.

  Mike Hilgert then winked and called to the corner, “What made you so sociable all of a sudden?”

  Omaha Charlie angrily removed himself from the saloon but reportedly said later, “I could see Hell in that man’s eyes.”

  In Graham, Missouri, Jesse asked a blacksmith to renail a shoe, thawed his knuckles at a fire, and only then noticed that the man in the leather apron was Uriah Bond, whose son John was in grammar school with the James brothers in the late 1850s, then joined the Northern Army and was murdered by Jesse in the Civil War.

  Uriah Bond snuck looks under his eyebrows at the two as he worked on the hoof with his nippers and clawhammer. Jesse walked over with a rasp so the blacksmith could smooth the nails after he’d clinched them. He said, “You know who I am, don’t you.”

  Bond remained bent over and silent. He swiveled the hammer and broke a nail end off with a jerk of the claw. Then he just hunched there and a broad hand covered his eyes as he shook with rage and grief and hopeless fright.

  Jesse said, “You won’t tell anyone, will you,” and Uriah Bond mentioned the afternoon visit to no one until he saw the photograph of Jesse with his eyes shut, his arms crossed at his wrists, his body roped to a cooling board and tilted so that he seemed to stand.

  On a night in Kansas when the rain came down like cold coins, the two outlaws retreated into a small white hotel with a coven of rooms and rented one on the second floor. Two orange gas lamps sissed on the walls, the wide bed was tautly made, the closet and armoire were empty. But an eighteenth-century highboy in the corner contained a locked middle drawer that Jesse scratched at with a six-penny nail as Charley squirmed out of his clothes. The lock clicked open and Jesse said, “Presto chango!” and slid the drawer out. Inside were a night-black silk cravat that was striped in red, a starched white shirt that was still wrapped in blue laundry paper, and a crisp celluloid collar that was exactly his size (14½). According to an interview with Charley in the Richmond Conservator, those were the clothes that Jesse wore on the morning of April 3rd.

  THEN IT WAS the third week of March. Cold spells and winds were only occasional, the pasturelands were greening, there were rucks and islands of snow only in the shade, city streets were sloppy with mud that agglutinated on buggy wheels and slowly baked in the noontime sun and then peeled off like tree bark. Jesse mentioned robberies, but only as one might mention a sparrow’s nest in the eave or an annoyance in a mail-order shoe. His wife was pretty sick until noontimes, so he merrily took over some of the cooking and cleaning work, even walked into an apothecary and ordered Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. (Advertisements called it: “A positive cure for all those painful complaints and weaknesses so common to our best female population.”)

  He made macaroons with an apron on, he invited some girls over to visit Zee and kissed their gloved hands in greeting; he seemed to have subtracted from his make-up whatever was cruel or criminal and substituted for those qualities congeniality and inertia. He accorded to everyone, he spoiled his children, he offered Charley a substantial allowance as if Charley were his profligate but much-preferred son. He seemed resigned, placid, grandfatherly; he seemed to have given up.

  So it was a surprise when Jesse threw a chinchilla coat at Charley’s sleeping face and said, “Get your gatherings together. You and I are riding south.”

  South, of course, meant Richmond, which they achieved on March 23rd. They looked for Bob in Elias’s unlocked house, then found him in the grocery store with a clerk’s apron on, a feather duster jutting from a rear trouser pocket, climbing onto a wooden stool to stack jars of Heinz tomato ketchup on an overhead shelf. Only two customers were in the store: a woman was examining various lengths of penny shoelaces that were draped over a jacket peg and an elderly man was sliding a flour sack along an aisle that was coated with sawdust. Bob leaned to swish the feather duster over a row of applesauce lids and Jesse startled the boy by announcing, “You’ve been chosen.”

  Bob swiveled around and nearly slipped off the stool, his arm nearly flew up to cover his eyes. The color was leached from his face but he managed to squirm a smile onto it. He asked, “What do you mean?”

  “Your brother said you wanted to join us. But maybe you like this grocery store more than you said you did.”

  Bob looked for a clue from Charley but his brother was fixed on the store’s entrance, smoking a cigarette and coughing. Bob counterfeited bravura and arrogance, saying, “I’ll walk out of this crackerbox without so much as a fare-thee-well. This piddly work is beneath me.” He tore off the apron by way of illustration and dropped the feather duster handle-down in a water glass, and as he printed out a note to Elias that read, “Gone fishing,” he talked about what a sight for sore eyes the two of them were.

  Jesse smiled. “So you missed me?”

  “I’ve been crying myself to sleep every night.”

  Jesse rang open the cash register and praised the morning’s receipts. He stuffed cigars in his vest pocket. He took carrots out to his horse. By then it was noon and the three horses were nipping ears and politicking about seniority and Charley was already in the saddle, murmuring about what he’d packed for his brother and how they’d stolen a horse for Bob. They ceased talking when Jesse came out, correcting the crease in his black fedora. He slipped his left boot in the stirrup and asked, “Do you see him?”

  “Who?”

  “A man in the cottonwoods with a spyglass. He followed us from your sister’s.”

  Bob turned. He could barely see beyond the schoolyard; the cottonwoods were no more than a caterpillar of green against the light blue of the sky. “Do you think it’s the sheriff or a railroad detective?”

  Jesse climbed into his saddle and hooked his horse around to the left. “Hell, you’d have to lift their tails to tell the difference.”

  It was, as it happened, their brother Elias. He took the road to Kearney with them for two miles and postulated that they would stop at the Samuels farm that evening, but for reasons of his own, timidity probably being foremost, Elias forgot to report that information to Sheriff Timberlake and only communicated that the three men rode off into the west.

  JOHNNY SAMUELS SANK against the stained pillows and feebly greeted the legendary stepbrother who’d come, he thought, to oversee his laggardly dying. He napped feverishly most of the day, arising only to urinate in a tin pail that Charley gripped for him. He did not recognize the Fords nor did he speak to them; he seemed non compos mentis. Reuben too was increasingly mentally ill and spent much of the late afternoon sitting with an arm on the windowsill, an apple peeler in his lap, swarmed in a moth-eaten shawl and four or five coats and mittens. Zerelda cooked with her good left hand and caressed Jesse’s cheek with the stump of her right wrist and mothered her son and cried over him and asked the ceiling how she could continue to live without him, asked if she wouldn’t have been better off never to have married at all, asked if Jesse ever once considered his poor momma when he chose the lot of a criminal. Her ravings were so crowded with recriminations and insults and petitions, with weeping and caterwauling and wild expressions of love, that it seemed bewildering to Bob and Charley that Jesse remained there for minutes, let alone hours; yet he did. She was four inches taller than Jesse, a giant of a woman, but she made him seem even smaller, made him seem stooped and spiritless. She made him kiss her on the mouth like a lover and rub her neck and temples with myrtleberry oil as he avowed his affection for her and confessed his frailties and shortcomings.

  And then, at the six o’clock meal, she concentrated on the Fords, requiring opinions of them and explanations of why they wished to accompany Jesse and what they hoped to gain. To the last query Bob responded that they
were afraid to stay at home what with the rewards being offered and every scoundrel in the county gunning for the James gang.

  Zerelda gazed at Bob and mushed vegetables with zig-zag motions of her gums, her lips protruding like the clasp of a purse. She looked to Jesse and said, “I don’t know what it is about him, but that boy can aggravate me more by just sitting still than most boys can by pitching rocks.”

  Jesse stared across the table at Bob, a teaspoon in his mouth.

  The virago covered Bob’s right hand with her big-knuckled left and said, “I want you to swear to God that you’re still Jesse’s friend.”

  Bob swore, “Just as I hope for mercy in the hereafter, I’d sooner die than see your son harmed in any way.”

  “Read Galatians,” she said. “Chapter six. ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ ”

  Charley and Jesse played checkers after supper while Johnny looked on with the languor and apathy of the dying. At nine Dr. Samuels pulled himself to his feet with the arms of his chair and recited, as if he’d just created it, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

  Zerelda said she believed she’d follow Reuben’s good advice and shoved her knitting into a sewing basket. She extinguished two coal-oil lamps, banked the fire with a charred board, and kissed Johnny on each eyelid.

  Her third-born son stacked checkers in a glass and then, as Charley collected his things for a night ride, Bob saw Jesse slide into his mother’s room in order to wish her goodnight.

  Bob caught a glimpse of Mrs. Samuels as Jesse pushed open the door. A black net covered her hair and the doctor eased his sore neck with a red hot-water bottle, his eyes shut so tightly his face frowned. Zerelda asked if Jesse was liverish and if that was why he was so moody, and Bob heard him answer, “I guess I’m not feeling well tonight. I’m a little low-spirited.” And then there was a silence in which Jesse’s expression or stance must have changed and he continued melodramatically, “Maybe I’ll never see you again.”

  It seemed more a calculated statement than a candid one, it was as if it were meant to arouse her operatic emotions, or as if it were meant to be overheard. Zerelda exclaimed, “No! No! No!” and cried without restraint and noisily called for the intercession of angels and saints, and Bob scuttled over to the corner where Charley was plucking the straw flowers in a porcelain vase.

  Bob murmured, “He knows.”

  Charley didn’t turn. “Knows what?”

  “I’ve talked with the governor about him.”

  Charley scowled over his right shoulder at his kid brother, no nettled conscience in his look, only a toothache of concern and skepticism.

  “He needs to be stopped,” said Bob.

  Charley reconsidered the vase without comment and Bob walked back to a chair, where he sat as a model student sits when the teacher is out of the room. Jesse came to them with a bottle of sherry smuggled inside his long coat and asked the Ford brothers, “Ready?” and the three rode in a cold rain until they reached a Lutheran church twenty-eight miles from St. Joseph.

  It was wooden and painted white and the cross atop the steeple had a lightning rod attached. The minister was a cook in a restaurant that was known for its clam chowder. The double doors were unlocked, as Was the custom then, and inside the church was clean and dark and smelled of floorwax and candles. Jesse threw his greatcoat on a pew and lit an altar candle that he carried into the sanctuary. Bob kicked his bedroll flat on the floor as Charley climbed on a rear pew to light an unornamented chandelier.

  Bob said, “If we’re ever alone for more than a minute, I’d like a chance to speak with you further.”

  Charley carried a flame from one candle to the next and pretended not to have heard.

  Jesse came back from the sanctuary with a crockery jug cradled in the crook of one arm, a ribboned Bible in the other. He smiled at the two and said, “Grape juice and sherry,” but only remained with them a short while before he cloaked his shoulders with his coat and riffled the Bible, seeming to read whichever page his thumbnail settled on.

  Bob slept twenty minutes on the punishing floor and then awoke with the sensation that he’d been unconscious for much longer and might have missed something vital. He sat up and saw his brother in a vacant, animal slumber, saw Jesse curled over the book like a monk. Bob wandered over and sidled into the pew.

  Jesse licked an index finger and flipped a page. He said, “Go to the Good Book when you’re sore distressed, and your soul will be comforted.”

  “Your mother sure seems to know her scripture.”

  “She’s been an example to me all my life.”

  Bob rolled his head on his neck to relieve a crick and then canted a little to ascertain which section the man was on.

  “The Book of Psalms,” said Jesse. “Ever come across it?”

  “Well, I’ve never read it one right after the other, but I’ve listened to that poem about the Lord being my shepherd.”

  Jesse recited, “ ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.’ ”

  Bob nodded. “You hear it at funerals.”

  Jesse let the book divide from his finger and sought Psalm 41, which he scanned, vigorously scratching his two-inch beard, gingerly petting it smooth. He ironed out the page with his fist and knee and smiled wryly at Bob and then began a private study of the words, as if he were without company.

  Bob tried to imagine how Jesse’s children saw him: he would be the giant figure who could fling them high as the ceiling. They knew his legs, the sting of his mustache against their cheeks, the gentle way that Jesse had of fingering their hair. They didn’t know how he made his living or why they so often moved; they didn’t even know their father’s name; and it all seemed such an injustice to Bob that he asked, “Do you ever give your past life any thought?”

  Jesse squinted at him. “I don’t get your meaning.”

  Bob managed a grin and asked, “Do you ever give any thought to the men you’ve killed?”

  Jesse moved the candle forward so that it was near his left hand and he angled a little in-the pew. “Give me an example.”

  “I just thought you’d’ve imagined it maybe: how it must’ve been for that cashier in Northfield or that conductor you shot in Winston. You’re doing your job, you’ve just ate maybe, you’re subtracting numbers or you’re collecting tickets from passengers and then—bang!—everything’s changed and a man you don’t even know is yelling at you with a gun in his hand and you make one mistake and—bang!—you’re killed.”

  Jesse shut the book and rubbed a thumb across the two gold words on the black leather cover. Rainfall was the only noise. He said, “I’ve been forgiven for all that.”

  Bob said, “You might’ve had a good reason for killing them. I don’t know. I’m just saying it must’ve been like a nightmare for them, and maybe it is for you too, right now.”

  Jesse said again, “I’ve already been forgiven,” and then leaned to his left and blew out the candle.

  BOB AWOKE with sunlight coming through the mosaic windows in colors of red and blue. Charley was already slugging his feet inside damp boots. Bob slunk up the aisle, looking down pews, until he found Jesse rounded asleep inside his coat, his mouth open, his ankle twitching, a gun in his left hand. Bob then scuttled out of the church in his socks and saw Charley meandering through the cemetery, reading the inscriptions. He ambled over to him with his palms cupping his elbows.

  Bob said, “Craig gave me ten days.”

  Charley considered an angled gravestone and the engraving GONE ON TO GREATNESS.

  “For what?”

  Bob thought a moment, tugging up his right sock as he chose the proper term. “Arresting him,” he said.

  “You and me,” Charley said.

  “It’s going to happen one way or another. If not us, then some deputy sheriff in Saint Joe, or some Pinkerton man in Kearney, or some simpleton with a pistol on loan like it
was in the swamplands when the Youngers were captured. It’s going to happen, Charley; and it might as well be us who get rich on it.”

  Charley scratched his neck and looked across the road to a greening sward where cattle and sheep were mixed. Timberland was a blue smear on the horizon. His sunken cheeks and cruel overbite made him seem to be sucking a mint. He said, “Nobody’s going to get Jesse if he’s still live enough to go for his gun. He can kill ya with every hand.”

  “I’ll go alone then,” Bob said.

  Charley glanced at his kid brother disparagingly. “And besides that, he’s our friend.”

  “He murdered Ed Miller. He’s going to murder Liddil and Cummins if the chance ever comes. Seems to me Jesse’s riding from man to man, saying goodbye to the gang. Your friendship could put you under the pansies.”

  Charley sighed and said, “I’ll grind it fine in my mind, Bob. I can’t go any further than that, right now.”

  “You’ll come around,” Bob said, and returned to the church, twisting the crick in his spine.

  Jesse was by the altar and above the congregation in a pulpit of inlaid wood. He looked both pious and possessed. His face was stern as he flipped pages at the lectern, his fingers clenched the railing, and his blue eyes had silver fire in them as he put them on the Fords. He called, “From now on you two won’t go anywhere without me! From now on you’ll ask for permission; you’ll ask to be excused!”

  THEY MADE ST. JOSEPH by afternoon, with enough sun overhead to tarry at the railroad station and watch the men shunt cars, to number the cattle and sows in the stockyards, and to buy licorice and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper at an apothecary. Jesse asked what the clocktower said and Bob leaned from the store to read the time, almosting it, and they rode east through the mud and smoke of the city. Jesse carried himself like a chamberlain with two groundlings and intermittently winked or touched the brim of his fedora whenever a man called the name “Tom” in greeting.

  Soon they were near the red-bricked World Hotel and Jesse told Bob to raise his eyes to the roller coaster of Confusion Hill more than a quarter-mile off. Bob looked over the roofs of bungalows and a steep ascent of timber to a high skull of land on which rested a white cottage with green shutters. He could see laundry swelling with wind on the clothesline, the measured white pickets of the yard fence, the swing in the sycamore tree.