by Ron Hansen
Charley said, “Jesse finally come up with a place to match his prominence,” a comment he’d plagiarized from Zee.
And Jesse said, “I could mow down a thousand scalawags with no more than a thousand cartridges. I’ll never be surprised by anything again.”
The horses strained up Lafayette Street and stopped as soon as they heard the children. Jesse crawled off his saddle and accepted his daughter in his arms as he knelt to kiss Tim, and then, with a general’s arrogance, assigned Charley the stable chores, Bob the job of bringing their gatherings in, and moved off to the rear of the cottage, Mary clutching his right leg.
Bob skidded the packs and paraphernalia onto the stoop and eavesdropped on a conversation that was too remote to comprehend. Bob took off his bowler hat and bent close to the locked door, his pale forehead blotching against the screen. “Halloo!” he called and rattled the door on its hook. Zerelda James backed from the stove to see him and winced a little and said rather crossly, “You never mentioned Bob would be here.” And yet she squeezed her hands dry in her apron and managed an indulgent smile as she walked across the room and unlocked the door.
“He didn’t tell me you’d come along,” she said.
“Maybe he was saving it as a pleasant surprise.”
Little Mary was submerged in the woman’s skirt and glowering at Bob. Zee combed the girl’s hair and said to her, “You’ve got two cousins for company now,” and then mothered the child back into the kitchen.
Bob threw clothes and whatnots inside and then removed his gunbelt and soldier’s coat as he examined the room. The floornails had not been countersunk and were raised and silvered with shoe scuffs. A red rubber ball and two jacks were strewn on the tasseled green rug. Five Little Peppers and How They Grew was astraddle the rim of a straw portfolio that had been decorated with a gladiola seed package and nailed onto the wall. The sofa pillows had been shammed with lace and white doilies on the chair backs were tanned with the stains of hair oils and pomades. To the right of the door was an oak bed and a soogan quilt lighted by a tall window of flawed glass slatted by Venetian blinds. On the left was a corresponding window and a plaster wall that was papered with roses and an intricate scheme that had been scribbled upon with a child’s crayon. Contrary to the fabrications of magazines and stage sets, there was no tapestry embroidered with the sentiment “God Bless Our Home”; instead there was an ornate walnut frame and a watercolor painting of a racehorse named Skyrocket. Jutting from a wicker sewing basket was a feather duster made from some blue and brown exotic bird. Against one wall was a rush-bottomed chair and wine table, eater-cornered was a rocker, against the dining and sitting room wall was a broad sofa and a black, ironworked, naked woman whose lewdly cleft legs were used as a bootjack. Staring at Bob was Jesse. The man walked into the kitchen and muttered to Zee with amusement, “That boy can make our sitting room look like a matinee.”
BOB AND CHARLEY REMAINED at 1318 Lafayette Street until April 3rd, so more than a week was frittered away in inconsequential chores, afternoon naps on the sofa, and loudmouthed and lingering meals. The routine was to wake at seven, see to the care of the animals, then stroll down to the post office, where newspapers that Thomas Howard subscribed to arrived, each neatly rolled into a brown paper mailing sleeve. The three men would straddle wicker chairs and flatten pages on the dining room table until Zee carried in a farmer’s breakfast to them and Tim was sent off to school. By nine they would have finished two kettles of coffee and the men would retire to the sitting room while Mrs. James cleaned the kitchen. They would mention the two-or three-day-old news items they’d read and comment on each crime or predicament in accordance with their own creeds and stances. Jesse would wind his pocket watch; Jesse would wind the clock. Jesse would clean a revolver and load it and then he would clean another. Weather might be introduced as a subject of conversation and for many minutes the weather would be rigorously considered. Questions might be lazily asked about spring planting and the crops. Bob cited locusts once and ascertained from the increased interest that he’d inadvertently entertained an exciting topic that was never before discussed.
Lunch was served at noon and then the three would nap or kill time on the kitchen porch, where they would watch Mary play with a girl named Metta Disbrow. They scrupulously pored over a collection of nineteen ambrotype photographs. Bob reread Noted Guerrillas, or The Warfare of the Border, by John Newman Edwards, the one contemporary book that Jesse owned. Jesse exercised in the sun with weighted yellow pins. He touched his toes one hundred times. He twisted horseshoes with his fists. He looked at his physique from various angles in the mirror of the shaded kitchen window. He made his daughter feel his muscles and laughed at her mystified reaction. He made Bob and. Charley cup flexed biceps that were as round and solid as baseballs. He Indian-wrestled them one at a time and then struggled with them together, gradually becoming disgusted with their clumsiness and frailty.
At four they walked down for the evening newspapers and The Police Gazette and absorbed themselves in them until the main meal was served at six. Jesse never scolded the children, rarely even corrected them; the grammar, hygiene, manners, and temperament of his children, even if improper or inadequate, were either never noticed by Jesse or else caused an anguished look from him and a call for his wife’s ministrations. He spent the evenings in the crowded sitting room with one child next to him, another riding the jouncing pony of his knee, while Zee sewed and the Ford brothers simpered. Only when the children were asleep would the three men journey into the city, where they played pool in a South Jefferson Street saloon. By eleven or twelve they were asleep themselves, or at least they pretended to be.
After three days of this dreary routine, Bob was markedly nervous; by the fourth day, Bob was so skittish his legs jittered whenever he sat, he couldn’t remain in a chair for more than two minutes, he chewed his fingernails and clawed at his baby-fine hair and generally carried on so much that Jesse said, “Appears to me you’ve got the peedoodles, Bob,” and then compassionately prescribed Dr. George Richmond’s Samaritan Nervine.
Bob once went to the kitchen and slurped water from the bucket dipper as Zee separated egg whites and yolks. She usually swiveled away from Bob whenever he was near or curtailed their conversations by inventing chore-girl activities. Now she simply lifted on her toes to find a bowl in the cabinet and ignored Bob’s sulky consideration of her body. He saw the fine blond hairs raise from her neck as he stared and he sent his eyes to his feet. She moved to her mixing and Bob said, “If you want to clean your floor, you should first off scrub sand over it and follow that with a soda lye applied with a real stiff brush. You rinse it with warm water and when it’s nearly dry, you know, sort of coolish to your feet, you wipe it down with hypochlorite of lime and let it cure overnight. I learnt that at the grocery store.”
Zee sifted white flour into a bowl and said, “This isn’t my kitchen. We’re renting.”
Bob let the water dipper sink in the bucket. He scratched his calf. Zee spooned bicarbonate of soda from a canister and set it down. Bob was about to reach for the canister in order to read it but Zee shot a glance at Bob’s knuckles and he stalled. He sniffed a sliver of brown, gritty soap; Zee mashed cream of tartar into the bicarbonate of soda with a soup spoon. She asked, “Why are you so antsy?”
Bob improvised by saying, “It’s just this cussed boredom. This sitting around inside the livelong day, getting into your hair, getting slow and sleepy, making jail house dogs of ourselves.”
She looked at Bob with some animation and attention subtracted from her eyes, as if she were recalling something even as she spoke. “He’s sometimes gone for months. We sometimes change houses five times in a year. It’s gruesome being hunted, Bob. He can stay in his nightshirt all day if he wants; I’m just grateful that he’s around.”
“You can see it’s damaged his mind some,” Bob said.
She ignored his comment by rubbing flour from her palms with her apron and returning to he
r recipe.
Bob watched her work a minute more and said, “You’re making a cake.”
THEY WALKED TO A POOL HALL at nine on Saturday, and as the Fords shot eight-ball, Jesse maneuvered among the pool tables, letting players clap him on the back, making jokes, remembering names and relationships, visiting corner tables if anyone called him over, which was frequently and with gusto. A gunsmith chatted with Thomas Howard about a .22 caliber pistol the man carried inside his boot. Mr. Howard said, “You can’t more than make a man itch with that article,” and soon the two were in good-natured argument about marksmanship. They settled on a competition and walked outside to the alley with a starved-for-entertainment crowd.
Bob watched Jesse pry the lead ball from a cartridge and saw a notch in it with a skinning knife that he then fixed into the crook of a tree so that the cutting side was a thin, silver streak in the night. He worked a string into the cut lead ball and stomped his bootheel on it to close the nick, and that string he fastened to an overhead branch so that the ball swayed close enough to tick the skinning knife. He made a boy stand near the target with a coal-oil lamp. He took five strides from the oak tree and announced to the audience that the boy would set the cartridge ball in motion and the gunsmith and he were going to fire five times. The trick was to strike it just so and make the skinning knife shave both the swinging and the speeding bullets with one shot.
The crowd grumbled their grave doubts or murmured in awe or made side bets and the gunsmith raised a .22 caliber revolver with grim resignation. The boy flipped the ball into a metronomic swing and stood aside with the coal-oil lamp as the gunsmith shot at and missed the moving target five times, scattering oak bark and cursing the foolishness of the contest.
Jesse then removed his suit coat, rested his right hand on his hip, and with his left lifted the revolver he called Baby. The boy slapped the cartridge ball into a wide arc and retreated and Jesse squinted down the muzzle sights and fired. Wood chipped but the ball continued to swing. It ticked against the knife like a clock. Jesse jiggled his left arm by his side to relax it and then raised it again and missed a second time.
“Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of,” the gunsmith said. “It’s next to impossible.”
Jesse grinned at the gunsmith and said, “If I didn’t know I could do it, I wouldn’t have concocted it.”
The ball still clocked but with shorter strokes and Jesse squinted a third time and then there was a gunshot noise of plank clapped against plank, a chime as two cartridge balls skinned off the knife, and the long song of the steel blade as it quivered and rang.
Silence followed the accomplishment and then some men applauded and yahooed and some others crouched at the oak tree and a gratified Thomas Howard was rushed to by people who wished to congratulate him and vigorously pump his hand and gladly introduce themselves.
The boy carved the cartridge balls out of the oak tree and walked around with them as if they were wedding rings on a silver tray. Bob lifted one and rubbed his thumb on the flat of it and the boy asked, “Is it still hot?”
Bob moved over to his brother. “He arranged that for our benefit.”
Charley smiled. “You thought it was all made up, didn’t you. You thought everything was yarns and newspaper stories.”
Bob looked over at the shootist, who was then showing Baby to the gunsmith. “He’s just a human being.”
The Fords returned to the pool tables and Bob won the next rack. He supported his chin on the pool cue if standing; he snared his coat over his gun butt so that it showed when he leaned over the green felt and clacked the ivory balls. At midnight, Jesse winged his arms around Charley and Bob and weaved them out into the street, and on the climb up Confusion Hill gave them his recollection of the James-Younger gang’s robbery of the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank at Corydon, Iowa, in 1871: then nearly everyone was at the Methodist church as Henry Clay Dean pleaded the case for a contemplated railroad; the holdup attracted no attention and seven men were able to split six thousand dollars. Jesse now expected many people in Platte City, Missouri, to be at the courthouse on April 4th to see Colonel John Doniphan perorate in the defense of George Burgess, who was being charged with the manslaughter of Caples Burgess, his cousin. The Wells Banking Company—commonly called the Platte City Bank—would remain open for its commercial customers, but with only a teller or two in attendance.
They reached the cottage and Jesse reclined on the sitting room sofa, sending Charley out to collect firewood for the stove. Charley lolloped off and Jesse wedded his fingers on his stomach and closed his eyes. “How it will be is we’ll leave here next Monday afternoon and ride down to Platte City.”
Bob seated himself on the floor and crossed his ankles. “How far is that from Kansas City?”
Something in Bob’s inquiry made Jesse resistant and he chose to answer around it. “Platte City’s thirty miles south. You and me and Charley will sleep in the woods overnight and strike the Wells Bank sometime before the court recesses.”
Bob asked when that would be exactly, but his voice was too insistent, his attitude too intense, and Jesse said, “You don’t need to know that.”
Bob scrawled on the floorboards with his finger and Jesse arose to a sit. He said, “You know, I feel comfortable with your brother. Hell, he’s ugly as sin and he smells like a skunk and he’s so ignorant he couldn’t drive nails in the snow, but he’s sort of easy to be around. I can’t say the same for you, Bob.”
“I’m sorry to hear you say that.”
Jesse was silent a moment and then asked, “You know how it is when you’re with your girlfriend and the moon is out and you know she wants to be kissed even though she never said so?”
Bob didn’t know how that was but he said that he did.
“You’re giving me signs that grieve my soul and make me wonder if your mind’s been changed about me.”
“Do you want me to swear my good faith like I did for your mother?”
Charley clattered wood into the stove’s firebox and returned from the kitchen, slapping his hands. He saw Jesse glowering at Bob with great heat in his eyes, and said, “You two having a spat?”
“I was getting ready to be angry,” Jesse said, and then smiled at Bob. He reached out and coddled Bob’s neck and said in a gentling voice, “Sit over here closer, kid.”
Bob vacillated a little and then scooched over, smirking at his brother with perplexity and shyness.
Jesse fervently massaged Bob’s neck and shoulder muscles, communicating that all was forgiven, and he continued with his sketch of the robbery. “You’ll stay with the animals, Charley, and The Kid and I will walk into the Platte City Bank just before noon. Bob will move the cashier over away from the shotgun that’s under the counter and he’ll tell the man to work the combination on the vault. They’ll finagle about time locks and so on and I’ll creep up behind that cashier and cock his chin back like so.” And Jesse cracked his right wrist into Bob’s chin, snapping the boy’s skull back and pinning him against his knee as he slashed a skinning knife across his throat. The metal was cold and left the sting of ice on Bob’s fair skin and for an instant he was certain he’d actually been cut and he slumped against the sofa, incapacitated, in panic. Jesse’s mouth was so close his mustache snipped at Bob’s ear when he said in a caress of a voice, “I’ll say, ‘How come an off-scouring of creation like you is still sucking air when so many of mine are in coffins?’ ”
Bob’s eye lolled left to see the skinning knife vertical near his cheek. There was a crick in his neck and the man’s wristbone was mean as a broomstick under his chin. Bob manufactured a smile and said, “This isn’t good riddance for me, is it?”
“I’ll say, ‘How’d you reach your twentieth birthday without leaking out all over your clothes?’ And if I don’t like his attitude, I’ll slit that phildoodle so deep he’ll flop on the floor like a fish.” Jesse then retracted his arm and rudely shoved Bob forward and rested the skinning knife on the sofa cushion. Then his temper abr
uptly altered and he slapped both knees gleefully and grinned at Bob and exclaimed, “I could hear your gears grinding rrr, rrr, rrr, and your little motor wondering, ‘My gosh, what’s next, what’s happening to me?’ You were precious to behold, Bob. You were white as spit in a cotton field.”
Bob examined his neck by finger touch. “You want to know how that feels? Unpleasant. I honestly can’t recommend it.”
“And Charley looked stricken!”
“I was!” Charley said.
“ ‘This is plum unexpected!’ old Charley was thinking. ‘This is mint my day!’ ” He looked from Bob to Charley and joked some moments longer, laughing coaxingly, immoderately, sarcastically, unconvincingly, and when at last the two laughed with him, Jesse adopted a scolding look and slammed into his room.
SO IT WENT. Bob was increasingly cynical, leery, uneasy; Jesse was increasingly cavalier, merry, moody, fey, unpredictable. If his gross anatomy suggested a strong smith in his twenties, his actual physical constitution was that of a man who was incrementally dying. He was sick with rheums and aches and lung congestions, he tilted against chairs and counters and walls, in cold weather he limped with a cane. He coughed incessantly when lying down, his clever mind was often in conflict, insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot, he seemed in a state of mourning. He counteracted the smell of neglected teeth with licorice and candies, he browned his graying hair with dye, he camouflaged his depressions and derangements with masquerades of extreme cordiality, courtesy, and good will toward others.
He played the practical joker and party boy. At suppers Jesse would make his children shiver by rasping his fork away from his mouth so that the tines sang off his teeth. Zee set down a soup tureen and he winked at Bob when he asked, “Is this fit to eat or will it just do?” He’d belch and murmur, “Squeeze me.” He surreptitiously inched the butter or gravy dish under Charley’s elbow so that the chump stained his sleeve; he hooked Charley’s spurs together as he snored in the sitting room and then screamed the man off the sofa so that Charley farcically sprawled. He repeated jokes at the evening meals, making each more long-winded and extravagant than it was in his recollection, altering each so that it commented on the vices of railroad officers and attorneys—who were so crooked, he claimed, that they had to screw their socks on. But even as he jested or tickled his girl or boy in the ribs, Jesse would look over to Bob with melancholy eyes, as if the two of them were meshed in an intimate communication that had little to do with anyone else.