by Ron Hansen
“You going to look inside?”
“Why are you being so nice to me?”
“You gave me that bawdy bootjack; this is my Christmas gift to you.”
The wooden lid was nailed shut. Bob crammed a coin into the interstices and twisted it until the lid released. “It’s April Fool’s Day, you know.”
“Isn’t a joke,” said Jesse.
Inside the box, nestled in red velvet, was a pearl-handled .44 caliber revolver, a New Model Smith and Wesson number 3, with a six-and-a-half-inch nickel barrel. Bob beamed at Jesse and said, “Such extravagance!” and then turned the revolver to admire it.
“Doesn’t that nickel shine though?”
“It’s more than I could hope for!” said Bob. He clicked the chamber around, cocked and released the hammer, cocked the hammer and aimed the revolver at a red ball on the floor, investigated the play in the trigger, squeezed the trigger until the steel hammer snapped forward, listened to the mechanisms as he recocked the revolver at his ear, straightened his right arm and shut his left eye, skated his thumb across the serial number (3766), measured the full length: twelve inches. “I want a gunsmith to engrave this; some sentence with our two names and the city and the year of presentation. It’ll be a prize that can be passed on from one generation to the next.”
“I figured that granddaddy Colt of yours might blow into fragments next time you squeeze the trigger.”
Bob grinned and said, “You might have something there.” He substituted the New Model Smith and Wesson for the tarnished revolver in the scrolled black leather holster that he then buckled and let slant across his right rear pocket. He slapped it out like a gunfighter, snugged it, slapped it out again. The gun chuckled against the rigid leather but after repeated pulls and replacements it made no more noise than a man’s swallow.
Zee called from the dining room, “Dave? You ready for supper?”
“Pretty soon, sweetheart.”
Bob said, “I might be too excited to eat.”
Jesse smiled broadly and rose from the spindle chair. “You know what John Newman Edwards once wrote about me? He said I didn’t trust two men in ten thousand and was even cautious around them. The government’s sort of run me ragged, you see. I’m going the long way around the barn to say I’ve been feeling cornered and just plain ornery of late and I’d be pleased if you’d accept the gun as my way of apologizing.”
“Heaven knows I’d be ornerier if I were in your position.”
“No. I haven’t been acting correctly. I can’t hardly recognize myself sometimes when I’m greased. I go on journeys out of my body and look at my red hands and my mean face and I get real quizzical. Who is that man who’s gone so wrong? Why all that killing and evil behavior? I’ve been becoming a problem to myself. I figure if I can get you right I’ll be just that much closer to me.”
Bob looked at the man in bewilderment and couldn’t find the words for an answer, so he said, “I need to wash my hands if supper’s on. The gun’s made them feel sort of public.”
“Go ahead,” the man said, and graciously opened the door.
Bob exited from the children’s room and smiled meekly at Zee as he entered the kitchen and leaned on the counter for a moment. He spilled pitcher water into a pan and as he sank his hands in it he listened to Jesse greet his children, listened to chairs sliding away from the dining room table and sliding underneath it again. Jesse began to say grace without him and Bob raised a brick of yellow soap to his nose, smelling its ingredients: rainwater, sal soda, unslaked lime; tallow, rosin, salt.
APRIL 2ND was Palm Sunday and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Howard, their two children, and their cousin Charles Johnson strolled in sunshine to the Second Presbyterian Church in order to attend the ten o’clock service. Bob remained at the cottage, claiming he’d stomached all the religion he could when his father was a minister of a timber church that was called Jasper. So they went without Bob and he slyly migrated from room to room in his white-stockinged feet, a shining revolver slung near his thigh, a coffee cup near his mouth. He ate a slice of cold toast and walked into the master bedroom, where he rested the cup and saucer on the chiffonier and investigated each of the six wide drawers. Hanging from a mirror hook was an eighteen-karat-gold watch in a hunting case, made by Charles J. E. Jaeat and stolen from John A. Burbank in the Hot Springs stagecoach robbery of 1874. Bob listened to the ticks and chimings of the clock, gave it timidly to air, savagely grabbed it back. He walked into the closet and inventoried the clothes on the hangers and hooks; he slipped on one of Jesse’s worsted wool coats and inspected its tailoring in a mirror. He ironed the bed’s rumpled sheets with his hands, he sipped from the water glass on the vanity, he smelled the talcum and lilacs on a pillowcase that was etched here and there with snips of cut hair. He reclined on the mattress so that he could be in meeting with it and he situated each coal-oil lamp in the room by the smoke stains it made on the ceiling. He rolled to his left as Jesse must have rolled to marry with his wife in the evening. He resisted a temptation. His fingers skittered over his ribs to construe the scars where Jesse was twice shot. He manufactured a middle finger that was missing the top two knuckles. He imagined himself at thirty-four; he imagined himself in a coffin. Morning light was coming in at the window and pale curtains moved on the spring breeze like ghosts. Bob raised his revolver and straightened it on the door, the mirror, the window sash, a picture made from a fruit can label, a nightgown that hung from a nail. He went out to the sitting room. He considered possibilities and everything wonderful that could come true. He remembered the set-down coffee cup and saucer and removed them from the chiffonier, wiping a ring from the wood with his sleeve. And he was at the dining room table, oiling his gun, when the churchgoers returned to the cottage, each with a sword of green, palm.
THEY WENT on a picnic at noon. Jesse and Charley and the boy skimmed stones off the river and skulked around the bleached bones of a sheep that rocked in a shallow pool. The sleeves of their white shirts were sloppily rolled up past their elbows, exposing the farmer brown of their hands and wrists and the gradations into white. A dog plunged into the river and struggled out and chomped at the water as if it were meat. Bob reposed on his elbow and exchanged pleasantries with Zee as she scraped corn relish out of a jar and onto some cold mashed potatoes. He chewed a blade of grass and coolly watched Jesse swing his screaming and then giggling daughter over the river. Bob asked, “How come you married him?”
Zee changed position to remove covered bowls from the market basket. Her gingham dress rose and subsided. Her pregnancy didn’t yet show. She said, “Oh, he was so dashing and romantic and cast-out by the world, I couldn’t help but love him.” She smiled over the river, recollecting. She caught a strand of blond hair that flew near her eyes and refastened it with a small comb. “He was a figure out of a girl’s storybook. Gentle, adoring, dangerous, strong.” She looked at Bob. He was marking the checkered groundcloth with a spoon. “Surely you must’ve felt the same things. He has a magic about him. He steps straight into your heart.”
Bob looked for an exit and asked, “Your middle name is Amanda, isn’t it?”
She looked puzzled but replied that it was.
“I’ve got a sister whose name is Amanda.”
Tim waded in six inches of water. A couple fifty feet east of them was singing gospel hymns. Somewhere a girl was being tickled. Zee uncorked a mustard jar. “Do you have a sweetheart, Bob?”
“I’ve kissed a girl or two, if that’s what you’re getting at.”
“You don’t have a sweetheart though.”
“Nope.” He tapped the spoon against his palm and then set it across a plate. He said, “That’s the one thing that’s been denied me. Otherwise my life’s been a bounty.”
“You’re young yet.”
Bob smiled uncertainly. “You hear people mention being in love. It’s like a sickness I’ve never had.”
Zee stared at Bob sympathetically and simply said, “I know.”
&n
bsp; JESSE LOUNGED as he ate and grinned at the sunlight and after their picnic lunch moseyed along the river with Zee, her right arm engaged in his left as he gave names to birds with his pointing finger. Charley put on the blue spectacles that were supposed to keep his identity unknown and galloped to the rope swings with Tim piggy-backed. Bob catnapped with Mary in shade and twenty minutes later opened his eyes to see Jesse squatted beside him. “You’ve got a habit of startling me.
Jesse moved a toothpick in his mouth and asked, “Can I talk with you a minute, Bob?”
Bob said, “I’m just lying here with nothing better to do.” Jesse looked straight ahead. “I’ve got a grapevine of spies; I guess you knew that.”
Bob wasn’t sure what to say. “I guess maybe I didn’t.”
“One of my spies told me you’ve spent a good portion of time in Kansas City lately. Could you tell me what your primary reasons would be?”
“I’ve been making purchases.”
“You haven’t come across Dick Liddil by any chance?”
“Nope.”
“When would you say was the last time you saw him?”
Bob pretended to speculate. “December.”
“That long ago!”
“If you’ve heard otherwise, they’re mistaken.”
“You don’t have any idea where he might be?”
“Actually no. You hear plenty of stories but they contradict each other.”
“He hasn’t given himself up to get that reward?”
“Sorry I can’t be more help to you but I’ve been sorely placed since Christmas—no one drops any good gossip in Richmond; it’s mostly about who’s been tippling or about some boys swiping pigs.”
Jesse seemed to be in agreement. He gave his attention to Charley, who was walking in high grass in sunlight with Tim, his blue spectacles on his nose so that he could see over them and read aloud from a rain-damaged book he must have unearthed by the swings. “ ‘They were ready with their reins between their teeth,’ ” he read, “ ‘a loaded Colt’s revolver in each hand.’ ”
Jesse got up from his squat, jiggling his legs out to get feeling back in them. He frowned and asked, “What sort of garbage is he reading to my boy?”
Charley continued, “ ‘A wild yell from Jesse, and the eight sprang upon the unprepared greasers, and before the first awful fire of Jesse and his clan, half the Mexicans were killed.’ ”
Jesse strode over and Charley smiled hugely at him. “I’m getting to the good part. ‘The miserable Bustenado missed his mark but Jesse, quick as thought, sent a bullet between the Mexican’s shoulders, and he fell upon his horse’s neck, as dead as a bag of sand.’ ” Charley grinned again and showed a book cover that read The James Boys Among the Mexicans. “Someone forgot it over yonder.”
Jesse slapped the man’s cheek with his left hand and the blue spectacles flew. Charley staggered a little and became pale except for the hot pink of the skin where he was struck. Jesse yelled, “Don’t you ever read them lies to my boy again! You understand me? My children are growing up clean!”
“I’m sorry!”
Bob could see water in Jesse’s blue eyes. He said to the Fords, “I’m real angry,” and then gently lifted his sleeping daughter to his shoulder and crooned words of affection as he walked away with Tim.
LATE SUNDAY NIGHT Charley scrunched close to the wall in the sitting room bed. His mouth was so muted by the pillow that Bob could just barely perceive that his older brother was crying. Bob asked what was the matter and Charley said one word: “Scared.”
Bob snuggled close to his brother and curled his left arm around him. “He isn’t going to kill us.”
Charley sighed and shook a minute and scoured his nose with the pillowcase. Once he’d collected himself he said, “Yes he is. We’re going to leave here for Platte City tomorrow and he’s going to shoot us like he shot that conductor at Winston. Maybe he’ll wait till we’re asleep in the woods and then slit our throats like he said about that cashier.”
Bob looked over his shoulder to check the room and then murmured into Charley’s ear, “I’ll stay awake so he can’t.”
Charley rolled to his back and gazed at the ceiling and then glanced at his kid brother. “This was the ninth day, right? And Craig gave you ten? So maybe we’ll get surrounded up here and maybe we’ll go to the bank and when we run out it’ll be a crossfire and maybe fifty guns’ll be shooting every whichway at Jesse and who gives a golly goddamn about the nobody Fords or if you and me get killed in the bargain?”
“You’re imagining things.”
Charley covered his eyes with his arm, respirated great, calming breaths of air, and coughed rackingly. Quiet came to the room again and then he said, “Isn’t going to be no Platte City. That’s Jesse fooling with us.”
Bob considered the notion for a minute and then slipped out of bed and into his clothes. Charley looked at him and asked what he had in mind but Bob merely said in a low voice, “Go to sleep,” and walked through the sitting room, dining room, kitchen, and stepped off the wooden porch into the night. The earth was cold as marble to his feet and the grass stabbed like a broom. He wore gray wool trousers over his longjohns but the chill convinced him to shawl his shoulders with a tattersall quilt that was being aired on the clothesline. He could see a mare asleep on three legs next to the stable—the fourth leg was canted rather coyly, as if a curtsy were coming. The wind in the sycamore branches made a sound like “wish.” He could make out Severance, Kansas. He could smell fruit trees in the way that one can smell a neighbor’s cooling pie. He settled himself on a plain bench under the clotheslines that sagged from the cottage eave. A mangled spoon was in the dirt; a straw doll was in a tin bucket.
He heard the screen door creak and clap shut, heard his brother limp over and stand to the rear of him. He seemed to ponder their predicament, the past, the galaxy. He lowered onto the long bench like a man who weighed six hundred pounds, and Bob saw that it was Jesse.
“So you and me are the nighthawks.”
Bob made no reply.
“Mrs. Saltzman cut out a garden plot here. The Turners say it was a marvel: rabbit wire, noontime shade, clematis on the bean poles. I’ve been lazy about my seedlings.”
“I don’t like to garden; I just like to eat.”
Jesse clutched his trousers and craned his legs into alignment. He said, “Maybe I’ll nail together a Martin box.” He peered at his right knee and his left and rapidly pounded them with his fists. “I’ve got pains in every inch of my body. My ears ring; my eyes are itchy. I’m going to lose my gift of second sight.”
“Do you see future things like they were long gone, or do you just get inklings about what’s to come?”
Jesse showed no inclination to answer. He paused for some time and then asked, “Did you know Frank and I looked for my father’s grave over in Marysville, California?”
“You’ve mentioned that, but not at any length.”
“I could picture the grave and the wooden cross but I couldn’t get the geography right. They said it was cholera that killed him. They might as well’ve said the bubonic plague. You can always tell when it’s Satan’s work.”
“How?”
“Trickery. Empty promises.” Jesse scratched at his skull hair with all his fingers and then scratched at his jawbeard. He rubbed his eyes with his wrists. “You missed the Palm Sunday service.”
“I used to go every week but that was because my daddy put a gun to my head.”
Jesse shut his eyes and recited, “ ‘For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.’ ”
Jesse said, “A good preacher will match that up with Matthew twenty-six.” He coughed meanly and spat to the right. He squeezed his mouth with his palm. “Sometimes
I get so forlorn and melancholy. Do you ever get that way?”
Bob shrugged.
“Do you know what it is you’re most afraid of?”
“Yes.”
“What?”
“I’m afraid of being forgotten,” Bob said, and having admitted that, wondered if it was true. He said, “I’m afraid I’ll end up living a life like everyone else’s and me being Bob Ford won’t matter one way or the other.”
“It isn’t always up to you, Bob. It may not be in the cards for ya.” Jesse looked over to Kansas and leaned on his knees for a minute. “Do you ever get surprised when you see yourself in a mirror? Do you ever find yourself saying, ‘Why do they call him by my name?’ ”
It seemed to Bob that Jesse expected no response.
“You’re wrapped in a ragged coat for your three score and ten and nobody gets to see who’s inside it.”
“It’s getting chilly,” Bob said.
Jesse’s thoughts seemed to fly and he concentrated on something that Bob couldn’t see. “His voice is like a waterfall.”
“Whose voice?”
“If I could stand in it for a second or two, all my sins would be washed away.”
“I honestly can’t follow this conversation.”
Jesse approximated a smile. “Do you know who I’m jealous of? You. If I could change lives with you right now, I would.”
Bob said, “I guess this must be a case of the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence.”
“You can go away right now if you want. You can say, ‘Jesse, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the Good Lord didn’t put me here to rob the Platte City Bank.’ You can go inside and get your gatherings and begin a lifetime of grocery work. I’m roped in already; I don’t have my pick of things; but you can act one way or another. You’ve still got the vote. That’s a gift I’d give plenty for.”
Bob thought negligently, as a young man might—totally within his body and his own history, without etiquette or any influence other than his hunger and green yearning. He gripped the tattersall quilt at his neck, smelling borax in it. He said, “I don’t know. I’m not acting according to any plan. I’m just getting myself out of spots and pressing for my best advantage.”