by Ron Hansen
Then Finis C. Fair joined the Fords in Henry Craig’s law office in order to present them with their rewards, but first he spoke at dulling length, explaining and adapting with the intricacy, circumspection, and loftiness that was regarded as a signal of good breeding. He made a preamble about the governor’s July 1881 proclamation, saying the extra five thousand dollars that was promised for the arrest and conviction of one of the James boys couldn’t be justified in the circumstances of manslaughter and, second, funding depended upon the railroad companies and their complete cooperation in providing the money. Some of these companies had proven themselves to be irresponsible, Fair said, still others were parsimonious. And there was a third component to consider, that it was not only the Fords who’d made the capture possible, there were good men who’d struggled for many years at great risk, and these civil servants too, the governor felt, should take some part in the profits. (Henry Craig diplomatically slipped from the room.)
Charley was exasperated. He slumped deeply in a chair and stared gloomily at the ceiling, sighing as the governor’s secretary moved from point to point. Finally he asked, “Are we going to get a plug nickel?”
Bob sneered at Finis Farr. “It’s just that there’s these raspberry cough drops that Charley’s got his heart set on.”
They each were given a large brown envelope with two hundred fifty dollars inside. Farr anticipated them by saying, “You two can complain if you want but that’s the only cash available; anything else would come straight from the governor’s pocket.”
Charley said, “Well, let’s not be too hasty in turning that down neither. I mean, it spends just the same, don’t it?”
Farr reacted testily. “Many prisoners would be happy to pay five thousand dollars to get a governor’s pardon. Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.”
Charley put the envelope inside his shirt and responded, “Appears to me we already did.”
SO THEY WERE READY for a change of atmosphere and providence when George H. Bunnell arrived in Richmond squiring a poshly costumed actress who’d apparently patterned herself after the great Lillie Langtry and spoke with an emphatic and highly suspect English accent. Bunnell was a New York showman with a museum of curiosities and living wonders in Brooklyn and a repertory company that played one-night stands in cities and resorts throughout the East. He made a party of a cheap cafe supper that evening and as Bob and Charley gaped with aspiration at the actress, he persuaded them to sign a contract with his “players guild,” guaranteeing them costly publicity and promotion, repeated engagements before large audiences, payment of fifty dollars for each of six evening and two matinee performances per week, plus an aggrandizing script “crafted by one of America’s most accomplished playwrights” and the professional improvements of a Broadway director. He’d misinterpreted the newspaper stories about the Fords: he presumed they were explosive and stormy men of great prominence who’d already rejected multiple opportunities while the actual case, of course, was that nothing had yet happened to make them feel either prosperous or respected and by May even the town of Richmond was inhospitable to the Fords. People crossed the street to avoid passing them, shop clerks refused to acknowledge them, every mailing included letters of asperity, reproof, and warnings that they too would be shot when next their backs were turned. By the time George H. Bunnell came around they were living in protective custody inside the Ray County courthouse and splitting a nightwatch at the single high window, often scaring children away by clapping saucepans together.
William H. Wallace procured the necessary permissions for the Ford brothers to quit Missouri and they proceeded, incognito, to New York City in June, gaping at the strange new geography outside the passenger coaches, their noses against the windowglass like snails whenever the train precariously crossed a gorge or hairpinned up a steep mountain. George Bunnell generally stayed close to Bob during the journey, as if the young man were an invaluable object to which he’d just gained possession. They would sit in the dining car with a silver service between them and with men of color refilling their coffee cups at brief intervals, and Bunnell would ask Bob yet again to give an account of how he killed Jesse James, designing a stage presentation from those story ingredients that Bob rarely forgot.
The Ford brothers’ try-outs quickly verified Bunnell’s prior conviction that Bob possessed some acting talent and Charley not a jot, and the unaccredited playwright made allowances for that incongruity by casting the script as Bob Ford’s proud and complacent reminiscence, calling it How I Killed Jesse James. Bob was taught not to saw the air with his hand nor to split the ears of the groundlings but to give temperance to his passion, to keep within the modesty of nature, and to imitate humanity; Charley was only expected not to slouch or mutter and to transport his sicknesses to the alley before letting them go.
They practiced the skit for two weeks and then previewed it with music hall and carnival acts at seaside resorts such as Atlantic City, Jersey City, and Ocean Beach before they opened in a splendid theater at Nindi and Broadway in Manhattan. Bob was as groomed as a European prince; his ginger brown hair was recut and marceled with irons, he’d glued on a dignitary’s clipped mustache, his gentleman’s suits were tailored in England throughout the range of grays and greens, he gained nearly four inches in height from exaggerated Wellington boot-heels and lifts. Charley was simply given a Prince Albert suit and striped cravat and a glued chestnut brown beard and mustache that matched Jesse’s, along with rigorous promptings throughout the performance due to his inadequate memory.
Saucy girls danced in the French style, cowboys sang anthems and gunslinger ballads around a gaudy cardboard fire, an Appaloosa mare displayed feats of arithmetic by stamping on the floor, a railway coach was robbed by a snarling gang to gasconades of opera music, and then the Fords walked onto a set that resembled the sitting room of the cottage atop Confusion Hill. Stage right contained an oak bed and an easy chair with a crimson shawl on it; to the center was a round dining room table and chairs and canvas wall with two artworked windows and a wide door; stage left showed a wicker chair and two picture frames, one of which enclosed a spurious reward poster that announced Jesse was wanted dead or alive and included an etched portrait of the outlaw, and next to that a shabby, made-to-order painting showed Julius Caesar being stabbed by conspirators in the Senate.
How I Killed Jesse James began with Charley clomping across the stage in the apparel of Jesse James and pumping Bob’s hand imperatively as his mouth seemed to make imploring words. Bob looked out to the audience and said: “When Jesse James came to me at the grocery store, he told me that my brother Charley was with him and that they had planned to rob a bank in Platte City. It would take three men to do the job and he needed my help.”
Charley sat down at the dining room table like a gruff town burgess and rattled out a newspaper; Bob sat informally on a wicker chair beneath the pictures and polished a silver pistol. Charley scowled across the stage at Bob and Bob again confided to the audience: “After we got to his house in the suburbs of St. Joseph he seemed suspicious of me for some reason and never allowed me out of his sight for even a moment. He had me sleep in the same room with him and he even followed me when I would go out to the stable.”
Bob laid down the pistol and collected some newspapers placed under the chair rungs, then moseyed over to the dining room table. “Each morning before breakfast he would take me downtown with him to get the morning papers which he read every day. He would buy the Saint Joseph and Saint Louis papers and I wanted to get the Kansas City papers to keep track of things, and after we had read them we would exchange.”
Bob straddled a chair across from his brother and the two traded what they’d been reading. Bob perused a page and flipped to another and, without raising his eyes, said: “I had been told that I must keep the papers from Jesse if I could, as the reporters were on to the fact that something was in the wind and it might leak out and be published that Dick Liddil had surrendered, which fact, up to
that time, had been kept secret.”
Charley slammed his fists on the dining room table, astounding some in the audience, and jolted up as Bob registered amazement. Charley then careered around, wildly jawing, wagging a finger at his brother, overplaying wrath, as Bob shrugged and professed his guiltlessness according to the accepted conventions of stage acting. By way of explaining the foregoing, Bob stated: “Soon after my arrival in Saint Joseph, Jesse questioned me closely about Dick Liddil and I told him I had not heard anything about him for a long time.”
Charley resettled on the dining room chair and suspiciously eyed Bob as the young man walked to the footlights and invited everyone he could see to participate in his intrigue. “The days kept slipping by and it was getting hotter for me every hour. I knew anything might happen at any time to tip my hand to Jess, and I scanned the papers each morning eagerly.” He moved a little to the right in accordance with the director’s suggestion that Bob indicate a transition from summary to scene. “On the morning of April third, Jess and I went downtown as usual before breakfast for the papers. We were to go that night to Platte City to rob the bank, and I was afraid that I might need to go through with the prospect and that innocent people might be killed.”
Bob had by then circumnavigated to the oak bed; Charley squared on the audience and crossed his legs and looked at everything with belligerence. Bob raised the newspaper from the mattress and slowly rotated downstage. “We came back to the house at about eight o’clock and sat down in the front room. Jesse was sitting with his back to me, reading the Saint Louis Republican. I looked over the Kansas City Journal first, and seeing nothing of interest, I threw it on the bed and picked up the Kansas City Times.” Bob then glanced at the newspaper front page and his eyes signified aghast surprise. “The first thing I saw in big headlines, almost a foot long on the first page, was the story about Dick Liddil’s surrender. My only thought was to hide the paper from Jesse.” Bob perceptibly noticed the crimson shawl on the easy chair and pushed the newspaper under it with some expense of motion.
A pretty girl made to appear twice her age glided across to the dining room table with a porcelain coffee service on a tray. “Please sit down, Bob,” the actress said. “Breakfast is ready.”
Charley hackled a tooth as Bob sat and, seeming to prefer alternative company, Charley moved over to the easy chair where he conspicuously accomplished each action as Bob explained it: “Jess couldn’t have seen me conceal the Times but he sure enough picked up the shawl and threw it on the bed, and snapping open the newspaper, returned to his seat. I felt that the jig was up and I moved my belt around so that it was close to my right hand. I proposed to the game if Jesse began to shoot.”
The girl playing Zee poured cold coffee into painted cups and settled into her skirts at the table, sweetly facing the audience. Charley spread the newspaper over his plate and propped his chin on interlaced fingers as he joylessly read. Bob illustrated each of his director’s interpretations of panic, consternation, fright, and hopelessness. “My heart went up in my throat,” he said, without straying his eyes from the reading man. “I couldn’t have eaten a bite to save my life. All at once Jesse said—”
Charley surged in on signal: “Hello, here! The surrender of Dick Liddil!”
“And he looked across at me with the pitiless glare in his eyes that I had seen there so often before.”
“Young man,” Charley said, resticking a sinking wing of mustache, “I thought you told me you didn’t know that Dick had surrendered.”
“You mean he did?” Bob asked. “I didn’t know!”
“Well, it’s very strange. He surrendered three weeks ago and you was right there in the neighborhood. It looks fishy.”
The actress carried the coffee service off-stage, Bob removed to the easy chair as Charley continued to scowl at him and stood from the dining room table, his Prince Albert coat slung to the rear of his large revolvers.
Bob abstractly buffed his boots with a red bandana and slyly looked to the audience as Jesse loitered in the room. “I expected the shooting to begin right there, and if it had Jesse would have got me, for I was nervous. But then he was smiling and said pleasantly—”
“Well, Bob, it’s all right, anyway.”
Bob submerged a little in the chair in an attitude of judgment. “Instantly his purpose flashed upon my mind. I knew I had not fooled him. He was too sharp for that. He knew at that moment as well as I did that I was there to betray him. But he was not going to kill me in the presence of his wife and children, and so he was smiling and pleasant to throw me off-guard, intending when we were on the road that night to finish me.”
Charley strode to the oak bed with a general’s carriage and after some overacted deliberations in which his eyes squinched and his mouth screwed to the left and right, Charley painstakingly uncinched the cartridge belt and in a challenging way flung the two revolvers on the mattress. Charley had been coached to remember the balcony seats and his voice was consequently a little too like a yell: “In case you’re wondering why I took my guns off, it’s because I might want to walk into the yard!”
Bob revealed: “It was the first time in my life I had seen him without that belt on, and I knew in an instant that he threw it off to further quiet any suspicions I might have that he had tumbled onto my scheme.”
Charley’s brown eyes cast about the stage with what seemed mania and Bob helpfully clarified: “He seemed to want to busy himself with something to make an impression on my mind that he had forgotten the incident of a moment before at the breakfast table.”
Charley fetched a feather duster from a wicker stand and then flagged it toward the implausible painting of a dying Caesar and, with some tardiness in matching gesture to utterance, said: “That picture’s awful dusty.”
Bob surreptitiously got up from the easy chair and sneaked downstage as he softly divulged: “There wasn’t a speck of dust that I could see on that picture.” He swiveled to watch Charley flick the feather duster over the frame as one might watch a man at a petty crime and Bob let the audience espy his five-fingered right hand as he gradually rested it on his gun. His back was turned three-quarters to them, so he amplified his speech as he confessed: “Up to that moment the thought of killing him had never entered my mind, but as he stood there, unarmed, with his back to me, it came to me suddenly, ‘Now or never is your chance. If you don’t get him now he’ll get you tonight.’ ” Bob moved within six feet of a man who was then muffling a cough and straggling the duster onto the canvas wall, making the gray illusion undulate like a slowly luffing sail. Some people in the audience stirred with anticipation.
Bob said: “Without further thought or a moment’s delay, I pulled my revolver and leveled it.” Bob did so. “He heard the hammer click as I cocked it with my thumb in throwing it down on line with his head. He recognized the sound and started to turn to the right as I pulled the trigger.”
Bob let the hammer snap and a light charge of gunpowder ignited and the great noise on the stage made some of the audience gasp and later complain of the percussion still in their ears. Charley reeled on the chair, clapped his palms to his chest, shut his eyes, and then crashed unauthentically to the floor, stopping his collapse with his left foot, then his left elbow, but smacking flatly on his back and issuing one word: “Done!”
Bob stepped back and with a perfect imitation of marvel, puzzlement, and regret, confronted the witnesses to the assassination. “The ball struck him just behind the ear and he fell like a log, dead. I didn’t go near his body. I knew when I saw that forty-four caliber bullet strike that it was all up with Jesse.”
The girl playing Mrs. James ran onto the stage from the right, paused to see a man who was suppressing his breathing on the stage apron, and then permitted herself that which the script described as “a blood-curdling scream.” Then nothing happened; they froze. The houselights dimmed almost to darkness for many seconds and brightened once again on a stage that contained only Robert Ford. He slung his
gun and glared at the susceptible and with gravity proclaimed to the crowd: “That is how I killed Jesse James.”
The curtain rang down to magnanimous applause, rose to show Bob and the actress and Charley accepting their compliments, then sprang noisily down again as boys in knickers scurried onto the stage in order to change the scene.
HOW I KILLED JESSE JAMES was mentioned in only one newspaper and then as a skit of mild curiosity value in an evening of middling entertainments—by Thursday so many seats in the Manhattan theater were empty that George Bunnell couldn’t meet his expenses and he moved the show, on the 25th, to his Brooklyn museum on Court and Remsen streets, where the competition for theatergoers was not nearly so dismaying and public captivation with the Ford brothers was emphatic.
The crowds there were without Southern loyalties or strong emotions about the Yankee railroads and banks, and if they thought about the West it was with contempt, as a region of Baptists, Indians, immigrants, cutthroats, and highwaymen that only the savage and stupid could take much delight in; or they thought of it with a dreamy worship inspired by nickel books, thought of it as a place of dangers, deprivations, escapades, knightly contests, and courtly love. And in that prejudiced and uncomprehending atmosphere, the Fords attained the peculiar type of respect and approval they’d sought when they started out rustling horses as teenagers.