by Ron Hansen
“Do I know you?”
“You got your eyes open?”
“You woke me.”
The man sagged against the cabin logs and looked down Bachelor mountain into the gulch and the fog of light that was all they could see of Jimtown. “You hear that music?”
Kelly stepped out with his pistol by his hip. He could just make out a piano.
The man lighted a cigar and said, “It’s the Omaha Club. Bob Ford’s having his grand opening tonight.”
Kelly spit to his right. “I’ll give him a grand opening one of these days.”
The man ticked his head. “I come to tell ya regarding that. He’s got on one of his periodicals and he’s puffed himself up to say he’s going to kill Ed Kelly on sight.”
“Why, that son of a bitch!”
“And Bob’s one of the most plausible talkers I ever seen.”
“I expect he’ll ask me to turn my back first.”
The man sucked on his cigar and looked at it as he blew smoke. “You oughta do something.”
Kelly agreed. “I’ll go down there now and give him a straightening.”
“I’d give it till around afternoon if I was you.” He then put the cigar in his mouth and soon thereafter disappeared.
ON THE MORNING of June 8th, 1892, the body of Miss Nellie Russell was brought in by railroad crewmen and on the instigation of Dorothy Evans a subscription paper was made up to cover her funeral expenses. The Omaha Club prostitutes accepted the responsibility of collecting the philanthropies, and Dorothy went upstairs to raise Bob from sleep.
She said, “You know that girl you were talking to about a job? She went and killed herself.”
Bob sighed, “Oh God!” and gazed at nothing for some time.
Dorothy could find nothing to say that would subtract from his grief, so she only read a distillery’s mail-order form out loud to Bob as he dressed in his gentleman’s clothes. He flexed a stiff celluloid collar around his neck and closed it with a gold collar button that Soapy Smith would eventually carry as a good luck charm; then he adjusted a yellow cravat around the collar and affixed the cravat with a milk white opal pin. He asked Dorothy, “How do I look?” and she answered, “Very distinguished,” without lifting her eyes.
He ate a segment of her sugar doughnut and checked his mustache in a looking-glass and he slumped against a closet door as he thought about Miss Russell. Sunlight was coming in around the green window shades and a light breeze made them angle inside the room and subside again, lightly tapping the sill. Bob said he thought he would go for the mail; Dorothy thought she would stay inside with her sewing and magazines. She said, “You were right not to give her a job,” and Bob went out without saying goodbye.
Dorothy Evans would be married in 1900 to a Mr. James Feeney of Durango, Colorado. She would adopt two daughters, one of them nearly deaf, and, according to gossip, she would mistreat them. Her legal marriage would be no more joyous than her common-law marriage was and Mr. Feeney would leave her to make book at the races in Trinidad and Pueblo. She told a neighbor in June 1902, “My husband is gone, my health is miserable, I’ve mortgaged all the furniture, we scarcely have anything of our own,” and on Friday the 13th she sent a daughter to a drugstore with a note asking for fifty cents’ worth of chloroform. On Sunday morning she got into her green silk wedding dress, telling her daughters she was going to take a nap. She then poured the chloroform into a cloth and pressed it to her nose until she slept so deeply that she perished.
Bob skimmed the mail and then collected his subscription newspapers and rode a mare down to the Rio Grande River to read them. He hung his suit coat on a limb and sat on the brown paper sleeve that the Denver newspaper was mailed in. Shade dappled him; the grass whispered. Sunlight glinted on a river that would still be cold with snow. Boys with fishing poles were near the water, plunking out hooks that were yellow with corn. The Republican National Convention was meeting in Minneapolis. President Benjamin Harrison was expected to be renominated. The Dalton gang robbed the Santa Fe Railroad at Red Rock in the Indian Territories and a manhunt was under way. Bob smiled and said, “Good luck.” He got an apple from his coat pocket and ate it as he flipped pages. He saw a stick-float spin in the water and then dip and he sat up to watch a boy pull the fish to land. It curled out of the water once and then splashed wildly and abruptly disappeared. The boy complained and Bob put on his coat, giving the apple core to his mare before he rode back to Jimtown.
Deputy Sheriff Edward O. Kelly came down from Bachelor at 1 p.m. on the 8th. He had no grand scheme, no strategy, no agreement with higher authorities, nothing beyond a vague longing for glory and a generalized wish for revenge against Robert Ford. He ate a sandwich and soup at Newman Vidal’s restaurant and was joined by a French Canadian named Joe Duval. Duval would later maintain that Kelly informed him then about a message he’d been given, Kelly saying, “I’m not gonna give the dirty cur a chance to shoot me like he did his cousin, Jesse James.” The two acted accordingly. They walked to a machinist’s shop and there sawed a lead pipe into eighth-inch sections that French Joe chiseled in half. Duval was carrying with him a ten-gauge shotgun with twin barrels. Kelly removed the shells, cut off the paper tops, and emptied the shot pellets onto the ground, repacking the shells with extra gunpowder before reinserting them into the gun. He made a paper funnel and poured the pipe shrapnel through it into the right shotgun barrel and then the left. Duval shut his long coat around the shotgun and walked away with the walnut stock against the leggings of his right boot.
Edward O. Kelly would be ordered to serve a life sentence in the Colorado penitentiary for second-degree murder and French Joe Duval, his accomplice, would be given a term of two years. Over seven thousand signatures would eventually be gathered on a petition asking for Kelly’s release, and in 1902 Governor James B. Orman would pardon the man. Kelly began writing gruesome letters to Bob Ford’s widow in Durango but otherwise did nothing except get arrested on charges of vagrancy and ramble from one insignificant town to the next. He begged Jesse James, Jr., for room and board and the young attorney obliged Kelly for more than a month, but then the man strayed off again, going at last to Oklahoma City. And there, in January 1904 Kelly tangled with a policeman arresting him for burglary, chewing on the policeman’s ears as they fought until the man got out his pistol and shot Kelly through the head. His body was put in a potter’s field without rites or ceremony.
Robert Newton Ford worked in the Omaha Club on the afternoon of June 8th, stocking the bar with his overnight whiskey and getting jiggers of it for some of the Cornish miners sitting there. He removed his suit coat and hung it on a nail and then unfastened his cartridge belt, winding it around his gun and snugging it against the cash register. A man named Walter Thomson from Kansas City commented on Bob’s opal stickpin, saying opals brought bad luck.
Bob said, “My luck isn’t very good as it is. I guess an opal couldn’t change it much.”
The man said he knew what Bob meant.
The sun was high and the day growing hot. Some men had given a burro a pan of beer rather than water and they were laughing as the pack animal staggered down San Luis Avenue. Deputy Sheriff Plunket saw Ed Kelly crouched in an alley’s shade, looking at the Omaha Club, but considered it only another example of the man’s peculiarity.
A pretty entertainer named Ella Mae Waterson crossed into the Omaha Club with the completed subscription papers for Miss Nellie Russell and Bob perused the list of contributors, giving his opinion of each. She said Soapy Smith signed up just before going off to Denver that morning. Bob ascertained that Smith had pledged five dollars, so just below that line Bob printed his own name along with a pledge of twice that. And, paraphrasing from an epistle of Peter, he appended the inscription “Charity covereth a multitude of sins.”
It was twenty minutes to four when French Joe Duval, with whiskey in him, lunged around the corner of The Cafe and up toward the Omaha Club, struggling a shotgun out from under his long coat. A bo
y named Albert Lord scooted from the smithy’s shop to the club in order to change a twenty-dollar bill for his father and Edward O. Kelly was right behind him, slowing only long enough to grab the shotgun from French Joe and then pressing the cold metal to the boy’s neck like a kiss as he whispered, “Step aside, Albert.”
The deputy sheriff of Bachelor crossed from sunlight into the yellow light of the tent and caught the man who shot Jesse James laughing with Ella Mae Waterson, giving his back to the street. Kelly sighted down the shotgun and said, “Hello, Bob!” And as Bob was turning as a gentleman might to a greeting he recognized, the shotgun ignited once and again from five feet away, clumped sprays of shrapnel ripping into the man’s neck and jawbone, ripping though his carotid artery and jugular vein, stripping skin away, and nailing the gold collar button into scantling wood. His body jolted backward, jolted the floorboards, and Ella Mae Waterson screamed, but Robert Ford only looked at the ceiling, the light going out of his eyes before he could say the right words.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
MY SOURCES FOR THIS novel have principally been the Missouri newspapers of the period and the following: The Man Who Shot Jesse James by Carl W Breihan, The Crittenden Memoirs by H. H. Crittenden, Jesse James Was My Neighbor by Homer Cray, The New Eldorado by Phyllis Flanders Dorset, and Jesse James Was His Name by William A. Settle. I would like to express my gratitude to those authors for their information and guidance, and to the National Endowment for the Arts and the University of Michigan Society of Fellows for grants that helped me complete this novel.
R.H.
About the Author
Ron Hansen is the author of eight novels, two collections of stories, and a book of essays. He graduated from Creighton University in Omaha and went on to study at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and Stanford University. His novel Atticus was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award. His novel The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, also a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, was adapted into a movie starring Brad Pitt and Casey Affleck. Hansen has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. He lives with his wife, novelist Bo Caldwell, in Northern California, and teaches at Santa Clara University.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook onscreen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 1983 by Ron Hansen
Cover design by Mauricio Diaz
978-1-4804-2388-6
This edition published in 2013 by Open Road Integrated Media
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