The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

“Cook alum,” Jesse said, and took a heaped bowl and spoon from a man in a gunnysack apron. Jesse lowered onto a stump in his vast gray coat and Bob sat on the earth at his feet with his holster removed and his own coat opened for rather overdue ventilation. Jesse chewed and wiped his mouth on his hand. “Do you know what this stew needs?”

“Dumplings?”

“Noodles. You eat yourself some noodle stew and your clock will tick all night. You ever see that woman over in Fayette could suck noodles up her nose?”

“Don’t believe I have,” said Bob.

“You’ve got canals in your head you never dreamed of.”

Bob was scraping his stew out of a blue envelope. Juice broke from a corner and spoiled his trouser fly in a manner that suggested incontinence. He would not notice this until later. He flapped the envelope into the fire and licked his spoon with a hound’s care before submerging it in his pocket. He said, “Your brother Frank and I had just a real nice visit this afternoon. Must’ve been a hundred subjects entertained, having

to do with the Chicago and Alton Railroad and the U.S. Express Company and assignments on board the cars.”

Jesse had closed his eyes but kept the spoon in his mouth. He exercised a crick in his neck.

Bob went on. “Well, the upshot of our visit together was we sort of mutually agreed that the best thing for all parties concerned would be if I could use my huge abilities as your helper and, you know, apprentice. So we could be confederates together and come out of this unscathed. That was the upshot.”

“Well, Buck does the figuring.” Jesse looked at his bowl of stew. “Do you want the rest of this?”

“I’m sorta off my feed.”

“Hate to waste it.”

“My innards are riled as it is.”

Jesse arose and dumped his leftovers into the iron pot and gave over his bowl and spoon to a boy for washing. He said to Bob, “If you order a beefsteak in a restaurant and they don’t broil it long enough? Don’t ever send it back, because if you do the cook spits all over your food; tinctures it something putrid.”

Bob was dumbfounded. He said, “I don’t like to harp on a subject but—”

“I don’t care who comes with me,” Jesse said. “Never have. I’m what they call gregarious.”

Bob smiled in his never-quit way. Frank was drinking coffee and scowling again as he walked over from the far side of the fire. Jesse raised his voice. “I hear tell you and young Stovepipe here had a real nice visit.”

Frank looked askance at Robert Ford and flung on the ground the remains of his coffee. He dried the tin cup with his elbow. “Your boys have about an acre of rock to haul, Dingus. You’d better goose them down yonder.”

THEY SKIDDED a rain-surrendered cottonwood tree down the bank and horsed it over the polished steel rails, ripping bark away from the bone-colored wood. They carried limestone and sandstone and earth-sprinkling rocks that were the sizes of infants and milk cans and sleeping cats, and these they hilled and forted about the tree as shovels sang and picks splintered and inveigling footpaths caved in along the vertical Blue Cut excavations. Jesse supervised the rock-piling, recommending land to be mined for stone, dedicating his men to various jobs once the locomotive was shut down, chewing a green cigar black. Shadows grew into giants and died as the sun burned orange and sank. Mosquitoes flitted from hand to cheek until a night wind channeled east on the tracks and carried the insects away, even tore the ash of cigarettes and battened light coats over backs on the higher exposures. Clouds bricked overhead and were brindled pink, then crimson and violet; leaves sailed like paper darts and the air carried the tang of cattle and hogs and chimney smoke.

Frank was a solemn sentinel on the southern ridge, big as a park bronze of the honored dead, two inches taller than most of his men and majestic with confidence and dignity and legend. Bob Ford heaved rock and yanked the horses to creek water and stirred the camp fire out, and each time he passed Frank James he said “Hello” or “How do you do?” until Dick Liddil indicated that robbers crossed paths with each other many times in the course of an evening to-do and Frank considered it silly to even once exchange pleasantries.

Jesse, on the other hand, was the soul of friendliness and commerce, acknowledging each of Bob’s remarks, letting the boy ingratiate himself, rewarding him with trivial tasks that Bob executed with zeal. Then he asked Bob to strike a match as he read the dial of a pocket watch in a gold hunting case, stolen from a judge near Mammoth Cave. The clock instructed him and he retreated into the dark and after some minutes returned with a kerosene lantern and with a burlap grain sack over his arm like a waiter’s towel. “You can stick with me but don’t heel. I don’t want to bust into you every time I have the notion to change direction.”

Bob muttered, “I’m not a moron, for Heaven’s sake,” but his irritation was quiet and his head down—one might have thought his boots had ears.

Jesse wasn’t listening anyway. He scrubbed his teeth with his linen shirt collar and bulged his lips and cheeks with his cleansing tongue. He curtained his coat halves over his unmatched, pearl-handled pistols (a .44 caliber Smith and Wesson and a Colt .45 in crossed holsters), but he kept his gray suit jacket buttoned at the lapels in accordance with fashion. He told the boy, “They’re supposed to have a hundred thousand dollars in that express car; at least that’s what the gossip is.”

Bob smiled, but there was something incorrect and tortured about it. He said, “My fingers are already starting to itch.”

Jesse squatted and struck a match and turned up the flame on the lantern, then wadded a red flannel sleeve around the glass chimney under the curled wire protectors. The yellow light rubied.

“That’s ideal,” Frank called. He was on the south ridge above Jesse and the railroad tracks, up where the grade increased and horseshoed to the right, about twenty yards east of the rock accumulation on the rails. Dick Liddil, Wood Hite, Jim Cummins, Ed Miller, and Charley Ford were near Frank, murmuring and smoking and sitting or squatting with rifles erect on their thighs, their fingers inside the trigger housings. The Cracker Neck boys, the sickly sharecroppers and have-nots, had congregated with Jesse and been instructed to range along Blue Cut’s northern ridge, which they did in a lackadaisical fashion: they rambled far down the tracks, grew lonesome, rejoined, huddled, bummed cigarettes, strewed out again and perilously crossed paths with each other in the night of the woods. Frank commented, “They’re going to trip and shoot each other into females.”

Dick Liddil said, “I bet I can find them husbands if they do,” and that jollied even Frank.

Jesse held the lantern over his pocket watch. Both hands were near the IX. He said, “About two years ago we robbed the same railroad, only it was right in Glendale we boarded her.”

“I know that,” said Bob, a little peeved and superior. “You may not realize it yet but I’m a storehouse of information about the James gang. I mean, I’ve followed your careers.” Bob had snipped two eyeholes from a white handkerchief and this he stuffed under his stovepipe hat so that it concealed all but his mouth and chin. However, he had cut one hole slightly low and inside of where it should have been, resulting in a mask that gave the impression he was cock-eyed and pitiable, which was not at all what he had in mind.

Jesse looked at him curiously but recommended no alterations. His concerns were apparently historical. “Do you know what happened five years ago to the day? To the day? What happened on September seventh in eighteen seventy-six?”