The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Bob gingerly cupped his fingers around the bamboo pole and gazed down into the night-blackened water. The moon was out and the evening was cooling. Tim threw a rock and the river glunked and Jesse said, “Don’t do that, son. You’ll scare all the fishes away.”

“Daddy, I’m boring.”

Jesse laughed and said, “You mean, you’re bored.”

“Yes.”

Jesse hugged the boy to him with his right arm. “Maybe a fish will come and you can get all excited.”

“I don’t like fishing.”

“Sure you do. I do. You must.”

The boy shrugged and sank into the man’s wool jacket. Bob unscrewed the mason jar and swallowed the lukewarm bottom inch of beer. The river was the only noise.

Jesse said, “You know what we are, Tim? We’re nighthawks. We’re the ones who go out at night and guard everything so people can sleep in peace. We’ve got our eyes peeled; no one’s going to slip anything past us.”

“I’ve got something!” Bob said.

“You sure?”

“It’s heavy!” Bob had whipped up the bamboo pole at the first twitch and then jumped to his feet, bending the tip so low it made a parabola.

Jesse sidled next to him and clearly struggled with the temptation to grab the pole from Bob’s grip. “Don’t horse it, kid. Bring it up easy.”

There was no reel on the pole, so Bob stepped on the bamboo and tugged the fishing line up with his right hand, looking over the cliff into the river but getting no sight of his catch. He could hear it thrash out of the water and he began hauling the weight up with both hands and with great strain heaved onto the river bank a gruesome fish that seemed overdue for extinction. It was orange in the firelight and round as a dog and over its eyes were crimson feelers that moved like thumbs on its skull. Tim backed into his father’s leg but Jesse crouched close to examine the catch. “God damn it, but that’s an ugly thing.”

The fish seemed unperturbed even though cruelly hooked in the mouth. Its teeth meshed and unmeshed with a click, its red tail and gill wings undulated, and its frosted blue eye stared with calm accusation at the fishermen until Jesse grew disgusted and said, “Kill him, kid.” And Bob did as he was told, taking a burning stick from the fire and stabbing it into the fish over and over again until Jesse said, “That’s enough!” and then looked at Bob as if he’d been given a sign and would now act accordingly.

BOB WAS SENT AWAY cordially the next day, just as he knew he would be, with a goodbye from Jesse but nothing from Zee beyond what good manners demanded. It was forty miles to Martha Bolton’s farm from Kansas City and it was already noon by the time he attained Liberty, where he watered his common horse at a trough and sank a dipper in a water pail outside a dry goods store. But as he lifted the dipper he viewed himself in the store window and was discouraged by the picture of a scroungy boy in a ridiculous stovepipe hat that was dented and smudged, in an overlarge black coat that was soiled and stained and plowed with wrinkles and cinched at his waist by a low-slung holster. He thought he looked goofy and juvenile, so he went inside the store and cruised the aisles.

A gentleman’s clothes then were generally English: Prince Albert suits, greatcoats with caped shoulders, knee-length frock coats and knee-high Wellington boots into which pin-striped pants legs were stuffed. Men wore bowlers, derbies, fedoras, slouch hats, and short-crowned, wide-brimmed felt hats that were cooked stiff as boaters and were worn tilted back on the head so that a pompadour showed. Robert Ford was not yet extraordinary in his clothes and at the dry goods store selected a fine white shirt and a starched white collar that could be attached with a stud, white underwear with wooden buttons that ran down its middle, and a heather green suit with lapels that were abbreviated so they could be fastened nearer the throat than has been the fashion since. And he crowned his head with a black bowler hat that was ribboned with black silk, a hat that suited a boulevardier but did not part

icularly suit Robert Ford.

The store owner stacked the bundles and scratched their prices on a newspaper and totaled them after licking his pencil. “You come into some money, is that it?”

“You might say that.”

“Do you mind if I ask how you got it, being’s you’re so young?”

“I can’t see that it’s any of your business.”

The store owner tore off a long sheet of brown paper and folded it around the bundles with a great deal of noise. “I’d just like to know out of curiosity. Maybe I could get into your line of work and buy myself a year’s clothes in one afternoon.”

“Only thing necessary is a great aunt who loves her nephew to pieces.”

“Inheritance. I see.”

Bob put his finger on the twine intersection so that the store owner could make a knot. “You were probably thinking I got the cash like the James gang would. Am I right or wrong?”

The store owner leaned his arms over the counter and winked. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate the business.” He looked out the window as Bob rode off and then he crossed to a livery stable, where he talked to Sheriff James Timberlake.

MRS. MARTHA BOLTON rented the Harbison farm in 1879, just after becoming a widow, and she made a good income by giving rooms and meals to her brothers, Charley, Wilbur, and Bob, in exchange for chores and fifteen dollars per month. The wood frame house was two storeys high, the roof was buckled, an elm tree raked the shingles in storms. White paint blistered and scaled from the boards, oiled paper was tacked over the broken windows, the road door was nailed shut and a calico skirt insulated the cracks of the sill and sides. Martha raised chickens that nested under the porch and cows that watered at a wooden tank near a windmill. Elias Capline Ford ran a grocery store in Richmond, but mowed and maintained the agriculture on weekends. Wilbur, a brother two years older than Bob, was the enormous and morose hired hand and he lived a secret life in a room that clutched the earth brown barn.

When Bob arrived a black surrey sat in the weeds, a barn cat licking its paw on the surrey’s seat, and a number of horses drowsed in a rickety limb corral in which straw scattered on the wind. Dick Liddil was at the yard swing with Bob’s niece, Ida, twisting the slat seat until the raveled ropes squashed down on her hips. He released the seat and she twirled, squealing, her auburn hair flying out, and Dick fell backward and admired the girl. Wood Hite stood on the roofless kitchen porch, his fists on his hips, stern as John the Baptist. He called, “You’re gonna make her sick! She’s gonna upchuck, you don’t watch out!”

Dick ignored Wood and rose to cuff the girl’s dress so that it bloomed and revealed her thighs. She wailed unconvincingly, “You’re not supposed to peek, Dick!”