The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

“You don’t know that.”

“Never wore no mustache; never was anywheres near a cannon.”

“I can’t even calculate what I’m lookin’ at,” said Wood.

“Ever since he was a child, Bob’s collected whatsoever he could find about the James brothers. Got himself a little museum in this room.”

Bob rammed the nightstand’s drawer closed. “Next time you snoop around up here, you’d better strap on a shootin’ iron.”

Charley showed his buck teeth when he smirked. “You can see how scared I am.”

Bob scowled at Wood and said, “You too, Wood Hite. You cross me again and I’ll put a bullet through your head.”

“Now is that any way to talk?” Charley asked.

But Wood simply extended his fingers to Bob’s chest and disdainfully flicked a wooden button on Bob’s union suit and Bob sat on the mattress as if he’d been muscled backward. Wood sneered, “You better recollect who my cousin is. You seem to’ve misremembered that Jesse loves me like the Good Book. Jesse’s my insurance. You can play like you’re a dangerous person with people at the grocery store, but don’t you misremember who you’ll be accounting to if I so much as have my feelings hurt. I’d be gooder than you’ve been to me if I was in your shoes.”

Martha climbed a stair riser and called. “Do I have to yell suwee?”

Charley said, “Why don’t everybody make up and be pleasant for once? Why don’t we pass the evening like pleasant human beings?”

IT WAS THE EVENING of September 19th and President Garfield was on the New Jersey shore, fighting chills and nausea as surgeons talked about his degeneration and newspaper correspondents smoked cigarettes on the seaside lawn. An aneurysm that had developed over a ruptured artery apparently collapsed at about ten o’clock, for the president woke from sleep, complaining of an excruciating pain close to his heart. And at 10:35 p.m. James A. Garfield died.

Perry Jacobs stopped by the Harbison place at noon on the 20th to pass along that telegraphed news and he sipped coffee with Martha and Bob as Wood Hite and Dick Liddil packed for a trip east to Kentucky. When Dick came downstairs with his coat and bags, Martha kissed him on the lips and whispered something to his ear. He smiled and said, “Oh, goodness! Maybe I’ll change my mind.” But then Wood was behind Dick and bumping him toward the door and after some speedy farewells they were off.

They rode east sullenly, rarely speaking, rocking on their horses. Wood read a penny newspaper four inches from his nose under the brim shade of his hat; Dick counted crows and chewed sunflower seeds and watched the geography snail by. Brittle weeds slashed away from the horses; children clattered down cornrows with gunnysacks after school, jerking orange ears from the stalks; a young brakeman in a mackinaw sat on a freight car with a slingshot that knocked on far-off barn doors. “Cecil?” someone called out. It took them a week to reach St. Louis, where Dick caroused with someone named Lola who danced on a grand piano. Then the two ramped up onto a Mississippi River barge and worried throughout the long slide south to Cairo. The outlaws couldn’t swim and their water fright contaminated the animals so that they reared and bucked and showed their teeth with each crabbed movement on the current.

Then as the two outlaws crossed southwest Kentucky from Cairo, Wood began nagging and carping at Dick for his pettiness, his chicanery, and his philandering with Martha, pushing on to an imaginary problem with the divvy at Blue Cut. It was Wood’s contention that Dick stole one hundred dollars from his grain sack in the second-class coach and that he’d never turned it over to Frank when they apportioned the loot afterward. But that was all a smokescreen for his trepidation that Dick would try to romance Wood’s stepmother, Sarah, who was known to be susceptible to passionate attentions.

Wood’s father was Major George V. Hite, once the richest man in Logan County, Kentucky. He owned a grocery store, a mansion, and six hundred acres eleven miles south of Russellville, close to the Tennessee border, and was said to be worth one hundred thousand dollars when just one dollar represented a man’s daily wage. But he’d invested in the commodities market and lost so much on tobacco and cotton that he filed for bankruptcy in 1877. His first wife, Nancy James Hite, died a year later and he was sundered. After a suitable period of mourning, however, he began to consort with and court Sarah Peck, who was referred to by a newspaper reporter as “the pertest and prettiest widow in all this whole country.” And yet the community was scandalized by their eventual engagement, and the Hite clan was incensed, for Sarah was considered carnal and licentious and was even rumored to have been enjoyed by Jim Cummins in the course of an Easter visit. When Major Hite married the widow, most of his children left the mansion in anger, but the James gang would return whenever they needed seclusion and Jim Cummins made a second career of boasting that he’d tampered with Sarah in a pantry as pork chops burned in a skillet. And by the time Wood skidded the main gate aside and rode onto the Hite property, his case against Dick was so repeatedly and tempestuously made that the two were not speaking at all and only Dick’s promise not to toy with her feelings kept him from being prohibited from the grounds.

Beautiful thoroughbred horses milled about on the green pasture, colts dashed along the fence and cut away for no particular reason. Two ex-slaves threshed in a golden field a quarter-mile off, a black woman pinned laundry on a clothesline, and Mrs. Sarah Hite was weeding among the withered remains of a vegetable garden, five acorn squash sacked in her apron. One rolled out and dropped to the earth when she waved.

Wood said, “She eats men alive.”

Dick licked sunflower seeds from his palm and never paid attention to her; nor did he look at Sarah much at supper when she sat next to her emaciated husband, speaking wifely courtesies into his black ear trumpet. And because his shyness and silence were beginning to show, Dick leaned over his pot roast and asked, “You cook this, ma’am?”

She shook her head and said, “I’ve got a nigger woman.”

Hite inclined toward his wife with the trumpet. “Hmmm?”

“Dick asked if I cooked this.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

Major Hite picked up Sarah’s white hand, which was wristed with lace, and showed it to the assembled like a lovely greeting card. “You boys ever seen such dainty nubbins?” He grinned at her red-faced resentment and said, “Sarah’s my plump little plum.”

Dick looked at his knife and fork and Wood said, “She knew what he was like when she married him.”

After dessert the Hites and Dick repaired to the broad porch, where they were seated on chairs that the butler, John Tabor, skidded across the floor. The talk was dull and void of thought, consisting almost entirely of observations that were manifestly true—the railroads make money going each way; it’s no fun being sick; sometimes you don’t know you’ve eaten too much until you get up from the table. At eight-thirty the old man stood with pain and yawned until his body shuddered and said, “Morning comes awful early.” But Sarah said she wasn’t sleepy and stayed with a wicker rocker and embroidered daisies on a kitchen hot pad as the men chatted—Wood and Dick and George Hite, Jr., the grocery store manager, who was grotesquely hunchbacked and lame. Wood prevailed upon Dick to sing Confederate Army ballads and Dick complied in a tenor voice that was so tragic and piercing that Sarah momentarily put down her needlework. Then a stillness came and there was only the creak of the chairs and the Hite brothers retired, and though Wood scowled at his young stepmother, she obstinately remained in her rocker with her stitching, a squat candle between her black, buttoned shoes, a silver thimble clinking whenever she drove the needle.

Sarah was buxom and broad as a stove and was considered voluptuous. Her eyes were bright blue, the sort that can seem a mosaic of silver and white, and her hair was the color that was then called nut brown, and it curtained her cheeks as she concentrated on the flower’s yellow disk.

Finally, Dick said, “I guess we’re the night owls, you and me.”

She simpered but did not look up. “I’m glad.”