The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Bob followed Elias and his chores from the kitchen window, squeaking an eyehole in the glass with the elbow of his suit coat. The oven door clanked as Martha took out four bread loaves and Ida came inside from the root cellar with jars of vegetables clenched by their lids. Bob could see the girl in the looking-glass of the evening-darkened window. She gazed at him with misgiving and asked, “Does Uncle Bob like okra, Momma?”

“Can’t you see him standing there? Why don’t you find out for yourself?”

Bob smirked. “She’s afraid of me, Martha.” He saw Elias and Wilbur in conference next to the water tank and he then tacked on, “You all are.”

He sliced a loaf on a tin plate, dipped a knife into molasses, and let the syrup braid off onto the bread. Then he climbed the stairs with it and looked into the bedroom from the corridor. The candle was on the nightstand and Dick was moving his lips as he read a yellow book about a woman of riotous appetites. Wood’s mouth was open but someone had covered his eyes with spoons. Dick licked a finger and turned a page without looking over the book at Bob. “He ain’t disappeared, if that’s what you were hoping.”

“What chapter are you on?”

Dick said, “She’s seen some young swell and got herself all agitated.”

“How’s your leg?”

“Full of torment, Bob. Thanks for asking.”

Wood’s skin was sallow and smirched slightly green where veins branched at his neck. His fingers were vised together at his stomach. Bob ate over Wood but the syrup was tainted and it was a penance to chew and swallow the bread. He set the tin plate down and lowered onto Dick’s bed and examined the excavation in Wood’s stern and arrogant skull.

“I ought to feel sorry but I don’t. I’m just glad it’s Wood who’s dead and not me.”

Dick stared at Bob, his book closed on his index finger. “You and me, we’ll have to sit down and talk a few things over. Circumstances have changed.”

Then Elias was there with a moth-eaten brown blanket that smelled of animal sweat. His cheeks were clownishly red with the cold and moisture was clinging to the end of his nose like a teardrop. “Ready?” was all he said.

They lifted Wood and let him sink onto the brown horse blanket. They then towed him across the boards and skidded him down the stairs so that his skull thudded and his body fished from side to side. Charley and Wilbur solemnly rose from kitchen chairs as Wood was carried out; Ida covered her face with her palms and Martha turned to the stove.

The December cold sliced inside Bob’s coat sleeves and across his ears. His knuckles ached with the cumbersome load and the brothers periodically let the body down to relieve their backs and exercise their fingers. “Nippy,” Bob said once, but Elias must not have heard. After they’d achieved the second rank of the woodrows, Elias concluded it was enough of a remove that the stink wouldn’t reach the cattle lots, and they rolled the naked body into a snow-filled ravine that was once a sweetwater creek. Elias slid Wood to the right with his boot, then crouched to tuck the horse blanket over him. The two cleared snow and kicked at the ravine so that its dirt banks spattered down, then they collected whatever rocks and slabs were near. Elias swarmed apple leaves and strewed them over the cadaver as Bob ripped dead branches off the trees and swooped them down onto the long mound.

Then Elias stood there lugubriously, his arms crossed over the hat at his chest, and Bob stuffed his hands in his coat pockets. Elias prayed, “ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.’ ” He paused and then petitioned Bob with his eyes.

“Meek,” Bob said.

“ ‘Blessed are the meek….’ ” After a moment Elias beseeched his brother again.

And Bob recited, “ ‘For they shall inherit the earth.’ ”

4

DECEMBER 1881–FEBRUARY 1882

No one should know more about Jesse James than I do, for our men have chased him from one end of the country to the other. His gang killed two of our detectives, who tracked them down, and I consider Jesse James the worst man, without exception, in America. He is utterly devoid of fear, and has no more compunction about cold-blooded murder than he has about eating his breakfast.

ROBERT A. PINKERTON

in the Richmond Democrat, November 20, 1879

A MAN ON A CHESTNUT HORSE walked the road next to the Ford brothers’ farm at least once each week after the Blue Cut robbery. He wore a blue watchcap under a gray hat and he lived for hours at a time in the woodrows, as motionless as a clocktower, staring across the cow-ruined cornfields to the busy kitchen and the barn.

He was Sheriff James R. Timberlake of Clay County, and whenever a caller rode in, the sheriff noted in a journal the animal’s color and gender, the rider’s physical characteristics and comportment. His stakeouts were intermittent and without system however, whatever he encountered was by chance; and Timberlake’s information was so inadequate that on Monday, December 5th, he recorded the arrival of Jesse James but ascribed it to a visit from a Methodist circuit rider with whom Jesse shared a resemblance.

The man came at dusk and tied his bay horse to a Martin box, then peered through two windows and entered the house without announcement, greeting the Fords in a country way and letting the door blow wide until a girl pushed against it. The sheriff saw what he could of the man companionably roughhousing, rowdily swatting shoulders and biceps, receiving the Ford brothers’ handshakes, but soon the night was too cold and black and Timberlake lost patience with the dreariness and solitude and rode west from Ray County to Clay.

Bob was in the living room when Jesse arrived. Ida embroidered next to a candle and Bob sank in a chair across from her, poking grit from a comb with a sewing needle, listening to clockworks as they counterweighted. He saw branches veer over a windowpane and tremble still, and as he thought about it he became so spooked that he swiveled and adjoined his eyes with an apparition that receded from the glass. And then Jesse was inside the kitchen, as loud and large as a beer wagon, and Bob was scuttling up the stairs.

Dick Liddil was already hopping one-leggedly toward the closet, wincing with each movement.

“Why’d he come by, Dick? Does he know about Wood, do you think?”

“I can’t figure it, Bob. I only know that he don’t miss very much.”