Dick perused the document as he imagined an attorney might, with concentration and no little scorn and with occasional n
ods of concurrence. “It mentions Glendale and how certain parties confederated and banded together to steal what was on the train. It goes on about the Winston shebang last summer and how ‘in perpetration of the robbery last aforesaid, the parties engaged therein did kill and murder one William Westfall,’ and so on. Ta-da-ta-da-ta-fo, ‘I, Thomas T. Crittenden, Governor of the State of Missouri, do hereby offer a reward of five thousand dollars—’ ” He looked for a reaction from Bob and then from Sheriff Timberlake, who canted into the windowsill and placidly smoked without comment. “ ‘And for the arrest and delivery of said Frank James or Jesse W James, and each or either of them, to the sheriff of said Daviess County, I hereby offer a reward of five thousand dollars, and for the conviction of either of the parties last aforesaid of participation in either of the murders or robberies above mentioned, I hereby offer a further reward of five thousand dollars, in testimony whereof, I have hereunto set my hand,’ and ta-da-ta-dum.”
Timberlake took Dick’s coffee mug for his cigarette ashes. “You know why I gave that to you, don’t you, Mr. Siderwood.”
Dick scratched at a circle of starchiness in his trousers, where his wound had festered into the cloth. The pain seemed to reach into marrow and muscle like the roots of a sturdy weed. Dick said, “I meet a friend of mine, a friend who’d made some mistakes and maybe got himself into a mean scrape or two. You think I could tell him the government will erase whatever’s on the slate just for helping your people?”
“You go talk to Henry Craig in Kansas City if you want to make arrangements.” Sheriff Timberlake drew on a cigarette stub that was now so short it must have charred his mustache. He released it into an inch of coffee, where it hissed succinctly and floated. He said, “You tell your friend the governor’s got a regular toothache over the James gang. My guess is he’d agree to do just about anything if it’d make the pain go away.”
SOMETIME IN CHRISTMAS WEEK, Thomas Howard and his cousin, Charley Johnson, ascended Lafayette Street on foot, in slush, with a city councilman named Aylesbury who wanted to rent out a seven-room house owned by Mrs. August Saltzman. The rise was steep as a playground slide and on several occasions Aylesbury needed to rest in order to catch his wind.
Jesse smiled and said, “At least if you get weary of climbing this hill you can always lean against it.”
Aylesbury shook his head and respirated, his gloved hands on his hips. “I don’t know if I want stairs or a block and tackle.”
Charley reached the crest at 1318 Lafayette Street and there slouched around a one-storey, green-shuttered white cottage that was called the House on the Hill. He counted two scantily furnished bedrooms, a sitting room and a dining room, and a recently attached kitchen with a shaded rear porch that looked eastward over a ravine into wilderness. He could see fifty miles of countryside to the north, east, and west, and if he walked onto a neighbor’s corner lot, Charley could see Kansas, the brown Missouri River, an iron bridge that was the color of rust, the shuttle and steam and collision of boxcars at the railroad yard, and brick stores and downtown businesses with their streets of mud and brown snow and with a roof of coal smoke overhead.
Charley saw Aylesbury skid a shoe in the snow to reveal the loess soil underneath and he slunk after the two men as they clambered through snowdrifts to a smokehouse, to a stable that was cut into the earth, to a shed for “garden tools and what-have-yous,” and a warm outhouse that could seat two.
“You can see into next week from here,” Charley said. “You won’t never be surprised by company again.”
Jesse did not acknowledge the remark.
The city councilman walked from room to room in the cottage, his arms wide, his voice dwindling in closets. He shut doors, he raised and lowered windows, he sat on mattresses and sofa cushions, he informed Mr. Howard that across the street was Thomas Turner and his wife, along with a niece named Metta, who was three.
Jesse seemed lost in reveries. “So my little girl will have a playmate.”
“And it’s romantically situated, isn’t it? Here on this lofty eminence?”
Charley said, “I like the address most. Lafayette Street. When I was a kid I used to tinker with a French music box that the Marquis de Lafayette gave the father of our country.”
This was such a startling bit of information from such an improbable source that Aylesbury only looked over his nose to evaluate Charley for a moment, and then returned to the man he knew as a cattle buyer named Thomas Howard. “The rent is fourteen dollars a month.”
Jesse squinted at the councilman and slowly walked to the kitchen.
Aylesbury said, “I’ve priced about twenty places in town and that’s what a cottage goes for these days. I may even be a little low.” Jesse leaned on a kitchen window sash in a black mood, looking out. His coat shadowed the room like shutters. Aylesbury called, “How much is comfort and contentment worth?”
THE THOMAS HOWARD CLAN moved into The House on the Hill on December 24th, and in the late afternoon Jesse and Charley strolled downtown St. Joseph with a list Zee had written out: candies and chocolates and peppermint canes, a cloth hand puppet with a porcelain head, ivory barrettes carved to represent angels, and Five Little Peppers and How They Grew, a children’s book by Margaret Sidney. Jesse bought what he could with the little cash he had, then Charley saw a notice that said the Second Presbyterian Church was holding its annual Christmas party that evening, and the two walked over to Twelfth Street, slipped into the unlocked basement, and stole a game of feathered darts, a green metal hoop and stick, a rubber ball and six jacks, a sack of popcorn balls that were covered with molasses, a reed whistle, and a red Santa Claus suit and a white whisker set that was constructed from baling wire and painted binder twine.
At nightfall Charley cleaned the snow off his boots and softly knocked on the cottage door. Zee opened it in her apron, a streak of flour on her cheek. She asked where Jesse was and Charley answered that the Turners had invited their new neighbor over for an eggnog. Then he sat with Tim and Mary on the twin bed in the sitting room. He said, “Don’t you wish Santa would come now instead of midnight when you’re asleep?”
Tim looked at Charley with mistrust. “Yes.”
“Let’s squinch our eyes shut and wish that Santa would come right now.”
Charley and Tim squinched their eyes and Mary sucked her thumb and then the kitchen door was slugged in and sleigh bells jingled and Santa Claus jollied into the sitting room, his red coat made fat with straw. He shouted, “Ho ho ho,” in a voice that was low as a kettledrum and he seated himself on a wicker chair and bestowed sweets and toys to the children as Zee reminded them of their manners and smiled.
Tim collected his gifts within the metal hoop and then pestered Santa for more, investigating pockets, sticking his hands into straw, lifting the sides of the red coat until he contacted a Smith and Wesson revolver. The boy snatched his hand back as if it were burnt and scowled at the man in the red suit. “You’re not Santa Claus; you’re Daddy.”
Charley called across the room, “He’s one of Santa’s helpers!”
Jesse sat low in the chair with his boots kicked out, drew off the soft red cap by its cotton ball, then reached out and snuggled Tim close to his chest. He said, “Let me tell you a secret, son: there’s always a mean old wolf in Grandma’s bed, and a worm inside the apple. There’s always a daddy inside the Santa suit. It’s a world of trickery.”
THE FAMILY ATTENDED a Christmas service at the Second Presbyterian Church, at which time the Santa suit was returned before it could be missed. Afterward Jesse showed Tim how to roll his hoop on the cottage floor, Charley played jacks with Mary, Zee served an extravagant breakfast in a gift dress of black satin that was slightly too small and was unbuttoned beneath her apron. Then Jesse and Charley rode a noon train forty miles southeast to Kearney and visited the Samuels farm, an occurrence that was so inconceivable to Sheriff Timberlake and his deputies that no men were stationed on the road.
Mrs. Samuels cooked a goose and presented it with browned whole onions and candied yams and biscuits and turnips and cucumber pickles. A green rag carpet covered the floor, a wood heating stove was connected to the screened fireplace, a glassed case of yellow waxed flowers was on the cherrywood mantel; a scriptural engraving, a picture of “The Death of Stonewall Jackson,” and a sampler stitched by Zerelda Cole as a girl at St. Catherine’s Academy were nailed up on the plastered walls. Dr. Reuben Samuels sat dopily at the long table’s head, admiring his huge congregation: his eldest daughter, Sallie, her husband, William Nicholson, and child, Jesse James Nicholson; his eighteen-year-old daughter, Fannie, and her husband, Joseph Hall; his son, Johnny, who was twenty years old and the only child who still lived with them; Jesse’s younger sister, Susie, and her husband, Allan Parmer; Charley Ford, who shocked corn for him once; and none other than Jesse Woodson James. According to custom, a chair was left empty in memorial to Archie, the son accidentally slain by the Pinkerton Agency in 1875; and at the foot of the table, ruling it like Queen Zenobia, was the doctor’s overbearing and refractory wife.
A girl brought in a gravy boat that she’d allowed to cool so long the gravy curdled and Zerelda flew into a rage, clubbing the girl with her mangled right arm and yelling that she was an ignoramus. Jesse appealed to Dr. Samuels, “Pappy?” and the man grinned benignly at his stepson. Jesse said, “She’s acting up.”