The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Reuben looked to his wife and called, “Mother? She’s got to bring the goose in yet.”

“You shut up, Pappy,” Zerelda said. “She’s been snappish and peppery with me all day.”

Reuben simply commenced to ask for the Good Lord’s blessing on all the good food that had been prepared and brung over and Zerelda gave an amen to the prayer, permitting the girl to go back to the kitchen. Then Zerelda began talking about a Christmas letter she’d received from Frank that she was sure had been steamed open in Kansas City and only then sent on to Kearney. Annie and Rob were fine, the letter said; Baltimore was gloomy and crowded; Buck had seen Shakespeare performed in an opera house and nearly wept with joy. Zerelda talked about the nightwatchers, the town criers, the gossips, and many black-suited men, each thin as a coffin nail, who lurked in alleys and atop shop r

oofs in order to spy on her. She said she consistently claimed she hadn’t seen Frank for seven years and was scared he’d died of consumption. And as for Jesse, she’d initiated the misleading rumor that her third-born had passed away from this vale of tears too and was now planted under the gladiolas. Zerelda then ceased in mid-sentence and Charley turned from his victuals to see her mouth tremble and her white head gravely lower.

Reuben suggested, “Don’t get started again, Mother.”

But Zerelda flamboyantly covered her eyes with her coarse left palm and cried, “Doomed! Hunted down and shot at like coons in a tree! Soon every one of my boys will be killed and, oh, how will I endure it? My heart will crack in two!”

Charley chewed deliberately and swallowed; Jesse studied his plate; his half-sister Fannie said with annoyance, “Momma! You’ve embarrassed every single person at this table. You quit your ranting and raving. It’s Christmas.”

Mrs. Samuels reached out the stub of her right wrist to touch Jesse’s cuff and she looked at her son with red eyes and unflinching melodrama as she asked, “How can I continue without you? How can I bear to let you go?”

Jesse was so abashed and perplexed by his mother’s mawkishness that as the supper continued he refrained from anything other than a jocose comment or two over the butter dish, and after the four o’clock exchange of Christmas presents—receiving a cruet of elegantly scented hair oil and a red cravat made of silk—Jesse convinced the Samuels family that the Fords had an evening celebration prepared, and he’d promised Charley that they’d attend.

Charley took up the invention and inquired, “You think you can eat another goose?”

Jesse ticked his head and said, “Don’t know. My pants are getting sort of personal with me already.”

Everyone yelled goodbyes back and forth outside for several minutes, then Jesse and Charley climbed into a two-horse phaeton and steered it east at a trot. Jesse sighed, “Mercy!” and then was mute for a mile. He said at last, “She wonders why Frank’s in Baltimore and I wonder why I’m not.”

Charley complimented Jesse on all the pretty things in the house and Jesse said, “You can have a palace of carpets and gold and expensive paintings but they aren’t worth the mud off your feet if it isn’t full of God’s peace.”

“I suppose,” Charley said, and then he found silence practical, and he practiced it for most of the trip to Richmond. But as they neared Martha’s rented farm, he remembered Wood Hite mouldering in the creek bed and imagined a yellow cadaver, its withered skin retracted from inch-long teeth, its mouth in a scream, cavities in its skull where the eyes once were, and sitting, for some reason, on the sofa, like a circuit rider at Saturday tea. They rattled onto the road to the barn, slewing aside in the snow, and Jesse clucked the two horses toward the stables.

Charley moved off the seat, letting a lap blanket slide to his boots, and Jesse slowed the team. “What’s made you so jittery?”

“I better go ahead in case my sister’s in the altogether.”

Jesse smiled. “That’d be just dandy!”

“And there’s Ida to think about. You know how young girls are with gentlemen; how they’re so modest and everything.” And before Jesse could contradict him, Charley jumped off the carriage and fell to his knees in the snow, then violently brushed himself and galumphed to the kitchen door.

Bob was in a chair, wan and shyly startled, his arms beneath the oak table like a schoolboy sticking gum.

Charley asked, “Is Dick still here?”

“Kansas City.”

“Anything you should hide?”

“Jesse?”

Charley nodded and removed his coat. “Don’t let him see us so much as wink at each other. He’s suspicious as a danged coyote, and he don’t trust you one iota.”

Bob lifted a cocked revolver from under the table and carefully let the hammer click forward. “I guess that makes us even.”

Then Jesse came inside in his reddish brown beaver coat, frost on his dark brown mustache and beard, moisture in his eyes from the cold, and communicated amicably with Bob, joshing as he jigged at the stove fire, creating Christmas cheer. Then as Charley vagrantly talked about the weather, Jesse played truant and roamed the second floor of the house, nosing into closets and cabinets seeking evidence. His footfalls overhead were faint: Bob presumed that Jesse gently pushed the shut doors so that they swung ever so gracefully into the night of the rooms.

Bob touched his own lips to stop Charley from speaking and the two brothers listened as Jesse knocked a chair akilter and carefully righted it. Bob said, “Dick might be making arrangements with Henry H. Craig.”

“Oh? And who would that be?”

Martha came into the kitchen fastening a yellow robe around herself. Her auburn hair was wrecked with sleep and her complexion was very pale. She murmured, “Are you telling him?”

“Maybe you better,” said Bob. “I’ll stand at the door.”