The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Uriah Bond snuck looks under his eyebrows at the two as he worked on the hoof with his nippers and clawhammer. Jesse walked over with a rasp so the blacksmith could smooth the nails after he’d clinched them. He said, “You know who I am, don’t you.”

Bond remained bent over and silent. He swiveled the hammer and broke a nail end off with a jerk of the claw. Then he just hunched there and a broad hand covered his eyes as he shook with rage and grief and hopeless fright.

Jesse said, “You won’t tell anyone, will you,” and Uriah Bond mentioned the afternoon visit to no one until he saw the photograph of Jesse with his eyes shut, his arms crossed at his wrists, his body roped to a cooling board and tilted so that he seemed to stand.

On a night in Kansas when the rain came down like cold coins, the two outlaws retreated into a small white hotel with a coven of rooms and rented one on the second floor. Two orange gas lamps sissed on the walls, the wide bed was tautly made, the closet and armoire were empty. But an eighteenth-century highboy in the corner contained a locked middle drawer that Jesse scratched at with a six-penny nail as Charley squirmed out of his clothes. The lock clicked open and Jesse said, “Presto chango!” and slid the drawer out. Inside were a night-black silk cravat that was striped in red, a starched white shirt that was still wrapped in blue laundry paper, and a crisp celluloid collar that was exactly his size (14½). According to an interview with Charley in the Richmond Conservator, those were the clothes that Jesse wore on the morning of April 3rd.

THEN IT WAS the third week of March. Cold spells and winds were only occasional, the pasturelands were greening, there were rucks and islands of snow only in the shade, city streets were sloppy with mud that agglutinated on buggy wheels and slowly baked in the noontime sun and then peeled off like tree bark. Jesse mentioned robberies, but only as one might mention a sparrow’s nest in the eave or an annoyance in a mail-order shoe. His wife was pretty sick until noontimes, so he merrily took over some of the cooking and cleaning work, even walked into an apothecary and ordered Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. (Advertisements called it: “A positive cure for all those painful complaints and weaknesses so common to our best female population.”)

He made macaroons with an apron on, he invited some girls over to visit Zee and kissed their gloved hands in greeting; he seemed to have subtracted from his make-up whatever was cruel or criminal and substituted for those qualities congeniality and inertia. He accorded to everyone, he spoiled his children, he offered Charley a substantial allowance as if Charley were his profligate but much-preferred son. He seemed resigned, placid, grandfatherly; he seemed to have given up.

So it was a surprise when Jesse threw a chinchilla coat at Charley’s sleeping face and said, “Get your gatherings together. You and I are riding south.”

South, of course, meant Richmond, which they achieved on March 23rd. They looked for Bob in Elias’s unlocked house, then found him in the grocery store with a clerk’s apron on, a feather duster jutting from a rear trouser pocket, climbing onto a wooden stool to stack jars of Heinz tomato ketchup on an overhead shelf. Only two customers were in the store: a woman was examining various lengths of penny shoelaces that were draped over a jacket peg and an elderly man was sliding a flour sack along an aisle that was coated with sawdust. Bob leaned to swish the feather duster over a row of applesauce lids and Jesse startled the boy by announcing, “You’ve been chosen.”

Bob swiveled around and nearly slipped off the stool, his arm nearly flew up to cover his eyes. The color was leached from his face but he managed to squirm a smile onto it. He asked, “What do you mean?”

“Your brother said you wanted to join us. But maybe you like this grocery store more than you said you did.”

Bob looked for a clue from Charley but his brother was fixed on the store’s entrance, smoking a cigarette and coughing. Bob counterfeited bravura and arrogance, saying, “I’ll walk out of this crackerbox without so much as a fare-thee-well. This piddly work is beneath me.” He tore off the apron by way of illustration and dropped the feather duster handle-down in a water glass, and as he printed out a note to Elias that read, “Gone fishing,” he talked about what a sight for sore eyes the two of them were.

Jesse smiled. “So you missed me?”

“I’ve been crying myself to sleep every night.”

Jesse rang open the cash register and praised the morning’s receipts. He stuffed cigars in his vest pocket. He took carrots out to his horse. By then it was noon and the three horses were nipping ears and politicking about seniority and Charley was already in the saddle, murmuring about what he’d packed for his brother and how they’d stolen a horse for Bob. They ceased talking when Jesse came out, correcting the crease in his black fedora. He slipped his left boot in the stirrup and asked, “Do you see him?”

“Who?”

“A man in the cottonwoods with a spyglass. He followed us from your sister’s.”

Bob turned. He could barely see beyond the schoolyard; the cottonwoods were no more than a caterpillar of green against the light blue of the sky. “Do you think it’s the sheriff or a railroad detective?”

Jesse climbed into his saddle and hooked his horse around to the left. “Hell, you’d have to lift their tails to tell the difference.”

It was, as it happened, their brother Elias. He took the road to Kearney with them for two miles and postulated that they would stop at the Samuels farm that evening, but for reasons of his own, timidity probably being foremost, Elias forgot to report that information to Sheriff Timberlake and only communicated that the three men rode off into the west.

JOHNNY SAMUELS SANK against the stained pillows and feebly greeted the legendary stepbrother who’d come, he thought, to oversee his laggardly dying. He napped feverishly most of the day, arising only to urinate in a tin pail that Charley gripped for him. He did not recognize the Fords nor did he speak to them; he seemed non compos mentis. Reuben too was increasingly mentally ill and spent much of the late afternoon sitting with an arm on the windowsill, an apple peeler in his lap, swarmed in a moth-eaten shawl and four or five coats and mittens. Zerelda cooked with her good left hand and caressed Jesse’s cheek with the stump of her right wrist and mothered her son and cried over him and asked the ceiling how she could continue to live without him, asked if she wouldn’t have been better off never to have married at all, asked if Jesse ever once considered his poor momma when he chose the lot of a criminal. Her ravings were so crowded with recriminations and insults and petitions, with weeping and caterwauling and wild expressions of love, that it seemed bewildering to Bob and Charley that Jesse remained there for minutes, let alone hours; yet he did. She was four inches taller than Jesse, a giant of a woman, but she made him seem even smaller, made him seem stooped and spiritless. She made him kiss her on the mouth like a lover and rub her neck and temples with myrtleberry oil as he avowed his affection for her and confessed his frailties and shortcomings.

And then, at the six o’clock meal, she concentrated on the Fords, requiring opinions of them and explanations of why they wished to accompany Jesse and what they hoped to gain. To the last query Bob responded that they

were afraid to stay at home what with the rewards being offered and every scoundrel in the county gunning for the James gang.

Zerelda gazed at Bob and mushed vegetables with zig-zag motions of her gums, her lips protruding like the clasp of a purse. She looked to Jesse and said, “I don’t know what it is about him, but that boy can aggravate me more by just sitting still than most boys can by pitching rocks.”

Jesse stared across the table at Bob, a teaspoon in his mouth.

The virago covered Bob’s right hand with her big-knuckled left and said, “I want you to swear to God that you’re still Jesse’s friend.”

Bob swore, “Just as I hope for mercy in the hereafter, I’d sooner die than see your son harmed in any way.”

“Read Galatians,” she said. “Chapter six. ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ ”

Charley and Jesse played checkers after supper while Johnny looked on with the languor and apathy of the dying. At nine Dr. Samuels pulled himself to his feet with the arms of his chair and recited, as if he’d just created it, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Zerelda said she believed she’d follow Reuben’s good advice and shoved her knitting into a sewing basket. She extinguished two coal-oil lamps, banked the fire with a charred board, and kissed Johnny on each eyelid.

Her third-born son stacked checkers in a glass and then, as Charley collected his things for a night ride, Bob saw Jesse slide into his mother’s room in order to wish her goodnight.