“Do you want me to swear my good faith like I did for your mother?”
Charley clattered wood into the stove’s firebox and returned from the kitchen, slapping his hands. He saw Jesse glowering at Bob with great heat in his eyes, and said, “You two having a spat?”
“I was getting ready to be angry,” Jesse said, and then smiled at Bob. He reached out and coddled Bob’s neck and said in a gentling voice, “Sit over here closer, kid.”
Bob vacillated a little and then scooched over, smirking at his brother with perplexity and shyness.
Jesse fervently massaged Bob’s neck and shoulder muscles, communicating that all was forgiven, and he continued with his sketch of the robbery. “You’ll stay with the animals, Charley, and The Kid and I will walk into the Platte City Bank just before noon. Bob will move the cashier over away from the shotgun that’s under the counter and he’ll tell the man to work the combination on the vault. They’ll finagle about time locks and so on and I’ll creep up behind that cashier and cock his chin back like so.” And Jesse cracked his right wrist into Bob’s chin, snapping the boy’s skull back and pinning him against his knee as he slashed a skinning knife across his throat. The metal was cold and left the sting of ice on Bob’s fair skin and for an instant he was certain he’d actually been cut and he slumped against the sofa, incapacitated, in panic. Jesse’s mouth was so close his mustache snipped at Bob’s ear when he said in a caress of a voice, “I’ll say, ‘How come an off-scouring of creation like you is still sucking air when so many of mine are in coffins?’ ”
Bob’s eye lolled left to see the skinning knife vertical near his cheek. There was a crick in his neck and the man’s wristbone was mean as a broomstick under his chin. Bob manufactured a smile and said, “This isn’t good riddance for me, is it?”
“I’ll say, ‘How’d you reach your twentieth birthday without leaking out all over your clothes?’ And if I don’t like his attitude, I’ll slit that phildoodle so deep he’ll flop on the floor like a fish.” Jesse then retracted his arm and rudely shoved Bob forward and rested the skinning knife on the sofa cushion. Then his temper abr
uptly altered and he slapped both knees gleefully and grinned at Bob and exclaimed, “I could hear your gears grinding rrr, rrr, rrr, and your little motor wondering, ‘My gosh, what’s next, what’s happening to me?’ You were precious to behold, Bob. You were white as spit in a cotton field.”
Bob examined his neck by finger touch. “You want to know how that feels? Unpleasant. I honestly can’t recommend it.”
“And Charley looked stricken!”
“I was!” Charley said.
“ ‘This is plum unexpected!’ old Charley was thinking. ‘This is mint my day!’ ” He looked from Bob to Charley and joked some moments longer, laughing coaxingly, immoderately, sarcastically, unconvincingly, and when at last the two laughed with him, Jesse adopted a scolding look and slammed into his room.
SO IT WENT. Bob was increasingly cynical, leery, uneasy; Jesse was increasingly cavalier, merry, moody, fey, unpredictable. If his gross anatomy suggested a strong smith in his twenties, his actual physical constitution was that of a man who was incrementally dying. He was sick with rheums and aches and lung congestions, he tilted against chairs and counters and walls, in cold weather he limped with a cane. He coughed incessantly when lying down, his clever mind was often in conflict, insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot, he seemed in a state of mourning. He counteracted the smell of neglected teeth with licorice and candies, he browned his graying hair with dye, he camouflaged his depressions and derangements with masquerades of extreme cordiality, courtesy, and good will toward others.
He played the practical joker and party boy. At suppers Jesse would make his children shiver by rasping his fork away from his mouth so that the tines sang off his teeth. Zee set down a soup tureen and he winked at Bob when he asked, “Is this fit to eat or will it just do?” He’d belch and murmur, “Squeeze me.” He surreptitiously inched the butter or gravy dish under Charley’s elbow so that the chump stained his sleeve; he hooked Charley’s spurs together as he snored in the sitting room and then screamed the man off the sofa so that Charley farcically sprawled. He repeated jokes at the evening meals, making each more long-winded and extravagant than it was in his recollection, altering each so that it commented on the vices of railroad officers and attorneys—who were so crooked, he claimed, that they had to screw their socks on. But even as he jested or tickled his girl or boy in the ribs, Jesse would look over to Bob with melancholy eyes, as if the two of them were meshed in an intimate communication that had little to do with anyone else.
Bob was certain the man had unriddled him, had seen through his reasons for coming along, that Jesse could forecast each of Bob’s possible moves and inclinations and was only acting the innocent in order to lull Bob into stupid tranquility and miscalculation.
Once Bob was occupying himself in the stables, scraping the clinging mud from the horses’ fetlocks and pasterns with a wire currycomb. Then misgivings overtook him and he straightened to intercept Jesse peering in angrily at the window and in the next instant disappearing. And yet, when reencountered on the kitchen porch no more than five minutes later, Jesse dipped his newspaper to happily remark on the weather. On some nights Jesse segregated the two brothers and slept with Bob in the sitting room, a revolver, as always, clutched in his strong left hand. His brown hair smelled of rose oil and his long underwear smelled of borax; sleep subtracted years from his countenance. Bob listened to each insuck of air so he could tell when Jesse went off, and when the man’s inhalations were so slow and shallow they never seemed to come out again, Bob cautiously rolled to a sit and placed his feet on the cold boards and the revolver was cocked with three clicks. “I need to go to the privy,” Bob said.
“You think you do but you don’t,” said Jesse, and Bob obediently returned to bed.
On Monday, Zee worked outside in a wide brown dress with the cuffs rolled to her elbows, stirring a white froth of laundry in a cast-iron wash boiler that steamed into the blue sky. Charley dampened a red handkerchief and ran it along the metal clothesline in order to remove the rust. Bob cringed up to Zee and asked if she would wash his clothes and she consented with some annoyance. She swished his socks and shirts in a soapwater tub on the stove and scrubbed them against a Rockingham pottery washboard, but after they were rinsed and cranked through the wringer, Bob refused to clothespin them and returned with them to the sitting room, where he smoothed them out on the oak bed so that they would gradually dry.
Jesse walked in, slapping a rolled newspaper against his thigh, seeking company. He oversaw Bob’s meticulous care in the arrangement of a shirt’s sleeves and then espied an H.C. laundry mark on some white underwear. He asked, “Whose initials are those?”
“I beg your pardon?”
Jesse frowned and inquired, “What’s H.C. stand for?”
Bob looked at the letters and then remembered that he’d confused Henry Craig’s underwear with his own that night in the St. James Hotel. He couldn’t fiction an answer.
“High church?” Jesse offered. “Home cooking?”
Bob fidgeted a little and smiled ingratiatingly. “I stayed in a workingman’s hotel and saw them squished up in a closet. I couldn’t find any cooties, so I kept them as a sort of memento.”
Jesse either accepted that or considered it a subject not worth pursuing. He strolled out onto Lafayette Street. Bob sank down on the mattress and cooled his eyes with a wet sock; Jesse circled yard trees, scaring squirrels with sticks.
THE SITTING ROOM conversations were about Blue Cut that week: the Kansas City newspapers carried front-page articles about the movement of John Bugler, John Land, and Creed Chapman from the Second Street jail to Independence, Missouri, where there was a court trial over their complicity in the Chicago and Alton train robbery. The reporters called them stool pigeons. Creed Chapman had lost forty-two pounds while incarcerated; John Land was rumored to be so apprehensive about reprisal by Jesse James that he refused to even mention the man’s name. “He evidently is in fear of bodily injury,” one man wrote, “and dreads the idea of ever again leaving jail.”
On the afternoon of March 30th, a policeman meandered near the cottage and then loitered on the sidewalk to inventory the geography of St. Joseph. He wore a riverman’s short-brimmed cap and a navy blue coat with brass buttons and a brass star. A shoulder sling crossed the man’s chest to a black leather holster that housed a dragoon revolver. He made a cigarette and, like a cat with its catch, seemed to look everywhere except the cottage, and then he found cause to rest his elbows on the white picket fence and lounge there, scrutinizing and squinting.
Charley was sunk in a brown study: he creaked a rocking chair forward and back and stared morosely at the marred wallpaper as he smoked a cigarette. Jesse came out of the master bedroom with a revolver tucked inside a folded newspaper, looking imperiled and perturbed. He asked in a whisper, “Is anyone out there?”
Charley craned around to see out the screen door and saw the policeman allow smoke to stream from his nose. “Yes!” Charley said, and slid off the chair as Jesse crouched across the room. “How in Heaven’s name did you know?”
Jesse raised the revolver next to his left ear and split two bottom window blinds with his fingers. He said, “I had a premonition. ’s-5’