“You can’t always make things happen, Bob.”
“Well, like I say, I’m just taking what comes my way.”
Jesse rose up and crimped his fingers over the metal clothesline, sagging a little on it, looking at the ground. “You Fords show your teeth like apes.”
Bob couldn’t imagine where their dialogue was going but the man’s gloom seemed vaguely dangerous, so he decided to go back inside. He threw the tattersall quilt over a raspberry bush and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m going to call it a night.”
Jesse was slumped forward dismally, swinging his weight on the clothesline, making the metal hooks complain. He asked, “Why don’t you stay with me a little longer?”
“I’m sort of sleepy, Jess.”
“Go ahead then,” he said.
Bob was perplexed by the man’s despondency. He walked to the screen door and then said, “I appreciate your frankness with me. This has been illuminating. I’m going to ponder all you said.”
Jesse moved off into the darkness. “Don’t make anything out of it,” he said. “I was only passing the time.”
MUCH LATER Bob would remember that he woke at sunrise on April 3rd looking at the racehorse named Skyrocket. Charley was climbing into a rough wool shirt that he wore whenever he worked with the animals. Bob dangled his fingers to the floor and walked them over his gun. Zee was already at the stove and Bob could see steam escape from a covered saucepan in shy phrases of smoke. Tim was in the children’s room annoying his little sister.
Bob would recall that Jesse then came out of the master bedroom and scolded the children for pestering each other when it wasn’t more than seven. He wore the crisp celluloid collar and the dazzlingly white linen shirt that he stole from the Kansas hotel highboy, and he adjusted the silk cravat in a looking-glass that revealed a section of shut door, a chair woven with rushes, a marred wall with the heights of Tim and Mary designated in crayon. Bob slithered from under the covers in order to conceal an erection and struggled his legs into nut brown trousers, then struggled his stockinged feet into boots that were so worn in the heels that his ankles caved out. Charley clomped to the stables via the front door and the screen door clapped off a sinking mist of street dust. Jesse buttoned a black cashmere Prince Albert coat over a vest and over his two crossed holsters and guns. He informed Bob without nastiness that he could stay inside and sleep some more, and he walked out into sunlight just as Zee angrily banged shut the oven door, muttering, “Oh, shoot!”
Bob tucked in a yellow shirt and called, “Is that you making all that smoke?”
He saw Zee flip some burnt cottage biscuits from a blackened baking pan and say to no one, “This ornery stove!” He fingercombed his ginger brown hair in the looking-glass and slipped through gray oven smoke to go out to the privy.
He stepped over puddles that an overnight rain had put in the yard and he closed the privy door behind him. The temperature forecast was eighty degrees and already the April morning seemed as warm and moist as cooking vapors. Mary crouched outside with a coffee grinder that she’d ruined with sand; Tim propelled himself on a rope swing that rasped against a sycamore bough. Bob walked over to the backyard cistern, buttoning his fly, and the cistern pump brayed mulishly when he worked the iron handle. Charley came up from the stables and scraped off manure on a rusted rake that was forgotten in the grass, and though Bob said good morning to him, his only gesture of recognition was to slouch down the slope of the yard a ways and squat for some time inside cigarette smoke.
Jesse caught the swing set and gentled Tim down to a stop and then the two strolled down Confusion Hill for the subscription newspapers. Cold water that was slightly orange splashed into Bob’s lifted white enamel bowl and spotted his trouser cuffs and boots. He brought the water to his face gratefully, as a man might a sweetheart’s fingers, and he imagined without willing it the gruesome fish he’d caught in September. When he looked up Zee was peering at him through the porch screen.
“How much do you want to eat?” she asked.
“Just a smidgen,” Bob said, and got up on his legs. “I’m feeling sort of peculiar.” He pushed Mary in the swing for a while, responding to a two-year-old’s questions, and then grew weary of that, flung her higher than before, and straggled into the front yard, where he leaned over the white picket fence to look down Lafayette Street. Sunlight flashed off the city’s windows. The railroad yards to the west were ceilinged with smoke. The river moved with the slow advancement of blood. He lingered there for five minutes or so, his thumbs cocked by his pockets. He could have been a man at the races, a gambler with money on Skyrocket. Craig and Timberlake would be sitting at breakfast perhaps, making preparations for Tuesday, eating sweet croissants. Craig would enrich his coffee with cream. A crew would be in the freight cars strewing straw for the deputies’ animals.
Bob watched the great man and his child climb the steep ascent of the sidewalk with shoes on their feet and grand aspirations and a common language between them, but Bob figured that only meant they were slightly more intricate animals. It meant they were given more mechanisms than guns. Bob saw Jesse move a cigar in his mouth and squint his eyes from the smoke. He said, “How come you’re looking so interested?”
Bob asked, “Do you think it’s intelligent to go outside like that, so all creation can see your guns?”
Jesse ignored him and threw the cigar so that it sparked and rolled, screwing smoke. And then he rushed his daughter, monstering, catching Mary as she ran squealingly to the screen door and swinging the girl around so wildly her right stockinged foot lost its shoe.
Zee called everyone in to a breakfast that was cooling and Mary hugged her father’s neck as he gracefully walked to the dining room. Tim carelessly threw down the rolled newspapers in the sitting room and climbed up next to his sister’s highchair. Bob slit open a brown paper sleeve and spilled out the Kansas City Times, seeing instantly a story about the arrest and confession of Dick Liddil. Charley slouched into the dining room late, looking meek and afflicted, lying about some complaint with the horses to which Jesse paid scant attention. Bob slipped the newspaper under a shawl and strapped on the gun he had been given, tying the leather holster to his thigh with a string. Zee called Bob again, slightly irritably, saying everything was getting cold, and Bob seated himself across from Jesse, accidentally scarring the chair with his gun.
Zee jellied a biscuit for Mary and mentioned she’d invited a girl from across the street to go shopping with her for Easter clothes that afternoon. She asked Jesse to give her some money and he removed two five-dollar bills from a small roll secured with a rubber band. She asked if Jesse wanted some sandwiches for his journey. She asked if he’d come back for the Holy Thursday services.
Jesse frowned at his six-year-old son, who was staring blankly at the sunshine, woolgathering, his oatmeal spoon in his mouth. “What do you think goes on in that noggin of his?”
“Nothing,” said Charley Ford.
Jesse laughed. “I was referring to his mind, not yours.”
Bob snickered cravenly and Jesse looked askance at him. He then stood from his chair and fetched the newspapers that Tim had abandoned on the sofa, almost missing the Kansas City Times that was incompletely concealed by a shawl. He sat again with solemnity and stirred a spoon in his cup, swirling ghosts from the coffee.
Bob noticed every motion, every physical event: the crease in the man’s brow, the fret in his reading eyes, the stain on a finger from the cigars he smoked. Bob slid the second newspaper around and scanned the items on its front page: legislation and politics, advertisements for curatives and clothes, the outrages visited on a young woman in Memphis, the shedding of innocent blood. A man in Grandview was ruled insane; a farm was lost to incendiaries; it was the twenty-second anniversary of the start of the Pony Express.
Jesse unfastened his Prince Albert coat and snared it over his guns. Tim excused himself from the table with a rasher of bacon in his mouth and Mary climbed down from he
r highchair after him. Jesse flattened the Kansas City Times over the newspaper he’d finished and lowered his crossed arms to scour the articles. “Hello now!” he said. “The surrender of Dick Liddil.”
Charley said, perhaps too urgently, “You don’t say so!”