The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Jesse lifted a coffee cup close to his mouth and stared at Bob through the vapors. “Young man, I asked you yesterday and you said you didn’t know anything about Dick.”

“And I don’t.”

Jesse moved his finger down the page, guiding his eyes as he read. “It’s very strange,” he said and made no other comment as he continued to the conclusion. Zee was scraping the children’s breakfast plates in the kitchen and immersing them in soaped dishwater. They thudded together with the wooden sound of a muscular heart pumping blood. Jesse sipped some coffee without looking up from the newspaper. He said, “It says here Dick surrendered three weeks ago.” He glanced at Bob with misgivings. “You must’ve been right there in the neighborhood.”

“Apparently they kept it secret.”

Jesse slumped back in the chair with his fingers knitted over his stomach and glared at Bob and then Charley. “It looks sort of fishy to me.”

Bob said, “If I get to Kansas City soon, I’m going to ask somebody about it.” And then he left the dining room with his right hand on his gun. He raised the Venetian blinds and the screenless sitting room windows and reacquainted himself with the rocking chair, his body fidgeting. Tim hunkered down on the stoop outside, coercing the crank on the coffee grinder. His little sister squatted beside him, pushing her pale dress down between her thighs, stabbing at the earth with a crooked spoon, and repeating, for some reason, “Don’t.”

Jesse retrieved some remedy from the medicine cabinet in the pantry and murmured privately with his wife. Charley walked into the sitting room and remarked on the sultry weather, said the afternoon would be hot as a pistol. He sat on the mattress and looped his holster off the bedpost, looking significantly at Bob as he put it on.

Jesse paused at the sitting room entrance as if to reconsider a scheme and then proceeded across the tasseled green rug with a long linen duster over one forearm, the other cradling packed saddlebags and a folded newspaper that carried a gun. Bob jumped up from the rocker and it reared and rowed, clubbing the floor, until he could still the chair with his hand. Jesse asked, “You two ready?”

And Charley said, “I will be by noon.”

Bob strode over to the hanging straw portfolio, and as he snatched out a children’s book he could feel Jesse glare at his gun. Bob shouldered into the floral wallpaper and vagrantly read to himself the first sentence of chapter one: “The little kitchen had quieted down from the bustle and confusion of midday.” Jesse rammed a raised window sash higher, making the snug fittings moan.

Clouds were shipping in and accumulating and most of the eastern sky was the color of nails. “It’s an awfully hot day,” Jesse James said, and Charley thought so much of his earlier statement that he said once again it was going to be hot as a pistol. Jesse took off his Prince Albert coat and Bob concentrated on the man, stowing Five Little Peppers and How They Grew among some magazines. Jesse folded the fine black coat on the oak bed and then removed a six-button black vest that was extravagantly brocaded with red stitching. Charley shambled over to the screen door to scan Lafayette Street.

Sunlight streaked off Jesse’s two revolvers. He leaned on the windowsill and gazed at the skittish weather. A suspender was twisted once across the back of an ironed shirt that coins of sweat made the color of smoke. He proclaimed in a sentence that seemed composed just for Bob, “I guess I’ll take off my pistols for fear the neighbors will spy them if I walk out into the yard.”

Charley instantly turned from the screen door with vexation in his face and saw his kid brother’s right thumb twitch as Bob lowered his hand to his gun.

Jesse unbuckled the two crossed holsters with their two unmatched revolvers and carefully placed them on the mattress, as if creating some exhibit, and it seemed to Bob that the man was pretending: each motion seemed stressed, adorned, theatrical, an unpolished actor’s version of calm and nonchalance. Jesse lent his attention to the racehorse named Skyrocket and said, “That picture’s awful dusty,” and withdrew from a wicker sewing basket a furniture duster that was made from the blue-eyed feathers of peacocks. He could easily reach the picture by standing, but he skidded the rush-bottomed chair across the rug and climbed onto it as if the floor were inclined and uncertain.

Bob slunk from the wall in order to stand between Jesse and the two revolvers. He shook loose his fingers like a gunfighter and instructed his brother with scared eyes as Jesse stood above them and feathered the walnut frame. Charley winked and the two Fords slipped out their guns. Bob was the speedier and had his .44 extended straight out from his right eye as Charley was still raising his and Jesse appeared to hear the three clicks as the Smith and Wesson was cocked because he slightly swiveled his head with authentic surprise, straying his left hand toward a gun that he’d forgotten was gone.

Then Robert Ford’s .44 ignited and a red stamp seemed to paste against the outlaw’s chestnut brown hair one inch to the rear of his right ear, and his left eyebrow socked into the glassed watercolor of Skyrocket. Gunpowder and gun noise filled the room and Jesse groaned as a man does in his sleep and then sagged from his knees and tilted over and smacked the floor like a great animal, shaking the house with his fall.

He looked at the ceiling, his fingers curled and uncurled, his mouth worked at making words, and the two Ford brothers saw he was dying. Charley leaped out the window and into the yard and as Zee rushed into a room that was blue with smoke, Bob slowly retreated and straddled the sill.

She screamed, “What have you done?” and the boy looked as if he wanted to apologize but couldn’t. Zee knelt and cried, “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse,” and cradled his skull in her apron and smothered his right ear in petticoats that soaked red with his blood. Tim was at the screen door, seeing everything, and Bob was still crouched at the sitting room window, gawking at the man. She asked with anguish, “Bob, have you done this?”

And he answered, “I swear to God that I didn’t.”

The man sighed and grew heavy on her legs. His eyes seemed yellow, his muscles slack; the blood was wide as a table. He made a syllable like “God” and then everything inside him stopped.

Charley skulked inside the cottage to collect the Fords’ two hats and riding coats and to look again at the man they’d shot. He told Zee James, “The pistol went off accidentally.”

Then Charley was outside again and the two Fords ran down Confusion Hill, their coats flying, cutting through yards and down alleys until they achieved the American Telegraph office, whence was sent to Sheriff Timberlake, Henry H. Craig, and Governor Thomas Crittenden an abbreviated message that read: “I HAVE KILLED JESSE JAMES. BOB FORD.”

Part Three

AMERICANA

6

APRIL 1882–APRIL 1884

Outside my window about a quarter mile to the west stands a little yellow house and a crowd of people are pulling it all down. It is the house of the great train robber and murderer, Jesse James, who was shot by his pal last week, and the people are relic hunters. They sold his dust-bin and foot scraper yesterday by public auction, his doorknocker is to be offered for sale this afternoon, the reserve price being about the income of an English bishop….The Americans are certainly great hero worshippers, and always take their heroes from the criminal classes.

OSCAR WILDE

in a letter mailed from St. Joseph and dated April 19th, 1882

THEN THE FORD BROTHERS ran over to City Marshal Enos Craig’s office in order to surrender, but a man there told them Craig was at coffee and that a deputy marshal had just left for Confusion Hill, that a woman had called on the telephone to report a gunfight on Lafayette Street. The man was going to begin interrogating them about their intentions with Craig but the two were already running east, and they caught up