The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

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sp; Charley was initially delighted with the East and with the progress he’d made from his poor beginnings. He would slog through an ankle-deep ocean at Atlantic City with his suit coat gathered over his right arm, his shoes clamped together in that hand as the other shaded his eyes from sunlight so that he could see more unmistakably the pretty women in their thigh-length bathing dresses and knee-length bloomers, their sturdy white calves exposed. They would step into the sheeting water higher up on the sand and a larger wave would curdle foam over their feet and they’d squeal, and Charley would grin magnificently, looking around for Bob so he could share his enjoyment. A young girl might venture out and dip into the ocean, bravely swimming toward Europe as Charley’s aghast eyes followed her every stroke. And when she came out, the frills of her bathing dress would be sagging low and the black cloth would be clinging to her body, making everything significant and generating such excitement in Charley that he’d run to get Bob and show him the sight.

“She was a beauty, was she?” Bob said once.

“She didn’t have one more bump than necessary. And you could tell she liked you noticing too.” Charley sniggered a little and added, “I would’ve stayed put till the tide came in but I was afraid I was starting to bulge.”

By the time they were living in Brooklyn, though, Charley was getting no great pleasure in hungering for women and was going out of his way to avoid meeting them. If Bob brought along one of his dancing girls on their evenings out in Manhattan, Charley managed to speak only when protocol demanded it or when he had something ugly to say, smiled without good humor when Bob nudgingly joked, and glimpsed the girl leeringly on the sly. He whispered to one girl, “I know exactly who you’re working for. You won’t get your hooks in me.”

Charley was becoming an onlooker, a playgoer, judging but not joining, given to long days alone in his room, where he read strange pamphlets and testimonies and circled his bed with garlic and black candles. He called Bob’s girlfriends Jezebels and temptresses, begetters of greed and jealousy, and warned Bob that his “wrong-living life will carry you into the perpetual burning.” He compared all females unfavorably to Mrs. Zee James, whom he spoke of as certain priests might the Madonna, and composed long, soul-describing letters to her, begging her forgiveness, none of which he mailed. He said once, “I’m going to look for somebody like Zee. All my spots will disappear.” And on another occasion Charley disapproved of something by pointing out that a soothsayer named Perfecta had put him onto just such a scheme.

Bob said, “You’re spending too much time with gypsies.”

“You mark my words, Bob. They’ll pluck out your eyes. They’ve got your name written in goat’s blood.”

Hence Bob grew more estranged from his brother. He was appalled by Charley’s peculiarities, his progressively worsening illnesses, his mixture of puritanism, piety, black magic, and gullibility. He squandered no money but possessed no savings and it seemed probable to Bob that Charley was giving his earnings away, having been counseled by some crystal-ball gazer—who was no doubt the beneficiary—that this was the only means of assuaging his guilt. And guilt was pumping like poisoned blood through the chambers of Charley’s heart; he’d confessed that many times he’d lain on a mattress, calling for sleep, but was instead visited by gruesome imaginings of a coffin and of the subjugation of earth on his chest, and more than once he’d bolted upright at night to see a grisly form fly out through the window. Perhaps in consequence, there was something changed in Charley’s stage portrayal of Jesse: his limp now seemed practiced, his high voice was spookily similar to the man’s, his newly suggested dialogue was analogous to a script that Jesse might have originated, he said he was “getting to know him” with the unopposable conviction of a man who’d just been in colloquy with a spirit made flesh. It was a gradual transmogrification, but it was no less frightening to Bob. Too many gunshots on the stage and too many resignations to Bob’s betrayal were separating the Ford brothers as Charley accepted the obligation of personifying Jesse James. He was given to private yearnings, wistfulness about the past, all of the commonplaces of death like weeping and glamorized memory, and he began to look at his younger brother with spite and antagonism, as if he suspected that in some future performance he might present himself to a live cartridge in Robert Ford’s gun.

So Bob avoided Charley insofar as that was possible, and sought only to repair his evil reputation. Ironically, it was in New York that Bob first heard the song written by a Missouri sharecropper whose name was Billy Gashade. Bob was sitting in a Bowery saloon, a green bottle of whiskey on the crate to his right, a shot glass in his fingers, when a man with a banjo announced he was going to sing “The Ballad of Jesse James.”

He began: “Jesse James was a lad who killed many a man. He robbed the Glendale train. He stole from the rich and he gave to the poor, he’d a hand and a heart and a brain.” The man strolled the room, coming so near Bob that Bob pulled back his crossed legs as the man sang the chorus in a higher pitch. “Oh, Jesse had a wife to mourn for his life, three children, they were brave; but that dirty little coward that shot Mister Howard has laid Jesse James in his grave.”

A stevedore put a nickel in the singer’s palm; he tipped his head in appreciation and continued: “It was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward. I wonder how he does feel? For he ate of Jesse’s bread and he slept in Jesse’s bed, then he laid Jesse James in his grave.”

The man with the banjo, whose name seemed to be Elijah, sang the chorus again and Bob worked at registering no change in attitude or expression. He was so drunk by then that his head jerked when he shifted it and one arm hung slack by his side, but his mind was stubbornly unasleep and could make out that there was an incorrect stanza about robbing a Chicago bank and another about the shot coming on a Saturday night and one about Jesse being born in the county of Shea. The singer concluded: “This song it was made by Billy Gashade as soon as the news did arrive. He said there wasn’t a man with the law in his hand could take Jesse James when alive.”

Bob capped the green bottle with his shot glass and stood, gripping the bottle neck. His chair tipped over and he staggered a little with intoxication, gaining balance as he moved by sliding a hand against the saloon wall. “Two chilrun,” he said. “Munnay mornin, na Sa-urday nigh. Cowny of Clay. You said Shea.” He gave the bottle and shot glass to the saloonkeep and tilted slightly to the right as he took a boxer’s stance versus the singer. “You gonna fight me, see who the coward is?”

Elijah glared at him with repugnance but said without anguish, “I ain’t gonna fight you, boy. You get on outta here.”

“Huh?”

A man at the rail yelled, “Sleep it off!” and slapped Bob forcefully on the back, sending him walking a step or two before he regained himself. “Any you wanna fight me? Huh? Who’s gonna be?” He fell off his legs somehow and sat down on peanut shells, looking flabbergasted. He crawled up to his feet and swayed without words for a moment, his fists raised only gingerly at his sides, and his eyes glinting with tears.

The saloonkeeper said, “Get on home now, son. Go on! Get yourself outta my place!”

Bob guided himself through the door and got lost in the night and awoke at sunrise on Houston Street, a dog licking his mouth.

SOON EVERY SALOON’S piano man could sing the song and stock companies were incorporating it into their romances, and because the simple chorus came up no less than eight times in the course of the ballad, even the stupid or dipsomaniacal could recall that it was Robert Ford, that dirty little coward, who laid poor Jesse James in his grave.

Charley seemed to agree with the allegations of cowardice but Bob always challenged them, punching more than two street buskers, insisting on gunfights or meetings in alleys, stopping the stageshow at any gibe and asking the man if he wanted to investigate Robert Ford’s courage in some mutually agreed upon way.

On New Year’s Eve in the Horticultural Building in Boston, a rough who’d argued with Charley that afternoon (calling him

a barbarian), came to the Fords’ evening show and guyed them throughout the act, yelling so many insults that Bob eventually sprang from the stage, jolting the wind from the man, swinging punches at his skull, maybe socking him a dozen times before others yanked him off. And then Bob smashed into them as well, his fists striking blood from the lips and noses of gentlemen who tried to discourage his rage, as Charley pitched into a second group, misapplying his pistols until a policeman finally appeared, fetching a lump from Charley’s head with a single swipe of his billyclub.

Only sixteen from an original audience of over three hundred had stayed in the Horticultural Building; the rest had stampeded outside, some even crashing through windowglass as if the place were on fire. Five men were lying on the floor, cupping their mouths or noses, their starched shirt fronts crinkled and spotted red. The policeman said as he shackled Bob, “You may be the Ford brothers or the James brothers, but you cahn’t drink blood in Boston.”

Articles about the fight appeared in many newspapers. Over the next week, inspiring the St. Joseph Gazette to comment: “Since one of them acquired notoriety by shooting another assassin in the back, the pestiferous pair has traveled the country under the apparent assumption that they were protégés of the state of Missouri. These fellows ought to be locked up in the interest of public morals or put under bonds to keep the peace by holding their tongues.”

George Bunnell coincidentally came to a like opinion that the slayers of Jesse James had lost their stage appeal and he called in their repertory company, claiming the competition for shows like theirs was already too plentiful. J. J. McCloskey’s Jesse James, the Bandit King was still in New York; Charles W. Chase brought his Mammoth James Boys’ Combination to the West, playing Mosby’s Grand Opera House in Richmond in May 1883; another company stayed for a two-night engagement at Tootle’s Opera House in St. Joseph; and a show called The Missouri Outlaws was being reviewed by P. T. Barnum. And yet the Fords continued on the road with their own company, The Great Western Novelty Troupe, presenting seven thespians and a composition called Jesse James throughout Ohio, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, upstate New York, and New Jersey.

The playwright was a glamorous actor from Buffalo who gave himself the title role and rearranged American history to gain an enlarged arena for his gifts. The makeshift story commenced with an archetypal robbery with many killings, jumped rapidly to the cottage in St. Joseph where the swag was apportioned to the gang, the greatest amount going to Jesse. Angered by that, Bob shot the outlaw after supper on a Saturday night, but only now, on this stage in Cincinnati, Ohio, or Newark, New Jersey, did gallant and gritty Robert Ford see that he’d slain an impostor, for striding from the wings was the genuine Jesse James, and following a vainglorious dialogue, the two desperadoes met in a gunfight and Bob again vanquished the lion. Bob was then congratulated on his courage and accuracy with a gun and the tragedy was strangely forgotten as Bob began a shooting exhibition, firing many blank cartridges at apples that were jerked from Charley’s mouth with strings.

Charley called the road shows “a regular picnic” and claimed weekly receipts of nine hundred dollars, but they actually made only a fraction of that, and as they journeyed west they played to apathetic or antagonistic crowds. On September 26th, 1883, Jesse James played Louisville, Kentucky, and the management of The Great Western Novelty Troupe was agreeably surprised upon learning the Buckingham Theatre was completely sold out and that sitting rights to the aisles and galleries cost as much as regular box seats might. Only when the curtain was raised did Bob recognize that the great crowd was there to hiss and jeer at his every sentence and fling garbage onto the stage, and when he uneasily raised his gun at Jesse the audience rioted, according to Bob’s recollection, surging to the footlights, calling him a cur and a murderer, children scrabbling onto the stage to destroy the set and sneer at Bob in the sing-song of playgrounds.

And when Bob returned to his hotel that night he was given an unsigned letter that conveyed an account of Judas that was never accepted into the gospels. It said the disciple lived on after his attempt to hang himself, providing an example of impiety in this world. He grew huge and grotesque, his face became like a goatskin swollen with wine, his eyes could not be perceived even by an examining physician, to such a depth had they retreated from the sunlight, and his penis grew large, gruesome, a cause for loathing, yellow pus and worms coming out of it along with such a stink that he could stay in no village for long before he was chased away. After much pain and many punishments, Judas died in the place he belonged and, according to the account, the region still permitted no approach, so great was the stench that progressed from the apostate’s body to the ground.

EXCEPT FOR A MONTH as sideshow attractions with P. T. Barnum’s Greatest Show on Earth, the Ford brothers stopped performing in 1883 and their company dispersed into other productions as Bob and Charley sought more private lives, though that was problematical, even impossible, for many of those who’d once been in the presence of Jesse James.