“You’ve heard it?”
“Only about twenty times.”
Jesse was as still as a shut-down machine.
Bob said, “I’d love the chance to hear you tell it, though. I imagine you’ll make it more interesting.”
Jesse resumed, “ ‘I’ll gladly pay you,’ I say, and she said that was all right, we looked like genuine Christians and she’d do us the good turn. Kid, I want to tell you, that was one scrumptious supper. She went all out. But Frank saw she was crying and when he asked why, she said the mortgage was coming due and that the loan manager or whatever was going to be there any minute to repossess the place. And her a poor widow! Can you imagine? Well now, Frank and me, we insist on paying her something; and you know what we gave her?”
“Enough to pay off the mortgage,” Bob said.
“You have heard this one.”
“But no one ever said the supper was scrumptious. This is fascinating.”
“So we gave her what she needed and we go, and on the highway who’s coming our way but the loan manager. He greets us but doesn’t give Frank and me a second thought, he’s that greedy to get hold of that farm. Much to his surprise, of course, she paid him off and in no time he wa
s plodding along the road with his wallet bulging his coat out and his grin a little tighter. And that’s when Frank and me come out of the woods with masks on and steal all our money back.” Jesse laughed uproariously, like a plowboy. He even slapped his thigh.
“And you’re saying that’s a true story.”
“Is!”
“Jesse!”
“You calling me a liar?”
Tim crawled back up from the river, pretending to be something that he was not, and when he approached the two he said matter-of-factly, “I saw your pole dip, Cousin Bob.” And Jesse slipped out of anger into eager regard for their fishing, winding the line around his right hand as he pulled it up to check on Bob’s hook. The smelly mystery compound he’d gobbed on the hook was gone and he charged himself with the responsibility of baiting the snare again, adding to it a smear of tobacco that he wiped from inside his cheek. With that accomplished, Jesse swigged some more lager beer and put his boy in his lap, snuggling his chin beard into the boy’s neck and munching his lips along Tim’s ears in order to make him giggle. He said, “Do you know how to make a fire, Timmy?”
“Yes.”
“Bob’ll say you’re lying if he don’t see it.”
The boy angled forward to glance at Bob. He said, “I can.”
“You go ahead and make one for us. Show Cousin Bob you’re a six-year-old.” Tim got matches from his father and then went into the woods again to gather kindling and rotted logs. Jesse sipped some beer and then covered the mason jar with oiled paper and screwed on the lid. “You remember John Newman Edwards?”
“Newspaper man,” Bob said.
“He’d misbehave himself for two or three weeks at a time; drink himself nearly cross-eyed; and then he’d come back to Kansas City and say, ‘I’ve been to the Indian Territories.’ Always tickled me to hear that.”
“I’ve been to the Indian Territories,” Bob said to get it right.
There was a pause and then Jesse said, “Garfield is dying real gallantly,” and he went on to speak of the published newspaper interviews with Charles J. Guiteau.
On July 2nd President James A. Garfield had strolled into the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station with Secretary of State James G. Blaine in order to meet a morning train that would take the president to Long Branch, New Jersey, where his wife, Lucretia, was convalescing. They’d crossed a ladies’ waiting room without noticing a deranged evangelist and general miscreant named Charles J. Guiteau who’d spent the preceding three months in pestering them for the Paris consulship, and since June had been preparing to “remove” the Republican president. He crept up behind Garfield, straightened a .44 caliber British Bulldog revolver, and shot the president once in the right of his back, and as the man struggled around and cried out, “My God! What is this?” shot him again in the arm. Guiteau then slipped out of the station but was caught by a policeman, to whom he said, “Keep quiet, my friend, keep quiet. I wish to go right to jail.”
Jesse knew a great deal about Charles J. Guiteau: that he was five feet five inches tall and thirty-nine years old and once claimed his employer was Jesus Christ and Company. He was a swindler, insurance salesman, debt collector, a member of the Illinois bar; he skipped out on hotel bills, published a book on religion called simply The Truth, and had assigned his collected papers and .44 caliber pistol to the State Department library.
Jesse James, Jr., would grow up to be a good-looking man but he was a grouchy, ill-favored boy with ash blond hair that spiked up from his scalp and a mouth that was always pouting. But he put together fire sticks with some proficiency and was squatting by his woodstack, guiding a match along some kindling in a grandfather way, as his father continued to speak about the July assassination and Bob attended to what he was saying like a paid companion.
Tim plopped down in his father’s lap and asked Bob, “Do you see the fire?”
“It’s really burning, isn’t it?”
The boy said, “I made it myself.”
“Hup?” Jesse said. “I just felt something. Might’ve had a nibble.”