The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

Jesse accorded his back to Dick and scrubbed at his eyes with a blue bandana. “I must be going crazy.”

Mrs. Ford and Albert and Fanny were at the tall windows but when Jesse glimpsed them the curtains closed. Jesse dickered with his left boot until it thrust into the stirrup and then he swung up with an elderly sigh and rode off without a word.

CONCERNING ROBERT WOODSON HITE and what Clarence called “Wood’s scrape with the Negro,” it is only necessary to know that Sarah swore to a murder warrant and Wood was arrested by two deputies from Russellville, the county seat, as he fished in a creek with a bamboo pole. He’d become cold-blooded and complacent and unconcerned, and he seemed so tractable that the marshal rented an upstairs room in a city hotel rather than lock him in the crowded jail. A man sat outside the room with a shotgun but he appears to have been bribed by the Hites, because Wood was able to walk down the stairs one afternoon and exit the hotel through the chandeliered lobby, and ride out of town on a saddled and provendered horse that was hitched next to a tobacco-store Indian. Thereafter records lose Wood Hite in his torpid pursuit of Dick Liddil until finally in December the cousin who was given Jesse’s middle name was seen in Missouri.

Wood rode from Saturday night to Sunday morning, rocking sleepily inside a once-white goat-hair coat and long blue muffler, with his eyes shut and his left wrist tied to the saddle horn so he’d know if he slid. His face was bricked with windburn, his mustache was beaded and jeweled with ice. Snow made boards of his trousers and sleeves, his nose was injured with cold, and sometimes sleet sailed piercingly into whichever eye was open. Wood reached Richmond before six, warmed his cheeks and ears and backside at a railroad switchman’s stove, and turned toward Mrs. Bolton’s farmhouse. He saw Elias Ford near the corn crib shooing cattle toward the silage he’d scattered on the snow. Elias lectured the animals but his words were lost on the wind; quills of gray smoke left his mouth and disappeared. When he saw Wood he was startled, for he assumed it was Frank James who glowered at him from the road—the resemblance was strong even without the deception of darkness. Elias threw up his arm in greeting and then invited him in from the cold, pointing first to the stables and then to the farmhouse.

Wood walked his horse inside a stall, threw a moth-eaten brown blanket over it, and shoved a tin pail of oats at its nose to entice it to alfalfa. Then he walked to the kitchen with Wilbur, who was teetering with a milk can. Wood inserted his mittened hand in the can’s twin grip to make the carry less clumsy. He shouted into the arctic wind, “How come it’s always you does the chores?”

“Charley and Bob pay extree to Martha so’s they don’t have to!”

“Still don’t seem fair!”

“Well,” Wilbur said, then lost whatever their justification was and pitied himself for a moment or two. Then he shouted, “You know how I could tell it was you? You was carrying but the one six-shooter and the others carry two!”

Wood pulled the storm door for the man and he banged the milk can inside. Wilbur said, “I’d take a rag to my nose if I was you; it’s unsightly.”

Martha dumped bread dough onto a floured board and kneaded it with both hands. Oatmeal boiled in kettle water on the stove and her daughter yawned as she stirred it with a wooden spoon. Wilbur straddled a chair and blew into his hands; Wood removed mittens that dangled from sleeve clips like a child’s. A coal-oil lamp was on the fireplace mantel and Martha saw her shadow leap and totter against the wall as the lamp was moved to the oak table. She turned and saw Wood thawing his right ear over the lamp’s glass chimney as he stuffed a handkerchief up his coat sleeve.

“Look what the cat dragged in,” she said.

He rotated his head to thaw the left ear.

“You come from Kentucky?”

Wood circled the chimney bowl with his hands and looked at Martha in order to construe what she did and did not know. “You mean the news never got this far?”

Wilbur enlightened his sister. “Wood and Dick had a shooting scrape month or two ago.”

Elias closed the kitchen door behind himself and stamped his boots. “I thought you was Frank James when I saw you. I thought, ‘What in tarnashun is Buck doing here?’ ” He buffeted his ears with his mitts and, apparently captivated by his earlier stupefaction, repeated the query: “I thought, ‘What in tarnashun is Buck doing here when he’s supposed to been gone East?’ ”

Bob was awake upstairs and sore from a night on the duck feather mattress. The north window was raised and the room was so cold spirits left him with each exhalation. He attached the flame of a match to a floor candle and lay back with his hands behind his head and a socked foot dangling near the heat as Charley snored and Dick mewled. Over the breakfast noises he heard his sister Martha say, “Look what the cat dragged in.” Bob stared at the brown smudges of squashed spiders on the bedroom ceiling and pondered women and money until Wood’s voice penetrated the kitchen chat.

Then Bob bolted out of bed and crouched next to the inch-wide crack of the door. He missed some words from Elias and then Martha said, “Cover the kettle, Ida.” Bob could hear his sister trickle coffee beans into the box grinder, could hear a chair moan as someone skidded it on the boards. His sister said, “What on earth did you and Dick get into a fracas about?”

Bob scooted over to the cot and pressed his left hand over the Navy Colt beneath the pillow before he said with insistence, “Dick!”

Liddil automatically reached under the pillow but discovered the pistol trapped and saw Bob with his ginger hair jackstrawed, his eyelids welted green with worry and sleeplessness.

“Wood Hite’s downstairs.”

Dic

k boosted onto his right elbow and Bob released his hand from the pillow and the Navy Colt beneath it. Both listened to Wood claim yet again that Dick stole one hundred dollars from his Blue Cut loot—perhaps he’d said it so often he was now convinced that that was the cause of his ire. Martha cranked the coffee grinder and Wood claimed he’d been in the wilderness since October. He made no mention of Sarah or John Tabor or his recent arrest for murder.

From above the two heard Martha say, “I-da! Don’t stick your thumb in the cream when you skim it! Goodness sakes.”

And Wilbur said, “Dick told me a complete other version of that affray.”

Bob and Dick listened as a chair screeched on the floor and Wood said, “You mean he’s here?”

“Come in late last night.”

Dick cocked his revolver and nestled it under the five woolen blankets on the cot and said, “I’m going to play possum.” Bob shrank back, then crawled over to the nightstand between the twin beds as Elias told Wood to simmer down and Martha said, “Don’t you boys get into a fracas up there. I’ve almost got breakfast cooked.”

Bob extricated a loaded revolver from Charley’s holster and hunkered low and shivered as Wood made a racket on the stairs. Wood slammed the bedroom door with his boot so that it bashed the wall and plaster dribbled from the doorknob’s concussion and Charley jolted up. Wood strode into the room in his tall black boots and hairy coat, a blued Peacemaker outreached so that it was trained on Dick’s twirled and blond mustache. Wood kicked the cot and it jounced an inch. He roared, “Come on outside, you oily sack of puke!”

Bob saw Dick flutter his eyes a little and then the wool blankets lashed with the gunpowder’s detonation and Dick’s shot smashed a hole in the bedroom door. Wood ducked aside from the shot and then regained himself and fired once at Dick and strewed pillow feathers, and a second time as Dick rolled off the mattress, the ball striking short and swiveling a slipper.