The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel Read online

  The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

  A Novel

  Ron Hansen

  To John Irving, John L’Heureux, John Gardner

  CONTENTS

  PART ONE

  THE LOOT

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  PART TWO

  NIGHTHAWKS

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  PART THREE

  AMERICANA

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  A Biography of Ron Hansen

  Part One

  LOOT

  1

  SEPTEMBER 7th, 1881

  His manner was pleasant, though noticeably quiet and reserved. He listened attentively to every word that Scott Moore or I uttered but he himself said little. Occasionally he would ask some question about the country and the opportunities for stock-raising. But all the time I was conscious that he was alertly aware of everything that was said and done in the room. He never made the slightest reference to himself, nor did he show the least trace of self-importance or braggadocio. Had I not known who he was I should have taken him for an ordinary businessman receiving a social visit from two of his friends. But his demeanor was so pleasant and gentlemanly withal that I found myself on the whole liking him immensely.

  MIGUEL ANTONIO OTHRO

  My Life on the Frontier

  HE WAS GROWING INTO middle age and was living then in a bungalow on Woodland Avenue. Green weeds split the porch steps, a wasp nest clung to an attic gable, a rope swing looped down from a dying elm tree and the ground below it was scuffed soft as flour. Jesse installed himself in a rocking chair and smoked a cigar down in the evening as his wife wiped her pink hands on a cotton apron and reported happily on their two children. Whenever he walked about the house, he carried several newspapers—the Sedalia Daily Democrat, the St. Joseph Gazette, and the Kansas City Times—with a foot-long .44 caliber pistol tucked into a fold. He stuffed flat pencils into his pockets. He played by flipping peanuts to squirrels. He braided yellow dandelions into his wife’s yellow hair. He practiced out-of-the-body travel, precognition, sorcery. He sucked raw egg yolks out of their shells and ate grass when sick, like a dog. He would flop open the limp Holy Bible that had belonged to his father, the late Reverend Robert S. James, and would contemplate whichever verses he chanced upon, getting privileged messages from each. The pages were scribbled over with penciled comments and interpretations; the cover was cool to his cheek as a shovel. He scoured for nightcrawlers after earth-battering rains and flipped them into manure pails until he could chop them into writhing sections and sprinkle them over his garden patch. He recorded sales and trends at the stock exchange but squandered much of his capital on madcap speculation. He conjectured about foreign relations, justified himself with indignant letters, derided Eastern financiers, seeded tobacco shops and saloons with preposterous gossip about the kitchens of Persia, the Queen of England, the marriage rites of the Latter Day Saints. He was a faulty judge of character, a prevaricator, a child at heart. He went everywhere unrecognized and lunched with Kansas City shopkeepers and merchants, calling himself a cattleman or commodities investor, someone rich and leisured who had the common touch.

  He was born Jesse Woodson James on September 5th, 1847, and was named after his mother’s brother, a man who committed suicide. He stood five feet eight inches tall, weighed one hundred fifty-five pounds, and was vain about his physique. Each afternoon he exercised with weighted yellow pins in his barn, his back bare, his suspenders down, two holsters crossed and slung low. He bent horseshoes, he lifted a surrey twenty times from a squat, he chopped wood until it pulverized, he drank vegetable juices and potions. He scraped his sweat off with a butter knife, he dunked his head, at morning, in a horse water bucket, he waded barefoot through the lank backyard grass with his six-year-old son hunched on his shoulders and with his trousers rolled up to his knees, snagging garter snakes with his toes and gently letting them go.

  He smoked, but did not inhale, cigars; he rarely drank anything stronger than beer. He never philandered nor strayed from his wife nor had second thoughts about his marriage. He never swore in the presence of ladies nor raised his voice with children. His hair was fine and chestnut brown and recurrently barbered but it had receded so badly since his twenties that he feared eventual baldness and therefore rubbed his temples with onions and myrtleberry oil in order to stimulate growth. He scissored his two-inch sun-lightened beard according to a fashion then associated with physicians. His eyes were blue except for iris pyramids of green, as on the back of a dollar bill, and his eyebrows shaded them so deeply he scarcely ever squinted or shied his eyes from a glare. His nose was unlike his mother’s or brother’s, not long and preponderant, no proboscis, but upturned a little and puttied, a puckish, low-born nose, the ruin, he thought, of his otherwise gallantly handsome countenance.

  Four of his molars were crowned with gold and they gleamed, sometimes, when he smiled. He had two incompletely healed bullet holes in his chest and another in his thigh. He was missing the nub of his left middle finger and was cautious lest that mutilation be seen. He’d had a boil excised from his groin and it left a white star of skin. A getaway horse had jerked from him and fractured his ankle in the saddle stirrup so that his foot mended a little crooked and registered barometric changes. He also had a condition that was referred to as granulated eyelids and it caused him to blink more than usual, as if he found creation slightly more than he could accept.

  He was a Democrat. He was left-handed. He had a high, thin, sinew of a voice, a contralto that could twang annoyingly like a catgut guitar whenever he was excited. He owned five suits, which was rare then, and colorful, brocaded vests and cravats. He wore a thirty-two-inch belt and a fourteen-and-a-half-inch collar. He favored red wool socks. He rubbed his teeth with his finger after meals. He was persistently vexed by insomnia and therefore experimented with a vast number of soporifics which did little besides increasing his fascination with pharmacological remedies.

  He could neither multiply nor divide without error and much of his science was superstition. He could list the many begotten of Abraham and the sixty-six books of the King James Bible; he could recite psalms and poems in a stentorian voice with suitable histrionics; he could sing religious hymns so convincingly that he worked for a month as a choirmaster; he was marvelously informed about current events. And yet he thought incense was made from the bones of saints, that leather continued to grow if not dyed, that if he concentrated hard enough his body’s electrical currents could stun lake frogs as he bathed.

  He could intimidate like King Henry the Eighth; he could be reckless or serene, rational or lunatic, from one minute to the next. If he made an entrance, heads turned in his direction; if he strode down an aisle store clerks backed away; if he neared animals they retreated. Rooms seemed hotter when he was in them, rains fell straighter, clocks slowed, sounds were amplified: his enemies would not have been much surprised if he produced horned owls from beer bottles or made candles out of his fingers.

  He considered himself a Southern loyalist and guerrilla in a Civil War that never ended. He regretted neither his robberies nor the seventeen murders that he laid claim to, but he would brood about his slanders and slights, his callow need for attention, his overweening vaingloriousness, and he was excessively genteel and polite in order to disguise what he thought was vulgar, primitive, and depraved in his origins.

  Sicknesses made him smell blood each m
orning, he visited rooms at night, he sometimes heard children in the fruit cellar, he waded into prairie wheat and stared at the horizon.

  He had seen another summer under in Kansas City, Missouri, and on September 5th, in the year 1881, he was thirty-four years old.

  HE HAD INVITED Alexander Franklin James over from their mother’s farm in Kearney for the occasion, and dined on jackrabbit, boiled potatoes and onions, and hickorynut cake, then everyone, excepting Frank, autographed the night air with magnesium sparklers that were a gift from Jesse Edwards James, a six-year-old who thought his name was Tim. Frank presented his younger brother with a pair of pink coral cufflinks, and the two played cribbage as Zee tucked in the children, and after she retired for the evening, they rode a mule-powered streetcar downtown, Frank cleaning his nails on one side of the aisle as on the other Jesse slumped down in a frock coat and talked compulsively about stopping the Chicago and Alton Railroad at Blue Cut.

  On the following morning, Frank rode east and Jesse frittered that Tuesday and part of the next day through. He picked coffee beans from a canning jar and ground them fine as coal dust. He soaped his saddle and tack and glossed the rings and curb with pork lard; he carried water and cord wood; he tied onto his saddle horn a burlap sack that bore the red trademark of grain merchandisers in St. Louis. His two-year-old daughter swept his light brown beard with a doll brush, he dressed in a white linen shirt and gray wool Sunday clothes, tied a blue bandana around his neck, and climbed into a soiled Confederate officer’s coat that was rich with the odors of manual labor and was heavy enough to snap the pegs off a closet rack. He lunched on okra soup and kissed Zee goodbye, then rode eastward on back streets and cow-paths, his coat pockets clinking with flat pieces of slate that he skimmed into racketing trees and winged sidearm at coarse, scolding dogs.

  He urged his horse in the direction of Independence and into woods that were giving up their greens to autumn gold and brown. He ducked under aggravating limbs and criss-crossed through random alleys of scrub oak and scraggle where yellow leaves detached themselves at his least provocation. He could see the Missouri River in pickets and frames to his left, wide as a village and brown as a road, gradual in its procession. He came upon a hidden one-room barkwood shack with a puncheon floor and goats on the porch and blue smoke unraveling from the chimney. A man booted with tawny mud produced a shotgun from behind a door. A woman shaded by a broad sunhat teetered with buckets in a hog pen, evaluating his carnage and disposition and horse.

  Jackson County east of the Kansas City limits at that time enclosed a region called the Cracker Neck that contained ramshackle farms and some erstwhile Confederate Army guerrillas who routinely sided with the James gang and provided seclusion to the outlaws following robberies. Within the region was Glendale, where two years earlier the gang had rifled a Chicago and Alton Railroad express car, and close to Glendale was Independence and a cooperage where Frank James squatted among the stave piles in back, eating a cucumber sandwich under the afternoon sun.

  Jesse rode into the ring of shade beneath a huckleberry tree and canted his hat to conceal his face from the neighborhood; his brother tucked a sandwich corner into his cheek, regained his height, and wiped his broad mustache with his palm.

  Frank was thirty-eight years old but looked a homely fifty. He was five feet ten inches tall at a time when such height was above average and weighed about one hundred fifty pounds. He had ears nearly the size of his hands and a very large, significant nose that seemed to hook and clamp his light brown mustache. His chin jutted, his jaw muscles bulged, his mouth was as straight and grim as a hatchet mark, and he’d ground down his teeth in his sleep until they all were as square as molars. He was a stern and very constrained man; he could have been a magistrate, an evangelist, a banker who farmed on weekends; rectitude and resolution influenced his face and comportment; scorn and even malevolence could be read in his green eyes.

  Frank put a black cardigan sweater over his blue cavalry shirt and a gray coat over that, his scowl on two girls who lingered their dappled white ponies in the street and on a man with his hands in his pockets fifty yards removed.

  Jesse yelled, “Me and him, we’re circuit riders is why you never seen us beforehand.”

  The man continued to gawk. Frank untethered his mount and swung up and, as the two brothers ambled onto the eastward road, the man crossed to a hardware store to report his conclusions about the hard cases he’d observed.

  Jesse said, “You stop for a meal in these burgs and you don’t have to wait but five minutes for some fool to spend an opinion about the ugly strangers in town and what their appetites are like.”

  Frank said, “I’m gonna regret those cucumbers. They’re gonna argue with me through evening.”

  Jesse glanced at his brother with concern. “What you need to do is tap some alum onto a dime, cook it with a matchstick, and lick it clean before you partake of your meals. That’s the remedy for dyspepsia. You’ll be cured inside of four days.”

  “You and your cures.” Frank crossed in front of his brother, jamming his horse, and they turned left on a twin-rutted road and a median strip of grease-smeared, axle-flogged weeds. A great many animals had ganged on the road for a half-mile, then shambled into cannon-high straw grass that meandered into green bluffs. The James brothers pursued eccentric routes in that general direction, Jesse weaving right or left in his boredom, bending extravagantly from his saddle as he steered, shouting questions and assessments across the open to Frank. They meshed inside the woods, Frank ducking under an overhead bough that whapped dust from his coat shoulder, Jesse yanking his horse right and into a coulee where it noisily thrashed fallen leaves.

  Ahead was brown shale and green ferns and humus where the sun was forbidden, and then two naked trees connected by twenty feet of hemp rope, to which had been reined a considerable number of horses. Here thirteen men squatted with coffee and idled or cradled shotguns: croppers and clerks and hired hands, aged in their late teens and twenties, wearing patched coveralls and wrinkled wool trousers and foul-looking suit coats that exposed their wrists, or overcoats the color of nickel, of soot, that assorted weeds had attached themselves to. They were hooligans, mainly, boys with vulgar features and sullen eyes and barn-red faces capped white above the eyebrows. They were malnourished and uneducated; their mouths were wrecks of rotting teeth. Consumption was a familiar disease, they carried infirmities like handkerchiefs; several were missing fingers, one was sick with parasites, another two had lice, eyes were crossed or clouded, harelip went undoctored.

  Robert Woodson Hite and his simple younger brother, Clarence, were cousins from Adairville, Kentucky; Dick Liddil, Jim Cummins, Ed Miller, and Charley Ford had been in the James gang on previous occasions, the rest had been recruited to check the horses and divide the posses and parade with Henry rifles outside the passenger cars, firing on the recalcitrant and defiant. They bunched around the James brothers when they arrived that afternoon, several exhorting and goading Frank and Jesse in an exercise of kinship or special influence, the others wary and timid, slinking over or sniggering or investigating whatever was under their eyes.

  The Jameses descended from their saddles and a lackey pulled the horses to wild feed and Jesse hunkered with coffee brewed from his own fine-ground beans and chatted with Ed Miller and Wood Hite as some gangling boys eavesdropped. Jesse inquired if the Chicago and Alton managers had stationed guards in the depot or mail cars. He inquired about the nearest telegraph machine. He inquired about the time of sundown.

  Meanwhile Frank quit the main group to reconnoiter the woods and the railroad and the meager farm and inhospitable cabin belonging to a man named Snead. He stood in green darkness and weeds, smoking a cigarette he’d made, perusing the sickle curve in the rails and a grade that was hard work for a locomotive. The southern cliff on which he tarried rose about thirty feet above the cinder roadbed, the northern ridge had been a lower elevation on a hill the railroad had excavated and was about ten feet above t
he cut. Three miles east was Glendale station. Mosquitoes and gnats hived in the air and inspected his ears but he did not slap at them because he was using his hearing to position some fool crashing through weed tangles and creepers to the left and rear of him. The noise stopped and Frank opened his gray coat to slide his right hand across to his left pistol.

  “Excuse me,” a boy shouted, “but I see I’ve sort of traipsed in and interrupted you.”

  The voice was genial, golden, unrecognizable; Frank trudged up the hill some until he perceived a young man in a gray stovepipe hat and overlarge black coat that was reduced and cinched by a low-slung holster. His thighs were clenched by green bushes. His hands were overhead, as if a gun were on him, and the cuffs had dropped deep on his forearms. He had ginger brown hair and very small ears and a sunburned face that could have prettied a girl except for lips that seemed slightly pursed and swollen. He looked to Frank like a simp and a snickerer, the sort to tantalize leashed dogs.

  Frank queried, “Which one are you?”

  “Bob Ford.”

  “Ah, Charley’s brother.”

  Bob received that as an invitation to lower his hands. His face creased with a wide smile that hung on as Frank stubbed his cigarette cold on a cottonwood trunk and returned to his inspection of the geography, disregarding Bob Ford.

  The boy hunkered next to Frank and swatted his stovepipe hat around, dividing screens of mosquitoes and gnats that blew awry and rejoined and touched lighter than breath on his neck. He said, “I was lying when I said I just happened on down here. I’ve been on the scout, looking for you. I feel lousy that I didn’t say so at the outset.”

  Frank dug in his pockets and extracted cigarette makings. He was not inclined to converse.

  Bob scratched his hat-matted hair. “Folks sometimes take me for a nincompoop on account of the shabby first impression I make, whereas I’ve always thought of myself as being just a rung down from the James brothers. And, well, I was hoping if I ran into you aside from those peckerwoods, I could show you how special I am. I honestly believe I’m destined for great things, Mr. James. I’ve got qualities that don’t come shining through right at the outset, but give me a chance and I’ll get the job done—I can guarantee you that.”