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

by Ron Hansen

  They were going eleven miles north to Winston. A good many yards beyond that was a stone trestle that bridged Little Dog Creek and there Dick Liddil, Charley Ford, and Wood’s brother, Clarence Hite, were tying seven horses in a copse of trees. They then trudged back along the roadbed with Dick assigning jobs to his more agitated partners. They could hear crickets and frogs in the weeds and as they gained the Winston depot they could hear singing in the Presbyterian church.

  Already on the depot platform were Mr. A. McMillan, a masonry contractor, and a crew of four that included his two sons. They were going home to Iowa that Friday night and were joshing and goosing each other; the James gang avoided giving the crew their faces when they achieved the platform, and the three were straggled along it when the locomotive’s headlight yellowed their skin. McMillan and the four got on, but the brooding gang lingered. Conductor Westfall slanted out from the smoking car, his left arm hooked in the grab rail, and hollered, “All aboard!”

  Dick Liddil called out that they were only waiting for somebody, and when the conductor swung back inside they plunged through engine boiler steam to jump up onto the front and rear porches of the U.S. Express Company car, just behind the coal tender.

  Conductor Westfall moved down the smoking car, gripping seats to steady himself when the rolling stock jerked forward, spraddling his legs out like a man on a horse when he stopped to punch a spade design into a passenger’s ticket. He didn’t see the guns in Frank’s hands, didn’t see Ed Miller’s glare.

  They’d gone only forty yards and Westfall was checking a sleeping man’s ticket when Frank pushed a blue mask over his nose and pulled himself up, yelling, “Stay in your seats! Don’t move!” And when a man laughed at the joke of that James boys act, Frank fired his guns every whichway, into the floor, the gas lamps, the ceiling, making ears ring and making the forty passengers sink down beneath their crossed arms. Westfall straightened at the gun noise and edged just enough into it that he caught a shot between two ribs. His right hand went to the injury and he groaned and then staggered out of the smoking car as Ed Miller and Wood Hite joined in the gunfire; but Jesse James gave Westfall only the chance to get out the car door before his unaccidental gunshot killed the man and Westfall teetered off his legs, banging down the iron stairs and sliding off the train onto the roadbed.

  Frank McMillan and John Penn were standing outside the smoking car in the July night when the gun noise began. They crouched down and a lead ball crashed through an overhead window, spiderwebbing the glass, and John Penn jacked himself up to peek inside and drop down again. McMillan asked, “Who is it?” and Penn said, “I can’t tell,” and Frank McMillan was craning his neck to look inside for himself when a lead ball punched into his forehead above his right eye, stopping his life instantly. His body collapsed just as the air brakes screeched and McMillan too slipped off the slackening train.

  Jesse, Wood Hite, and Ed Miller were by then running forward through gunsmoke to get into the express company car, and Dick Liddil and Clarence Hite were scuttling over a coal pile to the locomotive in order to guarantee that it wouldn’t go further than their horses. But a crewman had switched on the automatic air brakes, which meant Dick had to command the engineer to bring the train gradually along until it was over Little Dog Creek.

  Charley Ford was standing by the baggage agent’s passageway with a disguise on, a gun cocked near his ear, but he gave way to Jesse, who rammed against the wooden door as if his bones were made out of timber, slamming the door into a packing case. He slapped aside the agent, Frank Stamper, and then rammed against an interior door as Charles Murray, the express messenger, was jarring an outside door shut. Ed Miller pushed Stamper into a wall and pressed a revolver into the agent’s cheek, saying, “You get out of here!” Stamper stepped outside and looked at the long gray beard hooked over Charley Ford’s ears, and Frank James, who was by then walking along on the ground, gripped the baggage agent by the leg and jerked him into a pratfall. “Keep your seat,” Frank said.

  Jesse scared Murray into yielding the key to the express company safe by saying one man was already killed so they had nothing to lose by killing him too. The only light in the express section was a coal-oil lantern that was hanging from a finger hook and though Jesse was thorough in gathering over three thousand dollars into a grain sack, he missed a good deal more in gold bullion and grieved about it for a week.

  He then said to Murray, “Get down on your knees.”

  The messenger glowered. “Why?”

  “You oughta pray; I’m going to kill you.”

  “Hey?” Miller called.

  “Get down!” Jesse said.

  Murray withdrew a little and replied, “You’ll have to make me.”

  “All right,” Jesse said, and surprised him by socking his pistol into the man’s skull so that Murray dropped like emptied clothes. Jesse looked abjectly at the man he’d so easily rendered unconscious and then he cocked his pistol to put it against Murray’s head.

  Ed Miller cried, “Don’t shoot him!”

  And Jesse grinned and uncocked his pistol and then picked up the grain sack. He said, “Don’t you tell me what I can and can’t do,” and then jumped down from the express car.

  And then the robbery was over. The James gang sprang down to the ground and down through the weeds and ran into the night, cutting their reins instead of untying them and then riding south through the woods.

  CHICAGO NEWSPAPER PUBLISHERS—who were still smarting over the loss of immigrants to St. Louis and Kansas City—made a great deal of the Winston train robbery, alleging that “in no State but Missouri would the James brothers be tolerated for twelve years.” Missouri was being called “The Robber State” and “The Outlaw’s Paradise,” and yet the governor had the authority to offer only three hundred dollars for capturing the outlaw. Governor Crittenden would later write: “Concluding that the James gang pursued its lawless course for the money in it, oftentimes acquiring large sums, I determined to offer a reward of $50,000; so much for each capture and conviction, which in my opinion would be a temptation to some one or more of the gang to ‘peach’ or divulge on their associates in crime. As money was their object in the first place in their lawless pursuit, I believed an offer of a large sum as a reward would eventually reach those who had become tired of the life, and more tired of being led on in blood and crime by a desperate leader.”

  He arranged a meeting with the general managers of the railroads and express companies operating in Missouri and persuaded them to contribute to a common fund from which the governor could offer rewards of five thousand dollars for the arrest and conviction of each person participating in the robberies at Glendale and Winston, with a further five thousand going to anyone who could bring in Frank or Jesse James.

  Jesse organized the September 7th robbery of the Chicago and Alton Railroad at Blue Cut to “spit in the governor’s eye,” and again the James gang got away with it, and Jesse brought Frank and Clarence Hite and two Ray County boys named Ford to the bungalow in Kansas City. And it seemed to Zee it could go on and on like that, with Jesse going off for days and weeks and then coming back with the jolly good cheer of a man given money and youth. It upset her but she didn’t complain; instead she looked for messages in the green tea leaves and made herself giggle when that seemed the right thing and then she stayed with her knitting like an indulgent mother until Jesse limped into the room and whispered, “You go to sleep.”

  Then she was awake again and the tattercrossed quilt was under her chin and the grandfather clock had chimed three. She closed a robe around herself and huddled a little at the bedroom door and saw Jesse in a ladder chair next to the side window. He sucked on a lump of chewing tobacco and seemed to contemplate the moon. Raindrops tracked reeds on the misted glass and wind disarranged the trees. His night thoughts seemed to walk the room. His eyes were on the street. A cocked revolver was across his knee but he lent it no more notice than a smoker would a cigarette.

  Zee
watched Jesse sit there for several minutes and didn’t say a word, and then she felt someone watching her and saw in a corner of the room the boy who called himself Bob Ford. He looked at her spitefully, and then he receded into darkness and she heard the screen door latch shut.

  Part Two

  NIGHTHAWKS

  3

  SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1881

  They were not the ordinary rough-shod highwaymen typical in the Western country, but were more of the nature of modern Robin Hoods, who robbed the rich and gave to the poor; who took human life only when they deemed it necessary for the protection of their own and their liberty; who were addicted to none of the ordinary vices of the bad men; who used liquor, tobacco or bad language sparingly, and who, in many particulars and traits, would have been model men had their vocations been honest and their lives unmarred by bloodshed and robbery.

  EDGAR JAMES

  The Lives and Adventures, Daring Hold-ups, Train and Bank Robberies of the World’s Most Desperate Bandits and Highwaymen—The Notorious James Brothers

  ANNIE RALSTON JAMES INVENTED an alibi for Frank by visiting Sonora, California, with their three-year-old son, Rob (who was being dressed as a girl then, and was being called Mary), and by writing letters to her parents that depicted the sights she and Frank were viewing out West. But following the Blue Cut robbery, she journeyed back to Kansas City and signed the registration book in the St. James Hotel, and on September 14th she and their “daughter” were in a phaeton carriage as Frank said goodbye to Zee in the kitchen of the bungalow. Jesse sat in a backyard rocking chair, ignoring their flight to the East, but Zee was getting mailing addresses in Chattanooga and Baltimore and young Ford was giving the glum man whatever intelligence about the coastal cities he could recall from his reading. He said Salem, North Carolina, was overrun with diphtheria owing to the sewers not being up to snuff. And Raleigh was a dead town with no sizable manufacturing establishment in it. And he’d heard tell that Richmond, Virginia, was all yellow-flagged because of an epidemic of small-pox. Frank simply circled his hat in his lump-knuckled hands and said, “I guess I’ll know who to come to the next time I plan a trip.”

  Bob poured another cup of coffee and in a pout replied, “I was only trying to be helpful.”

  Zee went outside to hug Annie and to grasp Rob to her bosom and then Frank received her kiss like medicine, glaring once to the backyard to see that his younger brother was angrily looking away. He said, “I’d better get to the depot,” and soon after that the Frank James family was gone.

  Bob peered out from the kitchen window to see the phaeton pull away, then dropped his coffee cup in dishwater and moseyed toward the clothesline pole where Jesse was sitting in a rocker that was submerged to its seat in straw grass and weeds. Bob thought he could say something about getting a goat to chew the yard down a little, but before he could get the sentence together, Jesse said, “My brother and me, we’re not on speaking terms these days. I can remember years at a time when we were scarcely civil to each other. I’ll get lonely though and invite him back and old Buck’ll be in the neighborhood before the week is out. You might say we’ve got an arrangement.” He glanced up at Bob and rubbed about in his chair. “That’s why I didn’t say goodbye.”

  “I wasn’t going to mention it.”

  Jesse reached under the rocker and into a tin cake closet from which he hauled up two writhing garden snakes. “You scared?” he asked.

  “Just surprised a little.”

  The snakes flicked their forked tongues out and the heads roamed the air from side to side as if searching for relatives in a crowd. Jesse said, “These aren’t as succulent as I like and they’re the devil to clean but if a man skins and fries them in garlic and oil—mercy, it’s good eating.”

  “I’ve never been that hungry.”

  Jesse allowed the snakes to crawl his sleeves and nose his vest and slide down to the bunched wool of his trousers. He unfolded a four-inch knife and lifted the head of the browner snake on the blade, but it glided onto his thigh. “Must have at least twelve of these critters in the yard. Sometimes of an evening I’ll sneak out here barefoot and listen to them slither over to where they don’t think I can catch them. Then I snag them with my toes just to prove there’s no getting away from Jesse.” He crooked a snake head around with his knife and read its cruel face before it ducked under the steel and veered to his elbow. “I give them names.”

  “Such as?”

  “Such as enemies. I give them the names of enemies.” He then carefully laid the snakes on the wooden arm of the rocking chair and sawed off their heads with his knife. The bodies curled and thrashed over his wrist. He flicked their heads into the straw grass. “Go tell Clarence and Charley to get their gatherings together.”

  “Me too?” Bob asked.

  Jesse glanced at him sharply but then changed and said, “You can stay.”

  The suggestion to leave struck Clarence Hite hard and he bickered with Bob about it when Bob nudged him from his nap. “I’m his cousin!” he said. “My momma was his daddy’s—?”

  “Sister,” said Bob.

  “That’s right! So how come it’s me has to rattle his hocks outta town?”

  Charley sacked turnips and acorn squash he’d grubbed from the vegetable garden. “If I know Jess, what it is is there’s some real nasty sad-Suzie work that’s got to be done around here and Bob’s the ninny that has to do it.”

  “I’m willing,” said Bob. “Don’t know why exactly. I guess that’s the noble and benevolent sort of person I am.”

  Clarence commenced coughing until he’d expelled something into a handkerchief. He peeked at it and then wiped his mouth.

  Bob said, “He probably would’ve picked Clarence except he was a little jumpy about finding goobers in his soup.”

  “Well,” said Clarence, putting the foul handkerchief in his pocket. “He certainly didn’t want you around for your charity toward others.” He climbed into his horse’s doghouse stirrups and rode out of the barn as Charley chaperoned his mare from her stall.

  Jesse was at the compost crib, drooling the snake bodies onto the corn shucks and vines. He called, “Clarence? You tell your daddy I’ll be in Kentucky in October and maybe we can hunt some birds together.”

  Clarence complained, “But how come it’s Bob who gets to stay?”

  “Bob’s going to move my gear to a house down the street.”

  Charley winked at his kid brother. “See?”

  “I don’t mind,” said Bob, though of course he did. “Sounds like an adventure.” He tore up a foxtail weed and stripped it between his teeth.

  Charley jumped onto his mare and said, “If you ever need me to swing the wide loop or, you know, make smoke someplace again, a body can usually find me at my sister’s—Mrs. Martha Bolton?—over to the Harbison homestead.”

  Jesse tipped his head and smiled. “I’ll keep it in mind.”

  Clarence said, “You know where I’ll be.”

  Jesse limped over to the bungalow, saying, “It’s been pleasant,” and at the porch door gave Bob an exacting look that implied he was already beginning to suspect his own judgment. “You’ve got some packing to do, kid,” said Jesse, and Bob traipsed after him.

  THEY MOVED to 1017 Troost Avenue at night so that the neighborhood couldn’t get a good look at them or their belongings, with Bob carrying single-handedly most of what Jesse called gear. And then he thought Jesse would give him eight hours’ sleep and a daydreaming goodbye; but Jesse forgot to say anything about it that night or the next morning and with a second day in the J. T. Jackson house, Bob thought he might never go but might be brought in as a good-natured cousin to the boy and a gentleman helper to Zee. Bob followed Jesse wherever he went, hawked him in his city rounds, watched him from a barn stall. He curried the horse next to the horse Jesse curried. He smoked a cigar that matched the cigar Jesse smoked. They rocked in chairs on the front porch and made trips to the Topeka Exchange saloon, where Jesse could spe
nd nearly sixty minutes sipping one glass of beer and still complain about feeling tipsy. Bob would rarely vouchsafe his opinions as they talked. If spoken to, he would fidget and grin; if Jesse palavered with another person, Bob secretaried their dialogue, getting each inflection, reading every gesture and tick, as if he wanted to compose a biography of the outlaw, or as if he were preparing an impersonation. One night Jesse and Bob and the boy, Tim, walked down a towpath with bamboo poles and dropped shot-weighted lines into the Missouri in order to snag some catfish. Jesse walked down from the cliff and waded the shallows with tobacco in his cheek and his trousers rolled, cold bottom mud surging between his toes and clouding brown over his white calves. Bob nannied Tim on the steep, damp bank, snatching insects with his shrewd left hand, his swift right. Tim asked the name of the yellow country across the green churn of the river and Bob told him Kansas. Tim pointed northwest. Nebraska. And then Bob crouched so close to the boy his ear might have been a fragrant flower. “Here’s what we’ll do: rifle your arm out like so, keep that finger unbent, and let me turn you clockwise. There’s Iowa above us. Still Iowa. Still Iowa. Illinois. You ever heard of Chicago?”

  “Yes.”

  “Chicago’s in Illinois somewheres.”

  “I mean: no, I haven’t.”

  “You haven’t heard of Chicago?”

  Tim shrugged.