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

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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 morning, 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 the 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.

Frank slimed the cigarette he’d made and struck a match off his boot sole. You’re not so special, Mr. Ford. He inhaled tobacco smoke and let it crawl from his mouth before he blew it. You’re just like any other tyro who’s prinked himself up for an escapade; You’re hoping to be a gunslinger like those nickel books are about, but you may as well quench your mind of it. You don’t have the ingredients.

I’m sorry to hear you feel that way, said Bob, since I put such stock in your opinions. He slapped a mosquito and looked at his blood-freckled palm and stood, rehatting his short, baby-fine hair. As for me being a gunslinger, I’ve just got this one granddaddy Patterson Colt and a borrowed belt to stick it in. But I’ve also got an appetite for greater things. I hoped joining up with you would put me that much closer to getting them. And that’s the plain and simple truth of the matter.

So what do you want me to say?

You’ll let me be your sidekick tonight.

Sidekick? said Frank. He’d heard the term applied solely to matched horses in a team-span.

So you can see my grit and intelligence.

Frank examined his cigarette, sucked it once more, and flipped it onto a roadbed tie where the butt was later shredded under a railroad detective’s laced shoe. He said, I don’t know what it is about you, but the more you talk, the more you give me the willies. I don’t believe I even want you as close as earshot this evening.

I’m sorry—

"Why don’t you go?" Frank said and the boy tramped up the hill, slapping weeds aside.

THE LATE CLELL MILLER’S kid brother Ed had imposed a large iron pot in the hoop of his saddle lariat, and he and Dick Liddil scrounged for wild onions and scarecrowed vegetables as Jesse gardened his rant into a second hour. He cut and rooted and cultivated until he’d worked on Shelby in the Civil War and the might of iron submarines and Mrs. Mary Todd Lincoln’s hysterics. Often he was facetious, but no one adventured a smile until Jesse did. His audience varied according to jobs they were expected to perform—steeds needed tending, roads needed watching, rookies were bossed into cooking chores—and each vacated seat was bullied over as Jesse continued what he liked to call wabash.

His cousin Robert Woodson Hite remained on his left, sulking and mooning the afternoon through over some imagined slight. Next to Wood was his nineteen-year-old brother, Clarence, who was stooped and consumptive and slack-jawed, and as void of calculation as a sponge. Persevering too was Charley Ford, who snorkled mucus and spit it, who chuckled and hee-hawed soon after the others did, continuing on with his bray seconds after the others had ceased, and who covered his left boot with a corrupted coat in order to conceal a clubfoot that practiced walking had made practically imperceptible. He had abetted the ransacking of the express car on the Chicago, Rock Island, and Pacific Railway, which the James gang had boarded on July 15th, and gave accommodations to the outlaws afterward at his sister’s place near Richmond. So he was in good favor. His brother William had married the sister of Jim Cummins, which was how Charley was initially noticed, and he hunted pigeons and turtledoves with Ed Miller, who had recruited him into the James gang by introducing him to Jesse on a gambling night in 1879—he had impressed Jesse as a savvy, sporting man then; just how Charley never could fathom.

Charles Wilson Ford was a rail-thin, rough, and likeably ignorant country boy who apologized for his failings before they could be found out: there was something of a good-natured dog about him, something hungry and grateful and vulnerable that made up for his general vulgarity. His lackluster brown eyes were sunk in his skull and his right eye was slanted enough to look akilter and borrowed and slapdash. Mismatched also were his ears (the right appeared to have taken wing), and his teeth (his overbite made it seem as if he were incessantly sucking his lower lip). He had heavy black eyebrows and a black mustache no coarser than body hair, that never seemed more than a random smear of newsprint under his nose. His complexion was pestered with acne, his fingers often looked shoe-grimed, he spoke with a paltry lisp that somehow made him seem younger than twenty-four.

Jesse was on the subject of the first electric power plant, which Thomas A. Edison was constructing on Pearl Street in New York City. He explained, incorrectly, how the incandescent lamp worked, and Charley stabbed at the dirt with a stick or pinched scarlet eruptions on his shoulder and neck or measured the others with sidelong glances. Then a boy in a gray stovepipe hat emerged from the snaggles and claws of the woods and reached into the blue smoke of the fire and praised the miscellaneous stew and principally slouched about doing fraudulent chores in order to eavesdrop on Jesse. At last Clarence Hite relinquished his seat and the boy pushed John Bugler aside and capered over boots and legs and wormed down next to Charley Ford with the incivility and intrusion that bespoke brotherhood. The boy had been introduced to Jesse more than once but the outlaw saw no reason then to store the kid’s name, and now, as he culled a list that Frank had read aloud Monday night, he kept returning to the name Bunny. The boy nodded like a horse whenever Jesse’s words seemed to want affirmation; whenever Jesse leavened his chat with humor the younger Ford boy laughed overloudly and infectiously with whoops and idiotic rises, like a knuckle-run on a piano. His were the light-checkered blue eyes that never strayed, the ears that picked up each nuance and joke, the amen looks that suggested he understood Jesse as no one else could.

Frank returned from his reconnaissance and scowled at the loiterers even as he drank black coffee with a carefree Jim Cummins. Dick Liddil rattled a wooden kitchen tool around inside the iron pot and sang Chowtime! and the gang filed by the fire with invented spoons and bowls. The Ford boy was the last to get up, finding his legs only when Jesse stood and closing on him like a valet.

Am I too late to wish you Happy Birthday?

Jesse grinned. How’d you know?

Bob Ford ticked his head. You’d be surprised at what I’ve got stored away. I’m an authority on the James boys.

Jesse asked, Your name isn’t Bunny Ford, is it?

The boy was so avid to second whatever Jesse said that he nearly admitted it was, but checked himself and corrected, Why no. It’s Robert Ford.

Of course it is.

Bob.

Jesse simpered a little and walked to the fire; Bob sidled and hopped to keep in stride with him. Jesse said, I don’t recollect: you’ve never been with the gang before, have you?

Oh no sirree. I’m a virgin. Bob thumbed back his stovepipe hat and grinned just as Jesse might. At least in that one respect, if you get my meaning.

Yes?

I’ve been fretting and fidgeting like I had ants down my pants the entire afternoon. Your brother and I had a real nice visit over toward the railroad, chatting about this and that, enjoying each other’s company, but otherwise I’ve been organizing my mind and working at calming my innards.

Cook alum, Jesse said, and took a heaped bowl and spoon from a man in a gunnysack apron. Jesse lowered onto a stump in his vast gray coat and Bob sat on the earth at his feet with his holster removed and his own coat opened for rather overdue ventilation. Jesse chewed and wiped his mouth on his hand. Do you know what this stew needs?

Dumplings?

Noodles. You eat yourself some noodle stew and your clock will tick all night. You ever see that woman over in Fayette could suck noodles up her nose?

Don’t believe I have, said Bob.

You’ve got canals in your head you never dreamed of.

Bob was scraping his stew out of a blue envelope. Juice broke from a corner and spoiled his trouser fly in a manner that suggested incontinence. He would not notice this until later. He flapped the envelope into the fire and licked his spoon with a hound’s care before submerging it in his pocket. He said, Your brother Frank and I had just a real nice visit this afternoon. Must’ve been a hundred subjects entertained, having to do with the Chicago and Alton Railroad and the U.S. Express Company and assignments on board the cars.

Jesse had closed his eyes but kept the spoon in his mouth. He exercised a crick in his neck.

Bob went on. "Well, the upshot of our visit together was we sort of mutually agreed that the best thing for all parties concerned would be if I could use my huge abilities as your helper and, you know, apprentice. So we could be confederates together and come out of this unscathed. That was the upshot."

Well, Buck does the figuring. Jesse looked at his bowl of stew. Do you want the rest of this?

I’m sorta off my feed.

Hate to waste it.

My innards are riled as it is.

Jesse arose and dumped his leftovers into the iron pot and gave over his bowl and spoon to a boy for washing. He said to Bob, If you order a beefsteak in a restaurant and they don’t broil it long enough? Don’t ever send it back, because if you do the cook spits all over your food; tinctures it something putrid.

Bob was dumbfounded. He said, I don’t like to harp on a subject but—

I don’t care who comes with me, Jesse said. Never have. I’m what they call gregarious.

Bob smiled in his never-quit way. Frank was drinking coffee and scowling again as he walked over from the far side of the fire. Jesse raised his voice. I hear tell you and young Stovepipe here had a real nice visit.

Frank looked askance at Robert Ford and flung on the ground the remains of his coffee. He dried the tin cup with his elbow. Your boys have about an acre of rock to haul, Dingus. You’d better goose them down yonder.

THEY SKIDDED a rain-surrendered cottonwood tree down the bank and horsed it over the polished steel rails, ripping bark away from the bone-colored wood. They carried limestone and sandstone and earth-sprinkling rocks that were the sizes of infants and milk cans and sleeping cats, and these they hilled and forted about the tree as shovels sang and picks splintered and inveigling footpaths caved in along the vertical Blue Cut excavations. Jesse supervised the rock-piling, recommending land to be mined for stone, dedicating his men to various jobs once the locomotive was shut down, chewing a green cigar black. Shadows grew into giants and died as the sun burned orange and sank. Mosquitoes flitted from hand to cheek until a night wind channeled east on the tracks and carried the insects away, even tore the ash of cigarettes and battened light coats over backs on the higher exposures. Clouds bricked overhead and were brindled pink, then crimson and violet; leaves sailed like paper darts and the air carried the tang of cattle and hogs and chimney smoke.

Frank was a solemn sentinel on the southern ridge, big as a park bronze of the honored dead, two inches taller than most of his men and majestic with confidence and dignity and legend. Bob Ford heaved rock and yanked the horses to creek water and stirred the camp fire out, and each time he passed Frank James he said Hello or How do you do? until Dick Liddil indicated that robbers crossed paths with each other many times in the course of an evening to-do and Frank considered it silly to even once exchange pleasantries.

Jesse, on the other hand, was the soul of friendliness and commerce, acknowledging each of Bob’s remarks, letting the boy ingratiate himself, rewarding him with trivial tasks that Bob executed with zeal. Then he asked Bob to strike a match as he read the dial of a pocket watch in a gold hunting case, stolen from a judge near Mammoth Cave. The clock instructed him and he retreated into the dark and after some minutes returned with a kerosene lantern and with a burlap grain sack over his arm like a waiter’s towel. You can stick with me but don’t heel. I don’t want to bust into you every time I have the notion to change direction.

Bob muttered, I’m not a moron, for Heaven’s sake, but his irritation was quiet and his head down—one might have thought his boots had ears.

Jesse wasn’t listening anyway. He scrubbed his teeth with his linen shirt collar and bulged his lips and cheeks with his cleansing tongue. He curtained his coat halves over his unmatched, pearl-handled pistols (a .44 caliber Smith and Wesson and a Colt .45 in crossed holsters), but he kept his gray suit jacket buttoned at the lapels in accordance with fashion. He told the boy, They’re supposed to have a hundred thousand dollars in that express car; at least that’s what the gossip is.

Bob smiled, but there was something incorrect and tortured about it. He said, My fingers are already starting to itch.

Jesse squatted and struck a match and turned up the flame on the lantern, then wadded a red flannel sleeve around the glass chimney under the curled wire protectors. The yellow light rubied.

That’s ideal, Frank called. He was on the south ridge above Jesse and the railroad tracks, up where the grade increased and horseshoed to the right, about twenty yards east of the rock accumulation on the rails. Dick Liddil, Wood Hite, Jim Cummins, Ed Miller, and Charley Ford were near Frank, murmuring and smoking and sitting or squatting with rifles erect on their thighs, their fingers inside the trigger housings. The Cracker Neck boys, the sickly sharecroppers and have-nots, had congregated with Jesse and been instructed to range along Blue Cut’s northern ridge, which they did in a lackadaisical fashion: they rambled far down the tracks, grew lonesome, rejoined, huddled, bummed cigarettes, strewed out again and perilously crossed paths with each other in the night of the woods. Frank commented, They’re going to trip and shoot each other into females.

Dick Liddil said, I bet I can find them husbands if they do, and that jollied even Frank.

Jesse held the lantern over his pocket watch. Both hands were near the IX. He said, About two years ago we robbed the same railroad, only it was right in Glendale we boarded her.

I know that, said Bob, a little peeved and superior. "You may not realize it yet but I’m a storehouse of information about the James gang. I mean, I’ve followed your careers." Bob had snipped two eyeholes from a white handkerchief and this he stuffed under his stovepipe hat so that it concealed all but his mouth and chin. However, he had cut one hole slightly low and inside of where it should have been, resulting in a mask that gave the impression he was cock-eyed and pitiable, which was not at all what he had in mind.

Jesse looked at him curiously but recommended no alterations. His concerns were apparently historical. "Do you know what happened five years ago to the day? To the day? What happened on September seventh in eighteen seventy-six?"

You made an attempt on a Northfield, Minnesota, bank. Bob rummaged in his memory and asked, Was it owned by General Ben Butler? The Scourge of New Orleans?

That’s right, said Jesse.

Knew it.

Jesse said, Bill Chadwell, Clell Miller, Charlie Pitts—they were killed outright. The Youngers have been in prison ever since. It’s painful to recall.

Bob added unnecessarily, And you never got a plug nickel from that bank.

Jesse failed to register a facial reaction; he merely replied, So you can see how this date would have an aroma for me.

Then Jesse seemed to pick up a sound as a receptive animal might, twisting sharply to the east, specifying and assessing and then grasping his lantern to walk off the cliff, hopping down ten feet in three plunging, dirt-sloshing steps. He stamped his boots (a pain shooting up his injured ankle) and shook out his trouser cuffs, then knelt to hear locomotive noise translate through the rails. The steel was warm and burnished with wear and smooth as a spoon to his ear. The hum was like insects in a jar. He called to his older brother, She’s right on schedule, Buck.

Frank was smoking another cigarette and beguiling Dick Liddil and Charley Ford with long passages from The Life of King Henry the Fifth, ending with, ‘But if it be a sin to covet honor, I am the most offending soul alive.’

Dick Liddil asked, How much of that you got memorized?

Over a thousand lines.

You’re a man of learning.

Yes, I am. Frank rubbed his cigarette out against the rough bark of a tree. You’d better go down to Jesse.

Jesse raised his blue bandana over his nose as soon as he could make out the boiler cadence, and he placed his right boot on the rail as Dick Liddil slid down the southern cliff, ouching and cussing and clutching weed brakes. Dick then tied a red bandana over his nose and ambled over, shaking dust from a beige shirt and from brown pants that were so long for his legs and were so creased with constant use that they looked like concertinas.

The locomotive’s chuffing was growing loud. Jesse’s right foot tickled with rail vibrations. He looked around and saw Liddil to his right with his Navy Colt hung in his hand, the Hites and Ed Miller to the east, preparing to strongarm the passengers, many other boys ranged along the cut with Henry rifles slung over their wrists, Bob Ford on the cliff behind him, looking like a gunfighter.

Jesse could hear the locomotive decelerate on the grade, hear the creaks and complaints as the carriages