5

MARCH–APRIL 1882

The pitcher goes often to the fountain, but it is broken at last. The longest lane comes to an abrupt and unexpected turning. The wild career of the James Brothers had gone on unchecked so long, that there is no wonder that many regarded them as invincible if not invulnerable. They seemed to bear a charmed life. And though they were scarred and wounded, and bullet-laden, they lived on defiantly as if they dared fate to the uttermost. But fortune is a fickle jade. She turns her mystic wheel with a capricious hand. She smiles to-day with little cause for smiling and the next day frowns without any cause at all. The fabled Nemesis waits long and patiently by the wayside, but at last vengeance wakes, and doom comes swift as lightning and awful as death.

ANONYMOUS

Lives, Adventures and Exploits of Frank and Jesse James

ACCORDING TO LATER COURTROOM confessions, Charley Ford stayed with Jesse James from December 6th to April 3rd, either in St. Joseph or on the road in Missouri, Kansas, and Nebraska, assessing farmland and small-town banks. The Boder Brothers’ Bank in Troy, Kansas, was considered but when Jesse asked that a hundred-dollar bill be broken down into smaller denominations, as was his custom in bank robberies, Louis Boder got an inkling that something was amiss and lied that their currencies were already locked in the vault for the night. And Charley later recalled that Jesse “liked the way the bank in Forrest City was situated, and said he wanted to take that bank, but I told him I did not want to go into that, as I was sick then.” Robberies were conceived, but never carried out, in Humboldt, Nebraska, Maryville and Oregon, Missouri, Sebitha and Hiawatha, Kansas. And of course Jesse would later contemplate an April 4th assault on the Wells Banking Company in Platte City, but that too would never come to pass.

It was February when Jesse lumbered through snow that was high as hip waders in order to inspect a corn crib and silo near Pawnee City. Charley sat on a mare and smoked a cigarette. The Nebraska cold cut his feet off at the ankles and the wind on his cheek was like thistles, but Jesse was ecstatic. He sat down in the chair of a snowbank and shouted, “I could purchase maybe a dozen long yearlings and breed the heifers at twenty months or fatten them until they’re all twos and threes. I could put the calves to grass as soon as they learnt to chew it. You can wean them on skimmed milk. I’d feed the young ones shelled corn and oats, and I’d give hay to the dry cows; no grain. I’d sorta like to try beets and parsnips in cold weather. Your German scientists swear by it.”

Charley let his mare garden the brown weeds that stemmed above the snowcrust. “Somehow I never seen you as the proud owner of a cattle lot. This is going to take some adjusting on my part.”

Jesse scooped up snow and ate it and swatted his mittens as he arose, rejoicing over his prospects. But when they visited another property the next afternoon, Jesse was so wary he wore three revolvers under his Confederate officer’s long wool coat and knotted a blue scarf over his nose and mouth in order to remain incognito. Charley made conversation with the owner as they walked from room to room and saw the grange and barn and stables, but the man seemed either too inquisitive or too comprehending and Jesse trudged to his horse through the snow, leaving Charley to say goodbye and make apologies.

However, by March 2nd agriculture was on his mind and Jesse wrote, in his gnarled and negligent scrawl, this letter of inquiry to J. D. Calhoun of Lincoln, Nebraska:

Dear Sir:

I have noticed that you have 160 acres for sale in Franklin County, Neb. Please write me at once and let me know the lowest cash price that will buy your land. Give me a full description of the land, etc.

I want to purchase a farm of that size, provided I can find one to suit. I will not buy a farm unless the soil is No. 1.

I will start a trip in about 8 days to northern Kan & south Nebrask, and if the description of your land suits me I will buy it. From the advertisement in the Lincol Journal I suppose your land can be made a good farm for stock and grain.

Please answer at once.

Respectful

Tho Howard.

Then the spell apparently wore off because Calhoun received no acknowledgment of his reply.

Charley and Jesse visited Kansas City once at about this time and there Jesse called on Mattie Collins as Charley supported his weight on a pool cue in a smoky Twelfth Street saloon.

Much later, Mattie admitted to a “great fondness” for Jesse and said they “were in constant communication,” which prompted many rumors about a love affair between them, but it is just as likely Jesse visited her in hope of private intelligence rewarding Mattie with presents for whatever she volunteered. Years afterward, when it no longer mattered, Mattie would claim she couldn’t love another man, that she was married body and soul to Dick Liddil, and she’d further claim that she’d never told even one of Dick’s secrets, so it could be Jesse never received what he really wanted, which may have accounted for his tart gloominess and the sting of his words when he collected Charley at the saloon that night.

He was increasingly irritable and suspicious, and a cantankerous mood could fly over him as quickly as the shadow of a bird. But Jesse was neither close-mouthed nor sulky for long, and over the weeks that he and Charley were on the road, he unscrolled yarns and anecdotes that excited interest in Charley only insofar as they permitted him a corresponding reminiscence.

Jesse revealed that for two months one summer, using the alias of John Franklin, he conducted a singing school for the Unity Baptist Church in Calloway County. He said he once intended to steal a Lutheran minister’s cigar box of coins but learned the German’s salary was a mere two hundred dollars per year and Jesse returned the box, avowing, “I’m not as bad as some people think.”

He chronicled a visit to a chum named Scott Moore at the Las Vegas hot springs in the New Mexico Territory. Moore and his wife, Minnie, ran the Old Adobe Hotel there and served gigantic eight-course Sunday dinners that could beguile the gold right out of your teeth. It was there, in July 1879, that Jesse was introduced to none other than Billy the Kid. Billy was slack-jawed and broad in the sitdown and the corners of his mouth collected white saliva when he talked, but he was otherwise an agreeable, generous boy who gloried in the coincidence that the two scariest men in America both wore left-handed guns. They buried him in leg-irons, Jesse said. His English was lazy, his Spanish exact, and Billy’s last words had been “Quién es?”—Who is it? “He was more sinned against man sinning,” said Jesse.

“Like you,” said Charley Ford.

He told Charley about the uncle for whom he was named, and how Jesse Cole had become overwrought by various illnesses and had therefore resolved to permanently end them. His uncle had walked out to a summer lawn, removed his coat and vest and rested a silver watch on them, and then grandiosely lay down, unbuttoned his shirt, and shot himself in the heart.

Jesse swiveled a little in his saddle to see Charley plodding his mare along to the right. “You ever consider suicide?”

“Can’t say I have. There was always something else I wanted to do. Or my predicaments changed or I saw hardships from a different slant; you know all what can happen. It never seemed respectable.”

“I’ll tell you one thing that’s certain: you won’t fight dying once you’ve peeked over to the other side; you’ll no more want to go back to your body than you’d want to spoon up your own puke.”

It was March then and the weather was nasty and the road was ice and muck and scrambled wagon ruts. Their saddles creaked with every movement and their two horses were morose: their nostrils were frosted and their manes were braided with icicles and if they rested the animals their coats would steam in the cold. Charley’s motor worked in the considerable silence between the two men and then he said, “Since we’re looking to robbing banks, I was wondering if I could go so far as to recommend we add another feller to the gang and sort of see if we couldn’t come out of our next job alive.”

Jesse seemed transfixed by his saddle’s left fender and stirrup, and would not raise his stare.

Charley went on, “Bob wanted to know at Christmas could he ride with us next time we took on a savings bank or a railroad.”

Jesse sneezed and then sneezed again and he scoured his nose with his yellow glove, examining the dark streak on the leather.

Charley said, “Bob isn’t much more than a boy to most appearances, but there’s about two tons of sand in him and he’ll stand with his shooter when that’s what’s called for. And he’s smart too—he’s about as intricate as they come.”

“You’re forgetting that I’ve already met the kid.”

“He surely thinks highly of you.”

“All America thinks highly of me.”

“Still. It’s not like you’ve got two million names you can snatch out of a sock whenever you need a third man. I mean, who else is there that isn’t already in jail?”

Jesse sighed and said, “You’re going to try and wear me down on this, aren’t you.”

Charley smiled. “That was my main intention,” he said, and went on to cite his brother’s constancy and his acquaintance with the Jameses, his many attainments and capabilities, his unqualified allegiance and courage, and eventually Jesse said Bob could come along as soon as they’d settled on a situation and a gratifying corporation to rob.

And with that he lost his audience. Charley looked to his left and saw that Jesse had peeled off and was maneuvering through clusters of hickories and hackberries, so that pickets of him appeared vividly against the snow, then vanished into gray air and deep brown trees where branches snapped sharply and shrieked off his coat. Charley wasn’t sure if it was Jesse he was pursuing or if he himself were not being pursued. Then he caught a fuller glimpse and nudged his horse to catch up and after some time he reached Jesse at a creek that was arrested in amber ice and partially covered by snow.

Jesse leaned in his saddle, his arms crossed on the pommel, and considered the small, three-dashed tracks that arrowed across the snow. He winked and said, “I see our supper.”

“Rabbits,” said Charley Ford.

A NOTE WAS MAILED to Bob Ford with the news that Charley and Jesse would come to Ray County within the next few weeks. Martha collected the letter at the post office and sent word of it to Commissioner Craig in Kansas City because, as a precaution against any slip-up or vendetta, Craig had moved Bob to a room over the National Bank on the corner of Fifth and Delaware streets, and had moved Dick Liddil to Sheriff Timberlake’s house in Liberty, Missouri.

Bob Ford would later be cross-examined repeatedly about Craig’s instructions to him and he never swerved in his recollection: that the commissioner enjoined him to return to Elias’s small cottage in Richmond to await the arrival of the two, that Bob was told to communicate their whereabouts to Sheriff Timberlake via William Ford, Bob’s uncle, or his brother Elias (who was a secretly sworn deputy then, on the lookout for Jim Cummins or Frank James), and furthermore if Craig did not receive word from Bob within ten days after Martha reported him gone, the government would consider the Ford brothers already slain and would move against Jesse without regard for their safety.

Craig said all that in a stoic, lawyerly, teacherly way, as if making simple calculations or performing a regular task that was then no more than routine. Bob accepted the counsel as an ignorant boy would, nodding general agreement at every phrase, veering his eyes toward a noise in the street, anticipating the conclusion to each sentence without fully appreciating the contents. Then he left Kansas City and spent two or three weeks with Elias in Richmond, where he showed uncommon industry by clerking in the grocery store.

Sheriff Timberlake prowled the store once, priced a tin of tooth-powder, and then slipped into the storeroom and made a cigarette, smoking patiently until Bob could join him.

When he could get away from the grocery buyers, Bob said, “Haven’t seen any sign of him.”

“Do you know where he’s living?”

“No.”

The sheriff sighed and gazed at a box containing Baker’s Breakfast Cocoa. “I can’t guess how he does it, but he’s always knowledgeable about what’s going on. He’ll know you’ve been with me. You ought to take that for granted. And he’ll kill you if he gets the chance.”

Bob scratched at his neck and slid his eyes away.

The sheriff asked, “You willing to risk that?”

Bob jiggled his head in agreement and then said, “Yes, I am.” He fastened his eyes on Timberlake and it was as if a shade had been drawn over the boy’s face: gone were Bob’s ingratiation and ingenuousness; all the sheriff could see was longing and misery. Bob said, “I’ve been a nobody all my life. I was the baby; I was the one people picked on, the one they made promises to that they never kept. And ever since I can recall it, Jesse James has been big as a tree. I’m prepared for this, Jim. And I’m going to accomplish it. I know I won’t get but this one opportunity and you can bet your life I’m not going to spoil it.”

Sheriff Timberlake winced from cigarette smoke and edged away. “Capture him if you can when he first comes to meet you. If you can’t do it, wait for your chance. Don’t allow yourself to be found alone with him if you can avoid it. And don’t let him get behind you.” The sheriff then ground out his cigarette and exited through the loading door.

Bob remained standing there and then kicked a cardboard box many times and fell down to his knees.

Meanwhile Jesse and Charley meandered, riding eighty miles per day for weeks at a time. On March 8th a newspaper reported that Jesse James was “shot full of holes” in a skirmish at a log cabin in Kansas. The man with him was said to be Ed Miller. Seven deputies were killed, the writer claimed, “in the enterprise of capturing the desperado.” The notice was recanted within the day, but not before one-eyed George Shepherd took exception to it. He immediately wrote a letter to the newspaper in which he jeered at every official pronouncement about the gang and every incompetent posse that went out after them, concluding, “I am of the opinion that there are hundreds of officers and detectives today hunting for the James boys and praying to God not to find them.”

A man who was retired from the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad maintained that he saw Jesse and another man in Lincoln, Nebraska, around this time, but a mill worker claimed they bought flour from him in Memphis, and there were occasional other reports of Jesse’s being sighted in Texas, Colorado, and the South; but he was actually spending the greater portion of his time in St. Joseph: Zee was pregnant once again and he sought to spare her the drudge work of keeping the cottage.

On March 17th, Jesse curried a stallion named Stonewall, braided green ribbons into its mane and tail, and rode magisterially in the St. Patrick’s Day parade with St. Joseph’s many cattlemen. He raised a broad white hat to the ladies, he cast rock candies to the children, he carried on like an army general or someone running for election, and yet no sheriff or Pinkerton operative recognized the outlaw, which may have been a disappointment to him.

It was also in March that Jesse and Charley visited Maryville and ordered steamed beer in Mike Hilgert’s saloon. A big, cruel, irascible man named Omaha Charlie—who would later be hanged with great enthusiasm from a railroad trestle for murder—moved about the saloon, noisily inviting various customers to play pool. He finally approached the newcomers, Jesse accepted the invitation, and Omaha Charlie immediately commenced insulting him for the swank of his clothes, his gentleman’s bearing, his high voice, the scrupulous method with which Jesse chalked his warped cue.

Jesse ignored the man and bent to the pool game with good humor, sinking five stripes in two turns, which caused Omaha Charlie to squinch up his eyes and call Jesse a cheat (according to plan) and tilt toward the stranger with his pool cue raised.

Eyewitnesses later recalled that the gentleman remained calm, almost pacific, but concentrated his cold blue eyes on Omaha Charlie and said with grave intention, “Stop where you are. You are threatening the wrong man.”

Omaha Charlie stalled for a minute and apprehensively reconsidered, then clapped the cue down on the pool table, slouched back to a corner chair, and occupied himself with his boot socks. Jesse James and Charley Ford merely lingered over their steamed beers, voted against inspecting the Maryville bank, and walked out.

Mike Hilgert then winked and called to the corner, “What made you so sociable all of a sudden?”

Omaha Charlie angrily removed himself from the saloon but reportedly said later, “I could see Hell in that man’s eyes.”

In Graham, Missouri, Jesse asked a blacksmith to renail a shoe, thawed his knuckles at a fire, and only then noticed that the man in the leather apron was Uriah Bond, whose son John was in grammar school with the James brothers in the late 1850s, then joined the Northern Army and was murdered by Jesse in the Civil War.

Uriah Bond snuck looks under his eyebrows at the two as he worked on the hoof with his nippers and clawhammer. Jesse walked over with a rasp so the blacksmith could smooth the nails after he’d clinched them. He said, “You know who I am, don’t you.”

Bond remained bent over and silent. He swiveled the hammer and broke a nail end off with a jerk of the claw. Then he just hunched there and a broad hand covered his eyes as he shook with rage and grief and hopeless fright.

Jesse said, “You won’t tell anyone, will you,” and Uriah Bond mentioned the afternoon visit to no one until he saw the photograph of Jesse with his eyes shut, his arms crossed at his wrists, his body roped to a cooling board and tilted so that he seemed to stand.

On a night in Kansas when the rain came down like cold coins, the two outlaws retreated into a small white hotel with a coven of rooms and rented one on the second floor. Two orange gas lamps sissed on the walls, the wide bed was tautly made, the closet and armoire were empty. But an eighteenth-century highboy in the corner contained a locked middle drawer that Jesse scratched at with a six-penny nail as Charley squirmed out of his clothes. The lock clicked open and Jesse said, “Presto chango!” and slid the drawer out. Inside were a night-black silk cravat that was striped in red, a starched white shirt that was still wrapped in blue laundry paper, and a crisp celluloid collar that was exactly his size (14½). According to an interview with Charley in the Richmond Conservator, those were the clothes that Jesse wore on the morning of April 3rd.

THEN IT WAS the third week of March. Cold spells and winds were only occasional, the pasturelands were greening, there were rucks and islands of snow only in the shade, city streets were sloppy with mud that agglutinated on buggy wheels and slowly baked in the noontime sun and then peeled off like tree bark. Jesse mentioned robberies, but only as one might mention a sparrow’s nest in the eave or an annoyance in a mail-order shoe. His wife was pretty sick until noontimes, so he merrily took over some of the cooking and cleaning work, even walked into an apothecary and ordered Lydia Pinkham’s Vegetable Compound. (Advertisements called it: “A positive cure for all those painful complaints and weaknesses so common to our best female population.”)

He made macaroons with an apron on, he invited some girls over to visit Zee and kissed their gloved hands in greeting; he seemed to have subtracted from his make-up whatever was cruel or criminal and substituted for those qualities congeniality and inertia. He accorded to everyone, he spoiled his children, he offered Charley a substantial allowance as if Charley were his profligate but much-preferred son. He seemed resigned, placid, grandfatherly; he seemed to have given up.

So it was a surprise when Jesse threw a chinchilla coat at Charley’s sleeping face and said, “Get your gatherings together. You and I are riding south.”

South, of course, meant Richmond, which they achieved on March 23rd. They looked for Bob in Elias’s unlocked house, then found him in the grocery store with a clerk’s apron on, a feather duster jutting from a rear trouser pocket, climbing onto a wooden stool to stack jars of Heinz tomato ketchup on an overhead shelf. Only two customers were in the store: a woman was examining various lengths of penny shoelaces that were draped over a jacket peg and an elderly man was sliding a flour sack along an aisle that was coated with sawdust. Bob leaned to swish the feather duster over a row of applesauce lids and Jesse startled the boy by announcing, “You’ve been chosen.”

Bob swiveled around and nearly slipped off the stool, his arm nearly flew up to cover his eyes. The color was leached from his face but he managed to squirm a smile onto it. He asked, “What do you mean?”

“Your brother said you wanted to join us. But maybe you like this grocery store more than you said you did.”

Bob looked for a clue from Charley but his brother was fixed on the store’s entrance, smoking a cigarette and coughing. Bob counterfeited bravura and arrogance, saying, “I’ll walk out of this crackerbox without so much as a fare-thee-well. This piddly work is beneath me.” He tore off the apron by way of illustration and dropped the feather duster handle-down in a water glass, and as he printed out a note to Elias that read, “Gone fishing,” he talked about what a sight for sore eyes the two of them were.

Jesse smiled. “So you missed me?”

“I’ve been crying myself to sleep every night.”

Jesse rang open the cash register and praised the morning’s receipts. He stuffed cigars in his vest pocket. He took carrots out to his horse. By then it was noon and the three horses were nipping ears and politicking about seniority and Charley was already in the saddle, murmuring about what he’d packed for his brother and how they’d stolen a horse for Bob. They ceased talking when Jesse came out, correcting the crease in his black fedora. He slipped his left boot in the stirrup and asked, “Do you see him?”

“Who?”

“A man in the cottonwoods with a spyglass. He followed us from your sister’s.”

Bob turned. He could barely see beyond the schoolyard; the cottonwoods were no more than a caterpillar of green against the light blue of the sky. “Do you think it’s the sheriff or a railroad detective?”

Jesse climbed into his saddle and hooked his horse around to the left. “Hell, you’d have to lift their tails to tell the difference.”

It was, as it happened, their brother Elias. He took the road to Kearney with them for two miles and postulated that they would stop at the Samuels farm that evening, but for reasons of his own, timidity probably being foremost, Elias forgot to report that information to Sheriff Timberlake and only communicated that the three men rode off into the west.

JOHNNY SAMUELS SANK against the stained pillows and feebly greeted the legendary stepbrother who’d come, he thought, to oversee his laggardly dying. He napped feverishly most of the day, arising only to urinate in a tin pail that Charley gripped for him. He did not recognize the Fords nor did he speak to them; he seemed non compos mentis. Reuben too was increasingly mentally ill and spent much of the late afternoon sitting with an arm on the windowsill, an apple peeler in his lap, swarmed in a moth-eaten shawl and four or five coats and mittens. Zerelda cooked with her good left hand and caressed Jesse’s cheek with the stump of her right wrist and mothered her son and cried over him and asked the ceiling how she could continue to live without him, asked if she wouldn’t have been better off never to have married at all, asked if Jesse ever once considered his poor momma when he chose the lot of a criminal. Her ravings were so crowded with recriminations and insults and petitions, with weeping and caterwauling and wild expressions of love, that it seemed bewildering to Bob and Charley that Jesse remained there for minutes, let alone hours; yet he did. She was four inches taller than Jesse, a giant of a woman, but she made him seem even smaller, made him seem stooped and spiritless. She made him kiss her on the mouth like a lover and rub her neck and temples with myrtleberry oil as he avowed his affection for her and confessed his frailties and shortcomings.

And then, at the six o’clock meal, she concentrated on the Fords, requiring opinions of them and explanations of why they wished to accompany Jesse and what they hoped to gain. To the last query Bob responded that they were afraid to stay at home what with the rewards being offered and every scoundrel in the county gunning for the James gang.

Zerelda gazed at Bob and mushed vegetables with zig-zag motions of her gums, her lips protruding like the clasp of a purse. She looked to Jesse and said, “I don’t know what it is about him, but that boy can aggravate me more by just sitting still than most boys can by pitching rocks.”

Jesse stared across the table at Bob, a teaspoon in his mouth.

The virago covered Bob’s right hand with her big-knuckled left and said, “I want you to swear to God that you’re still Jesse’s friend.”

Bob swore, “Just as I hope for mercy in the hereafter, I’d sooner die than see your son harmed in any way.”

“Read Galatians,” she said. “Chapter six. ‘Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap.’ ”

Charley and Jesse played checkers after supper while Johnny looked on with the languor and apathy of the dying. At nine Dr. Samuels pulled himself to his feet with the arms of his chair and recited, as if he’d just created it, “Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”

Zerelda said she believed she’d follow Reuben’s good advice and shoved her knitting into a sewing basket. She extinguished two coal-oil lamps, banked the fire with a charred board, and kissed Johnny on each eyelid.

Her third-born son stacked checkers in a glass and then, as Charley collected his things for a night ride, Bob saw Jesse slide into his mother’s room in order to wish her goodnight.

Bob caught a glimpse of Mrs. Samuels as Jesse pushed open the door. A black net covered her hair and the doctor eased his sore neck with a red hot-water bottle, his eyes shut so tightly his face frowned. Zerelda asked if Jesse was liverish and if that was why he was so moody, and Bob heard him answer, “I guess I’m not feeling well tonight. I’m a little low-spirited.” And then there was a silence in which Jesse’s expression or stance must have changed and he continued melodramatically, “Maybe I’ll never see you again.”

It seemed more a calculated statement than a candid one, it was as if it were meant to arouse her operatic emotions, or as if it were meant to be overheard. Zerelda exclaimed, “No! No! No!” and cried without restraint and noisily called for the intercession of angels and saints, and Bob scuttled over to the corner where Charley was plucking the straw flowers in a porcelain vase.

Bob murmured, “He knows.”

Charley didn’t turn. “Knows what?”

“I’ve talked with the governor about him.”

Charley scowled over his right shoulder at his kid brother, no nettled conscience in his look, only a toothache of concern and skepticism.

“He needs to be stopped,” said Bob.

Charley reconsidered the vase without comment and Bob walked back to a chair, where he sat as a model student sits when the teacher is out of the room. Jesse came to them with a bottle of sherry smuggled inside his long coat and asked the Ford brothers, “Ready?” and the three rode in a cold rain until they reached a Lutheran church twenty-eight miles from St. Joseph.

It was wooden and painted white and the cross atop the steeple had a lightning rod attached. The minister was a cook in a restaurant that was known for its clam chowder. The double doors were unlocked, as Was the custom then, and inside the church was clean and dark and smelled of floorwax and candles. Jesse threw his greatcoat on a pew and lit an altar candle that he carried into the sanctuary. Bob kicked his bedroll flat on the floor as Charley climbed on a rear pew to light an unornamented chandelier.

Bob said, “If we’re ever alone for more than a minute, I’d like a chance to speak with you further.”

Charley carried a flame from one candle to the next and pretended not to have heard.

Jesse came back from the sanctuary with a crockery jug cradled in the crook of one arm, a ribboned Bible in the other. He smiled at the two and said, “Grape juice and sherry,” but only remained with them a short while before he cloaked his shoulders with his coat and riffled the Bible, seeming to read whichever page his thumbnail settled on.

Bob slept twenty minutes on the punishing floor and then awoke with the sensation that he’d been unconscious for much longer and might have missed something vital. He sat up and saw his brother in a vacant, animal slumber, saw Jesse curled over the book like a monk. Bob wandered over and sidled into the pew.

Jesse licked an index finger and flipped a page. He said, “Go to the Good Book when you’re sore distressed, and your soul will be comforted.”

“Your mother sure seems to know her scripture.”

“She’s been an example to me all my life.”

Bob rolled his head on his neck to relieve a crick and then canted a little to ascertain which section the man was on.

“The Book of Psalms,” said Jesse. “Ever come across it?”

“Well, I’ve never read it one right after the other, but I’ve listened to that poem about the Lord being my shepherd.”

Jesse recited, “ ‘Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies.’ ”

Bob nodded. “You hear it at funerals.”

Jesse let the book divide from his finger and sought Psalm 41, which he scanned, vigorously scratching his two-inch beard, gingerly petting it smooth. He ironed out the page with his fist and knee and smiled wryly at Bob and then began a private study of the words, as if he were without company.

Bob tried to imagine how Jesse’s children saw him: he would be the giant figure who could fling them high as the ceiling. They knew his legs, the sting of his mustache against their cheeks, the gentle way that Jesse had of fingering their hair. They didn’t know how he made his living or why they so often moved; they didn’t even know their father’s name; and it all seemed such an injustice to Bob that he asked, “Do you ever give your past life any thought?”

Jesse squinted at him. “I don’t get your meaning.”

Bob managed a grin and asked, “Do you ever give any thought to the men you’ve killed?”

Jesse moved the candle forward so that it was near his left hand and he angled a little in-the pew. “Give me an example.”

“I just thought you’d’ve imagined it maybe: how it must’ve been for that cashier in Northfield or that conductor you shot in Winston. You’re doing your job, you’ve just ate maybe, you’re subtracting numbers or you’re collecting tickets from passengers and then—bang!—everything’s changed and a man you don’t even know is yelling at you with a gun in his hand and you make one mistake and—bang!—you’re killed.”

Jesse shut the book and rubbed a thumb across the two gold words on the black leather cover. Rainfall was the only noise. He said, “I’ve been forgiven for all that.”

Bob said, “You might’ve had a good reason for killing them. I don’t know. I’m just saying it must’ve been like a nightmare for them, and maybe it is for you too, right now.”

Jesse said again, “I’ve already been forgiven,” and then leaned to his left and blew out the candle.

BOB AWOKE with sunlight coming through the mosaic windows in colors of red and blue. Charley was already slugging his feet inside damp boots. Bob slunk up the aisle, looking down pews, until he found Jesse rounded asleep inside his coat, his mouth open, his ankle twitching, a gun in his left hand. Bob then scuttled out of the church in his socks and saw Charley meandering through the cemetery, reading the inscriptions. He ambled over to him with his palms cupping his elbows.

Bob said, “Craig gave me ten days.”

Charley considered an angled gravestone and the engraving GONE ON TO GREATNESS.

“For what?”

Bob thought a moment, tugging up his right sock as he chose the proper term. “Arresting him,” he said.

“You and me,” Charley said.

“It’s going to happen one way or another. If not us, then some deputy sheriff in Saint Joe, or some Pinkerton man in Kearney, or some simpleton with a pistol on loan like it was in the swamplands when the Youngers were captured. It’s going to happen, Charley; and it might as well be us who get rich on it.”

Charley scratched his neck and looked across the road to a greening sward where cattle and sheep were mixed. Timberland was a blue smear on the horizon. His sunken cheeks and cruel overbite made him seem to be sucking a mint. He said, “Nobody’s going to get Jesse if he’s still live enough to go for his gun. He can kill ya with every hand.”

“I’ll go alone then,” Bob said.

Charley glanced at his kid brother disparagingly. “And besides that, he’s our friend.”

“He murdered Ed Miller. He’s going to murder Liddil and Cummins if the chance ever comes. Seems to me Jesse’s riding from man to man, saying goodbye to the gang. Your friendship could put you under the pansies.”

Charley sighed and said, “I’ll grind it fine in my mind, Bob. I can’t go any further than that, right now.”

“You’ll come around,” Bob said, and returned to the church, twisting the crick in his spine.

Jesse was by the altar and above the congregation in a pulpit of inlaid wood. He looked both pious and possessed. His face was stern as he flipped pages at the lectern, his fingers clenched the railing, and his blue eyes had silver fire in them as he put them on the Fords. He called, “From now on you two won’t go anywhere without me! From now on you’ll ask for permission; you’ll ask to be excused!”

THEY MADE ST. JOSEPH by afternoon, with enough sun overhead to tarry at the railroad station and watch the men shunt cars, to number the cattle and sows in the stockyards, and to buy licorice and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Weekly Newspaper at an apothecary. Jesse asked what the clocktower said and Bob leaned from the store to read the time, almosting it, and they rode east through the mud and smoke of the city. Jesse carried himself like a chamberlain with two groundlings and intermittently winked or touched the brim of his fedora whenever a man called the name “Tom” in greeting.

Soon they were near the red-bricked World Hotel and Jesse told Bob to raise his eyes to the roller coaster of Confusion Hill more than a quarter-mile off. Bob looked over the roofs of bungalows and a steep ascent of timber to a high skull of land on which rested a white cottage with green shutters. He could see laundry swelling with wind on the clothesline, the measured white pickets of the yard fence, the swing in the sycamore tree.

Charley said, “Jesse finally come up with a place to match his prominence,” a comment he’d plagiarized from Zee.

And Jesse said, “I could mow down a thousand scalawags with no more than a thousand cartridges. I’ll never be surprised by anything again.”

The horses strained up Lafayette Street and stopped as soon as they heard the children. Jesse crawled off his saddle and accepted his daughter in his arms as he knelt to kiss Tim, and then, with a general’s arrogance, assigned Charley the stable chores, Bob the job of bringing their gatherings in, and moved off to the rear of the cottage, Mary clutching his right leg.

Bob skidded the packs and paraphernalia onto the stoop and eavesdropped on a conversation that was too remote to comprehend. Bob took off his bowler hat and bent close to the locked door, his pale forehead blotching against the screen. “Halloo!” he called and rattled the door on its hook. Zerelda James backed from the stove to see him and winced a little and said rather crossly, “You never mentioned Bob would be here.” And yet she squeezed her hands dry in her apron and managed an indulgent smile as she walked across the room and unlocked the door.

“He didn’t tell me you’d come along,” she said.

“Maybe he was saving it as a pleasant surprise.”

Little Mary was submerged in the woman’s skirt and glowering at Bob. Zee combed the girl’s hair and said to her, “You’ve got two cousins for company now,” and then mothered the child back into the kitchen.

Bob threw clothes and whatnots inside and then removed his gunbelt and soldier’s coat as he examined the room. The floornails had not been countersunk and were raised and silvered with shoe scuffs. A red rubber ball and two jacks were strewn on the tasseled green rug. Five Little Peppers and How They Grew was astraddle the rim of a straw portfolio that had been decorated with a gladiola seed package and nailed onto the wall. The sofa pillows had been shammed with lace and white doilies on the chair backs were tanned with the stains of hair oils and pomades. To the right of the door was an oak bed and a soogan quilt lighted by a tall window of flawed glass slatted by Venetian blinds. On the left was a corresponding window and a plaster wall that was papered with roses and an intricate scheme that had been scribbled upon with a child’s crayon. Contrary to the fabrications of magazines and stage sets, there was no tapestry embroidered with the sentiment “God Bless Our Home”; instead there was an ornate walnut frame and a watercolor painting of a racehorse named Skyrocket. Jutting from a wicker sewing basket was a feather duster made from some blue and brown exotic bird. Against one wall was a rush-bottomed chair and wine table, eater-cornered was a rocker, against the dining and sitting room wall was a broad sofa and a black, ironworked, naked woman whose lewdly cleft legs were used as a bootjack. Staring at Bob was Jesse. The man walked into the kitchen and muttered to Zee with amusement, “That boy can make our sitting room look like a matinee.”

BOB AND CHARLEY REMAINED at 1318 Lafayette Street until April 3rd, so more than a week was frittered away in inconsequential chores, afternoon naps on the sofa, and loudmouthed and lingering meals. The routine was to wake at seven, see to the care of the animals, then stroll down to the post office, where newspapers that Thomas Howard subscribed to arrived, each neatly rolled into a brown paper mailing sleeve. The three men would straddle wicker chairs and flatten pages on the dining room table until Zee carried in a farmer’s breakfast to them and Tim was sent off to school. By nine they would have finished two kettles of coffee and the men would retire to the sitting room while Mrs. James cleaned the kitchen. They would mention the two-or three-day-old news items they’d read and comment on each crime or predicament in accordance with their own creeds and stances. Jesse would wind his pocket watch; Jesse would wind the clock. Jesse would clean a revolver and load it and then he would clean another. Weather might be introduced as a subject of conversation and for many minutes the weather would be rigorously considered. Questions might be lazily asked about spring planting and the crops. Bob cited locusts once and ascertained from the increased interest that he’d inadvertently entertained an exciting topic that was never before discussed.

Lunch was served at noon and then the three would nap or kill time on the kitchen porch, where they would watch Mary play with a girl named Metta Disbrow. They scrupulously pored over a collection of nineteen ambrotype photographs. Bob reread Noted Guerrillas, or The Warfare of the Border, by John Newman Edwards, the one contemporary book that Jesse owned. Jesse exercised in the sun with weighted yellow pins. He touched his toes one hundred times. He twisted horseshoes with his fists. He looked at his physique from various angles in the mirror of the shaded kitchen window. He made his daughter feel his muscles and laughed at her mystified reaction. He made Bob and. Charley cup flexed biceps that were as round and solid as baseballs. He Indian-wrestled them one at a time and then struggled with them together, gradually becoming disgusted with their clumsiness and frailty.

At four they walked down for the evening newspapers and The Police Gazette and absorbed themselves in them until the main meal was served at six. Jesse never scolded the children, rarely even corrected them; the grammar, hygiene, manners, and temperament of his children, even if improper or inadequate, were either never noticed by Jesse or else caused an anguished look from him and a call for his wife’s ministrations. He spent the evenings in the crowded sitting room with one child next to him, another riding the jouncing pony of his knee, while Zee sewed and the Ford brothers simpered. Only when the children were asleep would the three men journey into the city, where they played pool in a South Jefferson Street saloon. By eleven or twelve they were asleep themselves, or at least they pretended to be.

After three days of this dreary routine, Bob was markedly nervous; by the fourth day, Bob was so skittish his legs jittered whenever he sat, he couldn’t remain in a chair for more than two minutes, he chewed his fingernails and clawed at his baby-fine hair and generally carried on so much that Jesse said, “Appears to me you’ve got the peedoodles, Bob,” and then compassionately prescribed Dr. George Richmond’s Samaritan Nervine.

Bob once went to the kitchen and slurped water from the bucket dipper as Zee separated egg whites and yolks. She usually swiveled away from Bob whenever he was near or curtailed their conversations by inventing chore-girl activities. Now she simply lifted on her toes to find a bowl in the cabinet and ignored Bob’s sulky consideration of her body. He saw the fine blond hairs raise from her neck as he stared and he sent his eyes to his feet. She moved to her mixing and Bob said, “If you want to clean your floor, you should first off scrub sand over it and follow that with a soda lye applied with a real stiff brush. You rinse it with warm water and when it’s nearly dry, you know, sort of coolish to your feet, you wipe it down with hypochlorite of lime and let it cure overnight. I learnt that at the grocery store.”

Zee sifted white flour into a bowl and said, “This isn’t my kitchen. We’re renting.”

Bob let the water dipper sink in the bucket. He scratched his calf. Zee spooned bicarbonate of soda from a canister and set it down. Bob was about to reach for the canister in order to read it but Zee shot a glance at Bob’s knuckles and he stalled. He sniffed a sliver of brown, gritty soap; Zee mashed cream of tartar into the bicarbonate of soda with a soup spoon. She asked, “Why are you so antsy?”

Bob improvised by saying, “It’s just this cussed boredom. This sitting around inside the livelong day, getting into your hair, getting slow and sleepy, making jail house dogs of ourselves.”

She looked at Bob with some animation and attention subtracted from her eyes, as if she were recalling something even as she spoke. “He’s sometimes gone for months. We sometimes change houses five times in a year. It’s gruesome being hunted, Bob. He can stay in his nightshirt all day if he wants; I’m just grateful that he’s around.”

“You can see it’s damaged his mind some,” Bob said.

She ignored his comment by rubbing flour from her palms with her apron and returning to her recipe.

Bob watched her work a minute more and said, “You’re making a cake.”

THEY WALKED TO A POOL HALL at nine on Saturday, and as the Fords shot eight-ball, Jesse maneuvered among the pool tables, letting players clap him on the back, making jokes, remembering names and relationships, visiting corner tables if anyone called him over, which was frequently and with gusto. A gunsmith chatted with Thomas Howard about a .22 caliber pistol the man carried inside his boot. Mr. Howard said, “You can’t more than make a man itch with that article,” and soon the two were in good-natured argument about marksmanship. They settled on a competition and walked outside to the alley with a starved-for-entertainment crowd.

Bob watched Jesse pry the lead ball from a cartridge and saw a notch in it with a skinning knife that he then fixed into the crook of a tree so that the cutting side was a thin, silver streak in the night. He worked a string into the cut lead ball and stomped his bootheel on it to close the nick, and that string he fastened to an overhead branch so that the ball swayed close enough to tick the skinning knife. He made a boy stand near the target with a coal-oil lamp. He took five strides from the oak tree and announced to the audience that the boy would set the cartridge ball in motion and the gunsmith and he were going to fire five times. The trick was to strike it just so and make the skinning knife shave both the swinging and the speeding bullets with one shot.

The crowd grumbled their grave doubts or murmured in awe or made side bets and the gunsmith raised a .22 caliber revolver with grim resignation. The boy flipped the ball into a metronomic swing and stood aside with the coal-oil lamp as the gunsmith shot at and missed the moving target five times, scattering oak bark and cursing the foolishness of the contest.

Jesse then removed his suit coat, rested his right hand on his hip, and with his left lifted the revolver he called Baby. The boy slapped the cartridge ball into a wide arc and retreated and Jesse squinted down the muzzle sights and fired. Wood chipped but the ball continued to swing. It ticked against the knife like a clock. Jesse jiggled his left arm by his side to relax it and then raised it again and missed a second time.

“Ain’t nothing to be ashamed of,” the gunsmith said. “It’s next to impossible.”

Jesse grinned at the gunsmith and said, “If I didn’t know I could do it, I wouldn’t have concocted it.”

The ball still clocked but with shorter strokes and Jesse squinted a third time and then there was a gunshot noise of plank clapped against plank, a chime as two cartridge balls skinned off the knife, and the long song of the steel blade as it quivered and rang.

Silence followed the accomplishment and then some men applauded and yahooed and some others crouched at the oak tree and a gratified Thomas Howard was rushed to by people who wished to congratulate him and vigorously pump his hand and gladly introduce themselves.

The boy carved the cartridge balls out of the oak tree and walked around with them as if they were wedding rings on a silver tray. Bob lifted one and rubbed his thumb on the flat of it and the boy asked, “Is it still hot?”

Bob moved over to his brother. “He arranged that for our benefit.”

Charley smiled. “You thought it was all made up, didn’t you. You thought everything was yarns and newspaper stories.”

Bob looked over at the shootist, who was then showing Baby to the gunsmith. “He’s just a human being.”

The Fords returned to the pool tables and Bob won the next rack. He supported his chin on the pool cue if standing; he snared his coat over his gun butt so that it showed when he leaned over the green felt and clacked the ivory balls. At midnight, Jesse winged his arms around Charley and Bob and weaved them out into the street, and on the climb up Confusion Hill gave them his recollection of the James-Younger gang’s robbery of the Ocobock Brothers’ Bank at Corydon, Iowa, in 1871: then nearly everyone was at the Methodist church as Henry Clay Dean pleaded the case for a contemplated railroad; the holdup attracted no attention and seven men were able to split six thousand dollars. Jesse now expected many people in Platte City, Missouri, to be at the courthouse on April 4th to see Colonel John Doniphan perorate in the defense of George Burgess, who was being charged with the manslaughter of Caples Burgess, his cousin. The Wells Banking Company—commonly called the Platte City Bank—would remain open for its commercial customers, but with only a teller or two in attendance.

They reached the cottage and Jesse reclined on the sitting room sofa, sending Charley out to collect firewood for the stove. Charley lolloped off and Jesse wedded his fingers on his stomach and closed his eyes. “How it will be is we’ll leave here next Monday afternoon and ride down to Platte City.”

Bob seated himself on the floor and crossed his ankles. “How far is that from Kansas City?”

Something in Bob’s inquiry made Jesse resistant and he chose to answer around it. “Platte City’s thirty miles south. You and me and Charley will sleep in the woods overnight and strike the Wells Bank sometime before the court recesses.”

Bob asked when that would be exactly, but his voice was too insistent, his attitude too intense, and Jesse said, “You don’t need to know that.”

Bob scrawled on the floorboards with his finger and Jesse arose to a sit. He said, “You know, I feel comfortable with your brother. Hell, he’s ugly as sin and he smells like a skunk and he’s so ignorant he couldn’t drive nails in the snow, but he’s sort of easy to be around. I can’t say the same for you, Bob.”

“I’m sorry to hear you say that.”

Jesse was silent a moment and then asked, “You know how it is when you’re with your girlfriend and the moon is out and you know she wants to be kissed even though she never said so?”

Bob didn’t know how that was but he said that he did.

“You’re giving me signs that grieve my soul and make me wonder if your mind’s been changed about me.”

“Do you want me to swear my good faith like I did for your mother?”

Charley clattered wood into the stove’s firebox and returned from the kitchen, slapping his hands. He saw Jesse glowering at Bob with great heat in his eyes, and said, “You two having a spat?”

“I was getting ready to be angry,” Jesse said, and then smiled at Bob. He reached out and coddled Bob’s neck and said in a gentling voice, “Sit over here closer, kid.”

Bob vacillated a little and then scooched over, smirking at his brother with perplexity and shyness.

Jesse fervently massaged Bob’s neck and shoulder muscles, communicating that all was forgiven, and he continued with his sketch of the robbery. “You’ll stay with the animals, Charley, and The Kid and I will walk into the Platte City Bank just before noon. Bob will move the cashier over away from the shotgun that’s under the counter and he’ll tell the man to work the combination on the vault. They’ll finagle about time locks and so on and I’ll creep up behind that cashier and cock his chin back like so.” And Jesse cracked his right wrist into Bob’s chin, snapping the boy’s skull back and pinning him against his knee as he slashed a skinning knife across his throat. The metal was cold and left the sting of ice on Bob’s fair skin and for an instant he was certain he’d actually been cut and he slumped against the sofa, incapacitated, in panic. Jesse’s mouth was so close his mustache snipped at Bob’s ear when he said in a caress of a voice, “I’ll say, ‘How come an off-scouring of creation like you is still sucking air when so many of mine are in coffins?’ ”

Bob’s eye lolled left to see the skinning knife vertical near his cheek. There was a crick in his neck and the man’s wristbone was mean as a broomstick under his chin. Bob manufactured a smile and said, “This isn’t good riddance for me, is it?”

“I’ll say, ‘How’d you reach your twentieth birthday without leaking out all over your clothes?’ And if I don’t like his attitude, I’ll slit that phildoodle so deep he’ll flop on the floor like a fish.” Jesse then retracted his arm and rudely shoved Bob forward and rested the skinning knife on the sofa cushion. Then his temper abruptly altered and he slapped both knees gleefully and grinned at Bob and exclaimed, “I could hear your gears grinding rrr, rrr, rrr, and your little motor wondering, ‘My gosh, what’s next, what’s happening to me?’ You were precious to behold, Bob. You were white as spit in a cotton field.”

Bob examined his neck by finger touch. “You want to know how that feels? Unpleasant. I honestly can’t recommend it.”

“And Charley looked stricken!”

“I was!” Charley said.

“ ‘This is plum unexpected!’ old Charley was thinking. ‘This is mint my day!’ ” He looked from Bob to Charley and joked some moments longer, laughing coaxingly, immoderately, sarcastically, unconvincingly, and when at last the two laughed with him, Jesse adopted a scolding look and slammed into his room.

SO IT WENT. Bob was increasingly cynical, leery, uneasy; Jesse was increasingly cavalier, merry, moody, fey, unpredictable. If his gross anatomy suggested a strong smith in his twenties, his actual physical constitution was that of a man who was incrementally dying. He was sick with rheums and aches and lung congestions, he tilted against chairs and counters and walls, in cold weather he limped with a cane. He coughed incessantly when lying down, his clever mind was often in conflict, insomnia stained his eye sockets like soot, he seemed in a state of mourning. He counteracted the smell of neglected teeth with licorice and candies, he browned his graying hair with dye, he camouflaged his depressions and derangements with masquerades of extreme cordiality, courtesy, and good will toward others.

He played the practical joker and party boy. At suppers Jesse would make his children shiver by rasping his fork away from his mouth so that the tines sang off his teeth. Zee set down a soup tureen and he winked at Bob when he asked, “Is this fit to eat or will it just do?” He’d belch and murmur, “Squeeze me.” He surreptitiously inched the butter or gravy dish under Charley’s elbow so that the chump stained his sleeve; he hooked Charley’s spurs together as he snored in the sitting room and then screamed the man off the sofa so that Charley farcically sprawled. He repeated jokes at the evening meals, making each more long-winded and extravagant than it was in his recollection, altering each so that it commented on the vices of railroad officers and attorneys—who were so crooked, he claimed, that they had to screw their socks on. But even as he jested or tickled his girl or boy in the ribs, Jesse would look over to Bob with melancholy eyes, as if the two of them were meshed in an intimate communication that had little to do with anyone else.

Bob was certain the man had unriddled him, had seen through his reasons for coming along, that Jesse could forecast each of Bob’s possible moves and inclinations and was only acting the innocent in order to lull Bob into stupid tranquility and miscalculation.

Once Bob was occupying himself in the stables, scraping the clinging mud from the horses’ fetlocks and pasterns with a wire currycomb. Then misgivings overtook him and he straightened to intercept Jesse peering in angrily at the window and in the next instant disappearing. And yet, when reencountered on the kitchen porch no more than five minutes later, Jesse dipped his newspaper to happily remark on the weather. On some nights Jesse segregated the two brothers and slept with Bob in the sitting room, a revolver, as always, clutched in his strong left hand. His brown hair smelled of rose oil and his long underwear smelled of borax; sleep subtracted years from his countenance. Bob listened to each insuck of air so he could tell when Jesse went off, and when the man’s inhalations were so slow and shallow they never seemed to come out again, Bob cautiously rolled to a sit and placed his feet on the cold boards and the revolver was cocked with three clicks. “I need to go to the privy,” Bob said.

“You think you do but you don’t,” said Jesse, and Bob obediently returned to bed.

On Monday, Zee worked outside in a wide brown dress with the cuffs rolled to her elbows, stirring a white froth of laundry in a cast-iron wash boiler that steamed into the blue sky. Charley dampened a red handkerchief and ran it along the metal clothesline in order to remove the rust. Bob cringed up to Zee and asked if she would wash his clothes and she consented with some annoyance. She swished his socks and shirts in a soapwater tub on the stove and scrubbed them against a Rockingham pottery washboard, but after they were rinsed and cranked through the wringer, Bob refused to clothespin them and returned with them to the sitting room, where he smoothed them out on the oak bed so that they would gradually dry.

Jesse walked in, slapping a rolled newspaper against his thigh, seeking company. He oversaw Bob’s meticulous care in the arrangement of a shirt’s sleeves and then espied an H.C. laundry mark on some white underwear. He asked, “Whose initials are those?”

“I beg your pardon?”

Jesse frowned and inquired, “What’s H.C. stand for?”

Bob looked at the letters and then remembered that he’d confused Henry Craig’s underwear with his own that night in the St. James Hotel. He couldn’t fiction an answer.

“High church?” Jesse offered. “Home cooking?”

Bob fidgeted a little and smiled ingratiatingly. “I stayed in a workingman’s hotel and saw them squished up in a closet. I couldn’t find any cooties, so I kept them as a sort of memento.”

Jesse either accepted that or considered it a subject not worth pursuing. He strolled out onto Lafayette Street. Bob sank down on the mattress and cooled his eyes with a wet sock; Jesse circled yard trees, scaring squirrels with sticks.

THE SITTING ROOM conversations were about Blue Cut that week: the Kansas City newspapers carried front-page articles about the movement of John Bugler, John Land, and Creed Chapman from the Second Street jail to Independence, Missouri, where there was a court trial over their complicity in the Chicago and Alton train robbery. The reporters called them stool pigeons. Creed Chapman had lost forty-two pounds while incarcerated; John Land was rumored to be so apprehensive about reprisal by Jesse James that he refused to even mention the man’s name. “He evidently is in fear of bodily injury,” one man wrote, “and dreads the idea of ever again leaving jail.”

On the afternoon of March 30th, a policeman meandered near the cottage and then loitered on the sidewalk to inventory the geography of St. Joseph. He wore a riverman’s short-brimmed cap and a navy blue coat with brass buttons and a brass star. A shoulder sling crossed the man’s chest to a black leather holster that housed a dragoon revolver. He made a cigarette and, like a cat with its catch, seemed to look everywhere except the cottage, and then he found cause to rest his elbows on the white picket fence and lounge there, scrutinizing and squinting.

Charley was sunk in a brown study: he creaked a rocking chair forward and back and stared morosely at the marred wallpaper as he smoked a cigarette. Jesse came out of the master bedroom with a revolver tucked inside a folded newspaper, looking imperiled and perturbed. He asked in a whisper, “Is anyone out there?”

Charley craned around to see out the screen door and saw the policeman allow smoke to stream from his nose. “Yes!” Charley said, and slid off the chair as Jesse crouched across the room. “How in Heaven’s name did you know?”

Jesse raised the revolver next to his left ear and split two bottom window blinds with his fingers. He said, “I had a premonition. ’s-5’

Charley squatted against the front wall, ground his cigarette out on the floor, and suspected the governor had grown impatient and that the cottage was at present encircled with perhaps fifty policemen and two hundred state militia. Plaster would spew if they shot; glass would sprinkle, pictures would tilt, even the sofa would move.

The window sash had been raised four inches in order to ventilate the room. Jesse rested his .44’s muzzle on the sill and steered it toward the policeman’s face.

Charley peeked out the screen door and saw the policeman screw his boot down on his dropped cigarette and then cruise over to the sidewalk gate. When the man’s thumb tripped the metal latch, the revolver cocked with its soft clicks and Charley prayed, Go home. The policeman was only a suggestion away from stepping onto the rented property when he lost either the gumption or the yearning and shut the gate and strolled on.

Jesse uncocked the revolver and covered it with the newspaper.

He said, “An angel tugged on his coattails,” and then with graceful nonchalance walked back into his room.

BOB WAS IN TOWN at the time. He’d told Jesse that the cash he’d earned at the Richmond grocery store was burning holes in his pockets and that he wanted to look for an Easter suit at the Famous Boston One-Price Clothing House. And 510 Main Street is indeed where he went, there buying a fifteen-dollar gentleman’s suit of salt-and-pepper tweed. Bob told the salesman that his name was Johnson, and that he was a cousin to Thomas Howard.

The cattleman?

Bob lent his affirmation.

Good neighbors, the salesman said. Always polite and respectable, with a pleasant word for everybody.

Bob started toward Lafayette Street but then got a notion and instead skipped down alleys and cut through stores until he came to the American Telegraph office, and there Bob slanted into a standing desk for many minutes, scribbling twenty messages that he might send to Governor Crittenden or Police Commissioner Craig.

He could be a glib and even grandiloquent speaker, but writing was agony for him: the right words seemed to disappear whenever he grasped a pencil, plus he was hampered by the grim recognition that he really had nothing to say. He listed the chances for capture that Jesse had given him and came up with only two: Bob had gallivanted past the kitchen window and noticed Jesse asleep in a chair; and Jesse unbuckled his gunbelts to scrub at a washbasin and Tim had strapped them on. But Zee was ironing a blouse close by as Jesse slept, a shot would have stabbed her left breast; and Bob himself wore no gun on the second occasion and to go after Jesse with anything else was unimaginable to him.

For the man was canny, he was intuitive, he anticipated everything. He continually looked over his shoulders, he looked into the background with mirrors, he locked his sleeping room at night, he could pick out a whisper in the wind, he could register the slightest added value a man put into his words, he could probably read the faltering and perfidy in Bob’s face. He once numbered the spades on a playing card that skittered across the street a city block away; he licked his daughter’s cut finger and there wasn’t even a scar the next day; he wrestled with his son and the two Fords at once one afternoon and rarely even tilted—it was like grappling with a tree. When Jesse predicted rain, it rained; when he encouraged plants, they grew; when he scorned animals, they retreated; whomever he wanted to stir, he astonished.

So some of Bob’s telegrams were apologies, some were clarifications, still more were prognostications of when the criminal would be “removed,” until finally Bob settled on a coded note to Sheriff Timberlake, providing him with clues about their living situation in St. Joseph and about the contemplated robbery in Platte City on the 4th. All he could think of as he jotted it down was Jesse’s story of George Shepherd sending a telegram in Galena, Kansas, and then riding into a barrage of gunfire from the James gang.

It took five minutes for the telegraph operator to code and transmit the note and two hours for Timberlake to receive it because of the court session in Independence at which he was an expert witness. But thereafter the sheriff acted with great speed, arranging a company of fifty deputies who would ride their horses into two freight cars at sunrise on the 4th and surround the Platte City Bank while the James gang was inside. Timberlake even went so far in his preparations as to order a Hannibal and St. Joseph locomotive’s engine ignited and kept fully steamed in the Kansas City roundhouse so that it could race to Platte City or St. Joseph without much delay. Having satisfied himself that the appropriate steps had been taken, the sheriff dined with Commissioner Craig on the night of the 30th and they toasted a victory that they seemed only days away from achieving.

GOVERNOR CRITTENDEN GAVE an interview that week in which he bragged about the many members of the James gang who were already in jail or in courts of law, going on to claim that certain arrangements had been made that could snag the James brothers themselves very soon. He could say no more than that, the governor smugly asserted, as if he had not already divulged enough to put the Fords in jeopardy.

On March 30th the Kansas City Evening Star carried a leading article that stated: “Commissioner Craig, Sheriff Timberlake, and Dick Little have been closeted in Craig’s office all afternoon, the outlaw having been engaged in making an affidavit to all the operations of the old gang. The Evening Star is able to state as a positive fact that Little has been working with the officers for several months past.”

And the Evening Star for Friday, March 31st, again concentrated its attention on Dick Liddil’s confession in an article that was somewhat inaccurately titled “The James Gang.” It accused the James gang of the robberies at Glendale, Winston, and Blue Cut, but then incriminated only Dick Liddil in the alleged murder of Wood Hite, even moving the gunfight to a location near Springfield, Missouri. “Jesse was greatly incensed at the murder of Wood,” the writer stated, “and Little ran away from the gang to escape Jesse’s wrath. Thereupon Jesse offered a reward of $1,000 for Dick Little, alive or dead, saying that he would prefer him dead. When Little learned of this offer, he surrendered himself to Commissioner Craig and Sheriff Timberlake, and betrayed, or pretended to betray to them, the whole gang.”

And though the Kansas City Times published similar stories, Jesse’s subscription to it meant it came by mail, so he couldn’t read about Dick Liddil’s collusion or make the correct inferences about the Fords until the morning of April 3rd. And yet he acted with the skepticism and suspicion of a man who already knew. He scarcely acknowledged Bob’s remarks all day on the 31st nor spoke at supper except to complain about an overdone seven-bone steak that Zee promptly removed to the kitchen to steam. He then confided to Charley, “Her cooking always has been a scandal. Cut her meat and the table moves.”

He passed the evening simply enough, sitting with Mary and Tim on the sofa and reading from Five Little Peppers and How They Grew: “The little kitchen had quieted down from the bustle and confusion of midday, and now with its afternoon manners on, presented a holiday aspect that, as the principal room in the brown house, it was eminently proper it should have.”

Charley took apart his pistol, squinting away from cigarette smoke and chugging slight coughs as he twisted a screwdriver; Bob catnapped on the sitting room bed and didn’t awaken until he heard Jesse swat Charley’s foot with his hat and say, “Come on, Cousin; let’s go for a ride.”

Charley shot a scared look at Bob and then said, “Sorry, but I’m not much in the mood.”

“Stomach ache?”

“Sort of.”

“The night air will cure it,” Jesse said and crushed Charley’s wrist in his seizing hand as he yanked him to his feet.

Charley climbed sluggishly into a coat and boots and glanced again at his brother. “Don’t you want to come along too?”

Jesse said, “Bob stays,” and the two men walked out to saddle their horses.

They rode east near Pigeon Hill under a moonshade of interlaced shagbark trees. Jesse rambled to the right or left of Charley, riding the creeksides and cowpaths, rising into the woods, reconnecting with the road many yards behind Charley and then creeping up alongside.

He asked, “Do you ever count the stars?”

Charley looked overhead at the pinpricks of light. It reminded him of his father’s badly shingled barn roof when the cat he was shooting at crouched on the rafters and everywhere else it was noontime but it was midnight whenever he sighted his gun.

Jesse said, “I can’t ever get the same number; they keep changing on me.”

“I don’t even know what a star is exactly.”

“Your body knows; it’s your mind that forgot.”

Charley slid an eye toward Jesse and said, “Riding was a good idea. I wonder if we could go back?”

“So early?”

“I don’t know why but I’ve been poorly lately and the rocking makes my gut want to jump.”

“You need to correct your way of living.”

“Well; like I say, I’ve been poorly.”

Jesse didn’t say anything more. His horse nickered and clicked its bit and its rider dangled his legs off the stirrups and squirmed around with soreness. He turned up his collar and lowered his chin as if the wind was mean and then reined back slightly so that he slipped four feet to the rear and with grim foreboding and fright Charley tried to guess if Jesse’s gun was already out. Greenery was high all around them as they climbed a grade and Charley began the only prayer he knew, getting to the words “my soul to keep” when a comet of golden fire careered down the road. It was the size of a cannon ball and instantly, spookily reeling at them, singeing the animals’ legs, causing them to skirt aside and whinny. And then it was not there but gone. Smoke rose to the horses’ noses and they jerked their heads at the smell.

Charley recollected the marvel to Bob and in the April 21st Liberty Tribune and was still not over his mystification, couldn’t tell if it was lightning or a meteor or tumbleweed that a practical joker set a match to and rolled down the hill. But he said Jesse reacted with calm acceptance, with no more man a scolding look, and claimed that it was an omen, that fire had come to him many times in the past in various manifestations and each visitation was followed by an affliction.

Charley had grown accustomed to the man’s grand manner of lying, so he did not challenge the statement but only glanced to see that he’d misjudged his plight, for Jesse’s greatcoat still covered his guns.

Jesse swung his horse around to the west and on the ride to the cottage swore, “I’ve seen visions that would make Daniel swoon; I’ve been warned as often as Israel.” Then he grinned at Charley as if it were a good wrench or rope pulley that they were talking about. “It’s mighty handy,” Jesse said.

SATURDAY INTRODUCED summer weather to the state: the skies were blue, the sun insistent, the temperature close to eighty at noon. The river flashed light from its rills and currents, and Zee could look up from her scullery work and see Kansas shimmer like a reflection in water. The Fords removed the storm windows and Jesse raised each sash so that sweet air could stir through the rooms, but they were too lazy or lumpish to attach screens, so flies crawled over the rising loaves and birds flew into the rooms.

Jesse went to the market with Tim and Mary and came back home at four with a crate of groceries and a black box clamped under his right arm. He kissed Zee and rubbed her fanny and asked her how she was feeling. She saw that he’d subjected his skull to a barber: a smear of white talcum powder was on his neck and his chestnut hair smelled of lilac water; but he looked much handsomer now than when she married him, a quality of aging that she’d often envied in men. Jesse sought Cousin Bob and she told him she thought Bob was resting in the children’s room.

Sunshine was diagonal in the room and curtains flirted in the air. Bob wasn’t sure what woke him. He pivoted in the child’s bed and saw Jesse in a spindle chair, peering at him with great interest. Jesse said, “I never learned what your nationality was.”

“How long’ve you been studying me?”

“You look French.”

Bob rolled to a sitting position. “My grandfather married a French girl in New Orleans. He was with the Virginia volunteers in the War of Eighteen Twelve. I guess I take after my grandmom.”

“You’re gonna break a lot of hearts.”

Bob arched an eyebrow. “How do you mean?”

Jesse revealed the black box from behind his back and reached it over to Bob. “It’s a present.”

Bob raised it and reckoned what it was. “Heavy,” he said.

“You going to look inside?”

“Why are you being so nice to me?”

“You gave me that bawdy bootjack; this is my Christmas gift to you.”

The wooden lid was nailed shut. Bob crammed a coin into the interstices and twisted it until the lid released. “It’s April Fool’s Day, you know.”

“Isn’t a joke,” said Jesse.

Inside the box, nestled in red velvet, was a pearl-handled .44 caliber revolver, a New Model Smith and Wesson number 3, with a six-and-a-half-inch nickel barrel. Bob beamed at Jesse and said, “Such extravagance!” and then turned the revolver to admire it.

“Doesn’t that nickel shine though?”

“It’s more than I could hope for!” said Bob. He clicked the chamber around, cocked and released the hammer, cocked the hammer and aimed the revolver at a red ball on the floor, investigated the play in the trigger, squeezed the trigger until the steel hammer snapped forward, listened to the mechanisms as he recocked the revolver at his ear, straightened his right arm and shut his left eye, skated his thumb across the serial number (3766), measured the full length: twelve inches. “I want a gunsmith to engrave this; some sentence with our two names and the city and the year of presentation. It’ll be a prize that can be passed on from one generation to the next.”

“I figured that granddaddy Colt of yours might blow into fragments next time you squeeze the trigger.”

Bob grinned and said, “You might have something there.” He substituted the New Model Smith and Wesson for the tarnished revolver in the scrolled black leather holster that he then buckled and let slant across his right rear pocket. He slapped it out like a gunfighter, snugged it, slapped it out again. The gun chuckled against the rigid leather but after repeated pulls and replacements it made no more noise than a man’s swallow.

Zee called from the dining room, “Dave? You ready for supper?”

“Pretty soon, sweetheart.”

Bob said, “I might be too excited to eat.”

Jesse smiled broadly and rose from the spindle chair. “You know what John Newman Edwards once wrote about me? He said I didn’t trust two men in ten thousand and was even cautious around them. The government’s sort of run me ragged, you see. I’m going the long way around the barn to say I’ve been feeling cornered and just plain ornery of late and I’d be pleased if you’d accept the gun as my way of apologizing.”

“Heaven knows I’d be ornerier if I were in your position.”

“No. I haven’t been acting correctly. I can’t hardly recognize myself sometimes when I’m greased. I go on journeys out of my body and look at my red hands and my mean face and I get real quizzical. Who is that man who’s gone so wrong? Why all that killing and evil behavior? I’ve been becoming a problem to myself. I figure if I can get you right I’ll be just that much closer to me.”

Bob looked at the man in bewilderment and couldn’t find the words for an answer, so he said, “I need to wash my hands if supper’s on. The gun’s made them feel sort of public.”

“Go ahead,” the man said, and graciously opened the door.

Bob exited from the children’s room and smiled meekly at Zee as he entered the kitchen and leaned on the counter for a moment. He spilled pitcher water into a pan and as he sank his hands in it he listened to Jesse greet his children, listened to chairs sliding away from the dining room table and sliding underneath it again. Jesse began to say grace without him and Bob raised a brick of yellow soap to his nose, smelling its ingredients: rainwater, sal soda, unslaked lime; tallow, rosin, salt.

APRIL 2ND was Palm Sunday and Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Howard, their two children, and their cousin Charles Johnson strolled in sunshine to the Second Presbyterian Church in order to attend the ten o’clock service. Bob remained at the cottage, claiming he’d stomached all the religion he could when his father was a minister of a timber church that was called Jasper. So they went without Bob and he slyly migrated from room to room in his white-stockinged feet, a shining revolver slung near his thigh, a coffee cup near his mouth. He ate a slice of cold toast and walked into the master bedroom, where he rested the cup and saucer on the chiffonier and investigated each of the six wide drawers. Hanging from a mirror hook was an eighteen-karat-gold watch in a hunting case, made by Charles J. E. Jaeat and stolen from John A. Burbank in the Hot Springs stagecoach robbery of 1874. Bob listened to the ticks and chimings of the clock, gave it timidly to air, savagely grabbed it back. He walked into the closet and inventoried the clothes on the hangers and hooks; he slipped on one of Jesse’s worsted wool coats and inspected its tailoring in a mirror. He ironed the bed’s rumpled sheets with his hands, he sipped from the water glass on the vanity, he smelled the talcum and lilacs on a pillowcase that was etched here and there with snips of cut hair. He reclined on the mattress so that he could be in meeting with it and he situated each coal-oil lamp in the room by the smoke stains it made on the ceiling. He rolled to his left as Jesse must have rolled to marry with his wife in the evening. He resisted a temptation. His fingers skittered over his ribs to construe the scars where Jesse was twice shot. He manufactured a middle finger that was missing the top two knuckles. He imagined himself at thirty-four; he imagined himself in a coffin. Morning light was coming in at the window and pale curtains moved on the spring breeze like ghosts. Bob raised his revolver and straightened it on the door, the mirror, the window sash, a picture made from a fruit can label, a nightgown that hung from a nail. He went out to the sitting room. He considered possibilities and everything wonderful that could come true. He remembered the set-down coffee cup and saucer and removed them from the chiffonier, wiping a ring from the wood with his sleeve. And he was at the dining room table, oiling his gun, when the churchgoers returned to the cottage, each with a sword of green, palm.

THEY WENT on a picnic at noon. Jesse and Charley and the boy skimmed stones off the river and skulked around the bleached bones of a sheep that rocked in a shallow pool. The sleeves of their white shirts were sloppily rolled up past their elbows, exposing the farmer brown of their hands and wrists and the gradations into white. A dog plunged into the river and struggled out and chomped at the water as if it were meat. Bob reposed on his elbow and exchanged pleasantries with Zee as she scraped corn relish out of a jar and onto some cold mashed potatoes. He chewed a blade of grass and coolly watched Jesse swing his screaming and then giggling daughter over the river. Bob asked, “How come you married him?”

Zee changed position to remove covered bowls from the market basket. Her gingham dress rose and subsided. Her pregnancy didn’t yet show. She said, “Oh, he was so dashing and romantic and cast-out by the world, I couldn’t help but love him.” She smiled over the river, recollecting. She caught a strand of blond hair that flew near her eyes and refastened it with a small comb. “He was a figure out of a girl’s storybook. Gentle, adoring, dangerous, strong.” She looked at Bob. He was marking the checkered groundcloth with a spoon. “Surely you must’ve felt the same things. He has a magic about him. He steps straight into your heart.”

Bob looked for an exit and asked, “Your middle name is Amanda, isn’t it?”

She looked puzzled but replied that it was.

“I’ve got a sister whose name is Amanda.”

Tim waded in six inches of water. A couple fifty feet east of them was singing gospel hymns. Somewhere a girl was being tickled. Zee uncorked a mustard jar. “Do you have a sweetheart, Bob?”

“I’ve kissed a girl or two, if that’s what you’re getting at.”

“You don’t have a sweetheart though.”

“Nope.” He tapped the spoon against his palm and then set it across a plate. He said, “That’s the one thing that’s been denied me. Otherwise my life’s been a bounty.”

“You’re young yet.”

Bob smiled uncertainly. “You hear people mention being in love. It’s like a sickness I’ve never had.”

Zee stared at Bob sympathetically and simply said, “I know.”

JESSE LOUNGED as he ate and grinned at the sunlight and after their picnic lunch moseyed along the river with Zee, her right arm engaged in his left as he gave names to birds with his pointing finger. Charley put on the blue spectacles that were supposed to keep his identity unknown and galloped to the rope swings with Tim piggy-backed. Bob catnapped with Mary in shade and twenty minutes later opened his eyes to see Jesse squatted beside him. “You’ve got a habit of startling me.

Jesse moved a toothpick in his mouth and asked, “Can I talk with you a minute, Bob?”

Bob said, “I’m just lying here with nothing better to do.” Jesse looked straight ahead. “I’ve got a grapevine of spies; I guess you knew that.”

Bob wasn’t sure what to say. “I guess maybe I didn’t.”

“One of my spies told me you’ve spent a good portion of time in Kansas City lately. Could you tell me what your primary reasons would be?”

“I’ve been making purchases.”

“You haven’t come across Dick Liddil by any chance?”

“Nope.”

“When would you say was the last time you saw him?”

Bob pretended to speculate. “December.”

“That long ago!”

“If you’ve heard otherwise, they’re mistaken.”

“You don’t have any idea where he might be?”

“Actually no. You hear plenty of stories but they contradict each other.”

“He hasn’t given himself up to get that reward?”

“Sorry I can’t be more help to you but I’ve been sorely placed since Christmas—no one drops any good gossip in Richmond; it’s mostly about who’s been tippling or about some boys swiping pigs.”

Jesse seemed to be in agreement. He gave his attention to Charley, who was walking in high grass in sunlight with Tim, his blue spectacles on his nose so that he could see over them and read aloud from a rain-damaged book he must have unearthed by the swings. “ ‘They were ready with their reins between their teeth,’ ” he read, “ ‘a loaded Colt’s revolver in each hand.’ ”

Jesse got up from his squat, jiggling his legs out to get feeling back in them. He frowned and asked, “What sort of garbage is he reading to my boy?”

Charley continued, “ ‘A wild yell from Jesse, and the eight sprang upon the unprepared greasers, and before the first awful fire of Jesse and his clan, half the Mexicans were killed.’ ”

Jesse strode over and Charley smiled hugely at him. “I’m getting to the good part. ‘The miserable Bustenado missed his mark but Jesse, quick as thought, sent a bullet between the Mexican’s shoulders, and he fell upon his horse’s neck, as dead as a bag of sand.’ ” Charley grinned again and showed a book cover that read The James Boys Among the Mexicans. “Someone forgot it over yonder.”

Jesse slapped the man’s cheek with his left hand and the blue spectacles flew. Charley staggered a little and became pale except for the hot pink of the skin where he was struck. Jesse yelled, “Don’t you ever read them lies to my boy again! You understand me? My children are growing up clean!”

“I’m sorry!”

Bob could see water in Jesse’s blue eyes. He said to the Fords, “I’m real angry,” and then gently lifted his sleeping daughter to his shoulder and crooned words of affection as he walked away with Tim.

LATE SUNDAY NIGHT Charley scrunched close to the wall in the sitting room bed. His mouth was so muted by the pillow that Bob could just barely perceive that his older brother was crying. Bob asked what was the matter and Charley said one word: “Scared.”

Bob snuggled close to his brother and curled his left arm around him. “He isn’t going to kill us.”

Charley sighed and shook a minute and scoured his nose with the pillowcase. Once he’d collected himself he said, “Yes he is. We’re going to leave here for Platte City tomorrow and he’s going to shoot us like he shot that conductor at Winston. Maybe he’ll wait till we’re asleep in the woods and then slit our throats like he said about that cashier.”

Bob looked over his shoulder to check the room and then murmured into Charley’s ear, “I’ll stay awake so he can’t.”

Charley rolled to his back and gazed at the ceiling and then glanced at his kid brother. “This was the ninth day, right? And Craig gave you ten? So maybe we’ll get surrounded up here and maybe we’ll go to the bank and when we run out it’ll be a crossfire and maybe fifty guns’ll be shooting every whichway at Jesse and who gives a golly goddamn about the nobody Fords or if you and me get killed in the bargain?”

“You’re imagining things.”

Charley covered his eyes with his arm, respirated great, calming breaths of air, and coughed rackingly. Quiet came to the room again and then he said, “Isn’t going to be no Platte City. That’s Jesse fooling with us.”

Bob considered the notion for a minute and then slipped out of bed and into his clothes. Charley looked at him and asked what he had in mind but Bob merely said in a low voice, “Go to sleep,” and walked through the sitting room, dining room, kitchen, and stepped off the wooden porch into the night. The earth was cold as marble to his feet and the grass stabbed like a broom. He wore gray wool trousers over his longjohns but the chill convinced him to shawl his shoulders with a tattersall quilt that was being aired on the clothesline. He could see a mare asleep on three legs next to the stable—the fourth leg was canted rather coyly, as if a curtsy were coming. The wind in the sycamore branches made a sound like “wish.” He could make out Severance, Kansas. He could smell fruit trees in the way that one can smell a neighbor’s cooling pie. He settled himself on a plain bench under the clotheslines that sagged from the cottage eave. A mangled spoon was in the dirt; a straw doll was in a tin bucket.

He heard the screen door creak and clap shut, heard his brother limp over and stand to the rear of him. He seemed to ponder their predicament, the past, the galaxy. He lowered onto the long bench like a man who weighed six hundred pounds, and Bob saw that it was Jesse.

“So you and me are the nighthawks.”

Bob made no reply.

“Mrs. Saltzman cut out a garden plot here. The Turners say it was a marvel: rabbit wire, noontime shade, clematis on the bean poles. I’ve been lazy about my seedlings.”

“I don’t like to garden; I just like to eat.”

Jesse clutched his trousers and craned his legs into alignment. He said, “Maybe I’ll nail together a Martin box.” He peered at his right knee and his left and rapidly pounded them with his fists. “I’ve got pains in every inch of my body. My ears ring; my eyes are itchy. I’m going to lose my gift of second sight.”

“Do you see future things like they were long gone, or do you just get inklings about what’s to come?”

Jesse showed no inclination to answer. He paused for some time and then asked, “Did you know Frank and I looked for my father’s grave over in Marysville, California?”

“You’ve mentioned that, but not at any length.”

“I could picture the grave and the wooden cross but I couldn’t get the geography right. They said it was cholera that killed him. They might as well’ve said the bubonic plague. You can always tell when it’s Satan’s work.”

“How?”

“Trickery. Empty promises.” Jesse scratched at his skull hair with all his fingers and then scratched at his jawbeard. He rubbed his eyes with his wrists. “You missed the Palm Sunday service.”

“I used to go every week but that was because my daddy put a gun to my head.”

Jesse shut his eyes and recited, “ ‘For it was not an enemy that reproached me; then I could have borne it: neither was it he that hated me that did magnify himself against me; then I would have hid myself from him. But it was thou, a man mine equal, my guide, and mine acquaintance. We took sweet counsel together, and walked unto the house of God in company.’ ”

Jesse said, “A good preacher will match that up with Matthew twenty-six.” He coughed meanly and spat to the right. He squeezed his mouth with his palm. “Sometimes I get so forlorn and melancholy. Do you ever get that way?”

Bob shrugged.

“Do you know what it is you’re most afraid of?”

“Yes.”

“What?”

“I’m afraid of being forgotten,” Bob said, and having admitted that, wondered if it was true. He said, “I’m afraid I’ll end up living a life like everyone else’s and me being Bob Ford won’t matter one way or the other.”

“It isn’t always up to you, Bob. It may not be in the cards for ya.” Jesse looked over to Kansas and leaned on his knees for a minute. “Do you ever get surprised when you see yourself in a mirror? Do you ever find yourself saying, ‘Why do they call him by my name?’ ”

It seemed to Bob that Jesse expected no response.

“You’re wrapped in a ragged coat for your three score and ten and nobody gets to see who’s inside it.”

“It’s getting chilly,” Bob said.

Jesse’s thoughts seemed to fly and he concentrated on something that Bob couldn’t see. “His voice is like a waterfall.”

“Whose voice?”

“If I could stand in it for a second or two, all my sins would be washed away.”

“I honestly can’t follow this conversation.”

Jesse approximated a smile. “Do you know who I’m jealous of? You. If I could change lives with you right now, I would.”

Bob said, “I guess this must be a case of the grass always being greener on the other side of the fence.”

“You can go away right now if you want. You can say, ‘Jesse, I’m sorry to disappoint you, but the Good Lord didn’t put me here to rob the Platte City Bank.’ You can go inside and get your gatherings and begin a lifetime of grocery work. I’m roped in already; I don’t have my pick of things; but you can act one way or another. You’ve still got the vote. That’s a gift I’d give plenty for.”

Bob thought negligently, as a young man might—totally within his body and his own history, without etiquette or any influence other than his hunger and green yearning. He gripped the tattersall quilt at his neck, smelling borax in it. He said, “I don’t know. I’m not acting according to any plan. I’m just getting myself out of spots and pressing for my best advantage.”

“You can’t always make things happen, Bob.”

“Well, like I say, I’m just taking what comes my way.”

Jesse rose up and crimped his fingers over the metal clothesline, sagging a little on it, looking at the ground. “You Fords show your teeth like apes.”

Bob couldn’t imagine where their dialogue was going but the man’s gloom seemed vaguely dangerous, so he decided to go back inside. He threw the tattersall quilt over a raspberry bush and shoved his hands in his pockets. “I’m going to call it a night.”

Jesse was slumped forward dismally, swinging his weight on the clothesline, making the metal hooks complain. He asked, “Why don’t you stay with me a little longer?”

“I’m sort of sleepy, Jess.”

“Go ahead then,” he said.

Bob was perplexed by the man’s despondency. He walked to the screen door and then said, “I appreciate your frankness with me. This has been illuminating. I’m going to ponder all you said.”

Jesse moved off into the darkness. “Don’t make anything out of it,” he said. “I was only passing the time.”

MUCH LATER Bob would remember that he woke at sunrise on April 3rd looking at the racehorse named Skyrocket. Charley was climbing into a rough wool shirt that he wore whenever he worked with the animals. Bob dangled his fingers to the floor and walked them over his gun. Zee was already at the stove and Bob could see steam escape from a covered saucepan in shy phrases of smoke. Tim was in the children’s room annoying his little sister.

Bob would recall that Jesse then came out of the master bedroom and scolded the children for pestering each other when it wasn’t more than seven. He wore the crisp celluloid collar and the dazzlingly white linen shirt that he stole from the Kansas hotel highboy, and he adjusted the silk cravat in a looking-glass that revealed a section of shut door, a chair woven with rushes, a marred wall with the heights of Tim and Mary designated in crayon. Bob slithered from under the covers in order to conceal an erection and struggled his legs into nut brown trousers, then struggled his stockinged feet into boots that were so worn in the heels that his ankles caved out. Charley clomped to the stables via the front door and the screen door clapped off a sinking mist of street dust. Jesse buttoned a black cashmere Prince Albert coat over a vest and over his two crossed holsters and guns. He informed Bob without nastiness that he could stay inside and sleep some more, and he walked out into sunlight just as Zee angrily banged shut the oven door, muttering, “Oh, shoot!”

Bob tucked in a yellow shirt and called, “Is that you making all that smoke?”

He saw Zee flip some burnt cottage biscuits from a blackened baking pan and say to no one, “This ornery stove!” He fingercombed his ginger brown hair in the looking-glass and slipped through gray oven smoke to go out to the privy.

He stepped over puddles that an overnight rain had put in the yard and he closed the privy door behind him. The temperature forecast was eighty degrees and already the April morning seemed as warm and moist as cooking vapors. Mary crouched outside with a coffee grinder that she’d ruined with sand; Tim propelled himself on a rope swing that rasped against a sycamore bough. Bob walked over to the backyard cistern, buttoning his fly, and the cistern pump brayed mulishly when he worked the iron handle. Charley came up from the stables and scraped off manure on a rusted rake that was forgotten in the grass, and though Bob said good morning to him, his only gesture of recognition was to slouch down the slope of the yard a ways and squat for some time inside cigarette smoke.

Jesse caught the swing set and gentled Tim down to a stop and then the two strolled down Confusion Hill for the subscription newspapers. Cold water that was slightly orange splashed into Bob’s lifted white enamel bowl and spotted his trouser cuffs and boots. He brought the water to his face gratefully, as a man might a sweetheart’s fingers, and he imagined without willing it the gruesome fish he’d caught in September. When he looked up Zee was peering at him through the porch screen.

“How much do you want to eat?” she asked.

“Just a smidgen,” Bob said, and got up on his legs. “I’m feeling sort of peculiar.” He pushed Mary in the swing for a while, responding to a two-year-old’s questions, and then grew weary of that, flung her higher than before, and straggled into the front yard, where he leaned over the white picket fence to look down Lafayette Street. Sunlight flashed off the city’s windows. The railroad yards to the west were ceilinged with smoke. The river moved with the slow advancement of blood. He lingered there for five minutes or so, his thumbs cocked by his pockets. He could have been a man at the races, a gambler with money on Skyrocket. Craig and Timberlake would be sitting at breakfast perhaps, making preparations for Tuesday, eating sweet croissants. Craig would enrich his coffee with cream. A crew would be in the freight cars strewing straw for the deputies’ animals.

Bob watched the great man and his child climb the steep ascent of the sidewalk with shoes on their feet and grand aspirations and a common language between them, but Bob figured that only meant they were slightly more intricate animals. It meant they were given more mechanisms than guns. Bob saw Jesse move a cigar in his mouth and squint his eyes from the smoke. He said, “How come you’re looking so interested?”

Bob asked, “Do you think it’s intelligent to go outside like that, so all creation can see your guns?”

Jesse ignored him and threw the cigar so that it sparked and rolled, screwing smoke. And then he rushed his daughter, monstering, catching Mary as she ran squealingly to the screen door and swinging the girl around so wildly her right stockinged foot lost its shoe.

Zee called everyone in to a breakfast that was cooling and Mary hugged her father’s neck as he gracefully walked to the dining room. Tim carelessly threw down the rolled newspapers in the sitting room and climbed up next to his sister’s highchair. Bob slit open a brown paper sleeve and spilled out the Kansas City Times, seeing instantly a story about the arrest and confession of Dick Liddil. Charley slouched into the dining room late, looking meek and afflicted, lying about some complaint with the horses to which Jesse paid scant attention. Bob slipped the newspaper under a shawl and strapped on the gun he had been given, tying the leather holster to his thigh with a string. Zee called Bob again, slightly irritably, saying everything was getting cold, and Bob seated himself across from Jesse, accidentally scarring the chair with his gun.

Zee jellied a biscuit for Mary and mentioned she’d invited a girl from across the street to go shopping with her for Easter clothes that afternoon. She asked Jesse to give her some money and he removed two five-dollar bills from a small roll secured with a rubber band. She asked if Jesse wanted some sandwiches for his journey. She asked if he’d come back for the Holy Thursday services.

Jesse frowned at his six-year-old son, who was staring blankly at the sunshine, woolgathering, his oatmeal spoon in his mouth. “What do you think goes on in that noggin of his?”

“Nothing,” said Charley Ford.

Jesse laughed. “I was referring to his mind, not yours.”

Bob snickered cravenly and Jesse looked askance at him. He then stood from his chair and fetched the newspapers that Tim had abandoned on the sofa, almost missing the Kansas City Times that was incompletely concealed by a shawl. He sat again with solemnity and stirred a spoon in his cup, swirling ghosts from the coffee.

Bob noticed every motion, every physical event: the crease in the man’s brow, the fret in his reading eyes, the stain on a finger from the cigars he smoked. Bob slid the second newspaper around and scanned the items on its front page: legislation and politics, advertisements for curatives and clothes, the outrages visited on a young woman in Memphis, the shedding of innocent blood. A man in Grandview was ruled insane; a farm was lost to incendiaries; it was the twenty-second anniversary of the start of the Pony Express.

Jesse unfastened his Prince Albert coat and snared it over his guns. Tim excused himself from the table with a rasher of bacon in his mouth and Mary climbed down from her highchair after him. Jesse flattened the Kansas City Times over the newspaper he’d finished and lowered his crossed arms to scour the articles. “Hello now!” he said. “The surrender of Dick Liddil.”

Charley said, perhaps too urgently, “You don’t say so!”

Jesse lifted a coffee cup close to his mouth and stared at Bob through the vapors. “Young man, I asked you yesterday and you said you didn’t know anything about Dick.”

“And I don’t.”

Jesse moved his finger down the page, guiding his eyes as he read. “It’s very strange,” he said and made no other comment as he continued to the conclusion. Zee was scraping the children’s breakfast plates in the kitchen and immersing them in soaped dishwater. They thudded together with the wooden sound of a muscular heart pumping blood. Jesse sipped some coffee without looking up from the newspaper. He said, “It says here Dick surrendered three weeks ago.” He glanced at Bob with misgivings. “You must’ve been right there in the neighborhood.”

“Apparently they kept it secret.”

Jesse slumped back in the chair with his fingers knitted over his stomach and glared at Bob and then Charley. “It looks sort of fishy to me.”

Bob said, “If I get to Kansas City soon, I’m going to ask somebody about it.” And then he left the dining room with his right hand on his gun. He raised the Venetian blinds and the screenless sitting room windows and reacquainted himself with the rocking chair, his body fidgeting. Tim hunkered down on the stoop outside, coercing the crank on the coffee grinder. His little sister squatted beside him, pushing her pale dress down between her thighs, stabbing at the earth with a crooked spoon, and repeating, for some reason, “Don’t.”

Jesse retrieved some remedy from the medicine cabinet in the pantry and murmured privately with his wife. Charley walked into the sitting room and remarked on the sultry weather, said the afternoon would be hot as a pistol. He sat on the mattress and looped his holster off the bedpost, looking significantly at Bob as he put it on.

Jesse paused at the sitting room entrance as if to reconsider a scheme and then proceeded across the tasseled green rug with a long linen duster over one forearm, the other cradling packed saddlebags and a folded newspaper that carried a gun. Bob jumped up from the rocker and it reared and rowed, clubbing the floor, until he could still the chair with his hand. Jesse asked, “You two ready?”

And Charley said, “I will be by noon.”

Bob strode over to the hanging straw portfolio, and as he snatched out a children’s book he could feel Jesse glare at his gun. Bob shouldered into the floral wallpaper and vagrantly read to himself the first sentence of chapter one: “The little kitchen had quieted down from the bustle and confusion of midday.” Jesse rammed a raised window sash higher, making the snug fittings moan.

Clouds were shipping in and accumulating and most of the eastern sky was the color of nails. “It’s an awfully hot day,” Jesse James said, and Charley thought so much of his earlier statement that he said once again it was going to be hot as a pistol. Jesse took off his Prince Albert coat and Bob concentrated on the man, stowing Five Little Peppers and How They Grew among some magazines. Jesse folded the fine black coat on the oak bed and then removed a six-button black vest that was extravagantly brocaded with red stitching. Charley shambled over to the screen door to scan Lafayette Street.

Sunlight streaked off Jesse’s two revolvers. He leaned on the windowsill and gazed at the skittish weather. A suspender was twisted once across the back of an ironed shirt that coins of sweat made the color of smoke. He proclaimed in a sentence that seemed composed just for Bob, “I guess I’ll take off my pistols for fear the neighbors will spy them if I walk out into the yard.”

Charley instantly turned from the screen door with vexation in his face and saw his kid brother’s right thumb twitch as Bob lowered his hand to his gun.

Jesse unbuckled the two crossed holsters with their two unmatched revolvers and carefully placed them on the mattress, as if creating some exhibit, and it seemed to Bob that the man was pretending: each motion seemed stressed, adorned, theatrical, an unpolished actor’s version of calm and nonchalance. Jesse lent his attention to the racehorse named Skyrocket and said, “That picture’s awful dusty,” and withdrew from a wicker sewing basket a furniture duster that was made from the blue-eyed feathers of peacocks. He could easily reach the picture by standing, but he skidded the rush-bottomed chair across the rug and climbed onto it as if the floor were inclined and uncertain.

Bob slunk from the wall in order to stand between Jesse and the two revolvers. He shook loose his fingers like a gunfighter and instructed his brother with scared eyes as Jesse stood above them and feathered the walnut frame. Charley winked and the two Fords slipped out their guns. Bob was the speedier and had his .44 extended straight out from his right eye as Charley was still raising his and Jesse appeared to hear the three clicks as the Smith and Wesson was cocked because he slightly swiveled his head with authentic surprise, straying his left hand toward a gun that he’d forgotten was gone.

Then Robert Ford’s .44 ignited and a red stamp seemed to paste against the outlaw’s chestnut brown hair one inch to the rear of his right ear, and his left eyebrow socked into the glassed watercolor of Skyrocket. Gunpowder and gun noise filled the room and Jesse groaned as a man does in his sleep and then sagged from his knees and tilted over and smacked the floor like a great animal, shaking the house with his fall.

He looked at the ceiling, his fingers curled and uncurled, his mouth worked at making words, and the two Ford brothers saw he was dying. Charley leaped out the window and into the yard and as Zee rushed into a room that was blue with smoke, Bob slowly retreated and straddled the sill.

She screamed, “What have you done?” and the boy looked as if he wanted to apologize but couldn’t. Zee knelt and cried, “Jesse, Jesse, Jesse,” and cradled his skull in her apron and smothered his right ear in petticoats that soaked red with his blood. Tim was at the screen door, seeing everything, and Bob was still crouched at the sitting room window, gawking at the man. She asked with anguish, “Bob, have you done this?”

And he answered, “I swear to God that I didn’t.”

The man sighed and grew heavy on her legs. His eyes seemed yellow, his muscles slack; the blood was wide as a table. He made a syllable like “God” and then everything inside him stopped.

Charley skulked inside the cottage to collect the Fords’ two hats and riding coats and to look again at the man they’d shot. He told Zee James, “The pistol went off accidentally.”

Then Charley was outside again and the two Fords ran down Confusion Hill, their coats flying, cutting through yards and down alleys until they achieved the American Telegraph office, whence was sent to Sheriff Timberlake, Henry H. Craig, and Governor Thomas Crittenden an abbreviated message that read: “I HAVE KILLED JESSE JAMES. BOB FORD.”