3

SEPTEMBER–DECEMBER 1881

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

EDGAR JAMES

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

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

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

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

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

“I wasn’t going to mention it.”

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

“Just surprised a little.”

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

“I’ve never been that hungry.”

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

“Such as?”

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

“Me too?” Bob asked.

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

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

“Sister,” said Bob.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Charley winked at his kid brother. “See?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“Chicago’s in Illinois somewheres.”

“I mean: no, I haven’t.”

“You haven’t heard of Chicago?”

Tim shrugged.

“Isn’t no such place as Chicago,” Bob said. “I was just making that up.” The boy looked at him strangely but Bob continued. “You’re on a raft on the Mississippi now and that’s as east as the state of Missouri goes. South. South. Quincy. Alton. St. Louis. Cape Girardeau. The Ohio River marries into the Mississippi and ol’ Miss fattens up and then it’s Kentucky for the blink of an eye, maybe forty miles or so, and Tennessee for another forty, and then you’ve got a skirt along the bottom and it’s called Arkansas, Arkansas, Arkansas. And then lookout, child, you better cover that scalp! It’s Indian Territory! Choctaw, Chickasaw, Cherokee, Creek, and Seminole, maybe a thousand of them yelping and slinging their arrows at you!”

Jesse had sloshed over the bank and scrambled up to the cliff, ripping a maple branch into a stick. He overheard the geography lesson and smiled at Bob with brown tobacco blotting out some teeth. The sun was gone and only an orange glow along Kansas recalled it. Jesse gazed down at the fishing lines and asked if there’d been any nibbles.

“Can’t say I’ve felt even a twitch, Jess.”

Jesse cautioned, “Little rabbits have big ears, Bob.”

“Dave,” Bob corrected. “Could be it’s not night enough yet, Dave.”

Jesse unfolded his pocket knife and whittled with the stick so close his eyes crossed. Blond shavings boated on the water eight or nine feet below them. When the stick was arrowed, he gave it to Tim. “You want to go play?”

The boy slid down the weeds without saying, going down to the water his father had walked in and then flinging the arrow into it. Jesse sighed as he watched the stick navigate the currents out and then he unlidded a mason jar that was not there when last Bob looked. The odor was that of lager beer. Jesse drank and sleeved his mouth and mustache. “You want some?”

Bob swallowed some but tilted the mason jar too much, spilling beer on his chin.

“Good?” Jesse asked.

Bob grinned. “Good as baby Jesus in velvet pants.”

Jesse scowled at the blasphemy but then sat back on an elbow, clicking stones in his palm. “Your people God-fearing, Bob?”

“Oh heavenly days, yes. My daddy’s a part-time preacher.”

“Rich or poor?”

Bob thought about it. “Prosperous, I guess. He could give me plenty of money but he’s got this philosophy that his boys ought to feel some hardships or else they’ll all spoil.”

“A man of principles;” Jesse said.

“People say that about themselves when really they only want to make you unhappy.”

Tim swatted the river with a washed-up board but when Jesse called, “What’re you doing down there?” the boy said he was letting minnows tickle his fingers. Jesse called, “Don’t get yourself all soaked now, you little honyock.” And on second thought, in a voice meant only for Bob, Jesse asked, “You ever meet Zerelda? Mrs. Samuels?”

“Haven’t had the pleasure.”

“The Good Lord really accomplished something. Giant woman; eight feet tall. If she’d been a man she’d be governor now.” Jesse looked for his red socks and rolled them onto his feet without brushing the silt off his ankles and soles. He then lunged his stockinged feet into his high boots and stuffed his gray trouser legs inside. He said, “You ever hear any gossip about my father and Frank’s being two different men?”

“Yes.”

“They say that was the reason my papa went West in the gold rush: he couldn’t support the shame of it. What do you think of a story like that?”

Bob said, “I’m personally more interested in what you think about it.”

Jesse glared at him and in a growl of a voice said, “I think it’s a goddamned lie.”

“I’m with you then; and I won’t hear another word of it if the subject ever comes up.” Bob removed his stovepipe hat and scratched at the circled indentation of his ginger brown hair. “Since we’re telling stories, have you ever heard the one about the James gang robbing this one railroad?”

“You’re not giving me enough clues.”

“It’s a funny story.”

Jesse shook his head in the negative and then raised the mason jar, swallowing a long sentence of the lager beer.

Bob continued, “You see, the James gang is robbing this railroad train like you do, and going through the passenger cars and on board is this Quaker minister or something, some old coot with a long beard and, you know, a mean disposition? You can tell he’s no joy to be around, but he’s got this pinched-up wife with him and she’s shivering with fright and clutching the preacher’s sleeve and so on. You’re sure you haven’t heard this?”

“I would’ve stopped you by now.”

“How’s it go? I’ve gotta get this right. Oh! I guess it’s you. You stand in this railroad coach and everybody’s cowering, of course, and you holler, ‘I’m Jesse James! And here’s what I’m gonna do! I’m gonna grab all your money. I’m gonna grab all your watches and jewelry! I’m gonna grab everything you own!’ The preacher’s wife is cringing now and the old coot’s guarding her and you say, ‘And then I’m gonna go down the aisle and rape all you women!’ ”

Jesse said, “I don’t like the way this story’s headed.”

“Well, everyone knows it’s not true, Jess; it’s just sort of comical. You see, after you say what you do about raping the women, the Quaker ups and says, ‘Surely you wouldn’t rape a preacher’s wife!’ And this is the funny part; his wife gets mad and gives her husband an elbow and says, ‘Shut up, Homer! It’s Jesse’s train. Let him rob it the way he wants to.’ ” Bob’s eyes slanted to Jesse and he saw the man wasn’t laughing. “You don’t think it’s funny?”

“Well, hell, how could I if it isn’t true?”

“Jokes don’t need to be, Jesse.”

“You’re gonna have to explain “why I oughta laugh then.”

Bob said with great impatience, “Why don’t we just forget it,” and instantly felt in jeopardy, for his impudence was plain and Jesse’s countenance was stern and it seemed just possible a boy might find Bob chambered in the river some morning. His hair would float in the water, his body would yeast until his clothes’ buttons popped, an elm blowdown would bash out his eye, and then the river would abandon him on a levee where snails would feel his skin with cold horns and red crawdads would cling to his ankles. He said, “I didn’t mean to sound sharp just then.”

Jesse simply adjusted his jacket sleeves on his arms and said, “I’ve got a good story for you that’s true as a razor. This’ll give you an example of Frank and me putting a man in his place, and it don’t depend upon any prevaricating. Once me and Frank were riding in the countryside and got hungry, so we went up to this farmhouse and asked would this widow lady make us some supper.”

“Oh, that one,” said Bob.

“You’ve heard it?”

“Only about twenty times.”

Jesse was as still as a shut-down machine.

Bob said, “I’d love the chance to hear you tell it, though. I imagine you’ll make it more interesting.”

Jesse resumed, “ ‘I’ll gladly pay you,’ I say, and she said that was all right, we looked like genuine Christians and she’d do us the good turn. Kid, I want to tell you, that was one scrumptious supper. She went all out. But Frank saw she was crying and when he asked why, she said the mortgage was coming due and that the loan manager or whatever was going to be there any minute to repossess the place. And her a poor widow! Can you imagine? Well now, Frank and me, we insist on paying her something; and you know what we gave her?”

“Enough to pay off the mortgage,” Bob said.

“You have heard this one.”

“But no one ever said the supper was scrumptious. This is fascinating.”

“So we gave her what she needed and we go, and on the highway who’s coming our way but the loan manager. He greets us but doesn’t give Frank and me a second thought, he’s that greedy to get hold of that farm. Much to his surprise, of course, she paid him off and in no time he was plodding along the road with his wallet bulging his coat out and his grin a little tighter. And that’s when Frank and me come out of the woods with masks on and steal all our money back.” Jesse laughed uproariously, like a plowboy. He even slapped his thigh.

“And you’re saying that’s a true story.”

“Is!”

“Jesse!”

“You calling me a liar?”

Tim crawled back up from the river, pretending to be something that he was not, and when he approached the two he said matter-of-factly, “I saw your pole dip, Cousin Bob.” And Jesse slipped out of anger into eager regard for their fishing, winding the line around his right hand as he pulled it up to check on Bob’s hook. The smelly mystery compound he’d gobbed on the hook was gone and he charged himself with the responsibility of baiting the snare again, adding to it a smear of tobacco that he wiped from inside his cheek. With that accomplished, Jesse swigged some more lager beer and put his boy in his lap, snuggling his chin beard into the boy’s neck and munching his lips along Tim’s ears in order to make him giggle. He said, “Do you know how to make a fire, Timmy?”

“Yes.”

“Bob’ll say you’re lying if he don’t see it.”

The boy angled forward to glance at Bob. He said, “I can.”

“You go ahead and make one for us. Show Cousin Bob you’re a six-year-old.” Tim got matches from his father and then went into the woods again to gather kindling and rotted logs. Jesse sipped some beer and then covered the mason jar with oiled paper and screwed on the lid. “You remember John Newman Edwards?”

“Newspaper man,” Bob said.

“He’d misbehave himself for two or three weeks at a time; drink himself nearly cross-eyed; and then he’d come back to Kansas City and say, ‘I’ve been to the Indian Territories.’ Always tickled me to hear that.”

“I’ve been to the Indian Territories,” Bob said to get it right.

There was a pause and then Jesse said, “Garfield is dying real gallantly,” and he went on to speak of the published newspaper interviews with Charles J. Guiteau.

On July 2nd President James A. Garfield had strolled into the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad station with Secretary of State James G. Blaine in order to meet a morning train that would take the president to Long Branch, New Jersey, where his wife, Lucretia, was convalescing. They’d crossed a ladies’ waiting room without noticing a deranged evangelist and general miscreant named Charles J. Guiteau who’d spent the preceding three months in pestering them for the Paris consulship, and since June had been preparing to “remove” the Republican president. He crept up behind Garfield, straightened a .44 caliber British Bulldog revolver, and shot the president once in the right of his back, and as the man struggled around and cried out, “My God! What is this?” shot him again in the arm. Guiteau then slipped out of the station but was caught by a policeman, to whom he said, “Keep quiet, my friend, keep quiet. I wish to go right to jail.”

Jesse knew a great deal about Charles J. Guiteau: that he was five feet five inches tall and thirty-nine years old and once claimed his employer was Jesus Christ and Company. He was a swindler, insurance salesman, debt collector, a member of the Illinois bar; he skipped out on hotel bills, published a book on religion called simply The Truth, and had assigned his collected papers and .44 caliber pistol to the State Department library.

Jesse James, Jr., would grow up to be a good-looking man but he was a grouchy, ill-favored boy with ash blond hair that spiked up from his scalp and a mouth that was always pouting. But he put together fire sticks with some proficiency and was squatting by his woodstack, guiding a match along some kindling in a grandfather way, as his father continued to speak about the July assassination and Bob attended to what he was saying like a paid companion.

Tim plopped down in his father’s lap and asked Bob, “Do you see the fire?”

“It’s really burning, isn’t it?”

The boy said, “I made it myself.”

“Hup?” Jesse said. “I just felt something. Might’ve had a nibble.”

Bob gingerly cupped his fingers around the bamboo pole and gazed down into the night-blackened water. The moon was out and the evening was cooling. Tim threw a rock and the river glunked and Jesse said, “Don’t do that, son. You’ll scare all the fishes away.”

“Daddy, I’m boring.”

Jesse laughed and said, “You mean, you’re bored.”

“Yes.”

Jesse hugged the boy to him with his right arm. “Maybe a fish will come and you can get all excited.”

“I don’t like fishing.”

“Sure you do. I do. You must.”

The boy shrugged and sank into the man’s wool jacket. Bob unscrewed the mason jar and swallowed the lukewarm bottom inch of beer. The river was the only noise.

Jesse said, “You know what we are, Tim? We’re nighthawks. We’re the ones who go out at night and guard everything so people can sleep in peace. We’ve got our eyes peeled; no one’s going to slip anything past us.”

“I’ve got something!” Bob said.

“You sure?”

“It’s heavy!” Bob had whipped up the bamboo pole at the first twitch and then jumped to his feet, bending the tip so low it made a parabola.

Jesse sidled next to him and clearly struggled with the temptation to grab the pole from Bob’s grip. “Don’t horse it, kid. Bring it up easy.”

There was no reel on the pole, so Bob stepped on the bamboo and tugged the fishing line up with his right hand, looking over the cliff into the river but getting no sight of his catch. He could hear it thrash out of the water and he began hauling the weight up with both hands and with great strain heaved onto the river bank a gruesome fish that seemed overdue for extinction. It was orange in the firelight and round as a dog and over its eyes were crimson feelers that moved like thumbs on its skull. Tim backed into his father’s leg but Jesse crouched close to examine the catch. “God damn it, but that’s an ugly thing.”

The fish seemed unperturbed even though cruelly hooked in the mouth. Its teeth meshed and unmeshed with a click, its red tail and gill wings undulated, and its frosted blue eye stared with calm accusation at the fishermen until Jesse grew disgusted and said, “Kill him, kid.” And Bob did as he was told, taking a burning stick from the fire and stabbing it into the fish over and over again until Jesse said, “That’s enough!” and then looked at Bob as if he’d been given a sign and would now act accordingly.

BOB WAS SENT AWAY cordially the next day, just as he knew he would be, with a goodbye from Jesse but nothing from Zee beyond what good manners demanded. It was forty miles to Martha Bolton’s farm from Kansas City and it was already noon by the time he attained Liberty, where he watered his common horse at a trough and sank a dipper in a water pail outside a dry goods store. But as he lifted the dipper he viewed himself in the store window and was discouraged by the picture of a scroungy boy in a ridiculous stovepipe hat that was dented and smudged, in an overlarge black coat that was soiled and stained and plowed with wrinkles and cinched at his waist by a low-slung holster. He thought he looked goofy and juvenile, so he went inside the store and cruised the aisles.

A gentleman’s clothes then were generally English: Prince Albert suits, greatcoats with caped shoulders, knee-length frock coats and knee-high Wellington boots into which pin-striped pants legs were stuffed. Men wore bowlers, derbies, fedoras, slouch hats, and short-crowned, wide-brimmed felt hats that were cooked stiff as boaters and were worn tilted back on the head so that a pompadour showed. Robert Ford was not yet extraordinary in his clothes and at the dry goods store selected a fine white shirt and a starched white collar that could be attached with a stud, white underwear with wooden buttons that ran down its middle, and a heather green suit with lapels that were abbreviated so they could be fastened nearer the throat than has been the fashion since. And he crowned his head with a black bowler hat that was ribboned with black silk, a hat that suited a boulevardier but did not particularly suit Robert Ford.

The store owner stacked the bundles and scratched their prices on a newspaper and totaled them after licking his pencil. “You come into some money, is that it?”

“You might say that.”

“Do you mind if I ask how you got it, being’s you’re so young?”

“I can’t see that it’s any of your business.”

The store owner tore off a long sheet of brown paper and folded it around the bundles with a great deal of noise. “I’d just like to know out of curiosity. Maybe I could get into your line of work and buy myself a year’s clothes in one afternoon.”

“Only thing necessary is a great aunt who loves her nephew to pieces.”

“Inheritance. I see.”

Bob put his finger on the twine intersection so that the store owner could make a knot. “You were probably thinking I got the cash like the James gang would. Am I right or wrong?”

The store owner leaned his arms over the counter and winked. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate the business.” He looked out the window as Bob rode off and then he crossed to a livery stable, where he talked to Sheriff James Timberlake.

MRS. MARTHA BOLTON rented the Harbison farm in 1879, just after becoming a widow, and she made a good income by giving rooms and meals to her brothers, Charley, Wilbur, and Bob, in exchange for chores and fifteen dollars per month. The wood frame house was two storeys high, the roof was buckled, an elm tree raked the shingles in storms. White paint blistered and scaled from the boards, oiled paper was tacked over the broken windows, the road door was nailed shut and a calico skirt insulated the cracks of the sill and sides. Martha raised chickens that nested under the porch and cows that watered at a wooden tank near a windmill. Elias Capline Ford ran a grocery store in Richmond, but mowed and maintained the agriculture on weekends. Wilbur, a brother two years older than Bob, was the enormous and morose hired hand and he lived a secret life in a room that clutched the earth brown barn.

When Bob arrived a black surrey sat in the weeds, a barn cat licking its paw on the surrey’s seat, and a number of horses drowsed in a rickety limb corral in which straw scattered on the wind. Dick Liddil was at the yard swing with Bob’s niece, Ida, twisting the slat seat until the raveled ropes squashed down on her hips. He released the seat and she twirled, squealing, her auburn hair flying out, and Dick fell backward and admired the girl. Wood Hite stood on the roofless kitchen porch, his fists on his hips, stern as John the Baptist. He called, “You’re gonna make her sick! She’s gonna upchuck, you don’t watch out!”

Dick ignored Wood and rose to cuff the girl’s dress so that it bloomed and revealed her thighs. She wailed unconvincingly, “You’re not supposed to peek, Dick!”

“But you’re so pretty! I can’t help myself!”

Bob hollered hello to Dick but the man was inattentive. Wood slammed the kitchen door behind him. Bob rode into a barn stable and had removed most of his tack before he saw his brother Elias on his back under a borrowed McCormick reaper that was clotted with weeds.

“Howdy do!”

Elias smeared grease from his brow, a screwdriver in his left hand. “Here to work, Bob?”

“Well, I’ve been on the road and—”

“Didn’t think so,” his brother said, and continued with the machine.

Bob clomped into the farmhouse, saw Wood on the sofa frowning at no one in particular, and heaved the clothes bundle onto Martha’s bed downstairs. She and Clarence Hite and Charley sat in the kitchen at a round oak table that was wide as a pond. Clarence slouched in a chair with his socked feet on an upended basket and sawed at warts on his hands with a paring knife. Blood trickled down to rags that were tied around his wrists. Charley slumped over the table with his chin on his thumbs, his sunken eyes closed, his boots hooked around the rear legs of the chair as he listened to Martha read about him from an astrological almanac.

Bob said, “Howdy!” but there was no response.

Martha read: “July ninth. ‘Diligence, tact, a keen sense of responsibility, and a capacity for detail are your dominant traits. Your sense of duty is strong. You have poise and meet every situation calmly and resourcefully. Home means much to you in your daily existence.’ ”

Bob said, “Howdy!” a second time, but it appeared that snubbing the last-born was a custom his siblings still kept. Bob snuck over behind Martha as she distributed her long reddish hair away from her cheeks, and he idiotically pulled her apron bow through the slats of the chair. Martha fetched the ties with a nuisanced look at her kid brother, and with a smile as wide as a kazoo, Bob said, “I’m finally home!”

Martha riffled the almanac and said, “I’m real glad, Bob.”

Clarence said, “Read the birthday sayings for Jesse James.”

And Bob asked, “Do you want to know where I’ve been?”

Clarence said, “Read Jesse’s birthday.”

Bob uncinched his cartridge belt and holster and clattered them onto a counter. He smiled. “I’ve been to the Indian Territories.”

Martha asked, “What day was Jesse born on, Bob?”

“September fifth, eighteen forty-seven.” He swiveled a chair around and sat on it and scowled at Clarence Hite’s slashed fingers and the blood that cross-hatched his hands. “What are you doing, Clarence?”

“Skinning off warts.”

Martha read, “September fifth. ‘You are a person of quick and rash judgment, violent moods, and vast enthusiasm. Temper your emotions with poise and self-control. You are lively, always active, and fond of pleasure and the society of friends.’ ”

Clarence said, “That isn’t Jesse.”

Charley said, “Why, I was about to say the opposite! That’s him like he was sitting in that chair and sipping Doctor Harter’s Iron Tonic.”

Bob said, “Read mine.”

The girl, Ida, had come in from swinging and she moved over to the round oak table with an apple in her hand, the red peel corkscrewing from the pulp. She looked down with consternation and said, “Clarence! What—”

He interrupted to say he was skinning warts off, and Charley said, “He’s about twelve shy of a dozen in the smarts department, Ida. He’s about a half-bubble off level.”

Bob said, “Read January thirty-first, eighteen sixty-two.”

Martha flicked several pages without care about whether she tore the sheets. “For some reason I thought you were January twenty-ninth.”

“No. That’s Zerelda Samuels, Jesse’s momma. Eighteen twenty-five.”

The congregation in the room all looked at Bob strangely. Charley sniggered and then said, “Isn’t he something?”

Bob justified himself by saying, “I don’t try to remember those things; I just do.”

“January thirty-first,” Martha read, and Bob rocked forward so that the chair back rubbed the oak table. “ ‘You are kind, generous in judgments of others, and possess a discerning, artistic temperament. You are not afraid of hard work,’ ” (Charley hooted) “ ‘yet are easily disheartened by obstacles and temporary failures. Be firm in your resolves and keep trying.’ ”

Bob took the almanac from Martha and said, “How come mine is the only one that’s negative?”

“Generous,” Martha said.

“Just that.”

“Artistic,” she said.

“You bet,” Charley said. “Bob can’t make the ends of a circle meet and he’s supposed to be artistic.”

Bob grinned and said, “I can’t even draw flies.”

Wood Hite clomped in from the sitting room. “How come you all are in the kitchen chatting, and I’m all by myself?”

Martha said, “You old stick-in-the-mud! What do you expect? Always fuss-budgeting around, telling people what they can and can’t do.”

Robert Woodson Hite was a man in his late twenties who was so crotchety and orthodox that he seemed almost elderly and was known among the James gang by the nickname “Grandfather Grimes.” His mother had contributed many of the James genes to his physical characteristics and he looked more brother to Frank than Jesse did—the same large ears, the same anteater nose, the same scorn and malevolence in his scowls. Martha had spurned his affections, so he pursued her daughter, but Ida was too young to be more than perplexed by his attentions, thus he’d spent most of the afternoon in a pout.

But Bob Ford rocked back in his chair and experimented one more time. “Wood?” he said. “I’ve been to the Indian Territories, Wood.”

Wood was in a mope. He dully asked, “How was it?” and frowned at Clarence’s wart work.

Bob couldn’t think of a sassy answer. He thumped his chair forward and said, “About like you’d expect.” He stood from the table. “Guess I’ll go get myself duded up. These clothes are a little rancid.”

And Wood said, “I’m in that room too, Bob. Don’t mess up my things.”

Bob sneaked from the overcoat a cigar butt smoked on September 7th after the Blue Cut robbery and then he scurried up the stairs to a room with twin beds and a cot in it. The cot was against an east wall that was covered with the corset advertisement pages from newspapers and Wood’s razor, comb, toothbrush, and toothpowder were laid out at the foot of the cot on his folded green blanket as if it were a toiletries salesman’s display. The twin bed next to the mullioned north window was Charley’s, the mating bed was Bob’s, a slat bed with a duck feather mattress that lumped like melons as he slept. Close to the closet door was a lady’s white dresser and screwed to it was an oval dresser mirror where Bob could watch himself practice moves and feints he hoped to use, veering left and fanning his thumb like a gunslinger’s hammer, blowing muzzle smoke from his index finger.

Bob kicked under his bed with his foot and hooked out a shoebox. He sat on his mattress with the box in his lap, removed the lid and clamped it against his neck with his chin. He rolled the cigar butt inside the white handkerchief with the cock-eyed holes cut into it, and poked it into a corner. He squirmed his boots off and flung off his month-old clothes until all he wore was a nasty union suit, then he took on loan a towel and cake of Ivory soap and a tile brush from Ida’s pink bedroom across the hall, and he crept downstairs and across the cold earth to the cattle lot and broad water tank.

Two calves stared with worry as he stripped off his underwear and they trotted six feet when he shooed them. Scum floated on the water but rocked away when he washed his hand across the surface. He lifted a snow white leg and sent it into cold water, then crashed over into the tank with such noise Martha was at the kitchen window when he stood, catching his breath. She smirked at his nakedness, so he lowered and rotated. His neck, wrists, and ankles were black in the creases and murked with road dust and wood smoke and his skin was reddened wherever he scoured with the tile brush. A breeze puckered the water and cast goose pimples over his back. He bent over to rinse soap from his hair and shook water like a hound. The calves backed a little and to terrify them more he smacked the water so that a clear sheet curved over the tank and tattered and tore apart in the air. And then he noticed an amused Dick Liddil standing as close as a tailor. He was hatless and his blond hair straggled in the wind.

“How long you been there?”

“Just now arrived. Did I miss much?”

Bob stalked the Ivory soap cake on the water. “Not unless you’ve never seen a man wash his dirty carcass before.”

Dick said, “Hear you’ve been to the Indian Territories.”

Bob scrubbed an elbow as if that could shift the conversation elsewhere.

But Dick continued, “It’s all anyone can talk about.”

Bob checked his other elbow. “Don’t try to fish me because I won’t hook.”

“Is that what the Indian Territories do? Make you turn over a new leaf?”

Bob swished his hands underwater and reexamined his nails. “That territories business is one of Jesse’s stories, is all.”

“You’ve got a big pecker for being such a little squirrel.”

“Is that what you come over here to see?”

Dick bent for the towel and some good nature slid from his face. He was perhaps five feet seven, an inch shorter than Bob, and twenty-nine years old. He grew a comma of light brown hair on his lower lip and his combed mustache was curled with wax so that he looked a Southern cavalier, and he considered himself a ladies’ man in spite of a right eye that strayed toward his cheek, the result of a childhood accident with a stick. He tossed the towel at Bob’s nose and nibbled his mustache as Bob rubbed his hair wild. “Your brother said Jesse kept you on in Kansas City some extra days. What was the reason?”

Bob covered his face with the towel as his mind motored a second or two. “Well, I’m not at liberty to say exactly. I will confess we had ourselves an adventure or two, the like of which you’ll never experience, but as for details and whatnot, that would be confidential.”

Bob straddled the tank and then hopped to the dirt. Drops of tank water pocked the earth where the cattle had churned it soft. Bob swatted the dust from his union suit and started to climb into it but Dick said, “Why don’t you burn that instead,” and Bob bunched it and surrounded himself with the towel.

Dick said, “Let me ask you this: did Jesse mention that me and Cummins were in cahoots?”

“Is that so?”

Dick smiled. “Oh dear. I’ve went on and said too much.”

“Who else is partners with you two?”

“You’ll just go and squawk about it to Jesse.”

“Ed Miller?”

“He’ll cut our throats if he finds out. You don’t know him like I do. You do Jesse dirt, you connive behind his back, he’ll come after you with a cleaver.”

“He can be spiteful, can’t he?”

“Ho. You’re darn tootin’.”

Bob cleaned between his toes with the towel and said, “Don’t see why he’d give a dang since he and Frank’ve called it quits and scattered the James gang hither and yon.”

Dick assayed Bob’s countenance for clues about what he understood or withheld but saw neither cunning nor deception. “Boy, you are slow as peach mold, you know that? Tucker Bassham’s already gone for ten years and Whiskeyhead Ryan’s in jail; soon as one or the other feels the urge he can give the government all he knows about Jesse and then go out on the street scot-free. Jesse don’t want us giving ourselves up and he don’t want us getting caught and he don’t want us gathering loot except if he’s in charge.”

The two heard a gate creak and saw big Wilbur strew a shock of garden corn stalks into a feed trough next to the barn. He doused the stalks with salt water from a tea kettle in order to lure the milk cows, and then seemed inclined to visit his shivering younger brother. But Bob shook his head in the negative and Wilbur changed his mind and maundered across the yard to the kitchen, banging the tea kettle with his knee. It was near dusk and the weather had cooled and Bob wanted a coat, but instead he asked, “So what’re you three cahoots cooking up?”

“Don’t know that I should say.”

“Much loot in it?”

“Thousands and thousands of dollars.”

“I don’t want to wheedle the dang news from you, Dick.”

“How about let’s leave it a mystery and then we won’t neither one of us regret our little chat.”

Bob clamped the tile brush with his teeth and crossed his eyes at Dick in a measure of exasperation, then clutched the towel around himself and reached down for his holster. Dick pinned it with his boot. “Let me carry your six-gun for you, Bob.”

Because of the brush in his mouth, Bob’s “All right” came out “Awri.” And he had taken no more than two strides toward the house when he felt Dick cuddle to him with the cold revolver insisted under the towel and blunt against his scrotum. Bob let the brush drop and shrank a little from the ice of the nickel barrel. He said, “Feeling lonely, are you, Dick?”

“You and me, we horse around and josh each other with lies and tomfoolery, but now and then we need to get down to brass tacks. Which is: you so much as mention my name to Jesse, I’ll find out about it, you better believe that. And then I’ll look you up, I’ll knock on your door, and I will be mad as a hornet, I will be hot.”

“You be careful with that iron.”

Dick removed the revolver and smacked it into Bob’s leather holster. He walked beside Bob. “You know where I stand on these matters and that’s all there is to it. We can be friendly as pigs from now on.”

“Could be I’ll never see Jesse again.”

Dick drew the screen door wide for Bob and restricted it with his shoulder as he pried his boots off on a mud-caked iron jack. He said, “Oh no. I’ve got a hunch about it. Jesse will come a courtin’ Ed and Jim and me, and then he’ll find himself in the neighborhood and call on them two Ford brothers. Jesse don’t miss much. He has a sixth sense.”

Inside, cooking smells maneuvered through the house: cow liver, sweet potatoes, stewed onions, cabbage—scents that were as assertive as colors. Dick moved sock-footed into the kitchen, bumped Clarence aside, tendered Martha’s rump with his hand and removed it before she could skirt from him, and spoke heartily to the assembled. Bob went to his sister’s bedroom, where he ripped the brown shop paper from his clothes and dressed in his new white underwear. Over Martha’s chiffonier was a square mirror that he could tilt to admire himself from toe to topknot, and he’d just noted his cowlicked, straw-wild, ginger brown hair when an intuition sickened him and he rushed the stairs to the room overhead, where Wood and Charley were rooting through his mementoes. The shoebox was crushed, newspaper clippings skidded on the floor with each wind puff, everything he’d stolen or saved was sinking shadowed cups in his soft pillow: a compass and protractor encased in a box of blue velvet; a green tin of playing cards missing only the three of clubs, once used by a Mr. J. T. Jackson at Ed Miller’s Thursday poker game; an item that was short as a thumb and wound in a linen handkerchief; a barkwood pocket knife with two blades and an awl, filched from Jesse’s stepbrother, John; a magnifying glass; brittle licorice that no one could chew; a sardine can that clattered when Wood shook it; a bag sachet that smelled of lavender.

Bob shouted in a juvenile voice, “You two have some nerve!”

Wood looked at him with more consternation than guilt. “What is this junk?”

Charley said, “Thievings; isn’t that right, Bob.” He was at the nightstand drawer, stirring his finger among yellowed book pages and tattered newspaper columns that were knitted together with shirt pins. His brother bodied Wood aside and gleaned the articles on the bed as Charley peered at a Civil War photograph and skittered it into the drawer. “This ain’t Jesse.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Never wore no mustache; never was anywheres near a cannon.”

“I can’t even calculate what I’m lookin’ at,” said Wood.

“Ever since he was a child, Bob’s collected whatsoever he could find about the James brothers. Got himself a little museum in this room.”

Bob rammed the nightstand’s drawer closed. “Next time you snoop around up here, you’d better strap on a shootin’ iron.”

Charley showed his buck teeth when he smirked. “You can see how scared I am.”

Bob scowled at Wood and said, “You too, Wood Hite. You cross me again and I’ll put a bullet through your head.”

“Now is that any way to talk?” Charley asked.

But Wood simply extended his fingers to Bob’s chest and disdainfully flicked a wooden button on Bob’s union suit and Bob sat on the mattress as if he’d been muscled backward. Wood sneered, “You better recollect who my cousin is. You seem to’ve misremembered that Jesse loves me like the Good Book. Jesse’s my insurance. You can play like you’re a dangerous person with people at the grocery store, but don’t you misremember who you’ll be accounting to if I so much as have my feelings hurt. I’d be gooder than you’ve been to me if I was in your shoes.”

Martha climbed a stair riser and called. “Do I have to yell suwee?”

Charley said, “Why don’t everybody make up and be pleasant for once? Why don’t we pass the evening like pleasant human beings?”

IT WAS THE EVENING of September 19th and President Garfield was on the New Jersey shore, fighting chills and nausea as surgeons talked about his degeneration and newspaper correspondents smoked cigarettes on the seaside lawn. An aneurysm that had developed over a ruptured artery apparently collapsed at about ten o’clock, for the president woke from sleep, complaining of an excruciating pain close to his heart. And at 10:35 p.m. James A. Garfield died.

Perry Jacobs stopped by the Harbison place at noon on the 20th to pass along that telegraphed news and he sipped coffee with Martha and Bob as Wood Hite and Dick Liddil packed for a trip east to Kentucky. When Dick came downstairs with his coat and bags, Martha kissed him on the lips and whispered something to his ear. He smiled and said, “Oh, goodness! Maybe I’ll change my mind.” But then Wood was behind Dick and bumping him toward the door and after some speedy farewells they were off.

They rode east sullenly, rarely speaking, rocking on their horses. Wood read a penny newspaper four inches from his nose under the brim shade of his hat; Dick counted crows and chewed sunflower seeds and watched the geography snail by. Brittle weeds slashed away from the horses; children clattered down cornrows with gunnysacks after school, jerking orange ears from the stalks; a young brakeman in a mackinaw sat on a freight car with a slingshot that knocked on far-off barn doors. “Cecil?” someone called out. It took them a week to reach St. Louis, where Dick caroused with someone named Lola who danced on a grand piano. Then the two ramped up onto a Mississippi River barge and worried throughout the long slide south to Cairo. The outlaws couldn’t swim and their water fright contaminated the animals so that they reared and bucked and showed their teeth with each crabbed movement on the current.

Then as the two outlaws crossed southwest Kentucky from Cairo, Wood began nagging and carping at Dick for his pettiness, his chicanery, and his philandering with Martha, pushing on to an imaginary problem with the divvy at Blue Cut. It was Wood’s contention that Dick stole one hundred dollars from his grain sack in the second-class coach and that he’d never turned it over to Frank when they apportioned the loot afterward. But that was all a smokescreen for his trepidation that Dick would try to romance Wood’s stepmother, Sarah, who was known to be susceptible to passionate attentions.

Wood’s father was Major George V. Hite, once the richest man in Logan County, Kentucky. He owned a grocery store, a mansion, and six hundred acres eleven miles south of Russellville, close to the Tennessee border, and was said to be worth one hundred thousand dollars when just one dollar represented a man’s daily wage. But he’d invested in the commodities market and lost so much on tobacco and cotton that he filed for bankruptcy in 1877. His first wife, Nancy James Hite, died a year later and he was sundered. After a suitable period of mourning, however, he began to consort with and court Sarah Peck, who was referred to by a newspaper reporter as “the pertest and prettiest widow in all this whole country.” And yet the community was scandalized by their eventual engagement, and the Hite clan was incensed, for Sarah was considered carnal and licentious and was even rumored to have been enjoyed by Jim Cummins in the course of an Easter visit. When Major Hite married the widow, most of his children left the mansion in anger, but the James gang would return whenever they needed seclusion and Jim Cummins made a second career of boasting that he’d tampered with Sarah in a pantry as pork chops burned in a skillet. And by the time Wood skidded the main gate aside and rode onto the Hite property, his case against Dick was so repeatedly and tempestuously made that the two were not speaking at all and only Dick’s promise not to toy with her feelings kept him from being prohibited from the grounds.

Beautiful thoroughbred horses milled about on the green pasture, colts dashed along the fence and cut away for no particular reason. Two ex-slaves threshed in a golden field a quarter-mile off, a black woman pinned laundry on a clothesline, and Mrs. Sarah Hite was weeding among the withered remains of a vegetable garden, five acorn squash sacked in her apron. One rolled out and dropped to the earth when she waved.

Wood said, “She eats men alive.”

Dick licked sunflower seeds from his palm and never paid attention to her; nor did he look at Sarah much at supper when she sat next to her emaciated husband, speaking wifely courtesies into his black ear trumpet. And because his shyness and silence were beginning to show, Dick leaned over his pot roast and asked, “You cook this, ma’am?”

She shook her head and said, “I’ve got a nigger woman.”

Hite inclined toward his wife with the trumpet. “Hmmm?”

“Dick asked if I cooked this.”

“Did you?”

“No.”

Major Hite picked up Sarah’s white hand, which was wristed with lace, and showed it to the assembled like a lovely greeting card. “You boys ever seen such dainty nubbins?” He grinned at her red-faced resentment and said, “Sarah’s my plump little plum.”

Dick looked at his knife and fork and Wood said, “She knew what he was like when she married him.”

After dessert the Hites and Dick repaired to the broad porch, where they were seated on chairs that the butler, John Tabor, skidded across the floor. The talk was dull and void of thought, consisting almost entirely of observations that were manifestly true—the railroads make money going each way; it’s no fun being sick; sometimes you don’t know you’ve eaten too much until you get up from the table. At eight-thirty the old man stood with pain and yawned until his body shuddered and said, “Morning comes awful early.” But Sarah said she wasn’t sleepy and stayed with a wicker rocker and embroidered daisies on a kitchen hot pad as the men chatted—Wood and Dick and George Hite, Jr., the grocery store manager, who was grotesquely hunchbacked and lame. Wood prevailed upon Dick to sing Confederate Army ballads and Dick complied in a tenor voice that was so tragic and piercing that Sarah momentarily put down her needlework. Then a stillness came and there was only the creak of the chairs and the Hite brothers retired, and though Wood scowled at his young stepmother, she obstinately remained in her rocker with her stitching, a squat candle between her black, buttoned shoes, a silver thimble clinking whenever she drove the needle.

Sarah was buxom and broad as a stove and was considered voluptuous. Her eyes were bright blue, the sort that can seem a mosaic of silver and white, and her hair was the color that was then called nut brown, and it curtained her cheeks as she concentrated on the flower’s yellow disk.

Finally, Dick said, “I guess we’re the night owls, you and me.”

She simpered but did not look up. “I’m glad.”

“Oh?” Dick asked, as if he were Clarence. “How come?”

She made an ambiguous motion with her shoulders and smiled at her shoes. “I could listen to you sing and carry on until sunrise. You have a real pleasant disposition; and you’re interesting to look at; and, I don’t know, you sort of make me warm all over.”

“I’m what they call a worldling.”

“Well, I knew there had to be a name for it.”

“You and the Hite family don’t get along, if I’m to trust Wood and his version of the situation.”

She let her hands and sewing sink in the navy blue lap of her dress. Orange candlelight raised and lowered on her face and she tucked her bottom lip with her teeth. “We hate each other like poison, if you want to know the truth. Most of the Hites wouldn’t spit on me if I was on fire.”

Dick never missed even the most concealed insinuation. He said with a wink of his skewed right eye, “They say when a woman catches fire you’re supposed to roll her around on the ground and cover her with your body.” And Sarah laughed so loudly she clamped her mouth, and then called him a naughty tease and said he tickled her to such an extent her cheeks were burning up. And then Wood was at the screen door in a nightshirt, his hair as sprigged as a houseplant. “Isn’t it just about bedtime?” he asked, and Dick kissed Sarah’s dainty nubbins as he exited for the second-floor bedroom.

Dick took off his boots and clothes and tucked himself under the bedsheet. He wacked the pillow, he rustled and stirred, he announced that he’d drunk too much coffee. He saw Wood in the bunk across from him as he arose in his longjohns and woolen socks. Wood’s eyes glared at him. “I need to visit the privy something terrible,” Dick said.

What he did was sneak down the first-floor hallway and touch the master bedroom door two inches inward to see Major George Hite alone in the room, puttering a snore. Dick did not allow the screen door to clap as he went outside. He walked around the rocking chair and across a cold lawn to a two-hole outhouse in back. The board walls showed interior candlelight at each severance and crack. Dick paused and looked around at the night, then slid into the outhouse and shut the door carefully behind him.

The candle was tilted in a tin cup that was nailed below a small side window and Sarah sat next to it, prim as a child, her dress hiked up and collected like laundry, her pale thighs squeezed and puckered a little with fat, her ankles thin above her shoes. He could see her blush and her downcast eyes were a maiden’s, but she seemed less shocked than amused. She said, “This is embarrassing.”

“You can go ahead and do your duty; I don’t mind.”

“Well now, I’ve sort of got stagefright with a strange man in the commode with me.”

“You look awful pretty.”

“Do I?”

“I’ve never seen such well-shaped limbs.”

She glanced fleetingly at the bent pronouncement at his crotch and then at his chill blue eyes. “Is Wood awake?”

“Just me.”

She contemplated her knees for a moment and then blew out the candle. She rose with her navy blue dress still bunched at her waist and shyly moved toward Dick. She said, “I bet you thought I was a lady.”

DICK LIDDIL stole into the house at eleven o’clock, crawled up the stairs so that the footboards wouldn’t creak, and saw that Wood’s bunk was empty. He reclined on the mattress for a minute or two, contemplating causes and effects, then sat up and removed his revolver from its scabbard and slid it under the woolen blanket like something pleasurable. And he awoke at sunrise to the calm voice of Wood Hite in middle sentence: “—moonlight and held a conversation with myself over what I should and shouldn’t do. Should I blow the sidewinder to kingdom come? Should I chop his perty face into hash? Maybe I could cut his oysters off like a steer.”

He sat on the bunk across from Dick, his eyes pouched and green with sleeplessness, his nose colossal beneath the strip of daylight allowed by a window shade. Dick’s pistol had somehow been fished from its place and was squashed under Wood’s thigh. Wood continued, “But I took into account our months together on the wrong side of the law and what I come up with is you and me should duel; and may the best man win.”

“You’re making this more grievous than you oughta, Wood.”

Wood smacked him with a pillow. “The honor of the entire Hite family is at stake!”

So the two accordingly stood back to back on the cold, dew-white lawn, revolvers raised like ear contraptions, Dick in his longjohns and boots. Wood created gentlemen’s rules for the duel as Dick kidded and negotiated and finally counseled Hite about the jeopardy to his very being that was forthcoming. Nevertheless, Wood counted out numbers in a stately, funereal measure and the two marked each word with a stride, greening the grass with their boot tracks. But Dick was a man who left nothing to chance; not only did he angle toward a broad ash tree as he walked, but he turned at nine instead of ten and fired at Wood’s left ear.

Wood ducked in reaction to the gunshot and the sizzle of a miss that veered wide of his skull, then he crouched and spun around to see the green lawn in streaks that slewed toward the ash and a flicker of yellow hair next to the gray bark. He clutched at his trigger and the revolver jumped so violently it sprained his wrist and a chunk of ash tree exploded. Dick bent out and shot at Wood a second time—his arm kicked up, there was a noise akin to a window that has crashed down in its sash, blue gunsmoke ballooned and then dwindled, and another noise like the snare of a saw cut the air near Wood’s neck.

The gunpowder noise surprised Wood’s relatives and servants from sleep and they rushed down the hallway to the screen door, closing robes around their nightshirts and nightgowns, as Dick discharged his last round and crackled branches in a woodrow next to the road. He snapped the hammer into three detonated cartridges, saw the Hites behind the screen door, and ran to them in the clomping, clumsy way of a cowhand unused to his legs as Wood shot at his back twice, neglecting to lead Dick each time.

Dick struck the last riser on the stairs with his toe and walloped into a slide across the porch. Major Hite flattened his nose to the screen as he hollered, “Here now! Stop this! Wood? Wood! I won’t have any gunplay on my property! I’ve told you a thousand times.”

Dick slithered toward the old man’s bare feet and Wood shot another time. It shattered a chair strut and nailed a dark hole in the windowsill. Major Hite stamped down on a throw rug and yelled, “Wood! You listen to me! No more!”

Wood looked down the revolver muzzle and clicked the chamber around. “That was my last bullet anyways.” He eyed the revolver at a bird feeder. “Something must be wrong with the sight on this thing.”

George Hite, Jr., was bent next to his father. He said, “You’ll notice I wasn’t in on it, Daddy. Don’t even own a shooting iron.”

Major Hite looked down at the man cowering near his white calves. “What’s the reason for this ruckus? Huh?”

Dick saw Sarah slink over to her husband, pink slippers on her feet and a patchwork quilt shut around her. Dick arose and said, “Me and Wood, we woke up on the wrong side of the bed this morning, is all.”

Major Hite showed no signs of hearing Dick; he merely waited for the man’s mouth to stop moving and then said, “You know what? You’ve worn out your welcome, young fellow.”

DICK LEFT AT ONCE and rode north as far as Russellville, where he rented a room with a concealed stairway above a blacksmith’s shop and worked infrequently for ten cents per hour and chewed tobacco on a store bench with veterans of the Mexican-American War. Afternoons he roistered with Mrs. Sarah Hite when she could visit town, or she arranged strange venues with Dick, sunrise on Mud River, or midnight near a revival tent, or noon underneath a railroad trestle, where she smeared a bedsheet flat over the weeds.

Her go-between in arranging these meetings was the ex-slave, John Tabor. He’d stand in the alley as the blacksmith rammed the ceiling overhead with a rod and Dick would skip downstairs in his socks; he’d throw twigs at Dick’s window, announce a time and location when the sash was raised, and then slip off into darkness.

One Thursday at nightfall, John Tabor lightly rapped a restaurant’s window near the table where Dick swabbed stew from his dish with pumpernickel bread. Dick went outside and the butler gave him a come hither look that lured him into an alley. John Tabor was reed thin, close to fifty, the brown of saddle leather, and he liked to claim a resemblance to the Great Pacificator, Senator Henry Clay. He twisted his coat collar up and blew in his fists and invented Alaska out of the nip of the air. “I won’t be delivering no more notes,” he said. “I won’t be fetching Sarah no more for you, neither.”

Dick saw that his checkered dinner napkin was still tucked under his belt. He removed it and stroked his wide mustache with a corner. “You in a snit, John?”

“Yeah. Uh huh.” He looked over his shoulder into the empty street and then he bowed closer to Dick. “Wood seen me and it don’t make him happy, a colored man owning a white lady’s secrets, setting her onto a backdoor man which ain’t her husband. He don’t know much yet but he suspects. That’s more than plenty right there. He’ll cut me dead, I don’t be careful.”

“Naw.”

“Said he would. Said he’d stick an axe betwixt my eyes.”

“She does want to meet me though, doesn’t she? You’ve come so far, you may as well tell me where she’ll be and make them your last words.”

Tabor gripped his coat and walked into the wind but as Dick hunched next to him the butler said, “At creekside, over near the pigsty; tomorrow evening, about nine. Now my mouth’s gonna be shut, as far as you’re concerned. You ain’t gonna hear no more from John Tabor.”

Dick Liddil saddled his bay mare at seven the next evening and rode south in a slow walk, his stomach so queasy that he submitted to one of Jesse’s prescriptions and ate salts of tartar and powdered gum arabic. And as he crossed onto the Hite acres, panic overtook him; he sometimes circled his horse around to check the night woods, to decipher the crackle of autumn leaves, to cock his Navy Colt at a raccoon that truckled into the creek. Trees groaned and sighed as the wind pressed against them; grasses rolled with the soft susurration of mourners whispering in a candled parlor; and Dick was conjuring phantoms, he was as spooked as a man alone in a room who watches a closet doorknob turn and the door ever so slowly open.

He crossed a meadow and motivated his mare down the creek bank, where she sloshed in water that was as shallow as the coronets of her hooves. The pigsty was a low barn with a roof over the feedboxes and the rest a mud roll-around inside an ill-made slat fence. Dick creaked his saddle and read his pocket watch with a matchstick and looked around for Sarah. He slid off the mare and let her drag her reins over to leafmeal as he walked to the brow of the hill.

Hogs oinked and grunted and climbed over each other for corner food. Weeds lowered under the wind and apprehensions spidered his back. He wandered about and broke sticks in his fists. The hogs snorted and crowded and there was a sound like pages being torn from a book and pigs screeched around a sow that was greedily wolfing something down as she trotted away from the corner. Dick leaned on the sty’s fence like a slow country boy and asked, “What the heck are you critters chewing on?”

Then Dick saw a shoe and ankle wobble as the hogs shoved and scuffled above a muddied wool coat. His skin nettled cold and water came to his eyes and he screamed at the animals as he swatted them in the hocks with his hat. They scampered and squealed and snorted the earth. A sow remained and wrenched at a cord of sinew that made the body jerk but Dick shot a bullet that punched into the mud and the sow scurried back with the others.

The wool coat was screwed around to the side and one sleeved arm was crooked beneath the man’s back while the other lolled over the bottom slat on the fence. Dick could see that the skin on the man’s knuckles was brown but that was the sole clue that this was John Tabor, for most of his throat and face were eaten off, there were only red sinews and laces of muscle and cartilage and the blood-slick bones of the skull.

Then there was a low moan that could not have issued from Tabor, that came from the pigsty, and Dick crouched with his Navy Colt lifted toward a collection of juts and ovals and shadows. “Wood?” he shouted. He clicked back the hammer, steadied the quavering revolver with his other hand, and shouted, “Jesse?”

The shadows broke and reconnected and he saw that the creature was closer by a foot and Dick jibbed to the side like a boy playing dodge ball, and he listened for the corduroy sound of a careful slide of iron from leather. “Can’t we talk about it, Jesse? Or Wood?”

The creature moved and Dick called out, “I’ll shoot! So help me, I’m scared enough to be real undependable with this Colt.” There was a snuffle and a sob and he called out, “Sarah?” and he turtled around the sty, his Colt raised, his coat sleeve skating off the fence rail, until he could make out Mrs. Hite. She was feeble with shock and her eyes were cloudily bottled by tears. The acid stink of her vomit was on her dress and for one insane moment Dick was ready to murder the woman because she smelled bad.

“Did Wood kill him?”

Sarah’s neck seemed restrained by a shackle and then she was able to nod, twice.

“You tell the sheriff that. You tell the sheriff that Wood Hite is a killer. You swear out a warrant for his arrest, but don’t you say word one about the James gang, and don’t let my name cross your lips.”

And then Dick walked by her without even nicking her dress, sliding down the creek bank to his mare. Sarah was standing in the same position, motionless, staring at the remains, her hands gloved with blood and stalled at her sides as if sewn there. Dick climbed into the saddle and trotted his horse westward across the Hite meadows and never saw the woman again.

JESSE JAMES RODE INTO KENTUCKY in October as he’d promised Clarence Hite he would, but he went by way of Louisville and then south into Nelson County, where his cousin Donny Pence was a sheriff. He stayed a week, hunting pigeons and quail in the daytime with Congressman Ben Johnson and playing cards in the Pence sitting room at night. Johnson would later retell how they were reading the newspaper one evening when Donny gave J. T. Jackson a page with an article about the James gang robbing a train in Texas. The man slapped the newspaper down and walked over to a windowpane, there scratching into the glass with a diamond ring: Jesse James and October 18th, 1881. He then turned to the congressman and said, “I want you to be my witness that I was in Kentucky on this date and not in Texas.” And then, having compromised himself, Jesse forgot about going south to Logan County and instead journeyed west to Missouri, stopping off in Saline County at the cabin and sixty miserable acres owned by Ed Miller.

He rattled the cabin’s cloth-screened door on its hook and looked around at the yard, at a bruised mule harness, a perilous rake, and a rusted plow embedded in soil, and then Jesse looked back at the door and saw Ed Miller with a gun in his hand and fright in his eyes. Ed asked, “You come by for a visit?”

“You going to let me in or do I have to talk through the screen?”

Miller flipped up the hook and Jesse pulled the door, passing the speechless man as he walked inside.

The room was a mess: in it was a kitchen table on which smeared dishes were stacked, a green suede of mold on their caked meats and rinds; newspapers were shocked like corn against a couch, a chair was tipped over, a patched shirt was draped over a closet door, a cat was on the kitchen cutting board licking something from the sink. “You aren’t much of a housekeeper, are you?”

“You didn’t just happen by,” Miller said.

“Why not?” Jesse glanced at the gun and Miller put it on the grimy table. Jesse said, “Clell kept himself so untidy you could rub his neck and make dirt worms.” He sat down on a ringed rug and nodded toward a sagging couch. “Go ahead and take the load off your feet.”

Miller did as instructed and looked out the window, twisting his unclean hair with his fingers. His clothes were as wrinkled as crumpled paper, his fingernails were outlined with filth, a corner of his mouth was stained brown with gravy or tobacco juice.

“You ought to get yourself a wife.”

Miller glared briefly at Jesse and then shrugged. “I was going to ask Martha—Charley’s sister? I was going to ask her if she could imagine it, but I guess Wood has plans of his own, and there’s always Dick Liddil getting in the way. I’ve give it some thought.” He picked something out of his hair and wiped it on a pillow. He couldn’t seem to put his eyes on Jesse; his right foot rapidly tapped the floor.

“Your crops in?”

“Don’t got much,” Miller said. “A garden patch and pasture. I was sick at planting time.”

“How you feeling now?”

He glanced fleetingly at Jesse and asked, “Why?”

“You’re acting queer.”

“You and me, we haven’t been just real good friends lately. It’s not your fault, you understand. You hear talk though.”

“Talk.”

Miller explained, “People tell you things.”

“Give me an example.”

Miller sighed. “Jim Cummins come by. Oh and Jim says—you know those boys got caught for the Blue Cut deal?—Jim says he got word—don’t ask me where—that you’re planning to kill them.”

“Why would I do that?”

Miller shot a glance at Jesse’s gun hand and then reestablished his gaze on the yard. “It’s just talk probably.”

“To shut ’em up?”

“Just talk.”

“Cummins say anything else?”

“Nope. That was it basically.”

“It don’t explain why you’re scared.”

Miller looked at Jesse with watery eyes and spit on his mouth, light glinting off the oils on his skin. “I’m in the same position, you see? I was petrified when I saw you ride up!”

“I just happened by, Ed.”

“Suppose you heard gossip though. Suppose you heard. Jim Cummins come by here. You might’ve put two and two together and thought we were planning to capture you or Frank and get that reward. Isn’t true, but you might’ve suspected it.”

Jesse got up, leaving coins from his pockets on the rug, and jiggled a pants leg over his boot. “Haven’t heard a lick of gossip lately.” He looked out at the road and at a sky that was pink with sunset. He grinned at Miller and said, “I’m glad I happened by.”

Miller worked at a smile and said, “Me too.”

“I want to put your mind at rest.”

“I’ve got six hundred dollars stashed away; I don’t need any governor’s reward.”

“It’s the principle of the thing too.”

Miller pulled himself to his feet and swept a hand over a plate to shoo away flies. They sewed in the air and resettled. “I can’t offer you supper; my cupboards are empty.”

“How about if we go for a ride? I could buy you something to eat in town and then be on my way.”

Miller gathered his mare in the paddock and saddled it as Jesse sat on a gelding with the night all around him. Then they trotted westerly, their bodies jumping off the saddles until the horses eased into a graceful lope and then into a walk. A farmer with a hayrake recognized Ed Miller and waved and Jesse nudged his horse to the right so that he couldn’t be seen. He said, “It’s a great month, October.” Some minutes later he said, “Your mare’s cheating on her right leg. Looks like she might be wind-galled.”

Miller couldn’t get himself to say anything.

Jesse pretended a cinch problem, slowing his horse, and said, “You go on ahead, partner. I’ll catch up.”

Miller slumped in his saddle and peered ahead.

Jesse gentled his gun from the leather holster at his left thigh and thought for a second or two before jogging his horse ahead.

When he got close enough, Jesse angrily said, “You ought to get better at lying.”

Miller stopped his horse but apparently couldn’t persuade himself to drop a hand to his pistol until he’d spun around, and just then Jesse tripped the hammer and a cartridge ball pounded into Miller’s cheek, snapping his head to the side and propelling his body off the mare so that he walloped onto the road.

Jesse stepped his gelding forward through gunsmoke and peered down at a man whose mouth and eyes were open in the rapt look of death. He got off the horse and tugged at Ed Miller’s legs, swatting weeds flat beneath the man’s coat, swishing leaves aside with each surge, towing the body under sumac and elm trees.

The mare was found browsing in its paddock two days later, a saddle rolled counterclockwise on its cinch until it was almost under the animal’s belly, the saddle fenders and stirrups sloppily bird-winged. Ed Miller was not found for many weeks and by then the coroner could only guess that the body was male and not yet middle-aged, it was little more than a bird-pecked skeleton with yellow teeth and a hank of black hair in clothes that had squashed flat in the rains.

Jesse disappeared.

DICK LIDDIL SOLD HIS HORSE in Kentucky and took a train to Kansas City, where he spent October and November in the apartment of Mattie Collins, his common-law wife. They’d met in a courtroom following her cross-examination by a prosecuting attorney. She’d killed her brother-in-law, Jonathan Dark, as he was punching his wife and she pleaded her case so convincingly that the gunshot was ruled justifiable. Dick had just been paroled from the Missouri penitentiary in which he was serving time as a horse thief and in which he’d developed an interest in legal manipulations. Mattie Collins seemed sharp, prudential, accomplished, and when she stepped down from the stand, Dick leaned over a bannister to whisper, “I admire your spirit.” Within weeks they were a couple. Their marriage was more tempestuous than happy, though, and Dick periodically separated himself from Mattie, repeatedly coming back just as he did in October, with a robbery in his past, anxiety in the present, and a promise of constancy in the future. He lied to Mattie about the previous two months; she grew petulant and burned a mincemeat pie and pitched asparagus soup at him; she coldly apprised him of his limitations and cruelty, his inability to love, the shipwreck he’d made of her life, and by midnight they were compromised.

He passed his days with sleeping and pool and penny-ante poker. Mattie took him shopping and made Dick buy her, over the course of the month, a veiled black hat, an oyster shell pillbox, eight damask naperies, and white gloves with four pearl buttons that were near her elbows when worn. Liddil kept seeing Pinkerton operatives in every floorwalker, newspaper reader, or common man poking about in a store; in the evening he would insist there were prowlers and make a simpleton of himself by going out in his nightshirt and gun. And even in the pool hall he was getting the feeling that each shot was being watched, each comment was being overheard, until the creepy sensations at last grew so strong that he spun around and saw Jesse step into the lamplight. “You want to go for a ride?” he asked, and Dick could only agree.

It was the weekend after Thanksgiving and cold weather was so regular that they gave it little attention as they rode out from Kansas City in the morning. Jesse could wake up with a speech prepared, but Dick was just the opposite, sleep kept him in its grip until he’d been up and around for an hour; so as they rode east, Dick Liddil listened and Jesse slipped in and out of topics like a man at a clothing store trying on coats. He was happily loquacious and Dick was suspicious and unnerved, but he gradually relaxed and even grew drowsy within Jesse’s spindle of yams. His was a pelican’s nest of unlinked sentences, fragmentary paragraphs, scraps of extraordinary information, variations on themes, but the issue he kept nipping at and tucking into everything else was that of the Jackson County court trial of Whiskey-head Ryan.

He said a prosecuting attorney—who’d been elected on the basis of a campaign against the James gang—had released Tucker Bassham from a ten-year sentence in the Missouri penitentiary in return for his craven testimony about the Glendale robbery in 1879. According to the newspapers, Jesse said, Bassham took the stand and testified that it was Bill Ryan and Ed Miller who recruited him into the James gang, and he furthermore claimed that he was ordered around at Glendale by none other than Jesse James, who was the man who’d looted the express car. Jesse said Cracker Neck boys had bullied some witnesses, Tucker Bassham’s house was burned to the ground, and railroad men were so scared off that none of them showed up in court; and yet, Whiskeyhead Ryan was convicted and sentenced to twenty-five years at Jefferson City. “I can’t have that happening,” Jesse said.

“How can you stop it?”

Jesse didn’t say. He looked up into cross-hatching trees and said, “The wind serenades a purified man.” He leaned back on his saddle cantle, his right hand on his bedroll supporting his weight. “Did I tell you that I moved out of Kansas City?”

“Where to?”

Jesse ignored that and said, “I’ll strap a chair on my back and walk out into the wilderness some nights. The prairie sounds just like a choir.”

“Are we going to your place?”

Jesse hooked a finger inside his cheek and flicked out the last of his tobacco chew. He wiped his finger clean, on his trousers. “I got word about you and Wood. You two ought to patch things up.”

“I’d still like to know where we’re going.”

“You seen Ed Miller lately?”

“Nobody has.”

“Must’ve gone off to California.” He scratched his neck beard and saw Dick looking at him with perplexity. He said, “If you were going to see Jim Cummins, wouldn’t you follow this road?”

“I guess so.”

“God damn it, Dick; use your head.”

James R. Cummins had served in the Civil War with Frank and Jesse under Brigadier General Joseph O. Shelby and in the late seventies had participated in many of the James gang’s robberies, though his reputation in Jackson and Clay counties was merely that of a common horse thief. His sister, Artella, married William H. Ford, Bob and Charley’s uncle, in 1862; and it was partly that connection that caused the Ford brothers to join on with the gang. And it was to Bill Ford’s farm near Kearney that Cummins withdrew after Blue Cut, prior to leaving the state for the hot springs in Arkansas.

He was already gone when Jesse and Dick approached the Ford house in late November, and Bill Ford was out in the meadow, doctoring sheep. His boy, Albert, scrunched at a tall window off the sitting room and stared at the two as they climbed down from their saddles at the rail fence. Then the raised curtain dropped from the boy’s shoulder and the stuck mahogany door screeched open.

Albert was fourteen and good-looking in a choirboy way—his cheeks dimpled when he smiled and there was a scampishness to his eyes. He wore black trousers with a scrim of straw and mud on the cuffs, and a green pullover sweater that was rotted at both elbows. The boy said hello but was ignored for a minute as Jesse reconnoitered the yard and then gravely ascended the steps. Dick could see past Albert to the kitchen, where Mrs. Ford and her daughter, Fanny, stirred clothes in a steaming laundry boiler. Jesse peered into other rooms.

The boy asked Dick, “Are you friends of my pa’s? Because if you are, he isn’t here right now but you’re welcome to sit a spell and enjoy our hospitality until he gets back.”

“We’re friends of Jim Cummins,” Jesse said, and rolled a cigar in his mouth.

“Oh?” said, the boy. His Uncle Jim had schooled Albert on how to answer a sheriff’s interrogations. Albert gained thirty years, became sullen. “Well, it so happens he’s been gone since August and never said where he gone to.”

“I’m Matt Collins,” Dick said, and shook the boy’s hand.

“Very happy to meet you.”

Jesse strode over and clenched the boy’s hand and introduced himself. “Dick Turpin.”

“Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

Jesse smiled around his cigar but stalled the shake and crushed Albert’s hand in his until the boy winced. Albert was about to cry out when Jesse clamped his left hand over the boy’s mouth and yanked him into the yard. Dick softly shut the mahogany door.

Jesse manhandled the boy toward a red barn, once slamming Albert into a cottonwood tree so that he lost his wind and water came to his eyes. Dick shambled after the two, looking apprehensive and ashamed, backing sometimes so he could check the road, blowing on his red fingers.

When he was rear of the barn, Jesse twirled and threw the boy to the earth and stepped a boot onto Albert’s throat. “Don’t you yell,” he said. “Don’t you say nothin’ except how I can find Jim Cummins. Matt, aim that six-shooter.”

“Come on, Jesse! He’s just a kid.”

Jesse glowered at Dick for letting his name slip, then returned his attention to the choking boy. “He knows where his Uncle Jim is and that’s gonna make him old pretty soon.”

The boy shook his head as he brawled and kicked at Jesse.

“Maybe he doesn’t know,” Dick said.

“He knows.” Jesse fell to his knees on the boy’s biceps and Albert cried “Ow!” and his mouth was clutched closed in Jesse’s left hand. Four bruises later colored his cheek like blue nickels. “You need to ask and ask sometimes. Sometimes a child won’t remember much at first and then it’ll all come back.” He twisted the boy’s ear like a clock wind-up and Albert’s eyes showed agony, his body racked wildly, his boots thudded against the earth. “Just tell me about your Uncle Jim, that’s all! Where’d he sneak off to; where’s he hidin’ out?”

The boy purpled and his swats at Jesse lessened with exhaustion. Jesse screwed the left ear more and Albert’s scream was snared in Jesse’s palm as he bent over with the cigar in his cheek and scrutinized the injury. “My gosh, I believe it’s about to tear, sweetie. Just a little more to get her started, then I can rip your ear off like a page from a book.”

Dick was slumped against the barn, sick to his stomach and overwrought. He moaned, “Let the kid go.”

“He’s lying.”

“Jesus; he can’t even talk!”

“Where’s Jim?” Jesse asked, and then chanted it: “Where’s Jim? Where’s Jim? Where’s Jim?”

“Quit it!” Dick yelled and slapped Jesse’s hat off and immediately felt juvenile.

But Jesse squatted back and reconsidered and rubbed his hands on his thighs and the boy wept but couldn’t make words. He wiped his nose and eyes with his hands and shuddered with sobs as he sucked for air and when at last he spoke his voice scaled like a child’s. “You bastard! I don’t know where he is and you won’t believe me and you never gave me a chance you kept my mouth squeezed shut so I couldn’t breathe and my ear, my ear’s burning up, how’d you like me to do that to you? I never know where Jim is or when he comes so leave me alone, get off me, you son of a bitch!” Grunting, Albert bucked under Jesse and shouted again, “Get off!” and Jesse rose.

The boy rolled over and Dick walked around the barn and to the road, his hands fisted inside the pockets of his sheepskin coat, his neck splotched crimson with fury and disgust. When Jesse came forward, Dick was already in his Texas saddle. His face was moon white, his mouth was weak, and he looked at his boot toe in order to talk. “I’m worn out, Jesse. I can’t—” He sighed and abandoned the sentiment and squinted down the road a mile until it was not more than a needle. The curdled sky was the color of tin and the woods were rose and gray in the twilight. Dick said, “My mind’s all tangled anyway. Little deals like that just make me feel dirty.”

Dick looked over to collect Jesse’s reaction to this and was astonished to see him caved forward into his bay horse, his nose flattened against its neck and mane, his mouth in the crescent of a man noiselessly crying, a grimace of affliction in his face.

“You all right, Jesse?”

He nuzzled into the gelding’s winter hide and muttered words that Dick couldn’t master. The boy limped toward the Ford house, tenderly cupping his left ear and crossing his nose with his sweater sleeve.

Dick said, “Maybe you better ride on to wherever it is you’re living now, and maybe I’ll sell this animal and skeedaddle on over to Mrs. Bolton’s and, you know, apologize to the Fords; put everything in its best light and so on.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Still don’t seem fair!”

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

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

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

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

He rotated his head to thaw the left ear.

“You come from Kentucky?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Wood Hite’s downstairs.”

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

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

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

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

“Come in late last night.”

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

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

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

The noise muffled Bob’s hearing until afternoon and left a high wail in his ears for days, so he couldn’t make out what Dick or Wood or Charley was yelling, nor could he see them much because of the gunsmoke that seeped from the accumulated blankets and moved over the room like desultory weather. He cowered next to the slat bed and clicked back the hammer on the revolver, so scared he could neither shudder nor swallow nor shut his eyes though they burned and itched with gunsmoke. He created rules and modified them—if Wood shot at Bob, Bob would kill him; if he murdered Dick, Bob would kill him; if Wood merely confronted Bob with his gun, surely Bob would need to kill him; if he looked at Bob, then kill him—until it seemed there was nothing left but to kill Wood, kill him soon.

Bob saw Dick dive across to the lady’s dresser and miss another shot at Wood that ripped a calendar down. Charley got out of bed and lunged to the windowsill, where he bent to squirm under the sash. Wood shot at Charley but missed; Bob nearly shot at Wood’s neck but checked himself because of scruples and Charley slipped on the eave shingles and slid off the roof and wumped into a snowbank that was twelve feet below.

It was when Wood was foolishly turned toward Charley that Dick triggered a shot meant for Wood Hite’s heart that snagged Wood’s right arm like an angry wife. Blood flowered under the goat hair of his sleeve and Wood cradled his arm, cherished it for a second, then dipped under the gunsmoke to see Dick slithering backward on the seat of his red union suit to the nook next to the closet door. Wood pointed the Peacemaker at the paramour’s groin but his injured muscles crippled with the revolver’s weight and the cartridge ball veered into Dick’s thigh and blood swatted the floorboards and bedsheets and Dick rocked with agony. Yet he lifted his Navy Colt again as Wood lurched around the doorjamb into the corridor and peeked back. The Colt’s hammer snapped against an empty chamber and Wood switched his pistol to his left hand and squinted the muzzle’s sights in line and it was then that Bob Ford, with calm intention and without malice, shot Robert Woodson Hite.

The round went in just right of his eyebrow and made a small button of red carnage that shut Wood’s motor off. Bob felt his wrist and arm muscles twitch spasmodically when the revolver jolted and he saw Wood’s skull jar to the side, saw Wood collapse to his knees as his brown eyes jellied and reason vanished and a trickle of blood lowered to his blue muffler, and then Wood fell to the left with a concussion that jostled the room, his cheek wetly smacking the boards.

Bob started to rise, but couldn’t. Dick looked at him with consternation, as if Bob had grown antlers or spoken in tongues. Bob released the revolver onto his mattress as he rose over it and walked around to Wood with sickness in his stomach, an apricot in his throat.

Dick asked, “Has he passed away?”

Bob cupped his ear. “What?”

“Is he dead?”

Bob moved him some with his foot and Wood’s maimed right arm slipped from the heap of his coat. Wood’s chest swelled and gradually relaxed and then expanded again. Blood pooled wide as a birdbath under his skull. “He’s still sucking air, but I think he’s a goner.”

Dick collared his thigh with his hands and choked it and brushed his eyes on either shoulder to quench the tears that collected. He said, “Hitch my leg up onto the bed so it won’t dispense so easy.”

He gritted his teeth when Bob seized his ankle and sagged back with a moan when Bob lifted it onto the mattress. Bob snuffed the candle on the floor and walked out to the corridor and looked down at Martha and Elias on the bottom stairs. “Maybe you oughta come up and wish him well on his journey.”

Blood crept away from Wood and drooled into board cracks that languidly conducted it toward the door. Bob stared at it as the stairs creaked, and on hearing the rustle of his sister’s dress, said to Martha, “He’s losing all his stuffing.”

She bumped past Bob, removed her apron, and carefully wadded it under the exit wound. “Do you want to be moved?”

Wood said nothing. His eyes were closed. A string of saliva hung from his mouth to the floor and it bowed with each cold draft of air. Martha tugged the blue muffler off and picked the blood-tipped hair from his brow.

Elias squatted next to her and canted his head to examine the injuries, inquiring here and there with his thumb and then wiping it off on his shirt. He said, “You were a good fellow, Wood. You talked kindly and you took care of your horse and you always pulled your own weight.” Elias looked around, somewhat embarrassed, and then arose with effort.

Martha said, “I hope the pain isn’t frightful, Wood. I’d fetch something for you to drink but I’m afraid it would just make you choke.” Martha paused and added, “Little Ida’s going to miss you. So is the rest of the family.”

She moved off to the side with Elias and cinched the muffler around Dick’s thigh as Bob came so close his toes brushed Wood’s cold fingertips. He said, “Just in case you never noticed, it was me who shot you. I don’t harbor any ill feelings toward you, I was just scared and looking out for my own well-being.” A finger ticked on Wood’s left hand and Bob retreated an inch or two and then recovered his composure. He said, “You’ve done a gallant job of dying so far and have nothing whatsoever to be ashamed about.”

ACCORDING TO MARTHA’S April confession, Wood Hite died “when the sun was an hour high”; at which time the men removed Wood’s clothes and lifted the corpse onto Bob’s twin bed and Dick Liddil onto Charley’s. Dick drank from a bottle of corn whiskey as Martha bathed Wood and anointed his chapped skin with alum and oil of sassafras, then Elias cared for Dick’s mutilated leg with veterinary medicines and a sewing kit that was such an affliction to Dick that he swooned.

Bob put Wood’s goat-hair coat on a closet hanger and balled everything else up in a box. He dressed in the heather green suit he’d purchased in Liberty and he slicked his hair in the mirror over his sister’s chiffonier. He sat down to breakfast and saw Charley sitting under a striped blanket on the stove, steam growing off his back, his sprained ankle round as a melon. Wilbur stood at a window vagrantly lettering the mist on the glass; Ida was weeping on the sofa; Martha served cold oatmeal and boiled milk and frequently rubbed her eyes with a dishtowel. Only Bob seemed without melancholy, only Bob seemed uninclined to brood. He showed Wilbur the shell of the bullet that murdered Wood Hite and loitered about the kitchen sniffing the burned gunpowder in it. He carried in a jorum that was packed with snow and made Charley step down into it in order to relieve his swollen ankle.

Neighbors visited oh their return from church and Wilbur was dispatched upstairs to shut the bedroom door. The wife talked about the preacher’s inspiring sermon and about the peace that always descended upon her on Sundays, and her husband, John C. Brown, followed his nose through the house, slapping his prayerbook against his thigh. “Do I smell gunsmoke?”

Bob explained, “I ought to get our flue pipes cleaned. Might be chimney swifts in them. I might could do that today.”

“You ought to keep the Sabbath, Bob.”

“You got your religion, I got my own. It isn’t right to spoon it down our throats every Sunday.”

“It’s just that me and the missus, we’re Spirit-fired people, and when you think you’ve got the answer, well, you want to share it.”

“I’d just as soon you didn’t,” said Bob.

Then it was afternoon and the neighbors were gone and no one mentioned Wood or an undertaker, nor wrote a letter of condolence to the Hites in Adairville, Kentucky. Ida mooned in her mother’s room, bread rose in towel-covered tin pans, Elias kept his scowl in a coffee cup, and Wilbur tinkered with a broken clock. Martha sat mute and motionless across from Bob, who intently perused The Farmer’s Almanac. Charley hopped into the kitchen on one foot and snared a cookie in an earthenware jar. He said, “One thing’s settled: can’t take him into Richmond.”

Wilbur looked up. “How come?”

Charley munched the cookie, sprinkling crumbs on his chest. He licked his scant mustache and said, “One: the sheriff will put Bob away in jail. And two: Jesse will find out his cousin Wood’s been shot dead in our house and that’ll be the end for each and every one of us.”

Bob clenched his teeth so that his jaw muscles twitched, but resisted any comment. The conversation languished and Charley hopped back to Ida with the cookie jar. Martha simmered tea and served it to herself. Ice melted from the eaves and peppered the snow underneath. The sun approached the mullioned windowpanes at four o’clock and then it was colder and the sun was screened by the southwest woods and Elias made himself portly with sweaters and coats and patiently waited at the door until Wilbur could torture his feet into Wood’s fine leather boots.

Bob followed Elias and his chores from the kitchen window, squeaking an eyehole in the glass with the elbow of his suit coat. The oven door clanked as Martha took out four bread loaves and Ida came inside from the root cellar with jars of vegetables clenched by their lids. Bob could see the girl in the looking-glass of the evening-darkened window. She gazed at him with misgiving and asked, “Does Uncle Bob like okra, Momma?”

“Can’t you see him standing there? Why don’t you find out for yourself?”

Bob smirked. “She’s afraid of me, Martha.” He saw Elias and Wilbur in conference next to the water tank and he then tacked on, “You all are.”

He sliced a loaf on a tin plate, dipped a knife into molasses, and let the syrup braid off onto the bread. Then he climbed the stairs with it and looked into the bedroom from the corridor. The candle was on the nightstand and Dick was moving his lips as he read a yellow book about a woman of riotous appetites. Wood’s mouth was open but someone had covered his eyes with spoons. Dick licked a finger and turned a page without looking over the book at Bob. “He ain’t disappeared, if that’s what you were hoping.”

“What chapter are you on?”

Dick said, “She’s seen some young swell and got herself all agitated.”

“How’s your leg?”

“Full of torment, Bob. Thanks for asking.”

Wood’s skin was sallow and smirched slightly green where veins branched at his neck. His fingers were vised together at his stomach. Bob ate over Wood but the syrup was tainted and it was a penance to chew and swallow the bread. He set the tin plate down and lowered onto Dick’s bed and examined the excavation in Wood’s stern and arrogant skull.

“I ought to feel sorry but I don’t. I’m just glad it’s Wood who’s dead and not me.”

Dick stared at Bob, his book closed on his index finger. “You and me, we’ll have to sit down and talk a few things over. Circumstances have changed.”

Then Elias was there with a moth-eaten brown blanket that smelled of animal sweat. His cheeks were clownishly red with the cold and moisture was clinging to the end of his nose like a teardrop. “Ready?” was all he said.

They lifted Wood and let him sink onto the brown horse blanket. They then towed him across the boards and skidded him down the stairs so that his skull thudded and his body fished from side to side. Charley and Wilbur solemnly rose from kitchen chairs as Wood was carried out; Ida covered her face with her palms and Martha turned to the stove.

The December cold sliced inside Bob’s coat sleeves and across his ears. His knuckles ached with the cumbersome load and the brothers periodically let the body down to relieve their backs and exercise their fingers. “Nippy,” Bob said once, but Elias must not have heard. After they’d achieved the second rank of the woodrows, Elias concluded it was enough of a remove that the stink wouldn’t reach the cattle lots, and they rolled the naked body into a snow-filled ravine that was once a sweetwater creek. Elias slid Wood to the right with his boot, then crouched to tuck the horse blanket over him. The two cleared snow and kicked at the ravine so that its dirt banks spattered down, then they collected whatever rocks and slabs were near. Elias swarmed apple leaves and strewed them over the cadaver as Bob ripped dead branches off the trees and swooped them down onto the long mound.

Then Elias stood there lugubriously, his arms crossed over the hat at his chest, and Bob stuffed his hands in his coat pockets. Elias prayed, “ ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they that mourn: for they shall be comforted.’ ” He paused and then petitioned Bob with his eyes.

“Meek,” Bob said.

“ ‘Blessed are the meek….’ ” After a moment Elias beseeched his brother again.

And Bob recited, “ ‘For they shall inherit the earth.’ ”