The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford: A Novel by Ron Hansen Read Free Book Online

at the auction too?”
    He grinned. “About the most they ask is that they come out of a swap with all their toes and fingers.” He then adjusted a dry hat on his head and without justifying his exit went out to the stables.
    Red coal-oil lanterns gladdened the interior of the barn but Frank James was glooming about and glaring at the younger men’s slipshod management of their horses. He saw Jesse at the Dutch door and sat on a long bench, his legs wide and his forearms on them, his rough hands joined around a yellow cigarette. The James brothers were not exceptionally close as boys and as they grew older were scarcely a pair—more than occasionally they were not even on speaking terms—so it was not particularly surprising that Jesse preferred not to seek out Frank’s company but stood just inside the sloshing eave and peered at his melancholy and peaked cousin Clarence and then at Charley Ford, who gave up wiping the waxy coat of his mare to attempt juggling the weighted pins that Jesse had dropped in the stall. Then Jesse abruptly perceived that the stripling Bob Ford had approached from his right. “You must’ve creeped up on cat’s paws.”
    Bob smiled. “I’ll wager that’s the first and last time you’ll ever be caught off-guard.” He no longer wore the overlarge coat or stovepipe hat, only green trousers with light green stripes and a collarless, yellowed shirt that plainly itched. He looked European, principally French, in spite of his blue eyes, and was not as scrawny as he initially appeared to be, but was muscular in a nuggety way, each sinew strapped to its bone as clearly as shoelaces on a shoe. Jesse could smell Mrs. S. A. Allen’s Zylo Balsamum Hair Dressing (which he too favored) on the boy’s ginger brown hair. They were exactly the same height.
    “How old are you, kid?”
    “Twenty,” he said, and then corrected himself. “Except I won’t really be twenty until January.” He scratched his sleeve apologetically and answered again, “I’m nineteen.”
    “You feel older than that though, don’t you?”
    Bob acknowledged that he did. A pigeon stirred on a rafter and cocked its head at a man flinging wooden objects into the air.
    “You enjoy yourself this evening?” Jesse asked.
    “I was strung too high for much pleasure.”
    Jesse seemed to think that was an appropriate remark and something in the boy’s manner of speaking inspired Jesse to ask, “Do you like tea?” And when Bob said he did (though he didn’t), Jesse invited him up to the bungalow without saying goodbye to the others. They were then gathering around a clove cake on which orange gumdrops spelled Grampa, part of the loot that Clarence Hite had pilfered on the coach. The younger men sat on the ground around Frank, and Clarence recapitulated some of the robbery’s disputes and amusements, emphasizing his valor, fabricating badly, boring both Charley and Frank in such a thoroughgoing way that they beguiled themselves by eating the gumdrops and cake, Frank ripping out large segments that he carefully squeezed into his palm until they were roundly packed, only then popping them into his mouth.
    Charley listened to Hite with impatience, almost petulance, a smile tucked like licorice in his mouth, his eyes glazed. When his ear at last learned of a stillness, he awoke and lurched into long and wearying stories about the Fords. He talked about their childhood in Fairfax County, Virginia, in rented rooms in George Washington’s Mount Vernon estate. He talked about sailing paper boats on the Potomac River, clambakes on the Atlantic coast, or playing doctor with the late president’s great-granddaughters while guests from foreign countries walked the grounds. He talked about the Moore School near Excelsior Springs and about Seybold’s Tavern and its sleeping rooms, in which the roughneck and frightening Younger gang retired on more than one occasion while the owner and his nephews, Bob and Charley Ford, looked on with