Shake Up The Country

by onedogtown

Summary:

He ate of Jesse's bread, and he lay in Jesse's bed, and he laid poor Jesse in his grave.

Notes:

• For skazka.

[Jesse] laughed, and remarked that he might have to go under eventually; but before he did he would shake up the country once or twice more. - from an interview given by Robert Ford, published in the St. Louis Republican, 1887.

The barn door opened quietly enough, but the inside was dim to the point where Jesse had to squint to make out Bob Ford skulking in one of the barn’s back corners. He was standing in one of the empty stalls with his back turned, to what purpose Jesse could not begin to fathom. There must have been some daydream there to keep him occupied, or else the sounds of Jesse’s movements would have roused him. There wasn’t enough sound to serve as a distraction: the rest of the makeshift household—Zee, Charley, and the children—were for once scattered.

It was Jesse’s suspicion that Bob was feigning to throw Jesse off his guard, but when Jesse had walked up behind him and touched Bob’s shoulder Bob jerked back and wheeled around, as unthinkingly as a startled horse: it made for a comical exhibition, Jesse thought though he was some distance away from laughter. Bob’s evident embarrassment and quick attempt to correct for his loss of dignity made him seem all the funnier.

“There doesn’t seem to be much purpose in your being in the barn, at this hour,” Jesse said, making his tone flat enough that Bob was able to read anything that he wanted into it. It was a low tone, and it came in handy calming the nerves of most animals.

There was a little, frantic silence, and then Bob said, in his boy’s cracked voice, trying for ingratiating: “Doing? Why, Jesse, I’m not doing anything. Mrs. James asked me to come out here and get her a lantern.”

“Try and call her Mrs. Howard from now on,” Jesse advised in the same mild tone, and then fell silent.

Bob seemed to be trying to think himself out of this new situation. Jesse, with some pity, thought that self-knowledge was possibly the worst fault that Bob had; most guilty men would have realized that they did not need to excuse themselves for standing alone in a barn.

After a minute Bob swallowed and began to speak, dry-mouthed and very rapidly: the lantern might be in the barn, though not in this stall, but more probably in was in the yard, and he should go and look for it, since he was sure that Mrs. James—Mrs. Howard would appreciate him collecting it, and in any case the horses would need to be watered, if it was Jesse’s intention to—

“They’re watered,” Jesse said briefly. It gave him great joy and peace to know that he had put discomfort into the heart of Bob Ford. He remembered with some amusement that he had once, prior to his first interaction with Bob, misremembered his Christian name as Bunny. He was living up to the conduct of that animal now; even from a foot away Jesse could feel Bob’s heart increasing in its speed.

What irritated Jesse most about Bob Ford—more besides his entitlement, and his deceitfulness, and his self-satisfied amateurism, when all his training in outlawry had come from nickel books of poor literary quality based on Jesse himself—was that Jesse was forced by circumstances to rely on him: there were no men left to follow him, other than the Ford brothers, and Jesse had not quite gotten the itch of highway robbery out of his system. Perhaps it was only that he had apprenticed to Bill Anderson when he was sixteen, and afterwards had never bothered to learn any other trade.

Any new recruit would have been raw and of uncertain loyalty—both of which were true of Bob and Charley, but at least Jesse liked Charley: the man was reliable, and Jesse had prevailed over his own brother’s more grounded opinions to not hold Bob’s scheming against him. As for Bob Ford, he might have killed Wood Hite with his own pistol, but that ability was not in much evidence. Jesse had cornered him, without knife or gun belt, with the intent of seeing what Bob would do about it, and for all Bob’s alleged planning the answer was that he would avoid openly cringing and count that as a victory in itself.

“You were too young to fight in the war, weren’t you?” Jesse asked him, though he knew the answer already.

“Born during it,” Bob said, the mulish expression on his face indicating that he knew that the fact would be used against him.

“If you had fought, then I might have found you of more use,” Jesse told him, and Bob’s face shifted slightly. He looked at Jesse, not with embarrassment, but with a kind of veiled satisfaction, as though Jesse had gone out of his way to confirm his own obsolescence.

The thing of it was that Jesse meant it, and had even intended it to be a sort of kindness. It was because of the war that Jesse had become a man at sixteen, more so than Bob was at twenty. He had learned everything that was useful to him during that time: how to shoot a man at close range with no hesitation even though he begged, how to coax a door open by convincing the owner that they were of similar sympathies, and how to tell a Pinkerton spy by the softness of his hands. At one point the whole of the James gang had been made up of men born from the same crucible. Jesse was not sure when that had changed.

The act of looking into a man’s face always gave Jesse the feeling of looking into the barrel of a gun, and having to make a second’s guess as to whether or not it would fire. Bob was still something of a puzzle, or perhaps he was just unpredictable. Bob thought of himself as the man worthy of killing Jesse, and Jesse was what he wanted: it was a split in motivation that interested Jesse, in a way that little else about Bob did, though the same kind of interest made him look and see in which direction the train would go off its tracks.

Jesse could be a quick mover, when it made a good effect. Bob didn’t have the time or the breath let to hit him back; he fell against the back wall with a thump that sounded like the prelude to a bruise, and let his arms flail out wildly instead of making a fist. He pushed himself back up, quickly enough, with a light in his eyes which might have been described in a newspaper as burning with defiance. The story in question, if it existed for Bob to find inspiration in, would have had Jesse for its subject.

Besides the belt around his waist there was nothing within reach, and as a weapon that seemed more trouble than it was worth. He didn’t want to kill Bob, after all, just see what he would do in response to further provocation— “to see what he would do” being the inspiration for most of his interactions with Bob Ford.

There were times when Jesse saw himself, not from his own satisfied perspective, but distantly or from above, from the perspective of an outsider. What he saw at those times, which seemed to push him out of his own body, was a brutally unkind man, a killer and a thief who targeted the innocent and the working man. The spells came infrequently, but the suspicion of their veracity stayed with him afterwards. The last time had hit him suddenly, halfway during the beating of Bob’s young nephew: Jesse had staggered out, into the cold, crisp air, and been overcome by an overwhelming sense of his own unworthiness. His father, who had died in the gold fields of California and been buried there when his youngest son was still a child, had been a preacher: Jesse had learned religion by rote at his mother’s knee, but it made sense to him that a moral understanding of his life would come to him from a great distance, like a story told by a man far-off. The spells had never changed any aspect of his behavior, but every time Jesse felt himself in the grip of one he wept, and endeavored to forget the shame of it as quickly as he could.

He decided that there would be no risk of one now. Instead Jesse took one step forward, until he and Bob were chest and chest. No violence on Jesse’s part; on the chance that Bob was inspired to take action, as he had so assiduously avoided doing, then that could not be properly considered Jesse’s fault.

Bob did not try to push his way out from the wall, but he didn’t meet Jesse’s eyes, either. When Jesse pushed his face up to the side of Bob’s Bob flinched away, as if he expected Jesse to head-butt him like a billy goat. Jesse did nothing of the kind. Instead he stood there, in the dim of the barn, leaning his forehead quietly against the side of Bob’s face.

The two of them stood there, in what would have looked to an outsider like an embrace but which could not have been farther from it.

Jesse waited for Bob’s move, and while he waited reached up a hand and laid it gently on Bob’s hair. Bob breathed out through his nose all in a rush, the sound noisy in their cramped tableau. Jesse carded though Bob’s hair a few times, trying to see what he would do next. It became a one-sided game: Jesse moved his hand down to the side of Bob’s face, moving his fingers experimentally to see how Bob shifted in response. Then to his jaw, and finally to his neck—only the side of his neck, where it would have been hard to do any kind of damage.

Through it all Bob had his eyes closed, as if he were embarrassed. Jesse supposed that this was what he had been dreaming about. Jesse was becoming interested in seeing Bob’s reactions despite himself. Finally he moved slightly and kissed him, which seemed to be the natural next step. He could hear his children’s shouts somewhere in the distance, and the sounds of the livestock in the yard: at any moment Zee would recover from her headache, or Charley return from his trumped-up errand.

He kept the kiss as light as a joke, but it lasted for a long while although Jesse had already given up the idea of it provoking Bob into real violence. When he pulled back an inch it was to look curiously at Bob’s face, to see what his reaction would be.

Jesse still had a hand cupping the side of Bob’s face: a position which might be controlling or tender, depending what happened next. Another man might have endeavored to shift Bob’s loyalties, at least long enough to serve as a distraction, but if Jesse had believed that a little affection was capable of altering Bob’s character he would have tried it months earlier. Bob was a man naturally given to bitterness and wanting what he could not have. If he had had Jesse’s trust and affection, he would have wanted more, and if he had had Jesse as a lover then he would have wanted more, and if Jesse had established him in Cole or Frank’s place and ridden under the James-Ford gang, then Bob would have been content for a little while before growing hungry again. It was the natural result of being in love with a man who did not exist outside of the pages of newsprint. Whatever violence happened next—and Jesse did not doubt that the tranquility of the moment would break itself—then at root it would be Bob’s own fault.

When Bob cautiously leaned forward, Jesse did not stop him: but he kept a hand to the side of Bob’s head, in preparation. He thought that the next time he went into town, he’d buy a new pistol for a gift, just to see what Bob would choose to do with it.