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

broke the clasp lock with a bullet and six men marched inside and the bank lost four thousand dollars. But citizens constructed a roadblock and resistance. Mayor John B. Shaw was killed while rushing the thieves, his revolver kicking with each wild shot. Several men in the gang had ridden over to the jail in order to release Felix Bradley, the rustler in confinement there, but a boy named Frank Griffin raised a cavalry rifle in the courthouse yard and fired on them. Someone aimed an answering shot at him and his forehead was staved in. His father was Berry Griffin, the jailor, who went insane when his son was killed and raced across the dirt street and tackled a robber’s boot and stirrup. The horse skittered and screamed. The robber looked at Griffin as if he were an inconvenience, and he lowered his revolver to the man’s head and fired, burning hair with the gunpowder spray. The man sank under the horse. With a section of his skull blown off and the robber fired a second time to make sure the jailor would remain dead. And then the gang rode out of Richmond without any casualties of their own, although Felix Bradley was soon lynched by an angry mob.
    Zee Mimms read that account as she’d read the accounts of the other robberies, and then she knelt with her arms crossed on the windowsill, her chin on her wrist, looking out beyond the pink blossoms of the yard’s cherry trees to the cinder alley that Jesse would trot along on another man’s horse. He would arrive with something expensive and inappropriate—a brass candelabrum, a garlic press, a wire dressmaker’s dummy—and if she broached the issue of the Richmond murders, he’d maintain he hadn’t yet heard the news and then look sick with sorrow and pity as she told him about the Hughes and Wasson Bank and Mayor Shaw and the Griffins; or he’d maintain the marauders were most likely driven to the crime by an unforgiving enemy that would never give ex-guerrillas a chance at more regular jobs. He would ignore her questions or laugh about them and he’d grow forbidding if she insisted he tell her where he’d been over the week, and yet when Jesse came—with a walnut metronome—Zee decided to find out what her fiancé did with his hours: Did he weed and water? Did he drink? Did he whore? Did he mumble-the-peg, fling sticks to dogs, whittle turtles from oakwood? Did he ride into peaceful towns and train his pistols on shopkeepers and college boys as outlaws ransacked the bank? She jested her inquiries so that she would not offend, but lies and evasions were what she received in answer, or Jesse cartooned his endeavors, saying, “I’ve just been sitting around the house practicing the alphabet.”
    She said, “You haven’t been doing anything bad, have you?”
    “ ’Course not.”
    “You haven’t been gallivanting around with the Youngers?”
    He glowered at her and said, “I guess that’s my own business, isn’t it.”
    Zee looked pained but practical. “I’m going to be your wife .”
    His eyes seemed hysterical and what strength he had seemed governed only with great difficulty. He struggled with a thought and then shrugged back into his riding coat. “I can’t remember when. I worked the farm last. I’m always changing horses and I’m gone for days at a time. I’ve got shotguns and six-guns in every room, I’ve got gifts to bring you and I’ve got greenbacks in my pocket and if you look in my closet you’ll see more fancy clothes than you will in all of Clay County. So you tell me what I do for a living. You figure something out and then you tell me if we oughta forget about getting married.”
    And Jesse was outside and climbing onto a stolen horse as Zee angrily shut the curtains. She folded up the newspaper and slid it under a cobbler’s door down the hall, she put a picture of Jesse at seventeen inside the top drawer of a jewelry box, she pushed the metronome’s pendulum and as it ticked in three-quarter time she gradually crouched by