The Pistoleer (44 page)

I’m convinced McCulloch saved Wes Hardin from dying in prison. He had a good many long conversations with him and advised him many a time to quit trying to escape and to instead apply himself toward being a good convict and cutting time off his sentence. His argument to him was real simple: “If you keep doing like you been doing,” he told him, “you’ll die in here for sure. You’ll die of a beating or a bullet or just plain choke to death on your own mean rage. And even if you somehow manage to stay alive all the twenty-five years, what then? You’ll be old and broken and not worth shit. Your wife will be older than her years, Wes, for all her worrying over you. You’ll never know your kids. They’ll be grown and long gone before you leave this place.”

It must have sounded to Hardin like he was being advised to surrender, which just wasn’t in his nature to do. But he was no ordinary con—he wasn’t stupid—and I think it goes to show how damn tough he really was that after his talks with McCulloch he never tried another break, not once in the next ten years.

*    *    *

H
e nearly died anyway—of an old wound, a chronically infected patch of raw flesh on his side, the result of a shotgunning he’d received more than ten years before. It suddenly abscessed so severely he could not stand up. It was an awful-looking thing—high-smelling and full of rank yellow pus and thick, constantly oozing, half-clotted blood. The doctor treated the wound the best he could. The rest, he said, was in the hands of God. With the warden’s approval, he assigned an inmate nurse to tend to Hardin in his cell till he recovered or he died.

At first his condition worsened by the day. Every morning, I arrived at the row expecting to be told he had died in the night. He was sopping with fever and out of his head. His hair was plastered to his head like riverweed. His bloodshot eyes receded into deep black wells. His nurse was an effeminate little convict named Maylon Donaldson—whom the convicts had called Sister May until he was made a nurse, and then they called him Florence. He tended the wound as the prison doctor had instructed him—he mopped Hardin’s brow, he spooned broth to his mouth, he sang softly to him. Sometimes Hardin would loudly address his wife, declaring his love for her, praising her eyes and breasts and the feel of her skin. Florence told me he sometimes laughed like a crazy man and babbled about the way he got his wound. “Goddamn tinhorn”—Florence said he once shouted—“shoots me
then
and kills me
now.
” I heard him speak many other names in his delirium besides his wife’s and children’s. He often mentioned Joe, and somebody named Simp.

After four weeks he was skeletal as death. Nothing the doctor did for the wound seemed to improve it. And then his fever suddenly lowered and he slowly began to recover. But still the wound refused to close up properly, and the fever lingered like a low fire. Occasionally it flamed up again for one or two weeks at a time, and he’d sink back into a half-delirious sweat. Then the fever would drop once more and he’d regain his senses and manage to sit up and eat a few mouthfuls of whatever Florence spoon-fed him. For week after week he continued in this tenuous up-and-down pattern of recovery and relapse. All in all, eight months went by before he finally mended.

*    *    *

I
t was then he began his serious study. His father had been a Methodist minister—which explained much about his own thorough knowledge of the Bible and his easy familiarity with books. He devoutly attended the prison Sunday School. Every day, just as soon as he was done with his assigned work in the boot shop, he would retire to his books. McCulloch was pleased by his turn in character and would visit him in his cell to press encouragement.

He read history and philosophy and politics. He recognized me as a somewhat educated man and delighted in engaging me in discussion on a variety of abstract topics—the nature of evil, the power of personal will, the origins of society, and so on. These conversations were enjoyable although I sometimes lost track of my own points as well as his. He studied everything—even arithmetic and science. I recall the time he demonstrated Archimedes’ principle of displacement to me and Florence in his cell, using a bucket of water and his foot. “I get it,” Florence said. “The point is, if you put your foot in a full bucket, you’ll spill water on the floor and get your foot wet. Makes sense to me.” His dictionary got so worn its pages began to shed like old leaves, and McCulloch presented him with a new one.

When he made up his mind to study the law, he asked McCulloch to recommend books in both criminal and civil proceedings. The captain said he wasn’t familiar with any law book besides Blackstone’s, but he forwarded Hardin’s letter to a friend who was a member of the Texas bar, and Hardin soon received a comprehensive list of readings in jurisprudence. Shortly afterward, he had law books piled all over his cell and was hip-deep in legal study. He joined the debating club and argued circles around everybody in it. McCulloch and I heard him declare against women’s suffrage one evening and both of us were swayed by his arguments. He had the lawyers stamp, no doubt about it.

*    *    *

I
’ve mentioned that Florence had an effeminate manner. To be blunt, he was as queer as a purple egg—the sort of fellow called “sweetmeat” by the other cons, especially the “chickenhawks,” the hard cases who preyed on them at every opportunity. But his assignment to the hospital included hospital living quarters, which put some protective distance between him and the chickenhawks on the main rows. He rarely went into the yard or even to another building unless there was no way to avoid it, and whenever he was outside he always kept in sight of the guards.

The safest he’d ever been in prison was during the eight months he was assigned as Hardin’s nurse and lived in the two-man cell with him, away from the main population. Once Hardin was back on his feet, however, Florence had to return to his own quarters in the hospital. A few weeks later a couple of chickenhawks cornered him all alone in the hospital storeroom. In addition to sodomizing him, they beat him so badly he was hospitalized with both arms broken and his jaws wired. He was a little fellow and looked even smaller under all the bandages. It was three weeks before he could move his bowels without a heavy loss of blood. I’m sure the hawks had threatened him with even worse if he talked: he looked terrified and told the investigator he hadn’t gotten a look at the men who did it.

Then Hardin went to visit Florence and they had a private chat. The next afternoon a chickenhawk named Beady staggered into the yard from behind the wood shop with blood streaming down his face. He’d been jumped from behind and never saw the man who’d cut his eyes out. The day after that a hawk named Kimble was found behind the laundry building beaten so badly with a lead pipe that he spent the rest of his days in an idiot’s fog. The word spread that Hardin had done the jobs and would do worse to the next man to lay an unwanted hand on Florence. The warden questioned him about the rumors, but he denied having had anything to do with the assaults. He had iron-solid alibis in both cases. “I will admit I’m not real sorrowful about what happened to them,” he told the warden. “They were terrible bullies and I believe they deserve what they got.” I don’t know if he knew it, but the warden believed so too.

Yes, there were rumors that Florence was Hardin’s personal chicken. I don’t know if they were true and I don’t care. What would it matter? It was a prison, and a man might do things in prison he wouldn’t dream of doing outside of it. I
do
know that nobody ever harmed Florence again in the two years before he was released. And I
know
he was Hardin’s friend. And I
know
Hardin wasn’t one to let a friend be bullied. Those things I know.

*    *    *

O
fficially, Hardin wasn’t supposed to write more than two letters a month, but I knew he was bribing some of the guards to slip out letters to his wife several times a week. It wasn’t an uncommon practice, and since it helped to keep the prisoner’s spirits up and permitted the guards to make a few extra coins, we generally turned a blind eye. As for
her
letters, well, sometimes several weeks would go by without one, and he’d be long-faced until one finally arrived.

I knew more about his family than he ever told me because I was good friends with Harvey Umbenhower, the prison censor. It was Harvey’s job to read every piece of mail the prisoners sent out and that came in for them. I ate dinner in the officers’ mess with Harvey nearly every day, and through him I learned that Jane had never got along very well with Hardin’s mother, with whom she and the children had gone to live when he got put in the walls.

“I don’t believe I ever seen a letter from her that didn’t have some complaint about the old woman,” Harvey told me. “Or one from the mother that didn’t have something bad to say about the wife. It’s got to be rough on a fella who loves both his wife and his momma to be getting letters from them with one always bitching about the other. Hardin tries to smooth their feathers the best he can, and sometimes he even writes to the two of them on the same letter so one can see what he’s writ to the other, how he’s begging them both to try to get along.”

When Jane at last had enough of Hardin’s momma—or Hardin’s momma had enough of Jane—or both had had enough of each other, most likely—she and the kids went to live with Manning Clements and his family on his ranch in the hill country. Harvey said her letters from San Saba were just as full of complaint as ever, only now it was mostly a lack of money she groused about. “You got to wonder what a woman thinks a man can do about that when he’s locked up in the goddamn penitentiary. What’d she expect him to do, print some up in the shop here? Go out and rob a bank?” Harvey’s own marriage had come to a bad end a few years earlier—his wife had run away to Dakota Territory with a piano player—so he wasn’t real sympathetic to a woman’s side of things.

He told me she finally took the children and went back to her home county of Gonzales to live with Fred Duderstadt and his family. Duderstadt and Hardin were old friends from their days on the Chisholm Trail. According to Harvey, Duderstadt had helped to set her up on a little farm of her own. “
Now
she complains about how goddamn hard it is for a woman to work a farm by herself and how she works from sunup to sunset and thank the Lord little Johnny’s old enough to help her in the fields with the crops and with the hogs and with this and that and the goddamn other. I tell you, Ed, it tires my mind to read that woman’s constant carping. It makes me wonder why he ever tied hisself to her in the first goddamn place.” I said I supposed he loved her. He sighed and gazed off to someplace where he probably saw his sweet and pretty and long-gone wife. “Yeah,” he said, “I guess so. He for damn sure
still
loves her too. His letters are just full of love for her. You know, he ain’t never told her of the pain he’s knowed in this place?—other than the pain of being apart from her and the children, I mean.”

The prison letters of John Wesley Hardin

To Jane:

My knowledge of wayward, forward men and women is that they lead wicked, miserable lives and die wretched deaths. The gambler dies a blackleg, the prostitute dies a whore. The thief falls into a thief’s grave, and the sepulcher of the murderer is the assassin’s sepulcher. This is the general rule. Their ways are hard, their days are sombrous and sad, their nights starless and sleepless; their hope for time and eternity has faded away and they await their terrible doom with trembling and fear because their end is dreadful and certain and terrific.…

To John W. Hardin, Jr:

Son, should any lecherous treacherous scoundrel, no matter what garb he wears or what insignia he boasts, assault the character and try to debauch the mind and heart of either your sisters or mother, I say son dont make any threats, just quietly get your gun, a double-barrel. Let it be a good gun: have no other kind. And go gunning for the enemy of mankind, and when you find him just deliberately shoot him to Death as you would a mad dog or wild beast. Then go and surrender to the first sheriff you find….

To his family:

Dear Jane, I have selected several pocket verses from my thesaurus; their sentiments are mine. I hope that each of my dear children will adopt them as theirs and learn each verse by heart—and as am earnest of this, I ask each to inform me of this fact at their earliest opportunity. Assuring you of my unalloyed, unwavering love, and wishing for your prosperity in the fullest sense, I close by sending each of our loving children a kiss and ask you to accept as proxy in my behalf. JWH

MOLLY:
“Keep thy passions down however dear; thy swaying pendulum betwixt a smile and a tear.”

JOHN, JOHN W. HARDIN JR:
“The trust that’s given, guard; to yourself be just; for live how we may, yet die we must.”

SWEET LITTLE JANE:
“Soar not too high to fall, but Stoop to rise; we wasted grow of all we despise.”