The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

We’re Clements women, me and my sisters Mary Ann and Minerva, Clements born and raised. And we’ll die Clements, no matter our names changed when we married, two of us into the Browns and one into the Densons. It’s a proud family we come from. None of us, man nor woman, ever took a step back from anybody—and I mean Huck too, our adopted little brother. We called him Maverick because he strayed onto the ranch one day when he wasn’t but about eight years old. He’d been orphaned by the cholera and been wandering on his own for months. Daddy was so impressed with his natural grit, he took him in and raised him like one of our own. All our brothers—Manning, Jim, Joe, Gipson, and Huck—had hard bark, as people used to say about the kind of man who stood his ground and could take care of himself and his own. It’s how Daddy raised them up to be. There wasn’t a boy in the Sandies—which is what that whole region around Gonzales County was called—to ever talk vulgar or make bold with me or my sisters, not with brothers like ours to protect the family honor. I’m telling all this so you’ll properly appreciate the admiration we had for Cousin Wesley. We Clements were a lot more used to getting admiration than giving it, but we’d heard all about Wesley before we ever made his acquaintance, and none of us ever felt nothing but proud for being kin to him.

You can imagine how pleased we all were when he showed up at the family ranch over by Elm Creek one late winter morning and introduced himself to Daddy and Momma. The boys were all out at their cow camp south of Smiley getting things ready for a roundup, so Daddy took Wesley out there to meet them. He sent Huck to give the news to me and my husband Barton Brown. Soon as I heard, I went off in the buckboard to tell my sisters and their husbands, and then me and Mary Ann and Minerva went directly to the family ranch to help Momma prepare a big welcome supper.

By the time they came in from the camp that evening, you’d of thought they’d known each other all their lives, they were joking so free and easy with Wesley and he with them. They come clomping into the house laughing and trying to raise knuckle knots on each other’s arms and boxing with open hands and knocking into the furniture, causing such a ruckus that Momma had to yell at them to quit before she took a hickory switch to all their behinds and she didn’t care how big they all were. Jim and Joe jumped to attention and saluted and said, “Yessir, Miz General, sir!” Momma tried to look fierce at them but it was all she could do to keep a straight face. “John Wesley,” she said, “I know your momma didn’t raise her boys to sass and mock her like these disrespectful no-counts of mine.”

When Daddy introduced him to me and my sisters, Wesley said he was honored—and he kissed each of us on the hand! You should’ve heard the boys whoop at that, but Wesley didn’t seem to mind their joshing one bit. Well, my heart just fluttered like a bird on a string! Mary Ann turned red as a radish, and Minerva didn’t hardly know where to look, she was so flustered. But they were as tickled as I was, I could tell. Listen, if I hadn’t been already married, I’d of set my sights on him for myself, cousin and all. He was so good-looking! He had a good strong face with the sweetest smile. But best of all was his eyes. They were warm and bluish-gray and really looked at you. Most men are either too shy or too scared to meet a pretty woman in the eyes for more than a second without getting nervous, but not Wesley. He looked a girl in the eyes as easy as offering her his arm.

It was a real fine supper we had in his honor that evening. Barton and Ferd and Jim—our husbands—were there too, naturally, and had brought all the children, and the house was chock-full of laughter and loud talk, good smells and babies crying and the clatter of dishware. I thought the tables might split from the weight of all the dishes set on it. There was fried pork and possum stew and sweet corn, yams and snap beans, mashed turnips, red gravy, corn bread and molasses—just everything.

He’d learned a good deal about his Clements kin from his daddy the Reverend, and he wanted to be caught up on what Clementses had got married lately and what babies had been born and who’d passed on and been buried. He’d come to us direct from visiting his family up in Mount Calm, and he said all the Hardins was in good health and spirits. His daddy was busy as ever with his good works, teaching and preaching all over Hill and Limestone counties. His momma and sister Elizabeth and little brother Jefferson Davis were doing just fine, and his big brother Joseph had married a Mount Calm girl and was fixing to move to Comanche to open his own law office.

It wasn’t till we moved the children to another part of the house and cleared off the table and left it to the men that he talked about his troubles with the law. Daddy brought out a jug and passed it around for them all to fill their cups. Matches flared and pipes and cigars got lit, and the room got misty with good-smelling smoke. While Momma and Minerva tended to the children, me and Mary Ann washed the pots and dishes in the open dog-run, trying not to make too much clatter so we could listen in on the men’s talk.

Wesley told about having to shoot three State Policemen in self-defense up in Bell County just a couple of weeks earlier—and before them, a bounty man who’d tried to back-shoot him outside a saloon in Fairfield. “I didn’t kill the bounty man,” he said, “I just shot him where his pleasure hangs. “ That got a good laugh at the table. “Leastways he won’t be siring any more sons of bitches into this world,’ Daddy said. Me and Mary Ann grinned at each other with our faces turned away from the men.

Then Barton asked him outright if it was true he’d shot a Nigra man off a fence in Hillsboro just for looking mean at him as he rode by. Barton said he’d read it in a newspaper. No Clements would of been so rude as to ask Cousin Wesley such a thing, but all the Browns were mannerless that way and didn’t know any better. Me and Minerva both knew we’d disappointed Momma by marrying into that family, though she never said it. It’s some hard choices we all have to make in this life. Mary Ann had done better, marrying the only Denson boy to be had.

Wesley didn’t seem to mind being asked, however, and he said what we Clements already knew to be so—that he never killed anybody but in self-defense. There were such stories told about him. That he’d snuck up and shot some gambler in Towash in the back of the head to get back some money he’d lost to him. That he shot just about every Nigra man, armed or not, who’d ever so much as looked cross-eyed at him. That he’d shot a fellow in a hotel for snoring too loud, for Pete’s sake! I always suspected Barton believed such terrible lies about him—though he wasn’t so stupid as to say so to me or mine—so it was good to hear Wesley tell him the truth of it from his own mouth. “It ain’t never wise to trust the word of a stranger nor a newspaper,” Wesley told him. I nodded at Mary Ann and hoped Barton saw me do it.

Wesley said there were so many lawmen and bounty men looking for him that he was starting to feel like a duck on a hunting pond. “I think I’d best light out for a spell,” he said, “before somebody blows the feathers off me in the middle of the night.” He’d talked it over with his daddy and they’d agreed it’d be best if he laid low in Mexico until such time as the Democrats finally got control of the state and rid Texas of the State Police.

There was a lot of loud talk then about Mexico. Jim Denson’s daddy had been with the Texans who fought under Zack Taylor in the Mexican War, and he’d given Jim a pretty picture of the country. “Daddy said it’s nice weather, and the food’s real good, and—” He gave a glance our way and lowered his voice, but the way they all laughed was enough to let us know he’d said something about Mexican girls. Mary Ann gave a tight-lipped look and shook her fist in front of her where Jim couldn’t see it.

“That’s how my daddy seen it, anyway,” Jim said. “He said it’d be a fine place to live if it wasn’t so damn many Mexicans down there.”

But Daddy and the boys didn’t have a good word to say about Mexico, even though none of them had ever set foot in it. All that mattered to them was what the Mexicans had done at the Alamo some thirty-five years before. “Going to live in Mexico’s like going to live with some sonbitch who killed your kin,” Daddy said.

Manning told Wesley he ought to forget about going to Mexico and instead join up with him and my other brothers on the cattle drive they were getting ready to make to Kansas. Columbus Carol was bringing up two thousand head from San Antone, and he wanted my brothers to round up another herd of a thousand head or so in the Sandies, then take both herds up to the railhead at Abilene. “We’d be proud to have you throw in with us,” Manning told him. Everybody thought that was a fine idea and said so. Manning said that as far as the law was concerned, Wesley wouldn’t have a thing to worry about on the trail. Columbus Carol had said there was some sort of agreement between the big Texas drovers and the governor. “Columbus ain’t never come right out and said so,” Manning said, “but it’s a common suspicion that Ed Davis is getting a slice of every drover’s profits in exchange for keeping the police away from their trail crews.”

A marshal might come around to a trail camp every once in a big while, Manning said, but they were most of them smart enough to halloo the camp from far enough away to give any cowboy on the dodge time to make himself scarce. “We give the badge a plate of beans and a cup of coffee, same as we would anybody else,” Manning said, “and then he goes his way and we go ours. He can say he’s done his job, and nobody in the trail crew is the worst off for it.”

Wesley said he’d think on it, and in the meantime he’d be proud to help them with the roundup. That suit everybody just fine, and Daddy sent the jug around the table again. Pretty soon they were all singing “Sweet Betsy From Pike,” and adding a lot of verses of their own making that had me and Mary Ann blushing and laughing into our hands.

Momma came out of the other room and told them to hush all that loud profanity or she’d drag every one of them by the collar down to the creek and throw them in. So they took their party out to the barn and kept at it till nearly midnight, when I reckon Daddy ran out of jugs. I bet there wasn’t one of them who didn’t have a sore head the next day.

Me and my sisters wasted no time arranging a barn dance for the next Saturday night so Cousin Wesley could meet our neighbors. Of course, the neighbors we most wanted him to meet were the unmarried girls of age. We’d come to find out he didn’t have a sweetheart waiting for him anywhere, and we believed such a sorrowful condition was in bad need of rectifying. Since it was me and my sisters that arranged for that barn dance, you could say it was us that were responsible for him meeting Jane.

Everybody will tell you that Jane Bowen was just the sweetest thing. Well, yes she was. She was pretty too, there’s no denying that, and had attracted the boys from the time she started blooming at about twelve. Her hair was the absolute envy of all the girls—it was long and soft and bright light brown. And if she was as vain about it as some believed, well, you couldn’t really fault her too much for feeling that way.

She was a quiet girl, but not really what you’d call shy—not when it came to saying directly what was on her mind if somebody happened to ask her. And when she did speak up, she hardly ever said anything that didn’t have a point, and she most always got right to it. Directness of that sort can put people off, since most folks like to stroll around in a conversation for a bit before getting to the point—if there even is one. Jane just wasn’t one for small talk, which was a big reason some saw her as stuck on herself. I’m not saying I thought so, I’m just saying there were some who did.

I did tend to agree with them who said she probably read more than was good for her. She read more books than anybody I ever knew. Books were hard to come by in the Sandies in those days, but her daddy, who was given to spoiling her, made it a point to bring her back a book or two from San Antone every time he went there on business. One time at school I heard this boy ask her what the book in her hand was about, and she said poetry, and the fella looked around at the rest of us with a smarty-pants grin and said, “You mean like ‘Roses are red, violets are blue’?” Jane nodded and smiled sweetly, then turned away and said—just loud enough for some of us to hear—“Even a jackass is smarter than you,” like she was finishing the poem.

It’s no wonder so many of the boys were skittish of her. They’d be attracted by her prettiness—she never did lack for dance partners at parties—but then her learning and direct way of talking would buffalo them so bad they’d be afraid to open their mouths for fear of sounding like ignorant fools to her, and so they’d shy away. It was that way with her and one boy after another until she met Cousin Wesley.

Wesley might of done some reckless things in his life, I won’t deny that, but nobody would ever call him an ignorant fool unless they’re a true one theirself. The fact is, as we quick came to find out, Wesley was an educated man—a lot more than most you’d ever meet. He’d read more than a few books himself, and he could speak just like his daddy the Reverend whenever he took the notion. I imagine that when he and Jane met at that barn dance they must of felt like two people from the same strange little country meeting in a place where nobody else could speak their true language.

I was right there when Gipson introduced them, and you should’ve seen the way their eyes lit up on each other in the first two minutes. I hadn’t never believed in love at first sight till that moment. He kissed her hand like he’d done to ours, but even though her cheeks got rosy she kept cool as you please, like she’d had her hand kissed every day of her life. Mary Ann looked at me and rolled her eyes. She wanted Wesley to meet a sweet girl as much as Minerva and I did, but she’d never been as easily abiding of Jane Bowen’s airs as we were.

“May I have the honor of this dance, Miss Jane?” Wesley said to her, and she said, “It would be my pleasure, Mr. Hardin.”

So off they went on the dance floor—and they didn’t sit down or separate from each other for more than a minute the whole rest of the evening. They danced like they’d been born to be partners. They square-danced and two-stepped and reeled—they danced every dance that Fiddler Thomason called. It was while they were Texas waltzing that they looked the most beautiful together—whirling round and round to the music of the fiddles and Elmer Quayle’s five-string and Toby Franks’s mouth harp. The barn was warm and close with all those people churning up such a dancing sweat, but him and Jane moved just as light and easy as a pair of birds, his open coat swirling and the skirt of her dress flaring full and sassy as they spun around the floor. I don’t believe I was ever so jealous of somebody and so happy for them at the same time.

I happened to pass close by to where they were sitting and sipping punch during a short rest the band took to wet their whistles. He was talking earnest and she was looking at him like he hung the moon. I heard him tell her she had eyes “like the fairest stars in God’s wide heaven.”

I’ve never forgot that. “The fairest stars in God’s wide heaven!” Declare, if any man ever said such a thing to me … well, never you mind.

The next morning Wesley told Manning he’d been thinking it over and had decided not to go to Mexico after all but would join up on the Kansas drive with him. Nobody was a bit surprised by his sudden decision—nobody who saw the way him and Jane had wrapped their eyes around each other the night before. We had a barn dance every Saturday evening for the next few weeks till the herds were ready for the trail, and Wesley and Jane would dance all night like they were in a world of their own, spinning and spinning to the music, just swimming in each other’s arms.