The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

The hole was a lightless cell about five feet high and four feet square. Its door was solid steel except for a small hinged slot at the bottom for pushing through the prisoner’s ration of bread and water once a day. The usual stay was three to seven days, depending, but if an inmate had been particularly troublesome—and Hardin surely was during his first six or seven years behind the walls—he could get up to fifteen days. What’s more, we were under full authority to add to a con’s discomfort in a variety of ways during his stay in the hole. His bread would certainly be moldy, and on occasion might even be soaked with “yellow gravy” dispensed from a guard’s bladder. His drinking water would likely be dipped from the privy.

But nothing we did to their food and water was as punishing to most inmates in the hole as the cramped darkness itself. Some men adjusted to it, but many could not. Isolation in total and prolonged darkness will unleash the demons in a man’s mind like nothing else can. Prisoners of weak will would start to scream within hours of the door closing on them. Others lasted a day or two before they began to howl. And once a man started screaming in the hole, he’d still be screaming when we came to take him out, even if his vocal cords had quit on him. They’d come out with eyes like loco horses and blood in their mouths and wouldn’t be able to talk for days. The whole time they were in there, they were obliged to relieve themselves on the floor and wallow in their own waste. They’d come out smelling worse than you could believe possible of a human being. They’d be purblind in the sudden light. After fifteen days in the hole, some never recovered their proper vision. Some couldn’t stand up straight or walk steadily for days afterward. A prisoner once described the hole as being as dark and foul as the devil’s asshole. It was a crude but apt description.

Hardin always got through his stays in the hole a whole lot better than most. When we opened the door at the end of his first time in there, he was on his back and had his legs straight up against the wall—a position the smart ones figured out as a way to keep their knees and back muscles from knotting up on them and losing their stretch. He seemed indifferent to the cockroaches crawling over his filthy nakedness. He squinted hard against the light and said, “Already?” He was a genuine hard case, all right, and I was certain he would never leave Huntsville alive.

After his first escape attempt, we riveted a ball-and-chain to his ankle—a punishment usually reserved for the worst of the repeat offenders—and put him in a cell with a lifer named John Williams, a big mule-faced con who was the row turnkey. He was also the best snitch we had on the row. He could convince the hardest cons of his loyalty to them. And because they believed he had the trust of the authorities—his position as turnkey was proof of that—they considered him a valuable confidant. We would have been at a grave disadvantage against the cons if it weren’t for snitches like Williams—but most of us saw them the same way the cons did: as worthless, dishonorable trash who would betray anybody for cheap gain. It is satisfying to know that a snitch’s luck will sooner or later run out. Williams’s ran out two years later when somebody overpowered him in his cell, sliced his tongue off at the root, and held his head back until he drowned in his own blood. Rumor had it that a row guard had tipped the cons about Williams. Perhaps so.

It took Williams more than a month to gain Hardin’s trust, but eventually he did. He informed us that Hardin had somehow managed to cut through the rivets that held the ball-and-chain shackles around his ankle and had replaced them with a clever tap-and-bolt assembly. “He can take that ball off as quick as slipping off a sock,” Williams said. He also said Hardin was planning another escape attempt. The worst punishment we could give him for cutting off his ball-and-chain was a trip to the hole, but if we caught him trying to escape again, we could whip him. So we let him think he had us fooled about the ball-and-chain, and we bided our time.

A few weeks later Williams knew most of the details of the plan. He was in on it himself. Hardin had formed wax impressions of all the padlock keys on Williams’s ring—which Williams had to turn over to the guard sergeant every evening after locking down the row. It was Hardin’s intention to fashion keys from pieces of tin to fit the locks on every cell on the row. Some night after lockdown, he would release the other cons on the row; they would overpower and disarm the night guards, and then shoot their way out or die trying.

A few days later Williams said Hardin had finished his keys. He’d had Williams test them on the locks and they all worked perfectly. “That boy’s a right wonder with his hands,” Williams said. “I believe he could make him a pocket watch from a tin can if he wanted.” The break was set for Christmas Eve.

Just after Williams locked down the row that evening, I posted guard details with shotguns at both ends of the row, and then Ballinger and Meese and I rushed into Hardin’s cell. He’d just taken off his ball-and-chain and was retrieving his keys from under a floor stone. He fought like a wildcat, breaking Meese’s nose and nearly biting off one of Ballinger’s fingers. I kept clubbing at him with my hickory stick, but it was hard to get a clear swing at him in all the rolling and tumbling. I finally landed some hard ones square on his head and took enough fight out of him for Ballinger and Meese to get him pinned and cuff his hands behind him. The rest of the row had been roused by the sounds of the fight and was roaring like a zoo at feeding time.

The lanterns in the drafty whipping room threw trembling shadows on the stained stones. It was so cold our breath showed in pale puffs. Wales was waiting for us, his sleeves rolled up on his muscular arms and the whip coiled in his fist. Ballinger and Meese each held Hardin by an arm and Lawrence had him in a choke hold from behind. It was all he could do to breathe. The warden had ordered us to give him a full whipping, then throw what was left of him in the hole for a week.

We stripped him naked and tied the end of one rope around his wrists and the end of another around his ankles, then stretched him facedown on the stone floor, Ballinger tugging on one rope and Lawrence on the other. He wriggled like a fish on a line and cursed us in a fury. Wales stepped up and uncoiled the whip with an easy twitch of his wrist. “You already got you some good scars, boy,” he said, “but you ain’t seemed to learn much by way of getting them.”

The whip consisted of four leather harness straps, each about three feet long and two inches wide, attached to a foot-long hickory handle. Wales was a master with it and made every lick crack like a pistol shot. He’d snap his wrist one way to cut into the flesh, and another to pull the wounds open wider. The limit on lashes was thirty-nine, which was enough to kill a man. I knew because I’d seen it happen. But if a man couldn’t take it, that was his bad fortune. He should not have done whatever he did to bring the whipping on himself. The convicts had a saying: “Don’t make a slip if you can’t take the whip.” It was an admonition worth heeding.

With the first twenty-five licks, Wales opened him up from shoulder blades to tailbone. His ribs showed through in several places, and we’d all been spotted with his blood. I told Wales he would kill him if he persisted in hitting him in the same places. He glared at me and said he didn’t need anybody to tell him how to do his job. His face was dripping sweat and his shirt was soaked through. He was in a temper because he’d been unable to make Hardin cry out until the seventeenth lick. No con had ever before lasted past the twelfth stripe before screaming, and none had ever taken all thirty-nine without losing consciousness. Only Meese had thought Hardin would go past twelve without yipping, and he won big in the betting among the guards. Nobody had been foolish enough to bet he’d be conscious at the end.

After one more to his ribs to remind me who the whipping boss was, Wales gave him the rest across the buttocks and the backs of his legs. When it was over, Hardin had fainted and looked like he’d been attacked by wolves. We took the ropes off him and poured water over his head, then pulled him to his feet and half dragged and half carried him down the hall to the hole. He left a smeared trail of blood behind him. On our way back to the block, Lawrence said, “He don’t look all that good. No salve on them bad wounds, nothing to eat the next seven days hardly, nothing to drink? I don’t reckon he’ll make it.” Ballinger said he didn’t think so, either, and they both looked at Meese, who smiled and said, “Five dollars says he does.”

Meese won again, though not by much. When we took Hardin out of solitary he couldn’t walk on his own. His back was a massive ugly wound, oozing pus and blood and festering with maggots. He was on fire with fever and half out of his head. The warden thought he was exaggerating his pain and refused to admit him to the prison hospital, but he did permit the doctor to treat him. It was a month before he was up on his feet again—with a fresh new set of scars to carry to the grave.

For years he wouldn’t quit trying. He took more beatings than any con I can recall. And then one day we got a new deputy warden, a former Ranger named Ben McCulloch. It so happened he and Hardin knew each other from some ten years or so before when they drove cattle together. He told Hardin he was sorry to see how poorly fortune had treated him. Hardin laughed and said it hadn’t treated him as poorly as it had McCulloch. “Ain’t much lower a man can get than a damn prison hack,” he said. “You must of displeased the Lord a good bit more’n I have.” Some guards took offense at such talk about our profession, but not McCulloch. He laughed along with Hardin and said, “Maybe so, Wes, maybe so.”

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.

* * *

He 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.

* * *

It 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.

* * *

Officially, 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.”