The Pistoleer: A Novel of John Wesley Hardin

We went back and told Uncle Barnett, and him and three of his hands went back into the Thicket with us and cut the body down. Uncle Barnett snatched the sign off him and threw it in the bushes. They took the dead man to the sheriff’s office in Moscow and put him in a coffin and stood the open box on end in front of the office with a sign resting on his chest saying, “DO YOU KNOW THIS MAN?” But after a whole day and night nobody had claimed to know him and he was stinking pretty bad by then, so they went ahead and buried him with just a plain cross on his grave.

We grew up together, Johnny and me. His brother Joe too, though Joe was a sight different from Johnny. Johnny liked to run around with the rest of us and was popular with everybody, but Joe tended to keep to himself. Always had his nose in a book, Joe. Actually, Johnny liked books too—Lord knows why—but he dang sure didn’t spend all his time with them. He much preferred doing things—riding, rassling, foot racing, chicken chasing, hunting, things like that. We didn’t either of us ever like the indoors much until we’d growed up enough to learn the pleasures of saloons and fancy houses.

Johnny was always long and lean, more on the skinny side than not, but he was strong as rawhide and twice as tough. And run? That boy could run like a scalded dog. He wasn’t but thirteen when he outran Moscow’s fast man, Oliver Weeks, and the very next year he outran Jean LeRoque, Sumpter’s fast man. Hell, he was quick in all the ways a man can move, not just on his feet. It’s what made him such a good rassler and boxing man. He could outrassle boys near twice his weight just because he was so fast and hard to get a good hold of. He could slip around you and pull you off-balance and have you down and pinned before you could say General Joe. If there was anything Johnny was better at than rassling or shooting it was boxing. Back in Moscow he had taught himself to box from a book writ by some Eastern professor of pugilism. Joe told me that. Johnny had practiced everything it taught—the way to stand and hold up your dukes, the ways to move your feet, the different kinds of punches, all that. “And who you suppose he practiced on?” Joe said. “I can still feel some of the knots he raised on my head.”

Hell, we was all of us pretty rough boys back then, and me and Johnny was right among the roughest, if I say so myself. But rough as we were, we weren’t old enough to lie about our age and get into the War. We felt cursed as Job’s goat for being born too late to join the ranks and go off to kill us some goddamn Yankees. All we could do back then was watch the men and the bigger boys go off to the fighting. We’d follow each departing bunch out to the main trace and wave after them till they were out of sight. Sometimes we’d see huge herds of horses and cattle being drove by on the way east to provide mounts for the cavalry and beef for the whole of the Confederacy.

The one good thing about being too young to go off to war was that now it was up to us to protect our homes and put meat on the table. We went about armed at all times. Me and Johnny and a few of the other boys shot at more than game, however. We used to make scarecrow-size figures of straw and old clothes and hang them from trees as targets. Our favorite was one we put a beard and a stovepipe hat on to make it look like Lincoln. Johnny drew a pair of eyes on it and always put his shots square between them. He was such a deadeye we always had to put a new head on the Lincoln dummy after Johnny got through taking his turn with it. He could shoot like that from the time he was ten years old.

My pa used to say there’s some so good at what they do best it’s like they been touched by magic. Farmers who can bring things out of the ground by hardly doing more than digging their boot toe in the earth and spitting in the hole. Men who can make music from any tight piece of string or empty tin can or open bottle, who can make a fiddle or a mouth organ or a banjo sing or laugh or howl just like it’s got a heart of its own. Gamblers who can make a playing card scoot like a fish or float like a feather. Bronc busters who can gentle the meanest mustang in six jumps with just a touch of their heels on its flanks and a whisper in its ear. I knew what he meant. Johnny, he had that kind of magic with a pistol.

He used to say his daddy’d taught him to shoot, but Uncle James said that wasn’t so. He said all he’d done was let Johnny practice with his old Colt Dragoon from the time he was big enough to hold it with both hands. “Nobody taught that boy to shoot,” I once heard Uncle James tell my pa. “He just knew. It’s a knowledge he was born with.” He said it the way somebody might tell you their child was born with a harelip. I guess he had a feeling about what a talent like that would do to a boy like Johnny.

Anything you ever heard about his shooting, no matter how stretched it might of sounded, was likely true. From the time he was a stripling he could shoot better than anybody I’ve yet seen, and I’ve seen more than a few shooters in my time. He could shoot a jumping squirrel in the head from eighty feet off. I saw him put all six balls in a knothole sixty feet away and no bigger around than the top of a saddle horn. I saw him set an empty whiskey bottle in the crotch of a tree with the open end facing his way, then take forty paces and spin around and shoot through the open end and blow out the bottom of the bottle. See how good you can even make out the open end of a bottle at forty paces. He taught himself all the usual twirling tricks too. He made himself a sorry-looking holster out of a piece of cowhide and practiced quick-drawing every day. I never heard of him losing a shooting contest in his life. For damn sure he never lost any of the kind that really count—the kind where you and the other fella ain’t shooting at bottles on a fence, you’re shooting at each other.

Let me tell you something. Most people who talk about gunfighting like experts ain’t usually been within ten miles of a gunfight in their whole life. But I have. I want it remembered that I was standing right there, not three feet from Johnny, the day in Trinity City when that tinhorn blasted him with a shotgun. I know how quick it happens, and how loud, and how it shocks you and don’t seem real either then or later. How afterward you’re not exactly sure just what it was you saw. There must of been two dozen witnesses to the Trinity shooting and afterward I heard two dozen different versions of it, including my own.

But that business in Trinity City was years later when he was on the run from the State Police. Right now I want to tell about the terrible days that followed the sad news of Bobby Lee’s surrender. On the day we heard of Appomattox, Uncle James told Pa that as bad as things had been during the War, they were sure to get worse now. Pa didn’t disagree. How could he? The damn Yankees were coming.

But ahead of the Yankees came our own soldiers, a small bunch of them every week or so. The few horses they had with them showed ribs through their hides like barrel staves. Hardly a man among them was whole. Every one of them had at least one bloody wound bound up on him someplace. The wagons carried men missing one or both legs, blind men, and men who just stared like they were blind. One-armed men stumbled along in the dust, men without hands, men missing an eye or some other part of their face. Twenty-year-olds looked like gray old men. But the most awful thing about it was how quiet they went by. They didn’t hardly say a word. All you heard was dragging feet and coughing and groaning, the tired clopping of horse hooves, the creaking of wagons. It was a sorely pathetic sight to behold. It made you curse and want to kick the ground. For years after, it was cripples everywhere you looked.

But it wasn’t till the Yankee army started showing up in our part of the country that we really got to know the hard consequences of losing the War. To make things worse, to rub salt in our open wounds, the Union generals had put a shitload of niggers in the companies they sent to enforce the Yankee law in Texas. Like most everybody else in East Texas, Johnny and me had knowed a good many colored folk and we had always got along with them just fine. Hellfire, there wasn’t a kin among us that owned so much as a single slave. But God damn, all them bluebelly troops to back up the land-grabbing, conniving, son of a bitch carpetbaggers and scalawags and federal bureau agents and God know who-all was bad enough—without having to put up with niggers carrying guns and giving orders to white people. That was more than we could endure. All them Union woolies was from someplace else—Alabama and Georgia, mostly—and they were a mean and insolent lot, I’m telling you.

And still things got worse. A cousin of ours, Simp Dixon, came down from Navarro County with a terrible tale to tell. Simp was son of Silas, who was brother to Johnny’s momma. His story poured coal oil on the hate we all felt for every Yankee in the world. What happened was, a bunch of Yank soldiers had rode up to the Dixon farm one day while Simp was way off in the woods hunting and his pa was in town getting supplies. The blues killed everybody—Simp’s momma and his baby brother and both his sisters, one twelve and one fourteen. Nobody knew why they’d done it. They mighta been drunk, but not necessarily. Simp said his ma had a sharp tongue and hated Yankees worse than the blackest sin, so likely she said things that set them off. They burned down the barn and shot their old milk cow and stole all four horses in the corral. They blew his little brother’s head off and took his ma and sisters into the house and violated them in the most dishonorable way before shooting them dead too. When Simp’s pa got back and found his neighbors gathered round the bodies of his family laid out in the front room of the house, he near lost his mind with grief. They told Simp later that his pa had cried and cried and started to drinking, and by nightfall he was in a drunken, sorrowing rage. He picked up the body of his youngest daughter, who’d always been his favorite, and let out a howl you could of heard clear to the Brazos.