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
* * *
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
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. “
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.…
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….
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.”
His transformation, according to officials at Huntsville, had been truly miraculous. Despite having been a most intractable convict during his first few years in the penitentiary, he had, after thirteen years, become a model prisoner. He was held up to the other inmates as supreme proof and example of what a man might make of himself behind bars if he truly tried. The prison superintendent had informed Wesley that if he persisted in his remarkable reform, he would likely be set free within the next two years.
Wesley was elated by the prospect; but his elation was shadowed by another ominous legal cloud. Namely: he was still under indictment in DeWitt County for having killed a man there twenty years before, a deputy sheriff
