The Convict and Other Stories

“Where’s little Hack? Where’s Satchel-ass at?” he said.

“He’s in the service now, Hack,” his son Jack said.

“Why ain’t he here?”

“He’s fighting in the war in Korea, Grandpa,” Bonnie said.

“He’s got more sense than all of you.” For just a moment he saw his grandson, barefoot in his overalls, following the mule sled through the rows of tomato plants, picking the blood drops out of the leaves and dropping them into the baskets, the sun hot on his freckled shoulders.

“I gave him that name Satchel-ass,” he said. “He looked just like a nigra washwoman bent over in the row.”

But they weren’t listening to him now. They were drinking bottles of Lone Star and Pearl and talking loudly about things the way younger people did, as though no one had lived them before. Someone put a piece of cake on a paper plate with a fork in front of him. A burned candle lay flat in the icing.

“Give me my whiskey.”

“One glass,” his daughter said.

“Bonnie,” Jack said.

“Let him have a glass, for God’s sake,” she said.

He saw her pour out of the Jack Daniel’s bottle into the cup in front of him. The whiskey shimmered with brown light in the sun’s glare through the window. He raised the cup with both hands and felt the bourbon spilling over his mouth onto his shirtfront, clicking over his tongue, burning through his throat. His eyes blinked slowly like a bird’s when the heat hit his stomach and ticked with a sharp fingernail at his loins. His hand went out toward the warm, amber light inside the bottle.

“Tomorrow, Hack,” Jack said.

“That’s right, Grandpa,” his son-in-law said, squatting by his chair. “Bonnie and I are spending the weekend, and I want you to tell the story about locking Wesley Hardin in jail. I brought the tape recorder and a nip for both of us.”

“You have the face of an idiot,” Hack said.

He wasn’t sure whether he fell asleep on the porch again or in his bed in the side room. Wakefulness came to him once during the middle of the night when he urinated into the metal pan he held between his naked thighs, and while the drops congealed between his fingers and the pin-oak tree bent outside in the wind, he slipped into a dream as bright and clearly etched in its sequence as a lucifer match touching a candle.

He and his grandson little Hack stood in the ruins of the old county jail. The ceiling and one of the adobe walls had collapsed, the roofing timbers hung down like broken teeth, and there were broken bottles and used condoms in the corners. The little boy ran his fingers over the worn, nail-scratched inscription on the wall: WES HARDIN WILL KILL HACKBERRY HOLLAND FOR NIGGER MEAT.

“Is that where you chained him up, Grandpa?”

“Yes, but Wes didn’t write that. He didn’t send a message when he shot somebody. He just come at you with his pistol already out.”

He looked into his grandson’s face and saw his own face there, and before the boy could ask, he told the story again about how he had put the most dangerous man in Texas in jail. When Hack was sheriff and justice of the peace, he had put out word for John Wesley Hardin never to come into DeWitt County again. A week later Hardin rode drunk all night from San Antonio and came into the lot just at sunrise, his black suit streaked with sweat and mud and whiskey. He had a navy Colt revolver propped on his thigh and a shotgun tied down to the saddle. He drilled five rounds from the pistol into one of the wood columns on the front porch, cocking and firing, while his horse reared and sawed against the bit.

“Get out here, Hack, and I’ll give you a rose petal between the eyes!”

But Hack was in the barn with one of his mares that was in foal, and he waited until Hardin’s pistol snapped on an empty chamber, then stepped into the lot with the Winchester that he always kept in the leather scabbard nailed inside the barn door.

“You goddamn son of a bitch,” he said. “Start to untie that shotgun and I’ll put a new asshole in the middle of your face.”

Hardin laid his pistol against his knee and turned his horse in a half circle.

“You come up behind me, do you?” he said. “Get your pistol and let me reload and I’ll pay them nigger deputies for burying you.”

“I told you not to come back to DeWitt. Now you shot up my house and probably run off half my Mexicans. I’m going to put you in jail and wrap

chains all over you, then I’m taking you into my court for attempted assault on a law officer. Move off that horse.”

Hardin looked back at him steadily with his killer’s eyes, then brought his boots out of the stirrups, slashed his spurs into the horse’s sides, and bent low over the neck with his fingers tangled in the mane as the horse charged for the front gate. But Hack leaped forward at the same time and swung the Winchester by the barrel with both hands, as though he were chopping with an ax, and caught Hardin squarely across the base of the neck. Hardin pitched sideways out of the saddle and landed on his back, and when he tried to raise himself to his feet, Hack kicked him full in the face with his boot. Then he threw him unconscious into the bed of a vegetable wagon, put manacles on his wrists, wrapped him in trace chains, and nailed the end links down to the boards.

“What did he say to you when he was in the cell?” his grandson said.

“He wouldn’t say anything. He’d spit in his food and throw it out on the floor and look at me with them eyes that was like a slow match burning. He didn’t need to say anything else.”