All Honest Men

by Claude Stanush

  Then he smiled.

  “Ain’t smart to make ’em look bad.”

  He was right. It weren’t smart. There was nothing the boys hated worse’n what they called a “righty boy,” somebody that played up to the guards. Well, I wasn’t playing up to nobody. But that didn’t make no diff’rence to them soddy-mite convicts. And all that got me to thinking I’d better watch my back. Only a week before somebody throwed gasoline and a lighted match on a prisoner that’d snitched to the guards. He was burned black like barbecue.

  One Sunday afternoon, when we was all walking around the yard for “recreation,” I run into Frank Holloway. He was setting on a bench reading the Houston Post. The chaplain had give it to him. Like I said before, Frank acted like a “know-it-all,” no matter what you talked about he put on like he knowed more. But it was true he’d had more school than near anybody else at Imperial, even the guards. And he was likely the only one that had much interest in what was going on outside the joint.

  Anyhow, I set down next to him and I couldn’t help saying how mad I was. Goddamn that Dirty Butter! Goddamn the whole bunch of ’em!

  “Your first mistake,” Frank said, laying that Houston Post down neat on his lap, “was going out with that brother of yours.”

  “I had to go out with him,” I said. “He’s my brother.”

  “One crazy in a family, Skinny, is one too many.”

  I didn’t say nothing else right off. He just wouldn’t get how me and Dock felt about each other. That’s one thing I knowed about “know-it-alls”—lots of times, it’s the simplest of things they just don’t get.

  Me and Dock was blood, that’s all. Dock got me in hot water this time. But he got me outa hot water other times. Like one time when we was kids, me and him’d run off from home and we was right in the middle of nowhere, having a good old time knocking over jackrabbits with our .22s. And right in the middle of that nowhere, I come down with the typhoid fever. Typhoid fever is that old, slow fever that’ll suck up ever’ last drop of water outa you and kill you just as dead as how a bad drought’ll fry up a cotton plant. Sure enough, I was so sick I died. Died just as natural as anything. And when I died, I seen the devil a-standing in front of me, clear as day, with them sharp horns on him and that crooked tail. And I went to laughing and saying, “Hey, devil, gimme a smile.” Dock seen what was going on, and he set off afoot under a burning, burning August sun to find me water, and he went fifteen miles one way and fifteen miles t’other way, bringing it back, and never one time did he say how long that walk was, or how hot that sun was.

  No, Frank didn’t know that. And I didn’t feel like telling him. I just reached down and pulled up my pants leg.

  “Look at this.”

  I stuck my left leg straight out so he could get him a good look. I didn’t wanta prove his point, that I didn’t have no more sense in me than my brother. Only I liked showing off them dog-bite scars. Hell, I didn’t holler, I didn’t even peep, when them hounds was chewing my legs right on down to the bone. Dew poison from the cotton plants had got into some of them sores; they was red and runny and full of pus. The prison doctor who treated ’em was a horse-doctor—a vet for the prison mules—and he give me kerosene when I’d asked for some liniment.

  Frank looked at my legs, but he didn’t whistle or nothing. He just held up the newspaper he was reading. “Listen to this, Skinny. The Baptists and Methodists are fighting to make it a crime to drink whiskey.”

  He turned to another page, “And over here, it tells how women are fighting to get the vote. Lady says here if women get the vote, ‘Peace will descend on this land like a morning mist.’”

  He turned to another page. “But over here it tells how England and France and Germany are arguing about something that’s liable to end up in another helluva big war, bigger than our own War Between the States.”

  He put down the paper, “Be wonderful, wouldn’t it, if life were so simple? Women get the vote, peace ‘descends.’ But I’d say that’s a piper’s dream, wouldn’t you?”

  “Who knows?” I said. “You ain’t never met my Ma.”

  I pulled my foot back on the ground. Frank wasn’t paying me no mind. He was too caught up in his own talking.

  “Well,” Frank said, going on, and shaking his head, “I, for one, doubt that women are the answer to the problems plaguing this crazy world of ours. Let me say this, Skinny: The world’s not all that civilized. Not like we like to think it is. Some animals live off others because they’re more powerful, and it’s the same with humans. If you have the power—money, guns, the laws—you live off the ones who don’t.”

  “Tell me something I don’t know, Frank.” I straightened the leg of my pants.

  Yeah, I knowed all that. Wasn’t I setting there caged up in a pen with two red, runny, chewed-up legs ’cause somebody had more power’n me?

  Only Holloway did know some things I didn’t, he’d been in the penitentiary before. So I let him keep on talking.

  Which he was, without me asking.

  “Let’s say you try that escape stunt again, Skinny. Let’s say this time the dogs don’t get you. You think the warden’s gonna lick his pencil and cross you off his register?” He give a titter. “He’ll keep after you, and he’ll keep after you, and he’ll keep after you. And sooner or later, one way or another, you’ll be back. And you know what they can do to you for getting rabbit in you a second time?”

  “I don’t care.”

  “When you get the book tossed at you, Skinny, you might care quite a bit. That, my friend, can put you up for life.”

  Life? Damn! I didn’t say nothing to that.

  “Think about that, Skinny,” Frank went on. “Think about it hard. If you haven’t learned it already, you can’t win by bucking the powers in this world. Not in the long run. You have to come at things from a different place.” And with that, Frank tapped his head. “Only way you can do it is to outwit ’em.”

  He give me a toothy smile, and that was the end of it. He’d talked hisself out.

  I thought to myself: if Frank Holloway is such a Smart Man, how come he’s in the joint along with the rest of us dumb clucks? Only, much as I hate to say it, he did get me to do some new thinking.

  I thought over it the rest of that day, and into the next. How there’s all kinds of power, and all kinds of smarts. We seen it ever’day out on the farm, how the bigger animals lived off the littler ones, and how mules and horses had more power in ’em than humans, but how humans ruled over ’em anyways.

  Take my brother Jess. He started busting broncs when he was just fourteen, still skinny as a twig and hardly outa kneepants. And it was damn risky, that kinda work. A 1,200-pound bronc can pitch the tar outa you, and whirl the tar outa you, and then, if it wants to, drop its head and do a somersault forwards, chile pa riba. We knowed one fella that got rolled like that and was smashed like a watermelon.

  But the crazier the horses was, the better Jess liked ’em.

  No horse could do a front roll with my brother because he knowed just how to rein ’em in. Jess couldn’t read a book, he hardly knowed his ABCs, but he sure as hell could read a horse. Before he ever got on one he studied ever’thing about ’em, whether they was skittery or just plain mean. How they moved their head and the muscles of their body and how much white they had showing in their eyes.

  No matter how mean or tricky a bronc was, Jess could ride ’em down to sweat.

  So the more I run it over in my head, how somebody like me, without no power, was gonna get out of a state penitentiary that was circled by mule-faced guards and 12-gauge shotguns and a pack of dirty dogs and ten rows of bobwire and the power of the whole state of Texas, the more I begun to think of Jess and how he out-tricked some of the biggest, rankest animals that ever was born.

  It took me a week of hard thinking and talking, mostly to Des Moines Benny, and then it come to me. It was a far-fetched idea. It’d be taking a helluva chance if it didn’t work out. But if I wanted to get anyw
here in this life, if I just wanted to get out of the joint, I had to take some chances.

  I was gonna need Ma’s help. I wrote her that I wanted her to visit me at Imperial, that I had to see her. I didn’t tell her why because the prison people read all our letters and scratched out whatever they didn’t like with a big, black pen. Ma wrote back right away; she was coming. How she got the money, I don’t know. Ma was a determined person, and somehow she got it.

  She was my first and only visitor.

  I can still see Ma coming through that door. She had her straw town hat on, and she’d stuck some crow feathers in the band to slick it up. There was tears in her eyes.

  “Willis,” she said. “Son. You all right?”

  There was a guard in the room. He didn’t want no visitor to slip you a knife, or to even touch you on the cheek. All I could do was stand up. “I’m fine, Ma. Fine. How’s ever’thing at home?”

  “Fine. Fine.”

  She knowed I wasn’t telling her the truth, ’n I knowed she wasn’t telling me the truth. So I didn’t ask no more questions. I come right to the point. “Ma, I want you to go see the Gov’nor for me …”

  Ma’s eyebrows jumped up like they had legs. “The Gov’nor?”

  I told it to her fast. I wanted Ma to ask the Gov’nor to give me a pardon, ’cause I hadn’t done nothing wrong in the first place to get sent up. They’d made a mistake. And Ma was a good woman, the Gov’nor could tell that right off. Besides which, I’d heard the Gov’nor was giving out pardons right and left. That anybody could get a pardon for the right amount of money, if they knowed how to do it. You didn’t give it outright to the Gov’nor, that’d be bribery, but there was a way, a legal way.

  I didn’t tell Ma the whole story. I didn’t tell her that there was a few things I’d likely have to do after she seen the Gov’nor—things that wasn’t altogether straight—to make double-sure I got me that pardon. But I always think it’s best to leave holes in a story, when you need to.

  Ma told me later how things come out when she went to see the Gov’nor. She told me exact.

  She said she took the Texas & Pacific to Dallas, and then the Katy to Austin. When she got to Austin and seen that state capitol building, she just stood and stared at it. It was like a palace, she said. Glittery pink granite with that big dome atop. When she finally went inside, she thought she’d never find the Gov’nor’s office. But she did. And then she done just what I told her to do. She set down on a chair like she was waiting for somebody. There was a young woman setting at a desk, and the room was full of people.

  For more’n an hour, Ma told me, she watched the hand on a big wall clock click around. At 2:16 p.m.—Ma could recall the time exact—the woman at the desk leaned over to pick up something she’d dropped on the floor. And Ma slid just like a garden snake into the Gov’nor’s office.

  The Gov’nor was a-talking on the telephone. He didn’t notice Ma a’tall.

  Ma told me the Gov’nor looked about like how she thought he’d look, dressed in a dark-blue suit with a dark blue vest and a white shirt with a stiff collar. He had a long sharp nose and a tall forehead. She said the rakes on his comb had made wide rows in his hair and it made his head look just like a fresh-plowed field.

  Since the Gov’nor was talking hard on the telephone, Ma said she took the time to look around his office.

  It was a big office, bigger’n some of the farm shacks our family’d lived in over the years. Behind the Gov’nor’s desk was the head of a big Longhorn steer with horns that stuck out near three feet each. And on the walls was pictures of Texas heroes in gold-color frames. One of ’em had a card under it saying “Stephen F. Austin,” and one said “Sam Houston,” and another said “Davy Crockett.”

  Ma’d heard stories about these Texas heroes all her life, but she never did know what they looked like. She told me she walked over to the picture of Sam Houston with his long white hair and his wild bushy eyebrows, and she stretched her neck forwards and looked at it hard. She started thinking about the stories she’d heard about Houston, how he was a good man but a big drunkard that was always passing out in the bushes outside that very state capitol building, when, all of a sudden, the Gov’nor’s voice was right in Ma’s ear.

  “May I help you, Ma’am?”

  The Gov’nor had put down the phone and he’d stood up and was a-walking straight to Ma.

  Ma told me she gulped, then quick found her voice.

  “Mister Gov’nor,” Ma said to him, “my name is Janetta Pecos Newton, and I’m a widder woman with four small children and I got a big patch of cotton that needs to be picked.” (Pa wasn’t no more dead than the Gov’nor, but right then Pa was more use to Ma dead than alive.)

  “My son, Willis Newton, is in prison,” Ma kept on. “They said he stole cotton but he’s completely innocent. And now I need to get Willis a pardon so he can help me with my patch.”

  “Willis Newton?” When the Gov’nor heard my name, Ma told me, his eyebrows pulled together and his upper lip pushed out, like he was thinking about something hard and smelling something bad, both at the same time. “Willis Newton? Isn’t he the one who jumped a guard with his brother down near Imperial?”

  “Wouldn’t you fight back if you was innocent?” Ma answered him. “If they was trying to take away your human freedom? Them men up there …” She pointed up to the Texas heroes on the wall. “… them men fought and died for their freedom. Any red-blooded Texan would. Mister Gov’nor, Willis never stole no cotton. His brother Dock did. He confessed to it—that he done it all by hisself.”

  Then Ma told me she walked over to that stuffed Longhorn head on the wall and stood right next to its glass eye.

  “My late husband, Jim Newton,” she said to the Gov’nor, “drove well over 2,000 o’ these Longhorns up to Wichita, Kansas.” (Pa drove less’n 200 cattle up to Kansas. But Ma didn’t think adding a coupla thousand would hurt none.)

  “While they was up in Kansas, some dirty thief stole Jim’s horse and money. But my husband didn’t want to steal nobody else’s horse, so he walked on his own two legs all them hundreds o’ miles back home.” (There wasn’t no dirty Kansas thief. Pa got stranded up there ’cause he got dead drunk one night and gambled away all his money, and his horse.)

  “’Course, them days, they hung a man if they caught him stealing a horse,” Ma went on. “I was hoping times was different. That a man’s life is worth more’n a horse. Or $35 worth of cotton—that he didn’t steal.”

  Ma waited a few moments for all that to sink in.

  “Gov’nor,” she said then, “I’m gonna set right here until you either throw me out, or turn Willis loose.”

  The Gov’nor didn’t say nothing right off. He give a long sigh.

  “Tell you what I’ll do, Missus Newton.” he said at last. “If you can get letters from the people back in Eastland County recommending clemency for Willis, letters that say a mistake’s been made, I’ll give your boy a pardon. Provided … provided he serves at least one more year of his sentence. That’s for helping to let all those prisoners escape. And I’ll tell you right now, ma’am, if he ever gets into trouble again, lets me down, God help him!”

  “Thank you, Gov’nor. God bless you.”

  Ma told me the Gov’nor then shook her hand and walked back behind his desk.

  “Good day, Missus Newton.”

  But Ma made no move to leave.

  “Gov’nor,” she said in a slow voice, “the other boy, Dock, he ain’t a bad ’un either. When he was jus’ a tot, he was bit on the head by a mad coyote.”

  “Good day, Missus Newton.”

  Ma told me she thanked the Gov’nor anyhow.

  It took more’n Ma’s determination to get me out. I still needed letters from all them skunks back in Eastland County, the ones that’d sent me up to the penitentiary in the first place. And I knowed damn well what they was gonna say. But I had a plan. I wrote to ’em anyway. And they all wrote back, just like I knowed they would. On a Su
nday afternoon, during recreation time, I showed them letters to Des Moines Benny. I’d been tight with him long enough to trust he wouldn’t snitch.

  “Read these,” I said.

  The first letter went like this: “To the prison warden: After what Willis Newton did to me, I’d rather see him hanging on the end of a rope than get out of prison. He’s been a troublemaker since he was born. Signed, Mel Calhoun.”

  The next letter was close to the same. “Dear Willis: Your brother Dock is a proved thief, and there’s no doubt in my mind that you are too. I wouldn’t recommend anything except to keep you in prison as long as possible. Signed. Constable Jim O’Toole.”

  The letters from the district attorney and the judge was along the same lines.

  “The rest is up to you,” I said to Des Moines Benny.

  Des Moines Benny, if you remember, had them long, thin fingers that could do things in a fine, careful way, like a woman. And with them long, thin fingers Benny’d got hisself a reputation as the best forger in Texas—as well as Oklahoma, New Mexico, Kansas, and Louisiana. So we borrowed some letter paper from the chaplain and Benny rewrote ever’ one of them letters, in handwriting even Mel Calhoun and Constable O’Toole would’ve swore was theirs. Except the letters all said they was so sorry that a great mistake had been made, and that I was completely innocent.

  Benny addressed all them letters to the Board of Pardons, and we sneaked them out of the penitentiary so they could be mailed from Eastland County. It was a big gamble, all right. But the chaplain had told me the board got so many letters it hardly ever double-checked ’em. And when the board read them letters, they wrote the Gov’nor that “no man ever had better recommendations than Mister Willis Newton.”