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1,198 words Perhaps
to the inquiring eye, a cattle-country scene featuring some cowboys around
a chuckwagon and longhorns as far as the eye can see, comes off as a non-sequitur,
when the central topic is William Sydney Porter. On closer consideration,
however, selection of this particular piece of art just reflects
one more contradiction in the life of a man whose existence was full of
them.
Bill Porter was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, but when his mother
died of tuberculosis in 1865, he was left a virtual orphan.
He and his father had never
shared much of a relationship. Left
at loose ends, his uncle gave him a home
and, at age fifteen, put him to work in his drugstore.
This arrangement served
to keep body and soul together, but left much to be desired in terms of
meeting the young man’s hopes and interests. At age 20, Bill Porter moved to Texas, and found employment on a sheep ranch. Without doubt it was in that rough company that he heard his first accounts of the cattle-rustlers, gunslingers, tin-horn gamblers and other characters that populated the southwestern United States immediately following the close of the Civil War. The early impressions he gained as a ranch hand are clearly reflected in many of his stories in the "Heart of the West" collection. Obviously, young Porter enjoyed the rustic atmosphere, but the meager wage (fifty-cents a day and meals was considered ‘regular’ back then) finally prompted him to move to Austin, Texas, without doubt in search of larger opportunities than his lowly position in the sheep business afforded him.
But
Austin, Texas, proved to be not merely inhospitable. It provided the matrix
within which unfolded a series of personal and economic disasters that
were to shape Bill Porter’s existence for the rest of his short and
tragic life. He arrived in Austin in 1884, and shortly thereafter met and married a young lady of that same city. The marriage was marked for tragedy from the start.
Athol,
the new bride, quickly became pregnant and almost simultaneously, was diagnosed
as an active tubercular, which disease would kill her a very few years
later. Their first child died in infancy. Bill struggled to support his
family on a meager stipend paid him as a draftsman in the General
Land Office, but it was woefully inadequate.
In a desperate effort to augment his income, he launched
a little weekly comedy magazine that he called "The Rolling
Stone". It barely lasted
a year, before folding for lack of subscribers. Broke and in debt, Bill Porter took a job as a teller in the First National Bank, in Austin. If this was a gambit intended to improve his financial situation, it failed miserably. Banks have never distinguished themselves by paying good salaries to rank and file employees, and the First National Bank of Austin was no exception to the niggardly rule. Perhaps incited by desperation, prompted by near-poverty and augmented by the demands of impatient creditors, "discrepancies" were discovered in his accounts. He was fired from the bank, while federal auditors went to work on his account books.
The Porters moved to Houston, where Bill hired onto
the
Houston Post, as a reporter. It
was almost a year later - in 1896 - that a warrant was issued for Bill’s
arrest,
on a charge of embezzlement. This
turn of events cost him his job on
the Houston Post, and put his and his family’s life in total turmoil.
His first
child had recently died and his wife, Athol, was steadily deteriorating in
health from the ravages of tuberculosis.
Rather
than submit to arrest at the hands of the United States Marshall, who was
looking for him with the embezzlement warrant, Porter fled. First to New Orleans,
then to Honduras, then to Mexico, and - finally - back to Texas. In
all he had been gone about two years, and he returned barely in time to be
present at her bedside when Athol died.
In the first trial, the jury brought back a "Not True" verdict.
But the bank
and the bank examiners were relentless.
They got permission for retrial, and
that time the verdict was "Guilty".
Porter was sentenced to three years in the
Ohio State Penitentiary.
In
retrospect, Texas generally and Austin, Texas, in particular, seem to reflect
a measure of well-justified
regret for the cavalier treatment accorded to an
"adoptive" son, who sought a new life within the "Lone
Star" environs. There is surely enough blame to go
around.
Without attempting to turn him into a Texas icon, a modest ‘museum’ in
Austin, serves to memorialize the fact that the famous storyteller did,
indeed, once live there. The circumstances of Bill Porter’s crime, if such it be, are cloudy at best. The first trial ended without a verdict. It took a second trial to convict, and footnotes to that unfortunate procedure by people who were close to it, offer pointed remarks concerning an overly vindictive bank management, and a politically supercharged prosecutor. The amount of money involved in the alleged defalcation is variously stated as high as $1,000.00, and as low as $350.00. Since Bill Porter never made it out of high school, it must follow that he was not an adept bookkeeper, raising another question:
Can mere
error
be ruled out?
Considering
the present-day reputation of Texas courts for drum-head ‘justice’,
we can only conjecture that in that distant past, judicial procedures were
undoubtedly even more rudimentary. The
house seems seriously divided on the basic
question as to whether any bank embezzlement actually occurred. The issue
of whether or not William Sydney
But
however this may be, and the questions will never be resolved to everyone’s
satisfaction, the sorry business turned Bill Porter into a perceived
victim of Texas overreaction, at least in the minds of millions of his
loyalists.
This unfortunate impression remains, and will never be eradicated.
A hundred
years later, is easy to postulate that, with a bit more tolerance -
even charity - for a young man beset by more problems than he could
possibly handle, a different approach might have been found.
A softer hand might have
been applied to the situation, whatever it turned out to be, and - as the
dividend for a modest investment in tolerance and understanding - William
Sydney Porter, or O.Henry if
you prefer, would - with credentials intact - have
passed into the ages as a favored, if adopted, true son of Texas. So the cattle and the cowboys in Allen Moir Dean’s pastoral (above) serves to remind us that although William Sydney Porter looked to Texas to seek his fortune. He found nothing there but disappointment, hardship, rejection and dishonor.
Without
further
seeking to sort out and place blame,
the events that transpired in Texas
were - without any reasonable doubt - the basic inputs that determined his
unfortunate future. By the
time the United States Marshall escorted Bill Porter
out of Texas, to the Ohio State Penitentiary, his fate was sealed.
---- and
the tragedy of O.Henry was irretrievably set in motion for all time to
come.
Lorenzo
Dee Belveal
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