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Claymore: a story of Texas
The late D. V. Pyle, Texas Aggie, oil-industry executive, old soldier, did not live to complete the tales he devoted his retirement to. What remain are a novella, a short story, and four unfinished works, here published for the first time. These are the stories of Texas during Reconstruction and the drive Westwards, of cow-punchers, bounty-hunters, bad men, cavalry troopers, cunning, salty wit, violence, raw humor, and, above all, redemption. This is Texas "with the bark off," as it was in the days of mavericks, trail drives, and raids.Edited by historian and Bapton Books partner Markham Shaw Pyle, these are tales of old-time Texas that Teddy Blue Abbott and J. Frank Dobie would have been proud of.
327 pages, Kindle Edition
First published June 24, 2012
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July 11, 2012
D. V. Pyle, 1932 – 2010, was descended of a family that came to Texas before the Mexican Revolution, led by a former Georgia state legislator who had lost a re-election bid … and who thereupon elected to leave his former constituents to their fate. (If they couldn’t appreciate him, he seems to have felt, to hell with them.) Subsequent ancestors came to Texas from Tennessee, after the Eaton “Petticoat” Scandal, Louisiana, and Missouri. That history, those stories, dyed him deep. Yet those ancestors had come to Deep East Texas, the westernmost region of the Kingdom of Cotton, the sunset province of the Old South whose sun was setting; and they had stayed. Donald V. Pyle himself was born in Houston, and raised there and – in summer and holiday times – in East Texas, visiting relatives; but his own interests were in the newer Texas of plain and cattle-country and the drive to the West.
Don Pyle attended Texas A&M; served overseas – Korea was his war; married; and was an executive with various manufacturing and oil industry concerns for most of his adult life.
And he never stopped reading, researching, honing tales, and planning, in his retirement, to write: to write of the westward expansion, the new Texas that arose and drove towards the sunset during Reconstruction, the mythic West that this movement created.
Sadly, after his retirement, his wife began to fail, in her health and, afterwards, in her wits. He also found his own physical health slipping away, increasingly frail, though his mind, imprisoned in that failing body and distracted by the duty of caring for his wife, remained sharp almost to the last.
What remain are these writings, essentially as he left them in draft. The novella, Claymore, was in an advanced stage of completion; the short story, “Chance Target,” was likewise in full, in draft form. The fragments of other works, appended to this volume – Crockett; Travis; Fare Thee Well – are as he left them. We will never know what he intended for his characters and the world he conjured. I wish I did. I wish he’d been able to tell us, and was still here to say. But what we do have is, I think – and I believe it is more than filial piety in me to think so – worth reading.
They are not, of course, histories; but they are, I think, historically defensible. Stories of war, occupation, fighting, and the westward expansion cannot fail, if they are at all true to the events that inspired them, to contain rather dark passages. In the appended fragmentary stories, these are not resolved. In “Chance Target,” brutality is a function of the situation, and historically inevitable. In Claymore, it is resolved, and the resolution is a part of the protagonist’s arc. Nevertheless, these scenes are, without question, disturbing – to edit, I may add, as to read, and particularly when the editor is the surviving son of the author, who is beyond question and conversation now. I urge readers, however, to stick with it, to a resolution at the end.
In these passages, as throughout, I have left matters as the author, my father, left them when he died, with only such editing as was necessary for intelligibility. This was little enough; and I have not presumed either to change or to attempt to emulate the style he chose for these stories, which is based upon the traditional diction of the period and the place, and may be further studied in the papers of “Teddy Blue” Abbott, John Young, and numerous other informants “out of the old rock” who told their stories to J. Frank Dobie or Leonidas Payne, or sang their ballads to the Lomaxes.
Don Pyle attended Texas A&M; served overseas – Korea was his war; married; and was an executive with various manufacturing and oil industry concerns for most of his adult life.
And he never stopped reading, researching, honing tales, and planning, in his retirement, to write: to write of the westward expansion, the new Texas that arose and drove towards the sunset during Reconstruction, the mythic West that this movement created.
Sadly, after his retirement, his wife began to fail, in her health and, afterwards, in her wits. He also found his own physical health slipping away, increasingly frail, though his mind, imprisoned in that failing body and distracted by the duty of caring for his wife, remained sharp almost to the last.
What remain are these writings, essentially as he left them in draft. The novella, Claymore, was in an advanced stage of completion; the short story, “Chance Target,” was likewise in full, in draft form. The fragments of other works, appended to this volume – Crockett; Travis; Fare Thee Well – are as he left them. We will never know what he intended for his characters and the world he conjured. I wish I did. I wish he’d been able to tell us, and was still here to say. But what we do have is, I think – and I believe it is more than filial piety in me to think so – worth reading.
They are not, of course, histories; but they are, I think, historically defensible. Stories of war, occupation, fighting, and the westward expansion cannot fail, if they are at all true to the events that inspired them, to contain rather dark passages. In the appended fragmentary stories, these are not resolved. In “Chance Target,” brutality is a function of the situation, and historically inevitable. In Claymore, it is resolved, and the resolution is a part of the protagonist’s arc. Nevertheless, these scenes are, without question, disturbing – to edit, I may add, as to read, and particularly when the editor is the surviving son of the author, who is beyond question and conversation now. I urge readers, however, to stick with it, to a resolution at the end.
In these passages, as throughout, I have left matters as the author, my father, left them when he died, with only such editing as was necessary for intelligibility. This was little enough; and I have not presumed either to change or to attempt to emulate the style he chose for these stories, which is based upon the traditional diction of the period and the place, and may be further studied in the papers of “Teddy Blue” Abbott, John Young, and numerous other informants “out of the old rock” who told their stories to J. Frank Dobie or Leonidas Payne, or sang their ballads to the Lomaxes.
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