The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  As it exists in my mind today the story of Thomas and Ella Ordway is a series of stereoscope views, like that trayful of them in my grandfather’s house with which I whiled away many evenings of my childhood. In black and white (my memories belong to the pre-Kodachrome era), speckled, yellowed, the subjects staring self-consciously at the photographer, above them a filterless, bald, overcast gray sky. Our viewer likewise was pre-battery-lit, pre-pushbutton-plastic: an antiquated and clumsy apparatus with a hood for the eyes and a cutout for the nose, a large wooden handle, and a track along which the card holder slid. You put one of the cards into the rack and moved it back and forth until it swam into focus, and you beheld twin ladies seated on twin cliff edges. Then you waited, and after a time (it was a little like sobering from drink) this slightly sickening double image began to merge, the two pictures became one. Simultaneously the picture space opened inward, the flat vista behind the now single young lady plunged into perspective and the perilous chasm gaped beneath her feet. So it is now with my collection of mental views—older by some thirty years, faded, spotted, curled with age; yet if I wait the scene will come into focus, and those old pictures first printed on my mind by my grandfather as we lingered over dinner on the ground on Mabry graveyard working day sharpen, open inward, and as it was then with the stereoscope, it is as if I have been drawn bodily through the lenses.…

  Eight days afterwards the battlefield at Shiloh was still strewn with corpses and with the carcasses of horses with bloated bellies, their stiffened legs sticking out like toppled equestrian statues. White-clad stretcher bearers wearing white face masks carried corpses to wagons which, when loaded, lumbered away drawn by teams of six mules in tandem, to be replaced by others returning empty for more. Meanwhile, in the area not yet cleared, black-clad women wearing bandanas over their mouths and noses revolved among the bodies, bent as though gathering firewood or picking cotton, and, like cotton pickers, crooning a steady low lament, broken occasionally, as a body was turned face up, by a wail of recognition. Flies were thick and buzzards hung overhead in the soft spring sky like kites on strings. Ella Ordway also remembered and later told her son, and when she herself was a memory he told her great-grandchildren of a man seen hanging by the neck from a limb of a tree and slowly spinning, with, pinned on his chest, a sign which read, “He was caught robbing the dead.” She was told that a number of bodies had been discovered with the ring fingers missing. The women searchers formed a posse. They had surprised him the day before Ella’s arrival in the act of extracting a gold tooth from a corpse’s mouth, and had lynched him on the spot.

  And even on the eighth day afterwards the line of wagons waiting outside the commandeered cotton shed where Ella Ordway was told to go was like the line outside the compress at the height of ginning season. Some, like hers, with one mule where there ought to have been two harnessed to the tongue, and equally wobbly; others sound, tight, painted, drawn by well-fed teams, all driven by those who had been left at home, fathers too old to fight, wives and mothers, some with infants at the breast. Nor was she the only one to have thought to provide herself, figuring they would be in short supply, with a coffin.

  The relatives were not allowed inside the shed. Soldiers, two by two, took the coffins inside—those who had not brought their own were given one—six returned with it on their shoulders and slid it onto the wagon bed. There the parents or the wife was allowed to view the body; when they nodded the carpenter nailed the lid down. As her turn neared and her wagon drew closer to the door, Ella could see inside as the soldiers went in and came out. The bodies lay in rows on the floor, covered with blankets, except for those which had been sewn into cottonsacks coated with paraffin wax. Of these bundles some bore only a semblance of human shape; some among them were only half length. The old man ahead of Ella Ordway had apparently seen that he was being given one of these cottonsacks. When his coffin was brought out it was already nailed shut. Ella Ordway overheard him say to the soldiers, “Men, are you sure? I don’t ask to be shown, but are you sure it’s my boy in there?” So when her turn came and her coffin was taken inside and she heard hammering on the lid and it was brought out, she signed the receipt without a word. She was sent to another barn, where she was given his effects, his watch and her last letter to him, all that was found on him. The officer in charge there insisted on having her wagon filled with hay for her mule. A native of Nashville, he recognized the address on the envelope and knew the length of the trip home which lay ahead of her. He also insisted that she take a loaded horsepistol, almost as big as she was, to defend herself with.

  In planning his death Thomas Ordway had overlooked two things, or rather three. First, that he belonged to an army drawn from a race of idolaters of the dead like himself, that never since the early Greeks had any body of fighting men lost more opportunities to pursue and harry a retreating enemy in order to gather and identify and notify the next-of-kin of, and render obsequies to, their fallen comrades; and that even had his wife appeared another week later they would promptly have detailed a squad to go and dig him up for her, to be taken home to lie among his kin. Only it was not necessary. He had not been buried yet. There were too many of them, and as he had been among the first casualties, and his telegram had gone out in the first batch, and as she lived within the state, she was expected. Second, his wife—that the very devotion which he sought to escape a lifetime of indebtedness to, would surely bring her, by day and by night, and even if it killed one mule, a mere three hundred and fifty miles to fetch him home, knowing he would never rest peaceful until he was laid beneath the dove-haunted cedars on that knoll down back of the house where every other known and remembered Ordway lay. Even so, he might have gotten away with it but for the watch, and an impostor be lying in that grave in Tennessee, and his descendants would never have sat above his bones in Mabry graveyard listening to the tale of how they came to be there. And even so, he almost did get away with it, because Ella Ordway was halfway home again before she looked at the watch, having instantly conceived the notion that it had stopped running when he died, that if she should open it (it was one of those with a closed face, a hinged cover released by pressing the stem) she would see the hands pointing to the exact moment of his death. So instead she waited until sometime during the third night, when lying in the hay alongside the coffin she awoke with no sense of the hour and in the dark opened the watch and moved the hands and wound the stem and set it going. And even after seeing that it was not her husband’s watch—which was the following morning when she stopped a man on the road and asked him the time—Ella Ordway still drove on towards home, saying to herself, they must have made a mistake back there in that office. Putting herself in that officer’s place and thinking, with so many to sort out and label and keep track of he must have gotten two watches mixed. Wondering how she was going to get it back to him. Telling herself then that maybe since leaving home her husband had swapped watches with some man. Not daring to admit the thought already pounding on the door of her mind, she urged the mule on still harder, the coffin jouncing on the bedboards. He had my letter on him, she said. She felt for it in her pocket. It was there. Then saying to herself finally, if I don’t look I’ll never know the difference. If I just go on home and dig the grave and bury it then it will be too late to do anything about it, too late to worry about it. If I find it’s not him I’ll have to take it back, and then I’ll have nothing. Then I will never know where mine lies buried, or even if he does. But if I go on home and bury this coffin then I can always believe I have him. If it’s not him I’ll never know. And what I don’t know won’t hurt me. Believing it’s him in time will make it so.

  Meanwhile Thomas Ordway lay in his bed in the improvised hospital secure in the knowledge that he was safely buried by now, and that the unknown soldier whose memory had been destroyed along with his sight, and whose breath he drew, would not be long in following. For he did not know that in the darkness (his own, his personal and private darkness: to the rest of
the world, as he had learned from overhearing the conversation of two orderlies who were carrying away those who had died in the night, it was morning, broad daylight) he had gotten the two watches confused. They were indistinguishable to the touch, and he had had to hurry. While they were carrying away the dead man on his right he had put his letter from Ella in the hand of the one on his left and exchanged watches with him. Or thought he had. Instead he had returned his own watch to his pocket and the dead man’s to his.

  He also did not know that the brevet major in charge of the casualty records (he who had given Ella Ordway her husband’s effects), when those who had been turned away at the cotton shed, then had searched the battlefield without success, came to him, took them to look at this patient, first warning them what they were about to see, and admonishing silence. Around this one patient’s bed a screen of blankets had been hung, for as he refused to eat, he had to be forcefed: the screen was to protect the other patients from this sight. Around himself the man had hung a curtain of despondency which nothing, not even yesterday’s news that his legs would not have to be amputated after all, could draw aside. No identification had been found on him, nothing but a watch of ordinary make and middling value, and he could not remember who he was or where he came from. The people who were brought to look at him one and all shook their heads and the curtains were dropped and they turned away, whether disappointed or relieved would have been hard to say.

  The brevet major had argued with him—or, rather, at him. To despair like this was wrong, he maintained. Things would not look so black, he said, conscious too late of the pun, when he was once more among his own people. They would restore his memory, and with it his will to live. Under the loving care of his mother, sisters, a wife if he had had one, the shock would gradually wear away. If it was earning a living that worried him, he was sure to be pensioned. Nor was his own usefulness at an end; there were lots of things he could still do. All the brevet major’s arguments met with silence. The young soldier’s face never changed expression, that is to say, never assumed any: it was like stone. And so these sessions always ended the same way, with the brevet major coming out from behind the curtains and ordering the patient to be fed. It took three men to do it.

  At noon that day the little woman who looked hardly big enough to open a sardine can without help pulled up at a farmhouse gate and asked the man who came out and stood staring at the pine box riding amid the hay, soaked with water to keep it cool, for the loan of a crowbar.

  “It ain’t just curiosity, mister,” she said. “I have got reason to doubt.” She heaved a sigh and said, “I ought never to have taken it without first making sure. I ought to have made them open it back there at that cotton shed. Here I’ve come all this way towards home. I can’t go no further till I know, one way or the other. There ain’t no getting around it.”

  “Little lady,” the man had said, “it ain’t likely they would make a mistake like that.”

  “You wouldn’t think so, would you?” she said. “But with so many of them, you can see how it just might happen.”

  The women of the house stood looking on from the doorway, an older one, the farmer’s wife, and a young one with a baby on her hip, his daughter-in-law or his own daughter come home to stay while her husband was away.

  “I expect they just give you the wrong watch,” the man suggested. “Or like you yourself say, maybe he swapped watches with one of his buddies since leaving home.”

  “I’m hoping that’s all it is,” she said.

  The man studied her for a while, looked again at the coffin, then darting a glance up and down the road as if afraid of being observed, and impatiently motioning his women indoors, he told her to drive around back into the lot. He opened the gap for her and she drove through. He went into his toolshed, emerged carrying a rusty crowbar and a claw hammer. He came to the side of the wagon and stood looking over the sideboards at the coffin, at the rim of its lid studded with bright new nails. He shook his head. “I’m liable to split them boards,” he said.

  “I never meant for you to do it,” she said.

  “Be a shame,” he said. “I don’t see how I could help but split them with this dang crowbar.”

  “I’ll be much obliged to you,” she said.

  Next I imagine—remember—see the wagon crawling along the road, headed east once more, away from Mabry, the one undersized and undernourished mule hitched to the tongue, on the seat holding the reins the tiny woman in the sunbonnet and the rusty black dress. Behind her a stretched tarpaulin forms a pup tent over the forward section of the wagon bed. The mule’s gait is spastical. The wagon creaks, the bed rocked like a boat by the regular-irregular turning of the wobbly wheels, the worn eccentric hubs grating and screeching on the dry ungreased axletrees and flinging the light little woman about like a rag doll. Yet despite this shaking, her head nods steadily lower, and as hers does, so does the mule’s. Then when a wheel rides over a bump and the wagon groans and then settles with a crash and from underneath the tarpaulin comes a human groan, she jerks awake, casts a quick glance over her shoulder, then shakes the reins and the mule starts and lunges into the traces. Gradually her head begins to droop again, again the mule nods with her, his pace slackening like a wind-up toy running down. Once he comes to a dead stop. For some time the wagon sits in the road, the mule asleep in the traces, the woman asleep on the seat. Then she comes awake, casts a hurried and frightened look beneath the tarpaulin, then slaps the reins, turning the mule aside and off the road. She climbs stiffly down, planting her small foot carefully in the spokes of the wagon wheel. She goes to the rear of the wagon, lets down the tailgate, fills her arms with hay and returns and throws the hay down in front of the mule. She gathers sticks and a handful of dead grass and carefully strikes one of her few matches and blows up a flame. From underneath the wagon seat she takes a blackened pot and from her pocket extracts a large black iron spoon. She sets the pot on the fire and slowly stirs the contents, the spoon making a dull clatter against the sides. For a moment, lulled by the sound and the flames, she relaxes the taut grip she has kept on her face, her eyes glaze, her lips part, and over her features spreads an expression of dumb resignation, bleak hopelessness. She sighs, or starts to sigh and catches herself, gives her head a shake, and the pot having begun to steam, lifts it by the bail with the handle of the spoon. She goes to the rear of the wagon, darts a look up and down the road, finds it empty and lifts her skirts and clambers into the wagon bed. Underneath the tarpaulin a man lies in the hay. A bloodstained bandage like a turban is wrapped around his head. His trousers are slit and both legs wound in bloodstained bandages. His eyes stare unblinking at the sunlit white cloth overhead. She crouches, raises his head, dips the spoon in the broth, and holds it to his lips. His mouth clamps shut. She holds the spoon there. After a while she spills that spoonful back into the pot, refills the spoon, and again holds it to his lips. His mouth remains shut tight. She lays him back in the hay, rises and goes to the rear of the wagon and climbs down and puts the gate up again. She eats, mechanically, a few mouthfuls herself. She scatters the fire and climbs back on the wagon seat, shakes the reins, and once again the mule lunges into the traces and resumes its stagger. The wagon creaks. From underneath the tent the man begins to speak, his voice worn and dry, like the sound of the hubs grating on the worn axles:

  “You’re a young woman still. After the war is over you’ll get married again, a man that can look after you, provide for you and the children. If you loved me you would. It would be a kindness. I beg you. I’m not asking you to do it yourself. Just leave me something in reach, something I can do it with myself. It would be done in a minute. No one else need ever know. If you loved me as you say you do …”

  She sits erect and impassive on the wagon seat, bouncing and swaying violently with the motion, dry-eyed, her lips set, shaking her head, turning finally to say, “Hush, now. We’re coming to some people on the road. You don’t want them to hear you taking on thisaway. Try
to rest. It won’t be much longer now before we’re home. Ssh. Hush, now. Just lie quiet and try to get a little sleep.” At the word “sleep” her own eyes close longingly. But when shortly the road begins to climb, she gets down from the seat (as if her weight made any difference) and walks alongside the slowly turning, grating wagon wheel.

  Women must feed us. At the breast, with the spoon, at table. Food is their medium, their meaning; rejection of it therefore strikes at their deepest urge, denies their function, and thus arouses their determination, calls up all their stratagems. Not only Ella Ordway but soon a conspiracy of all the menless women on the mountainside was bent on getting the invalid to eat. Never, even in the best of times, with much to spare beyond the needs of their own families, they nevertheless came bearing tempting gifts, whatever art and cunning could contrive of the sparse and simple materials at hand: baked bread, still smoking from the oven, which made the children swallow hard; hot honeybuns, savory soups, spiced meats. When it became known that his fast was broken every woman felt a share in the triumph, and a vindication of her kind.

  When they were unable to aid her in any other way the neighbor women gave Ella Ordway a morning’s or an afternoon’s work in the garden or in the field, or helped get out the wash, knowing she was tied indoors. For she seldom let him out of her sight, never out of the girl’s easy call. She did not fool herself. She did not trust him. She hid his razors and refused to shave him. She hid the knives, even hid her sewing scissors. At night she slept on a pallet on the floor in the hall outside his door.