He learned that she had a married sister living in Clarksville. She saw her seldom because it was hard to get in. He offered to take her when he went in once a month. She colored. It was with pleasure but he took it for embarrassment and wondered why. He realized she was thinking that she was a single woman and he a single man. He had not yet grown accustomed to thinking of himself as a single man, and he had not yet thought of her as a woman at all.
She was, and no sooner had he realized it than she began to seem the ideal woman for him. Her easy availability figured in his interest. She would save him the search he dreaded even to begin. He liked the fact that with her the field was clear, that he would not have to compete with other men for her attention. Her affection for children was evident. No doubt one of her own was what she longed for, perhaps at her age with not much remaining hope, but she liked them all, and had a special fondness already for one of his. The risks and disadvantages of marrying a widow became apparent to him. The time in which he had to find one was short, and he might get one who later would be forever throwing her first husband in his face. If she had children of her own she would need to be a saint not to be partial to them. He was not eager to raise another man’s children.
Sam Ordway had not had much schooling himself, and did not greatly miss it; he appreciated it in a woman, though, and it flattered his self-esteem to think of having an educated wife. The idea strongly appealed to him of being able to give Aggie’s girls, as well as those who were sure to come later (with boys of course this mattered less), not only an educated mother but one experienced in teaching children.
He believed he would stand a chance with her. He was no prize catch, but an old maid could not be too choosy. Unless (this struck him now for the first time, and whetted his desire to have her), unless she was an old maid out of choice, unless no man could ever hope to win her.
Though plain in a schoolmarmish way Miss Hester was not at all sour or severe, certainly not outside her classroom. On the contrary, she could be spirited and lively, and he had found she was not nearly so bossy and not nearly so infallible as he had supposed all schoolteachers to be, a discovery which it pleased him to make, as before he too had stood somewhat in awe of her. When it got so they could trust one another’s devotion to his dead then they could afford to forget them sometimes, and he found that she enjoyed a quiet laugh and was capable of making him laugh. He found her natural and unaffected. He began to like her pleasant, square, unadorned face. On the basis of her plainness he made the common, and commonly erroneous, assumption that she was free of vanity. He admired her for this.
In his proposal he was forthright and frank. He told her precisely what his assets were, listing the house, his acreage, his stock, his age, the state of his health: the list of credits was not long. Indeed, whether they—house, land, and stock—belonged on the credit or the debit side of the ledger was open to question. Debits certainly were three small step-children to have to take on, and he dwelt at length on that, though pointing out that Winnie at least was remarkably self-reliant. The boy as yet was neither fish nor fowl, but the girls were good girls. He said it who shouldn’t; but the credit was none of his, it was his wife’s—Aggie’s—Agatha’s.
He knew he ought to have taken longer about this than he had. But he knew too that she was a sensible woman. She would appreciate the fact that he could not wait. He did not know that no woman likes to be told that she is sensible. Especially one who has heard it all her life.
It was coming home from Clarksville in the wagon one Saturday afternoon that he proposed to her. Even as he spoke he was conscious of the thawing fields alongside, already summoning him. The first robins were back, were busy scavenging for straw to build their nests. The sides of the road were bearded now with the first shoots of grass and patches of yellow-green fog hovering above creek banks showed where the willows had leafed out. The seed for his crops was already laid in. In the wagon bed rode a bright new plowshare.
He said he believed he could say he was as good a worker as the next man, a good provider, and that while he had his faults in plenty, at least he did not drink nor gamble and—
He stopped, turned, and found her crying, silently, bitterly, and through her tears regarding him with a look which he could not fathom. She could not tell him what was wrong. No, he had not offended her. She answered yes, and he put down her tears to joy. It never once occurred to him that what he had done was not propose to her but offer her a job, trying honestly not to conceal its disadvantages but still offering her a job, and not nearly as good a one as she already had, that he had never once said he loved her nor given her a chance to say that she loved him, no chance even to preserve her self-respect, only to say yes, she would be his wife, while saying to herself, yes, she would be any man’s wife who asked her rather than go on as she was, lonely, barren, unwanted—an old maid.
Sam Ordway expected his new wife to realize that he was so hard-pressed for time that he would get around to loving her later, after he had gotten around to grieving for Aggie and gotten that out of the way. He did not phrase it to himself this way, but if he had it would certainly not have seemed unreasonable to him. Hester should realize that a part of his grieving for Aggie would have to be done, so to speak, on her time. That he had not been able to do it, farming, looking after two young children and worrying over a third, courting her.
But she could not forever walk on tiptoe, speak in whispers, as though in a shrine or a tomb. She expected him sometimes to entertain her, to be demonstrative and affectionate, sometimes gay, forward-looking, full of plans for their life together, a man whose life lay in the future, not buried in the past. She had a sense of her life’s beginning, a late flowering that like a retarded spring was all the more efflorescent for having been kept back. She was determined to think of her husband as hers, resented the notion of his ever having been anyone else’s, refused to share him with a memory, a ghost. She did not want a mere provider, a partner, who in fairness for his own lack of ardor excused her from showing any. He had awakened her love, and love was what she wanted in return.
She began to resent the children. Between her and Winnie things did not work out as expected. The forwardness which she had shown when she was Miss Duncan’s pet pupil disappeared when Winnie became her stepdaughter. Sam grieved to see this, and believed that Winnie disapproved of the match. Winnie neither approved nor disapproved. It was simply that she continued to treat Hester with the respect and awe appropriate to a teacher, and which towards a mother seemed like coldness. For a time she even continued, despite herself actually, but seemingly with intention of keeping her at a distance, to call her Miss Duncan. The child’s precocity with the housework caused friction. In her well-meant efforts to help Hester find her way about the new house in her new role, she touched unwittingly upon a raw spot: the former old maid brought with her into marriage a sensitivity in the presence of any other female of whatever age, and to her even little Winnie was not too young to patronize her for her supposed lack of womanly skills. To make matters worse, whenever Winnie discerned that she had offended her by offering to help with the cooking and the housework or telling her where something was to be found or how she made a thing, and sought to apologize by effacing herself, she did so by saying that she only knew because that was how her mother had always done it.
Then there was Bea. Bea had never been quick, but as a pupil at Mabry school she had suffered even more by comparison with a brighter older sister. This too carried over into the new arrangement. The stepmother could not cease overnight to be the schoolmistress, and the schoolmistress had been one known for her impatience with slow pupils.
But none of these matters was grave, and all would in time come to be smoothed out. It was little Ned who from the start was the thorn in Hester’s side. Though the two events, Agatha’s death and Ned’s birth, were one, and neither could be thought of without the other, Sam Ordway certainly did not blame the boy for his mother’s death. It was Hester t
o whom he was a living reminder of his mother’s martyrdom.
She ached for a child of her own. It was as if she felt challenged to emulate the dead Agatha, to pass through the same trial, ached for the pain itself as for a purifying flame to test and demonstrate her love, believing it would stimulate her husband’s love for her, that love which she would be obliged to share with Aggie’s ghost until she had done what Aggie had done for him.
It was not just a child she longed for, not just the pain and the proof, but for a son, a namesake to give him. Then, she believed, she would come to love Ned as well. While pregnant she was noticeably more affectionate towards the boy. When hers turned out a girl so keen was her disappointment that little Florence counted in her mind almost as a fourth stepchild.
You could see a long way if, like Winnie and Bea facing backwards at the tailgate of the wagon, you were looking westward. But facing forward, as the little nucleus of the second Ordway family faced, your view was more restricted. Ahead there the land rose and broke in waves like the offshore lapping of the sea. In the shallow valleys the soil was black, and when turned up in moist furrows by the plow, shone with a waxy iridescence like tar. Here grew cotton which when ripe blanketed the ground like a heavy fall of snow. Sloping upwards the soil changed colors, shading from black to brown to a golden red the color of bread crust. On the hillsides grew corn. A pale green fuzz upon the land now in May, it would stand taller than a tall man in August, with ears like clubs and long, broad leaves like banners.
And yet, facing forward as you went east into Clarksville, you had the odd sensation that you were going backwards. Perhaps it was just that you were meeting the sun as it went its journey in the opposite direction, giving you the sense that you were traveling counter to the course of time. Or was it a lingering sense that time and the course of history lay west, in that open space at your back towards which all the morning shadows pointed, a sense inherited from your forebears—not very remote from you in 1898—and that eastward, in the direction from which they had trekked, lay your family’s past, yours and everybody else’s you knew, that place of the past, the South? Whatever the cause, hearing the bells of the Clarksville courthouse clock you felt that they tolled a time already reckoned, already lived and buried, as the clock itself, though the tower rose eight stories high, lay buried in the folds of the hills.
The clock caroled every quarter hour and the notes came at you over the undulant hills like a series of balls sent rolling your way, fading as they struggled up the intervening inclines, then rushing at you two or three together as they rolled down the slopes. In a wagon you were making good time if, after you first heard them, the bells rang just twice more before you topped the hill from which you could see the belfry with its gleaming brass weathervane in the shape of a feathered arrow. By the time they tolled again you could see the pointed yellow tower rising out of the trees like an ear of corn half shucked, and the great white western face of the clock; and if just then the bells should strike again you could see the birds of the belfry from there. For the swallows that made their nests and roosted there had never grown accustomed to the noise that time makes, and every quarter hour with the throbbing of the bells they scattered out like the notes made visible on the air. As the sound died away they swooped back in.
On coming into town farm families like the Ordways drove straight to Market Square, two blocks northwest of the public square. There the farmer unhitched his team and reversed them towards the wagon bed, and if he did any truck gardening he arranged his goods and took up a stance alongside to await the coming of the Negro cooks and the housewives of the town. My grandfather was strictly a cotton and corn grower. His life was spent among hard things, things of iron, hickory, of thick unbending hide. Yet hard as they were, they were never hard enough, but were always breaking, wearing out. And so his one morning a month in town was spent in the hardware store and the blacksmith shop. Like every farmer of his time, he had a little home forge, and could shoe a horse in an emergency. But when a clevis snapped, or a whippletree, or when a colter hit a rock, then it was a job for the blacksmith. He liked going there. He liked to watch the iron redden in the forge, enjoyed the explosive whoosh and the billow of steam when the burning metal was plunged into the cold tempering bath. He liked also to linger in the hardware store, making his purchases of harness, rope, nails; loved especially to buy himself a new hand tool, such as a new handsaw or a new axe, handling them all though in the end always buying a Diston saw, a Plumb axe, a Stanley plane; for his loyalty to certain brand names was religious, and went to the point of giving him an almost religious intolerance of men who swore by other makes.
Around ten o’clock he rejoined the family back at the wagon for dinner, for they ate even earlier than usual, having breakfasted earlier that day. My grandmother would have spent her morning shopping, without having bought anything. She knew just what she wanted, and spent the morning in the stores comparing prices. Then in the afternoon, having nursed the baby, she would go back to the best place for each item on her mental list, and giving her order to the clerk in a tone which discouraged any salestalk, would complete her purchases in half an hour. They ate sitting in the wagon bed: cold fried ham, biscuits, fried fruit pies.
After his dinner my grandfather liked, in wintertime, to stroll over to the courthouse and up to the trial room and listen for a while to whatever case was on the docket. In the spring now, with the court calendar recessed, he would saunter downtown, and after a turn or two around the square, join one of the groups of men on the corners, and taking out his billet of cedar, would settle down to an afternoon of whittling and talk. There the girls would find him and they were given a nickel and set free, and spent the next three or four hours going round and around the square working themselves into a frenzy of indecision over how to spend their money. Bea was to mind Winnie when they were alone, and did, according her sister an authority which, now that she was no longer the woman of the family, and now that Bea was older, she knew better than to try to assume at home, or even outside the city limits. On that particular Saturday my grandfather closed his knife at half past three by the courthouse clock and stood up and brushed the shavings off his lap and set off towards the blacksmith shop to call for the part he had left. Passing the variety store he remembered his promise to bring Ned something from town. The gift he chose, perhaps reminded of the medley of songs that had come drifting out of the jailhouse as he sat eating his dinner, was a little French harp.
Back at the wagon the team was hitched and the family drove to the grocery store, around to the loading platform on the side, where Negroes lounged, eating cheese and crackers and sardines and bananas. Haines’s, with whom the Ordways had always traded, was dark as a root cellar, and even more redolent. The first thing to hit you on entering was a tingling sour smell which was not the smell of pickles but of the pickled oak of their barrel. Then coffee and the strong yellow smell of soap in unwrapped bars laid up like masonry and the slightly rancid smell, like a new copper penny, of the leathery bacon flitches hanging from the rafters, between which hung spiraling flypapers encrusted with dead and struggling flies. Beneath the long counters on each side ran rows of bins with sloping hinged glass covers containing cookies and dried fruits. On the floor, squat barrels of salt cod like flakes of slate; fat sacks with tops rolled back of beans and rice. On the counters sliced hams the color of cedar, the yellow bone like a knot in the wood. The Ordways bought flour and cornmeal in hundred-pound barrels, sugar in fifty-pound sacks, coffee in the bean, and such things that Hester could not make for herself as bluing, baking powder. While their parents gave their order the Ordway girls would bashfully peek into every bin, dragging their feet in the sawdust sprinkled on the floor.
When the wagon was loaded and while my grandfather settled his bill (he had refused for years Mr. Haines’s offer of credit), the sordid side of the business which was left to the wife of the firm, Mr. Haines gave the girls their treat. They were no longer invited
as they once had been to name their choice. This they had never been able to do, but were overcome with such a paroxysm of shyness that Mr. Haines used to just fill up a bag with assorted candies and force it on them. Then one day the truth came blurting out. They really did not want candy, being by that hour of the day already glutted, sometimes a little sick, on their nickel’s worth. It came out that each had long suffered a suppressed passion, Winnie for dried apricots, while Bea burned secretly, shamefully for cheese. So now each got what she craved; and going home they sat on the tailgate dangling their legs, each extolling her treat and wondering loudly how the other could stand hers, and nibbling small so as to make it last all the way home.
The Ordways were a bit late coming back that day and by the time they turned down the road home it was past milking time. The cows would long since have trundled to the barn, spraddle-legged and rolling with each pendulous sway of their swollen bags. As milking time neared their teats stiffened and rose outward like a bunch of carrots drawn together by the tops, and oozed and dripped, and by now a puddle would be standing under each, the color of porcelain, bluey-white. But though my grandfather could see all this in his mind, still he did not whip up the team. You did not wind one animal for the sake of another.
The Ordways Page 12
