The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  So it was not until the afternoon of the tenth, the third day, that my grandfather came into Clarksville, to the sheriff’s office—afoot, having left the wagon and his broken-winded team a mile outside of town, and in the wagon bed the frayed piece of harness strap with which he had punished Dolly and the mule for his own slow unsuspicion.

  “Vinson?” said the sheriff. “Vinson? The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I don’t seem able to call the man to mind.”

  “Well, he was a quiet sort, and never in any trouble before, I’m sure, so it’s not surprising that you should have trouble remembering him. But try. Will Vinson. Local boy. Grew up somewhere in Red River County.”

  “What’d he look like?”

  “Look like? Why, Will Vinson was …”

  “I say—what did he look like?” said the sheriff.

  My grandfather shook his head. He knew he was not a very observant man (each of his wives had found occasion to tell him he was not); he wondered, though, if anyone could have described such an ordinary old country boy as Will Vinson was. There was nothing to describe. He shook his head. “I couldn’t tell you,” he said, “to save my soul.”

  They came back out in the sheriff’s buckboard. Together they went through the house. Upstairs they found the mattresses gone from the beds, found the drawers emptied of clothes, and everywhere throughout found evidence to indicate that the house had been abandoned—not ransacked, but picked over, with care, as though by plan. There no signs of struggle. They said nothing, either man, until the sheriff opined that it looked like they had left, all right.

  To suspect Will Vinson of any recent crimes was not possible; there had not been any. Certainly none the consequences of which were fearful enough to make a man abscond. The sheriff said he would keep him informed. Meanwhile he would send somebody out from town with his wagon and team. My grandfather pulled the front door shut behind him. The closing of the door seemed to echo the sheriff’s words through the empty house: it looked as if they had cleared out, taking his boy with them.

  He ought to go home himself, he supposed. But in his perplexity he lingered. As yet his feeling was one of bewilderment so complete as almost to muffle any concern for his child. The Vinsons had been such good neighbors to him! And now he was supposed to wonder whether a murder would shortly come to light, or a robbery, or whether some husband would shortly publish his wife’s infidelity, or, unable to lay violent hands on Will Vinson, do something worse to her. It was not in my grandfather to deny the ancient wisdom in the sheriff’s words (“It’s them quiet ones you can never tell about,” he had said); and yet to try to connect Will Vinson with crime or scandal was enough to make him feel like a fool. And if flight, for whatever reason, was the man’s imperative need, why had he hobbled himself not only with his own kindergarten, but added to it a neighbor’s child not yet three years old?

  My grandfather found himself drawn out to the barn. He was not at home in houses. Houses spoke of their mistresses, spoke to other women. He could tell as much from a man’s barn as a woman could tell from five minutes alone in another’s kitchen. But he could not tell from Will Vinson’s barn what the man had kept hidden behind that face that seemed to hide nothing, because there was nothing to hide, to reveal nothing because there was nothing to reveal, what he had done or what been threatened with to make him snatch up a few belongings and disappear, run away, taking another man’s child along with him. There was no indication of that kind of man. The tools, such as had been left behind, the plowshares and cultivators, were all sharp and sound, bright, rust-free, the handles all worn smooth by hard work. You could, as he said to himself, have eaten off the floor. The bins for the bran and the cottonseed meal were lined with zinc to keep out rats. The peanut hay in the loft was of a quality to compare with his own—and peanuts was a crop that my grandfather particularly prided himself on.

  He went out into the fields. The cotton was ahead of his own, a downy green, and ahead of his own, too, in already having had a first hoeing. Will Vinson plowed a straight furrow, he would have to say that for him. But to say so was to use the very figure of speech which my grandfather used to say that a man led a straight life. What had happened? What had Will done to make him throw up everything, leave his home, his stock, and, with a crop in the ground, run off like a thief in the night, not even stopping to milk his just-freshened cows, compounding his crime by not even returning his neighbor’s child left with him for the day? My grandfather turned to leave. All this had taught him nothing. And he found it hard to hate a man, any man, while standing amidst his young cotton.

  During the following week my grandfather went over to the Vinson place every morning and evening as soon as his own chores were done and milked Vinson’s three cows, slopped his hogs, fed his chickens, and collected his eggs. At first he brought over pails and jugs from home and put the milk in the springhouse, put the eggs in the kitchen. Soon the milk began to sour and had to be fed to the chickens, the eggs commenced to turn, there were no table scraps for the hogs, and it being spring and the corncrib getting low, my grandfather did not know what else to do but take all the animals over to his place.

  Meanwhile he went into town every other day, neglecting his crops to do so, and called at the sheriff’s office. No crime rose to ripple the surface of life in Clarksville, or Annona or Avery or Detroit. A report came in after about a week that a family answering more or less to the description of the Vinsons had been seen passing through Bagwell on the day of their flight; but Bagwell was only ten miles away, and so that, if reliable, was hardly a fresh clue.

  It was a trying time, and people were all very kind, very considerate. A little too considerate—depressingly so. They said little, but their avoidance of the topic seemed ominous. Their looks were heavy with sympathy, and had the effect of suggesting that the child was lost forevermore, dead. All were, perhaps, conscious of a certain delicacy in my grandmother’s position; perhaps that was why they hung back. As for her, she could not have taken it more to heart had it been her own child. That too was, however, taking it harder than my grandfather cared to believe was called for.

  That spring he worked both his place and Vinson’s. Where before he had always gotten up at four thirty, so as to milk the cows and do the chores, have his breakfast and be in the field by half past five, now he was up an hour earlier, milked his own and Vinson’s three by lantern light, and was in the field by five, out till after dark. Why he did it he himself hardly knew. Somebody had to do it. Perhaps, though he would have considered this sentimental and would not have owned to it, it kept alive a hope that Will Vinson would come back. Mainly, however, he did it simply because he could not stand by and see a crop, any man’s crop, rot in the ground. He knew too well what labor had gone into putting it there.

  Milking six cows, he now went into Clarksville every Saturday with butter and cream to sell. The family went with him, though they could not enjoy themselves in town, and spent the time at the wagon in Market Square. Past the Vinson place they would drive in silence, while each stole sidelong glances at the house. Already in that burgeoning heat weeds overran the yard, and here and there among the burdocks and thistles a poppy or a coxcomb or some other of Mrs. Vinson’s perennials had shamelessly reared its gaudy head. As the wagon drew near the gate the one scraggy hen who had eluded all my grandfather’s and the girls’ efforts to capture her on the morning they came to take the chickens away, and whose eggs, for a time afterwards, he would find dropped about the yard, sloshing rottenly when shaken, would fly up out of the weeds with a squawk like murder, the only sound ever heard now about the deserted house. For a while afterwards, out of their habit of stopping to leave the boy, the team would slow down there, and my grandfather’s voice was husky as he growled, “Hum up.”

  They drove straight to Market Square and parked the wagon, and my grandfather crossed over to the jailhouse, where on the first floor the sheriff had his office. The news was always the same. There was that report, of w
hich the sheriff seemed never to tire, that a family almost certain to have been them had been seen passing through Bagwell. However, their description had been circulated, the Texas Rangers brought in on the case, the U.S. marshals alerted, and so it was only a matter of time, said the sheriff, before something broke.

  But cotton-chopping time came and went, the cotton flowered, the bolls appeared, swelled in the heat and burst white like popcorn, and it was cotton-picking time, and the news remained the same. The only difference was that now a deputy told it, my grandfather’s visits being punctually on the last stroke of eight from the courthouse clock, so regular that the sheriff could quite confidently plan his absences from the office. Which, though it confirmed the lines around the corners of his mouth, did not greatly surprise my grandfather. He was a country man, and had the country man’s contempt for the law.

  In Texas back in 1898 people felt differently about children from the way people feel today. They loved their children, but their love had to be spread over a larger number than is usual nowadays. And they often lost them. They were resigned to this, and they buried them, and dried their tears, and had others, and forgot them. They swore they never would, and their hearts were broken and sore; but there was just not much time, while having and rearing eight or nine others, to miss the missing one. The case of Ned was a harder one than most. It was harder to resign yourself to the loss of a child who was not known to be dead but was presumed alive, somewhere, growing up among strangers, ignorant of his kin. Nevertheless, there was cotton to be hoed and picked, cows to be milked, corn to be husked; and when my grandmother told him that another child was on its way, my grandfather felt that it was being sent to take the place of little Ned.

  That year, to pick his own and Vinson’s cotton, my grandfather had to hire extra hands. One day in early September he was picking a row alongside a Negro woman of indeterminate age named Belle, whom he had hired for the past three or four seasons. Belle was a good picker, could keep up with him. On the tail of her sack, with its hundred-odd pounds of cotton, rode about three pounds of pickaninny—most of that pot belly—as waxy black as the trail of soil which followed the cottonsack as it scraped along, and which, two or three feet back, dried gray in the broiling sun. Like a new-shorn lamb, the baby was bare except for a fore-knot of wool on his crown. The two picked without straightening, to the sound of their two sacks scraping along. When they stopped they could hear, as the pickers in the adjacent rows moved on, the steady faint fibrous squeak of the cotton being plucked from the bolls, while the sweat dripped unattended down their chins and noses. They came to the end of the row, where my grandfather straightened his back and wiped his face and puffed, and Belle, taking her cue from him, straightened, wiped her oily face, turned to her child and cried: “Boosker! Stop eatin that cotton, boy! You want to ketch the cholera mawbus?”

  Sure enough, Boosker was plugging himself with cotton, looked like a stoppered flask of something dark.

  “I don’t believe you’ve been feeding Boosker right, Belle,” said my grandfather. “He don’t look to me like he’s done much growing since this time last year.”

  Belle made no reply for a moment. Then, “Mista Awdway,” she said, in a tone chosen, he realized a moment later, to spare him embarrassment as much as to spare herself pain, “you thinkin of my last year’s baby, Toodler. This here is my this year’s baby, Boosker. Toodler took the hwoopin cawf over the winter, po little soul, and wasn’t nothin nobody could do to save him.”

  “Forgive me, Belle,” said my grandfather. “I didn’t know. Though I ought to have taken more notice.”

  “Mista Awdway,” said Belle softly, “you got trouble enough of yo own on yo mind.”

  They were both silent for a moment, then Belle hitched up her sack, giving Boosker a bob like a hiccup, sighed, and said, “You don’t appreciate em till they taken f’om you, an then it’s too late.” Her grief had passed, like the little momentary cloud no bigger than a boll of cotton just then passing over the sun, and she was merely mouthing a phrase. But it struck home to my grandfather.

  The following day was a Sunday, and he awoke with the consciousness of a duty long neglected. He did the chores and hitched the team, ate his breakfast, stropped his razor with such vigor it sounded as if he were whipping a horse out in the kitchen, dressed in his Sunday suit, the one he had bought to marry Aggie in, and drove off with his family to church. It was Mabry’s day to have the circuit rider, and my grandfather vowed to listen to every word of the sermon as if he were the only person in church. His principal act of piety, however, was to be performed before services, while the children were in Sunday school, an hour ordinarily spent in gossip with friends beneath the oak trees in the churchyard.

  He left Hester among the women and, not to attract her notice, postponed his mission for a few minutes, joining the men and listening, or pretending to listen, to their talk. He knew that Hester begrudged him none of his memories. Still he saw no point in spreading them out, so to speak, and fondling them while she looked on. She knew he made an occasional pilgrimage to Aggie’s grave; she must know too that he made them more and more infrequently as time went by. After a while, unable to see Hester anywhere about, he drifted away from the group. He went around back of the church, behind the privies and down along the graveyard fence to the hollow.

  Among the wildflowers he found a ragged aster or two left over, and a few snaggle-toothed daisies. Passing a pine tree on his way back to the graveyard, he broke off a branch and added this to his bouquet, saying to himself, evergreen for remembrance. He was creeping along the fence, trying not to notice his stealth, when, at the gate, just as he was about to slip in, whom should he meet but Hester, just coming out. She was alone, having left the baby with some woman friend to mind. In his confusion my grandfather let drop about half his flowers. As he stooped to gather them up, the warmth rising around his stiff collar, he felt a momentary resentment against Hester, not because she might resent his coming here, but because of his own unmanliness in hiding it from her. This feeling passed, his awkwardness returned, mounted, and rising—and again dropping a flower or two—he stammered, “A few flowers. To lay on poor Aggie’s … Agatha’s grave.”

  “Oh, no!” cried my grandmother. “Don’t!”

  He was too astounded to be angry. Apparently astounded at herself, my grandmother gasped, and squeezing past him, rushed out.

  Then he was angry. He would go and lay a few flowers on his first wife’s grave if he wanted to! It was nothing much. He was only too conscious of that. It was nothing much, after letting her child, the child she had given her life for, be taken away. And who was more to blame for that, him or Hester? And had he ever breathed one word of reproach to her? And she begrudged him coming to lay a few flowers on poor Aggie’s grave!

  And small cause she had for her jealousy! For look, he could no longer even remember where Aggie lay. That showed, ah, showed all too well, how little time he had spent here of late. He was torn between resentment towards Hester for not appreciating his neglect of Aggie, and guilt towards Aggie that he could longer even find her. In his search his eye fell again on the grave with the fresh little bouquet lying on it. That was Aggie’s! (“Weep not for me,” to his shame it said.) That was Aggie’s: the one with the bouquet. No wonder he could not find her!

  Who could have put that there? Who was there to remember poor Aggie but himself? The girls? But they had gone directly indoors to their Bible class. Puzzled, and vaguely irritated, he knelt and laid aside his own bouquet and took up this interloper. It had been picked—just picked, still damp—in the same place as his, for it was composed of the same flowers as his. Then looking closer he perceived that this bouquet was not, after all, quite the same as his own. For it contained a flower that his was missing, and which told him who had laid it there. Told him, too, in what spirit it had been brought. For it was a plant whose single shy syllable in the language of flowers was a pink whisper of remorse. It was a tendril, carefull
y twined about the daisies and the phlox, of the plant, peculiar to the region, known as shame vine.

  That was what Hester had been doing in the graveyard, and the reason she had wanted him not to come. She had not put it there for him to find. On the contrary. This was something between herself and Agatha. For a moment my grandfather felt himself the husband of neither. They were together, and both beyond him: two mothers.

  Forgetting the bouquet that he himself had brought, and rather untenderly returning to Aggie’s earthen bosom the one that Hester had brought her, he rose to go and find his wife, tell her that she was not to blame herself, comfort her and tell her that it was not her fault. He turned and found her there behind him, hanging back, uncertain of him, eager but afraid to approach, tears trembling on her lashes, ready to fall as soon as he had shown her what kind of tears they must be. He held out his arms to her. She sobbed, ran to him, and flung herself quaking against his breast.

  “Oh, Mr. Ordway,” she sobbed, “can you ever forgive me? Not now, but someday? I was jealous of her, and I didn’t love her child enough, but oh, Mr. Ordway, try to forgive me. If you knew how tormented I’ve been you wouldn’t be hard on me.”

  “There, there,” he said, patting her back, his own eyes brimming. “There now. It was nobody’s fault. Certainly not yours. There’s nothing to forgive.”

  “It was my fault!’ she cried. “Oh, blame me! Blame me! Do! Only, give me a chance to win my way back to your heart. Don’t cast me off. Give me a chance, that’s all I ask. I’ll give you other boys—many boys—fine boys, Mr. Ordway. Oh, I don’t mean that the way it sounds, for I know they won’t be the same to you. But they will be yours too, Mr. Ordway. They will be yours too and you will love them too. I’ll raise them so carefully and they will be good boys, and I won’t expect you to love them as much as Ned. I won’t expect it. But they will be good boys, and I will be a good mother to your boys, and more careful, as I should have been of poor Agatha’s little Ned, and not let anybody steal one of them and run away with him. Oh, God forgive me for saying it, but why couldn’t it have been mine they wanted? Or why couldn’t she have been where I am, and I where she is now?”