The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  Then at last my grandfather knew what Will Vinson’s crime had been.

  He stiffened and Hester felt it and stiffened too. His arms slackened and fell from about her and he turned his face to hide his emotion. She cried, for she misinterpreted his turning from her. The church bell, rather the triangle, rang just then. He said, “You go in. I’m not coming. I’ll stay out here. Go on now. And don’t torment yourself any further. I forgive you for your part in it.”

  He knew now what Will Vinson had been running away from. He was running away from him. He had seen the theft of his son as a mere accident attendant upon some crime, and for weeks and months had waited for the crime to come to light. Now he knew, as Hester, feeling herself, poor thing, to be an accomplice to it, had known all along, that Will Vinson’s crime was the theft of little Ned. She was less to blame than himself. She had never loved the boy; but it was not to be expected that she should. And though she had not loved him, she could imagine what his father could not—that someone else might. She could blame herself and could suffer under the burden of his unspoken accusation, could credit him with kindness in not speaking it, when the truth was, he had not suspected that he had been done a personal injury.

  At the strains of singing from the congregation floating out through the open windows of the church, my grandfather stirred himself and wandered away through the graves to a farther part of the cemetery. He could have borne it easier if the Vinsons had been childless. Not, of course, that that would have made him any more willing to give them one of his. But that they could love the child for himself, and not just because he was a child, made their theft of him more of an accusation than ever. They had children, they wanted this child; and to have him they had been prepared to give up everything—everything, as he remembered saying to himself before: their home, their stock, a crop in the ground, their good name, their own children’s future—and fly to an unknown country still only half tamed, sooner than give him up again at the end of the day. He knew he had never loved the child that much, and it was almost enough, he said to himself, to make you let them have him.

  He could see his boy clearly in his mind’s eye. Clearly, for he was no foolish father. A little thing, pallid, plain, ordinary. What had the Vinsons seen in him to make them commit such folly? I don’t mean that I didn’t love him, said my grandfather to the gravestones, ranked in clans, his own included, that accused him with their bleak and stony stares. Only that you wouldn’t think anybody else would except me, and his mother.

  Thus he was recalled to the spot on which he once again found himself standing. He looked down at the grave, with its two bunches of wildflowers, of the woman who had died young giving birth to the fruit of his pleasure. At that moment the organ inside gave out with a wheezing chord. The congregation would be bowing their heads. At the foot of the grave, facing the stone, my grandfather also bowed.

  “Aggie,” he said, “my dear, I have two things to confess to you. The first is about Hester, my wife. I don’t compare the two of you. You’re as different as two women picked by the same man could be. I loved you, Aggie, in your time. But the world moves on, though you have left it. Hester is my wife now, and I have to put you out of mind.

  “That brings me to the second thing. I have lost our boy, Aggie. The child whose coming put you where you lie. You mustn’t blame Hester; it was more my fault than hers. I didn’t appreciate him until it was too late; but, Aggie, you couldn’t want me to miss him more than I do now. Please, try to forgive me. And though I must forget you, I vow never to forget our boy again, and not to rest till I have found him, Aggie, though I have to search to the end of the world.”

  PART THREE

  Sam Ordway’s Revenge

  SINCE my grandfather, so many lone avengers in western romances, films, and TV serials have buckled on their holsters and mounted horse and set off across the plains in pursuit of the man who wronged them, that it will be necessary to distinguish him from the type. Sam Ordway differed in certain particulars from the heroes of television. First of all, Texan-born though he was, he was no horseman; he was an East Texan. The hind end of a plowhorse as he plodded behind it breaking a furrow was about the extent of his knowledge of horseflesh. Like any dirt farmer, given the choice between going somewhere on foot or riding horseback, he would have walked any day—the longer the distance, the easier the choice. It was in his creaky old all-purpose farm wagon, drawn by Dolly, his swaybacked, slue-footed, one-eyed mare, then already long in the tooth, and the mouse-gray mule whose only name was a cuss word, that my grandfather went after his man. He was not very fast on the draw either; that was another difference between my grandfather and John Wayne. In fact, up to that time he had never fired a shot at anybody in his life. So if I say that he packed a pistol when he went after Will Vinson, the reader is not to picture him taking down from its accustomed peg his cartridge belt and holster and strapping it around his waist and spinning the cylinder of his six-shooter; when I say he packed one, I mean packed it on the bottom of his gladstone bag, wrapped in his extra union-suit, so as not to alarm his wife. Anyhow, it was too big to carry any other way—or, I may say, is too big, as it lies on my desk before me as I write: the same old percussion cap and ball horse-pistol given to his mother by that brevet major on the battlefield at Shiloh. It is seventeen and a half inches long, and tips the baby scales at six pounds three ounces. When my grandfather took it west with him in 1898 it was still loaded from that brevet major’s hand. Caps were still available, a good many old muzzle-loading shotguns being still in use at the time, and black powder was still stocked by the hardware stores, but he lacked the mold for casting balls. So those five shots (it’s a five-shooter) were all he had, and they were thirty-six years old. Since 1862 the pistol had not been fired nor the charges drawn. My grandfather did not know how to draw them. Whether the gun would go off or not there was no knowing, unless, of course, you were to test fire it once, but this my grandfather did not bother to do, as he had no intention of shooting anybody. Even to think of pointing that cannon at a man he had known, worked alongside of, like his ex-neighbor, made him feel like a fool. Just how he was going to deal with Will—supposing he succeeding in finding him: he had faced, or rather had glanced sidelong at that question once or twice, but had said to himself, well, it’ll probably never come to that, the chances are I won’t find him. He took the pistol along just because he figured it was something a man traveling in strange, out-of-the-way places with close to three hundred dollars in cash on him probably ought to have. And the wisdom even of this was unclear to him. As he was packing it, “My Lord,” he said, “that would sure be a lot to get down if somebody was to make you eat it!”

  Nor was my grandfather, in setting out on his quest, so singlemindedly bent on vengeance, as the heroes in the movies always are. As he later said, it wasn’t easy to hate a man who had wronged you by loving your child enough to steal him. A man who loved him more than you yourself ever had. “For I might as well admit,” my grandfather told me, “that I didn’t really miss the boy as much as I told his poor mamma’s spirit I did. How could I? I hadn’t had time to take much notice of him. He wasn’t but two years old. A mother can love them at that age, but to a father they’re not yet either fish nor fowl. In the second place, by then I was more or less beginning to get used to the idea of him being lost. In the third place, little Ned up to that time had been mainly a worry to me and little else. Not that I held his mamma’s death against the poor child, you understand. But put it this way: if I just had to lose my wife, then I wouldn’t have sorrowed long, I would have counted it a blessing, if the motherless child had been taken at the same time. I expect that sounds awful, but just remember the fix I was in: a man with a crop to make and two little girls on my hands. Well, the child had lived, and though it was no fault of his, had made trouble on all sides. I was obligated to my neighbors on his account, and your grandmother. … Well, your grandmother. … Naturally. Any woman would. All this is not to say I wa
s glad to lose him, and later on I came to miss him sincerely; but at the time I was madder at Will Vinson for taking him from me than I was grieved at the loss of my boy.”

  Disarmingly open and full as it sounded, this admission of my grandfather’s actually obscured the truth. That he had yet to learn to love his boy and long to have him back was true; but even at the outset he missed him more than he told me; he was always shy of displaying his deeper feelings, and in telling me the story he minimized his loss. Also he wished to spare my grandmother, even at that late date, any self-recriminations, and to spare me having to judge her. And secondly, he was not mad at Will Vinson, as he said; he was mad at himself. Will Vinson had merely exposed to public view a lifelong failing of his: a character too easily put upon, trusting, unsuspicious, slow to anger, quick to pardon, incapable of imagining that anyone could mean him harm. Both his wives had found occasion more than once to tell him that he was a regular doormat. “Without me around,” each in her turn had said, “you would let people just walk all over you.” He made frequent resolutions to bristle more, to take exception to passing remarks—in vain. Not until days afterwards would he find the barbs of deliberate provocation buried in his thick hide. He could never nurse a grudge, could be joked out of anything, always saw the other fellow’s side in any argument, was absolutely not to be stopped from admitting it and apologizing whenever he found himself in the wrong. In another place this weakness might have passed unnoticed; it was my grandfather’s misfortune to have been born such as he was in Texas. Insults and aggravations there are possibly no more common than elsewhere, but it is a place where a man, where even a boy is expected to find quarrel in a straw when honor is at stake. My grandfather admired men who could take fire at a spark, who were not to be mollified by anything short of blood, who handed down the torch of their wrath to their descendants, but he could not emulate them. Now, like Hamlet, he had had a cause, and been unpregnant of it.

  “Will had made me look like a fool,” he said. “I had let six whole months go by not only without doing anything, but without even suspecting I’d been wronged. What I mean to say is, I didn’t know it was me, personally, that Will had wronged. I felt ashamed for the world to see that another man loved my son more than I did. And I had done something else to be ashamed of too. I’d done something I ought never to have done. Something I was going to have a hard time ever living down.”

  “What, Grandpa? What had you done?”

  “I had gone to law, sir. This was something to be settled man to man, and I had gone to law! I suddenly saw the sheriff’s failure to turn up any clues in an entirely different light. He hadn’t tried. He had refrained from interfering in the matter until I awoke to a sense of my duty. If I was ever to be able to hold my head up again I had to do something to make up for that.

  “While I am at it, though,” he said, “I might as well also admit that I was not really prepared to search to the end of the world. That was only a manner of speaking. Nor did I believe that I would have to. Putting myself in Will’s place, I figured that if I had been running to get away from me, I’d have begun to feel pretty safe after about thirty miles. So I really thought I would find Will holing up somewhere just the other side of Paris. Of course, in those days Paris was the end of the world, as far as I was concerned.”

  He set off after breakfast one morning in October, two days after his last bale of cotton had been ginned, with tufts still clinging in the sideboards and the cracks of the wagon bed. He left home quietly, telling no one of his plans. It was sure to leak out, but the quieter he himself had been about it, the easier it would be to return home emptyhanded. He traveled light, trusting to the luck of the road, the hospitality of people: an extra shirt, pair of socks, union-suit, a complete change of clothes for Ned, let out to allow for six months’ growth. “I may not have any use for them,” he had said wistfully. “You may not,” Hester all too readily agreed. “But if you do, then there you’ll have them.” He shaved, then packed his razor and strop, brush, mug, and whetstone, and that little French harp he had bought to give Ned on the day he was stolen; harnessed Dolly and the mule, put his grip and the lard pail with his dinner in it under the wagon seat, kissed his wife and daughters goodbye, clicked his tongue at the team, and lumbered away. The baby was crying, the girls were puckered up, Hester had that now-don’t-you-worry-about-us look. He did not look back until he was beyond the railroad crossing, then he turned on his seat and waved and they waved to him. A disheartening thought arose in his mind at this last sight of his family: how long would it be before he saw them again? A cold trail Will Vinson’s was by now. In bed the night before, waiting for sleep, he had said, “Hester? Hester? Hester, what do you honestly think? Do you think I’ll find them?”

  “Well,” Hester had replied, “you won’t if you don’t look, will you?”

  Driving past the Vinsons’ house, he wondered where they were right that moment. He thought of the six months’ head start Will Vinson had, and Paris did not seem so very far away. Six months! How far, even with a wagonload of younguns to slow him down, Will could have gotten in that time! From the inner pocket of his jacket he drew out a folded map, unfolded a section of it, and spread it on his knees. It was a map of Texas. His gaze went from right to left. Past Bagwell lay Detroit, Paris, Bonham. Southwest of it lay Fulbright, Bogota, Sulphur Springs. He unfolded another, more westerly fold of his map and allowed his left eye to stray over into that expanse of buff-colored blankness on which settlements were as small and sparse as flyspecks on a ceiling. What a haystack to have to search through for one little needle of a boy!

  It had needed no report from Bagwell to establish the direction Will Vinson had taken. Men went west. Especially those with no place to go, but rather some place to go urgently from. You would as soon have looked for the sun to turn around at noon and start back, as to expect a man striking out from Clarksville on a new life to head any other way. How far west he had gone before deciding to stop, that was the question; and revolving it, with the map spread out before him on the kitchen table these past few nights, it had come to seem to Sam Ordway that he was studying a chart of Will Vinson’s imponderable soul. The question where Will Vinson was became the question who he was. Had Will the nerve, the daring, the madness, whatever quality it required, to strike out into those unending, uncolored wastes? Sam Ordway was lost. For as Clarksville was only barely in Texas, the rest of the state stretching west of his ken, so he realized now that he had never gotten beyond the Clarksville of his former neighbor’s character—a character which had suddenly opened out vast and blank, unmapped, unexplored. How smart was Will Vinson? Not very, Sam Ordway would have said. But then he would also have said that he was the last man on earth to turn baby-snatcher and run off into the wild West. And how brave and how smart was he himself? Again, not very, he would have said. Brave enough to follow Will however far he went, smart enough to find him in all that blank expanse?

  At Mabry store, where his road joined the main road, while he was lost in his speculations, the team automatically turned left, east, towards Clarksville. It was only after the turn was made that my grandfather woke up. He pulled on the reins, backed the team into his road, and turned them the other way. The mare cocked her head and rolled her one eye at him.

  Once started in that unaccustomed direction, with that flat and far horizon before him, he wondered what would make anyone ever stop. The road ran straight as a seam. The barb-wire fences alongside the road, wires drawn so taut they twanged in the breeze, ran on and on, straight as the ruled lines of a musical stave. Housetops appeared, then disappeared, like the small boats toiling in the trough of a wave. Beyond, the sweeping treeless terrain was furrowed in fine regular waves like water rippled by a steady breeze. Tufts of cotton clung in the weeds along the fencerow; and occasionally on a barb of the wire, like a dirty tuft of cotton, underfeathers loosened from the plumage and ruffled by the breeze, hung the corpse of a songbird, impaled thereon by butcherbirds.


  My grandfather looked again at his map, drawing his eyes back right, away from those desert-colored western sections, and gazed again at PARIS. Will Vinson was a country boy, like himself; on reaching, say, Honey Grove, after a week or ten days in a wagon, would he not have felt that the chance of news of him getting all that far back was pretty slim? Settled in some place with a name like Gober, or Pecan Gap, would he not have felt himself lost to the world? But one is never more scornful of anything than of a just-lost illusion, and Paris, which only yesterday had seemed to Sam Ordway the point at which a fugitive from him would begin to feel himself safe, now seemed the mere gateway to the route Will Vinson had taken. Bobbing about on the wagon seat as the team inched along, he thought that Hester had been very naïve in agreeing with him yesterday when he said he expected Will was hiding out somewhere in Lamar or Fannin County.

  He was reminded of Hester when, unfolding a further section of his map, he found a wisp of hair lying in the crease. It was his hair, must have fallen there yesterday as he sat under the chinaberry tree out back of the house with the map on his knees while Hester gave him a haircut in preparation for his journey.

  “It is certainly too bad,” she had said, “that you haven’t got a picture of Mr. Vinson to show people. How will you go about describing him? He stood an inch or two taller than you, didn’t he?”

  “Who, Will Vinson? He wasn’t a bit taller than me. Inch or two shorter if anything.”