The Ordways

by William Humphrey

“I’m afraid you didn’t care for it.”

  “Not care for it! On the contrary! It was delicious. But, I—”

  “Ah, it does my heart good,” said Mrs. Eubanks, though the sigh she fetched sounded as if her heart was breaking, “to see a man eat my baking again!”

  My grandfather swallowed noisily, and said the most consoling thing he could call to mind on the spur of the moment, which was, “Awful good pie, Mrs. Eubanks.”

  “I thought the crust was a little tough.”

  “No, no! Exactly right.”

  “Well, it’s nice of you to say so, but it’s not as good as I generally do. My friends are forever telling me I ought to go into the bakery business. ‘You’ve won all them prizes,’ they say.” And she indicated with a wave of the hand the row of red ribbons, blue ribbons, white, green, yellow, hanging on the wall behind her.

  “You really ought,” said my grandfather.

  “It’s something to fall back on, I suppose. But what would I do with the money? Eubanks left me very well provided for. Clear title to the house and sixty-four acres making half a bale to the acre in a good year. Eight heavy milkers and six heifers. A team and all the farm implements. Not that I mean to brag, you understand. Anyhow, I wouldn’t care to do that—take a pie or cake of mine out of the oven and think of some other woman’s husband sitting down to it.”

  “Have you ever thought of getting married again, Mrs. Eubanks?” my grandfather asked.

  “Not,” she said with a demure downward glance, “up to now.”

  “Well, it ain’t for lack of offers, I’m sure,” said my grandfather. “And I’m not just thinking of that half a bale to the acre. A woman that can bake like—” With his fork loaded and halfway to his mouth, he stopped. Something was troubling Mrs. Eubanks’s eyes. Suddenly they ceased batting and fluttered open and the look she sent his way seemed to wing over and hover above him and alight like a butterfly upon a blossom.

  “What was I saying?” said my grandfather.

  “Oh, Mr. Ordway!” she said. “What were you saying?”

  “I was fixing to say, Mrs. Eubanks, don’t hesitate to remarry on account of your children. My two daughters—”

  “Your two daughters?” she said faintly. For a moment her eyelids beat rapidly, but recovering herself quickly, she said, “Oh, how I always prayed for some girls! To pass on my cooking to.”

  “—have got on very well with their stepmother. Oh, I don’t say it’s been a bed of roses, but by and large …”

  He let his words trail off. In the silence which ensued he took a vow never again to accept any housewife’s invitation to step inside, unless the man of the house was in evidence. He found himself still holding his fork and laid it down. Then it seemed that the least he could do, out of common courtesy, was not to leave that last bite on his plate, gorged as he was. He ate it, and he felt he had brought the interview around to about as neat a close as could be expected under the circumstances, by saying, “Mrs. Eubanks, that was without doubt the best pecan pie I ever tasted.” And this, he fully meant her to understand, was including his two wives’.

  Next day, the next road, results the same as the day before. He was like a fisherman casting over a stretch of water, beginning nearby and working outwards, and reeling in and casting again, each cast longer than the last.

  On the morning of one of those days, as he went along the main Paris road he had ahead of him—not much bigger than a bobbing cork when he first glimpsed it—a wagon piled high with furniture and bedding, a highboy mirror flashing in the sunlight, tubs and washpots clattering and banging against the sides. There was a boy trudging alongside and a little girl holding a baby on her lap sitting with her legs dangling over the tailgate. Tenant farmers, maybe, on the move to a new situation; but to my grandfather for a moment they were the Vinsons, setting out, heading west; and seeing the slow, ponderous sway of the wagon, creaking and wallowing like a sailing ship all but becalmed in an ocean of grass, that broad horizon before them, he felt as never before the immensity, the hardihood of what the Vinsons had undertaken.

  Overtaking them, he rode alongside. “Hidy,” he said.

  “Hidy-do.”

  “Moving?”

  “That’s right. Yessir, moving. From Oglethorpe County, Georgia.”

  “All the way from Georgia!”

  “Yessir. Been a-coming since around the first of the year. And I ain’t there yet.”

  “Where?”

  “Where I aim to get to. But I’m getting near. Look at it! Fur as the eye can see, not a stump. Not one solitary back-breaking, gut-rupturing, plow-busting stump! You could open up a furrow clear to the Psific Ocean!”

  “Yes,” said his wife, sitting beside him, “but what do you build your house out of? What do you burn in your stove? And whereabouts do you draw your water from?”

  “Always complaining,” said the husband.

  “Well, what do you build your house out of?” she said.

  “Sod. Mud and straw. Live in a tent for a time if you have to. Land like this ought to grow you such crops you can send back to Georgia for a load of them damn rocks that come up in the fields ever’ spring, and make you a house out of them.”

  “Yes,” said she. “If the rains come. And the grasshoppers don’t. And—”

  “Why, lady,” said my grandfather, “you ain’t out west yet at all here.”

  “Mister, I’m a lot further west than I ever meant to be,” she replied. “You mean it gets worse?”

  “I swear, if you was ever to find yourself getting low on trouble you would send out to borrow some, wouldn’t you, Thelma? Look at this country! It took my old daddy all his life to clear forty acres back home in Georgia, him and three boys. But look! God has cleared the land out here for me and mine. A man can see out here!”

  “See what?” my grandfather heard the wife say, as, waving goodbye, he whipped up and pulled ahead.

  Was it that same day—or had those early days of his search gotten mixed together when he told me the story thirty years later?—that he pulled up late, exhausted, discouraged, covered with dust, thirsty, to a farmhouse of dog-run construction with a crippled davenport on the front porch, broken window lights covered with pasteboard, rusty parts of worn-out farm tools lying scattered about the yard like the bones of a dried and rotted-apart skeleton, the home of real puppy-loving poor whites, a pack of some nine to a dozen of which (dogs, that is) came out from under the porch to moil about his feet as he made his way up the path. The man of the house lounged out and leaned against a pillar grown Pisa-like from such usage. You’d think, said my grandfather to himself, that he wouldn’t have much else to do but notice and remember anybody that goes down the road. My grandfather begged a drink. They went out to the well, where a fresh bucketful was drawn for him. The dipper was one of that year’s gourds and imparted to the water its own sweet flavor, like new-mown hay. My grandfather flung out his dregs, then told his story, showed his photograph, and wearily asked his everlasting question. The mouth was an organ of perception with this one as with most of them, and he listened with it all agape, closing it as my grandfather wound up. Then he put his tongue in his cheek like a quid of tobacco and scratched the beard on his throat. How many times now my grandfather had seen that train of gestures! Now he would scratch his nape, ruffle up his back hair, spit and drag dirt over it with his toe. And now—yes—he would ask to have the whole thing repeated. Sometime last May, was it? Hmmm. Man about thirty-five years of age, you say? About that, give or take a year. Four younguns? Four, yes, running from nine months up to three years, his own Ned, then Felix, Perry, and baby Grace Vinson. And this one here in the picture was yourn, you say? Now he would thrust out his jaw and stare off into space, would squinch up one eye, put his tongue, like a dip of snuff, down inside his lower lip, would begin slowly, slowly to shake his head, and would finally drawl, “Naw, sir. Naw, sir, I sure wisht I might say yes, but I’m afraid I have got to say no.” Except that what this one said w
as, “Never had ere big collie dog with em, did they?”

  How could he have forgotten Rex? How many people might have answered yes if only he had included Rex in his description! How many dogs there were who stood out in his own memory more vividly than their owners! How much easier to describe, and more memorable Rex Vinson was than Will! He did not forget Rex afterwards, when putting his question to any country man or boy.

  Now my grandfather bade the Ingrams goodbye and moved on. But he came to another fork in the road. And having chosen, he came to another fork, and having chosen, another. And now a change came into his little set speech. He no longer ended up with, “I wonder if you happened to see them?” but instead, “I don’t suppose you seen them,” his own head already shaking.

  This is crazy, he would say to himself in whatever farmhouse bedroom he found himself at night, the children having been turned out to sleep on pallets on the floor or in a trundle bed underneath their parents’ bed. I can’t go from door to door across the state of Texas, especially here where the doors are five miles apart. Why didn’t he give up and turn around and go home where he belonged?

  Ordinary men were struck with wonder and respect for him, which made him blush with shame. They marveled at his pertinacity. When instead of displaying his affection for his boy or his grief at the loss of him, or flaunting his determination to revenge himself bloodily on his enemy, he said, well, it was the off season, there wasn’t much to do around the place just then, and he might as well look a little further, that he wasn’t as discouraged as they supposed because he had never much expected to succeed, then their admiration knew no bounds. As a matter of fact, he considered giving up and returning home daily. He could be out on the Paris-Clarksville road in a day, then home in a matter of hours. He was sore tempted. If he kept on going his reasons were precisely those that he gave, and which were put down to his modesty: there was not much to do around the place just then, and though he did not expect to succeed, still he had promised Aggie’s spirit to give it his best, and while this might seem to be the end of the world, it wasn’t, and he was ashamed to go back emptyhanded and face his friends quite so soon.

  Meanwhile he grew more observant of children—with unhappy results. Where before he had never paid much attention to kids, now he looked closely at every one; and where before kids had all seemed to him more or less alike, now he was amazed to discover how different they could be. And in becoming more observant, he could not help remarking how many—alas, almost all of them, he did believe—were so much cuter, and how many so much quicker-looking than his boy.

  Poor little fellow. It was not his fault that he was homely. No, indeed. Whose fault that was, said my grandfather to himself, was as plain as the nose on your face. And not only the nose.

  What my grandfather could never understand was what the Vinsons had seen in Ned to make them do it. He would look at the photograph where it lay among the things emptied from his pocket on his nightstand, and he never ceased to wonder. Of course, being your own, you loved him—especially when, he thought, catching sight of himself in the washstand mirror, especially when he so plainly was your own. But sometimes he almost felt that he had cheated the Vinsons.

  Some answered quickly and some answered slowly, but all answered no. Then it was turn around and go back to the last fork in the road and go down the other way. And maybe then go back to the fork before that and take the road not taken there. And so he almost went past without stopping to ask, and collect another no from, the bearded rheumy-eyed old-timer feeding cane to his sorghum mill by the roadside. He did stop, did ask, but did not listen to the reply, heard it only as it echoed afterwards in his mind. He stopped to watch the blindfolded mule hitched to the mill crank plodding round and round and around. Stopped to listen to the snap of the cane as it was fed into the jaws of the mill, the crunch as the millstone bit down on it. Stopped to savor the smell of the running juice. What was that? Said yas, believed he had seen some folks like them. They’d stopped the wagon to eat a bite of dinner. He’d been eating his on the other side of the fencerow. Two little boys, one of them that un there in the tintype, had come on him as they played.

  He had become so attuned to disappointment that he was now suspicious of any encouragement, and his manner with this old man resembled that of a policeman grilling a suspect. Whereupon the old fellow supplied him with a description of Will Vinson which he committed to memory to serve him in future, wherever his quest should take him.

  “Blink-eyed feller, sandy-haired, medium-complected, stood about five foot ten, pigeon-toed, old carbuncle scar just under his right ear here, had a slow grin and a real hardworking Adam’s apple?” In five minutes this old man had noticed more about Will Vinson than he had noticed in five years.

  But two days later—and just fifteen miles farther along, such was the character of the road the old man had sent him down—he had encountered not one further word of confirmation, was beginning to suspect that old boy of all sorts of things, including being in Will Vinson’s pay to steer him wrong. He had gone through two settlements, two holes in the road, where his approach had been heralded by a squadron of bare-bottomed little sentinels who spied him from half a mile off and ran howling to their respective homes that mamma, mamma, somebody was a-comin—yet of the Vinsons nobody had seen hide nor hair. The third such place, which he vowed would be the last, being still farther back in the sticks, was even smaller than the first two. The men on the gallery of the general store, all chewing rhythmically like a ruminating herd, watched him descend from the wagon, listened to his story, spat as one, ran their tongues around their cheeks to collect the stray bits of tobacco, spat collectively again, and allowed as how they couldn’t none of them recollect no such folks as that. The women rolled up their aprons and filled their lips with snuff, and the children all shook their heads just about off, and my grandfather was on the point of climbing aboard his wagon, turning around and going back, stopping only to curse the old devil who had sent him on this wild goose chase, when:

  “I seen em.”

  Who had spoken? No one.

  “I seen em.” And from beneath the gallery, like the moon coming up, rose a saucer-shaped face belonging to a tousleheaded lad of perhaps fourteen. “I seen them folks,” he said.

  A number of heads were meaningfully shaken in my grandfather’s direction, and the man standing on his left whispered in his ear, “Not quite one hundred per cent. We all humor him.” The way he accented that “we” suggested that it would be taken as a very Christian thing if Mr. Ordway humored him too. So he swallowed down the hope that had gone sour in his mouth, assumed a smile, and one of the men, contriving to beam at the boy while shaking his head sadly at the crowd, said, “Tell us whereabouts you seen them, Lightnin.”

  “Seen em rat here,” said the youth. “Early in the mornin. Ever’body asleep but me.”

  “And I reckon that’s true, too,” said one man with a hearty nod. “That boy is always out and doing ’fore anybody else is up.”

  “Papa, mamma, and four younguns, just like the man there said,” said the youth, and the locals all nodded at my grandfather as if they were proud of him—of him, not the boy.

  “And a dog. Just like the man said.” And again everybody gave my grandfather an encouraging nod.

  “Not quite all there, you understand,” said my grandfather’s neighbor. “But, Lord, it’ll save him lots of heartache, won’t it?”

  “Boy’s daddy, sir,” said my grandfather’s neighbor on the other side, into the ear which he commanded. My grandfather hoped that the man intended was seated at some distance off, because that whisper had not been any too soft. However, it was not meant to be. It was an introduction, and following his neighbor’s nod, my grandfather found himself saluted by the modest father. Meanwhile, raising his voice, the gentleman at his elbow continued, “Pet of the whole place, that boy. Never gives no trouble. Always comes when called. Eats anything you set before him. Don’t know the meaning of sas
s. There’s a boy that won’t never grow up to bring shame on his family. There’s one boy that’ll never come to curse his poor old father, nor leave home to take up with some woman, will you, sonny? No, sir! There’s a boy that’ll never run off and join the Navy, will you, son? What I say is, the world’d be a lot better place to live in if we had more like that boy. I reckon you ain’t much worried what’d become of that boy if anything was to ever happen to you, air you, Dub? Everybody knows which little feller gets the call whenever there’s any pans to be licked here in south Saddleblanket!”

  “Felix,” said the youth.

  “How’s that, son?” said my grandfather’s neighbor.

  “Felix. That’s what the man called one of them little boys. I jist wusht I had a purty name like that—Felix—’stead of Hubert.”

  Following that road my grandfather found himself, by a different approach, and three weeks after his first visit there, in Paris, the town through which Will Vinson had been too stupid and too countrified to realize lay his safest passage.

  $125

  REWARD

  for information leading to the recovery of Edward (“Ned”) Ordway. 3 yrs old. Blond. Blue eyes. Slight. Stolen from home near Clarksville, Red River County, Tex., on May 7, this year, by WILL VINSON. About 35 yrs age. Medium build. Medium complexion. Farmer by trade. Fled west by wagon in company of wife Fern and 3 Vinson children—Felix (3 yrs) Perry (2 yrs) and Grace (9 mos). Also large collie dog named Rex. Samuel Ordway, father of the stolen child, will be at the Ben Milam Hotel, Paris, on Sat. Oct. 29. All communications held in strictest confidence.

  “Something the matter with it?” asked my grandfather. “If you catch any mistakes I’d be much obliged to you for correcting them. I don’t pretend …”

  “No,” said the printer. “No, it’s all spelled and punctuated right.”

  “Then why are you shaking your head?”

  “Well, first of all,” said the printer, “I can’t help wondering at that figure. I mean, why one hundred and twenty-five exactly?”