The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  That was just what my grandfather had been afraid he might say. Arriving at that figure had cost him quite a lot of thought, not to say distress, and he was still feeling far from sure about it. How much, in dollars, was it worth to a man to recover his lost child? Impossible to say. Offensive to try. What did you do when you had to try, had to say? It was complicated by other painful considerations too. He had started off by thinking of $100, mainly because it was just about the most he could think of putting out. It seemed to trumpet aloud his guilty conscience. His indifference to his boy, his six months’ ignorance of Will Vinson’s love for him, stood proclaimed by that display of atonement, that bid for public opinion. What was more, another reaction had to be foreseen. To anger people by an intimation that his child was worth more than theirs would not help his cause. And yet there would be others (there would even be some of those very same ones whom the offer of $100 would have offended as excessive) who would call him a tightwad and a bad father if he offered only $50. There really was no acceptable sum. The trouble with $75 was that it was neither $50 nor $100. It lacked the humility of the one, it fell short of the unreserved self-disclosure of the other. How painful it was, how humiliating, how terribly embarrassing even though one were all alone, to have to consider the matter in this way, to have to calculate one’s effect and weight the public response; yet it had to be done. My grandfather had chosen to stand accused of having learned too late to value his child, and of overvaluing him now, rather than of stinting on the price of getting him back, and decided to post a reward of $100. It was the most he could afford. No sooner had he put it that way than he was forced to ask himself, had Will Vinson considered how much he could afford when he took his boy? Thus, because it was more than he could afford: $125.

  “Well, never mind. Just wondered,” said the printer. “Anyhow, you spread it around that you’re carrying that kind of money on you, you’re just asking to get knocked on the head in some back alley one dark night. Furthermore, you got any more youngsters? Have? Well…”

  And I was afraid he might say it was too little! said my grandfather to himself. “What would you think would be about the right amount?” he asked.

  “Well, yours is the first case of a stolen boy we have had,” the printer said. “Get a good many calls for bills for runaway boys. Keep the form in the lock-up, in fact. Hard to say. You want to get out as light as you can, naturally; on the other hand you don’t want to look chinchy—after all, it’s your own flesh and blood. On runaway boys they generally offer ten dollars. The last man put up fifteen, but that was for a boy already working age—nearly twelve. But people like to turn in a runaway boy. They can put theirselves in the father’s place. You don’t have to offer much inducement. I reckon you will have more resistance to overcome. In your case I would think you might have to go as high as fifty. That ought to be a big enough sum to induce the average fellow to tell you if he knows anything.”

  “Truth is,” said my grandfather, “anybody who gave me the information I’m after really wouldn’t have anything to fear. I’m not just trying to save money in saying that—you’ve seen that I was ready to offer more than you suggest. But Will Vinson is actually a very mild-mannered fellow—last man on earth you would ever expect to steal his neighbor’s child and run off. But I realize that other people don’t know Will like I do, and would think they ought to be paid for the risk they would run in—”

  “I’ve got a better out,” said the printer. “Don’t offer nothing. That is, don’t specify any sum. Just say, ‘Reward,’ and let it go at that. That way nobody will think you’re trying to get out cheap nor others that you’re willing to pay just anything and try to hold you up. Who knows? When the time comes you may have to go as high as fifty—maybe higher. But as long as you haven’t shown your hand, there’s always a hope of getting out lighter. It’s going to depend on who you have to deal with. You just may strike some rounder who’ll be happy with five dollars to blow on hooch.”

  “I begin to see there’s an awful lot I hadn’t taken into account,” said my grandfather, who as a matter of fact had once considered offering no reward, but for a very different reason: he had thought it just might be insulting to any prospective informant to suggest that he would expect pay for helping a father recover his lost child.

  “This ain’t a very full description,” said the printer. “I’m not just trying to run up your typesetting bill, but this ain’t much to go on.”

  “Here. Here’s a picture of my boy,” said my grandfather. “Maybe you can describe him better than I can. You’re a man of words. And you know, you never see your own clearly.”

  The printer studied the photograph, and my grandfather studied him. He kept a straight face; still my grandfather could see that he found it hard to understand why anybody, much less a man with children of his own, should want to steal that boy. “Hmm,” he said, “I guess you have said about all there is to say. I suppose they all look pretty much alike at that age.” He passed back the picture. “What about the man? Wilson?”

  “Vinson. I haven’t got any picture of him. He seen to that. He took them all with him when he left.”

  “Clever,” said the printer—a word which my grandfather had not previously thought of in connection with Will Vinson.

  “So far as describing him is concerned, though,” said my grandfather, “I don’t know that it would help much if we did have a picture. Like I say, to look at him Will was just the last fellow on earth you would ever expect—”

  “No mustache? A gold crown? Sideburns? Tattoo?”

  “Ho, no! Will certainly wasn’t the kind ever to get himself tattooed! No, no, you’re way off. Unnoticeable! Why, he had lived in and around Clarksville all his life, and yet after this all happened people would come up to me and say, ‘Will Vinson. Who is Will Vinson?’ And Clarksville, you realize, ain’t all that big a place.”

  “I don’t understand it,” said the printer. “What do you suppose would make a man do such a thing?”

  “Search me,” said my grandfather.

  “I’ve heard of men running off with their neighbors’ wives, or with money that wasn’t theirs, or both, and I knew of a fellow here in Paris once a few years back that run off with his neighbor’s bird dog. A Gordon setter bitch, it was. But that’s different, ain’t it? I mean, you can understand a man coming to think that a certain dog or a certain horse, say, is absolutely the only one of its kind, and a horse or a dog is something you can’t make for yourself. But this is the first case that’s come my way of a man wanting somebody else’s youngun.”

  “Well,” said my grandfather, “I suppose if some little fellow just sort of got you … came to seem like ‘the only one of his kind.’…” He enclosed this in quotation marks because he wanted to dissociate himself from any such unmanly sentiments. And certainly he did not wish to suggest that his boy was “one of a kind.”

  “I expect his wife put him up to it, don’t you expect?”

  “Well, Will was always very fond of children,” said my grandfather. Then he wondered why he should feel called upon to defend Will Vinson’s title to master in his own house. “You think it would help any to say in the bill that he was sort of blink-eyed, and that when he swallowed his Adam’s apple run up and down real fast? You see, what worries me about such a loose description is the possibility that some poor innocent devil might come under suspicion, maybe even get beat up and tossed in jail, just because he happens to be a stranger in a place and to have four little kids. However, I’m counting on that collie dog to help prevent anything like that from happening.”

  “If he’s got any sense,” said the printer, “he will have gotten shut of that dog by now.”

  “Yes,” said my grandfather with a sigh, “I’m afraid even Will ought to be able to think of that. He was awful attached to that dog, though.”

  “Well,” said the printer, “not everybody notices the same things about people. Maybe it’s better not to go into too much detai
l. He’s a white man, at least.”

  “How do you mean?” said my grandfather.

  “Well, we had a case out west of town here last year. Lady was raped. In broad daylight. Well, nearly raped. They got up a posse and went out and rounded up all the niggers they could find. Lady pointed out one—big strapping buck about two hundred pounds and black as my shoe. ‘’At’s him,’ she says. ‘’At’s the one.’ Wellsir, it wasn’t a week later that she comes a-running into the house all out of breath and says to her husband, ‘I seen him!’ ‘You seen who?’ says he. ‘The boy that attacked me,’ says she. ‘The hell you did!’ says he. ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘I must’ve been mistaken that first time.’ Well, so him and a party of friends go looking for this second one, and they take along the lady to point him out.’ ‘Ere he is,’ she says. And what is it this time but a little bandy-legged runt that wouldn’t have gone no more than a hundred and forty soaking wet, and sort of gravy-colored. ‘You’re sure now?’ asks her husband. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘I’m sure.’ ‘All right,’ says he. ‘Just don’t come around a week from now telling me you’ve seen him again, ’cause this is the last damn nigger I’m a-going to lynch for you.’ And do you know what she says to that? ‘I’m sorry, honey,’ she says. ‘But you know they all look so much alike.’ Now you need two thousand of these by tomorrow afternoon, you say. What time tomorrow afternoon?”

  “I would like to have them a little before time for school to let out, if possible.”

  “We’ve got a couple of jobs ahead of yours, but they will just have to step aside. Least we can do to help a man find his boy. It’s been a pleasure to do business with you, Mr. Ordway, and I wish you the very best of luck.”

  From the printshop my grandfather inquired the way to the grammar school. On the playground he found a gang of boys, and hired six of them at ten cents apiece to pass out circulars around town on Saturday morning, agreeing to meet them there with the circulars the following afternoon.

  The circulars were ready as promised and his boys were waiting for him. My grandfather divided the circulars among them and paid them in advance. They were surprised when they read the text; he was surprised at what they had expected. It was nearing election time, and it appeared that these boys, some of whom had handed out campaign circulars for candidates in previous years, had supposed that he was running for public office. They were thrilled to be assisting in a manhunt instead.

  “What’ll you do with him if you find him, mister?” asked one open-eyed youngster.

  Only later did my grandfather realize that by “him” the boy had meant Will Vinson. Which explained his look of disappointment at the answer:

  “Why, take him home with me, of course.”

  Overnight, lying keyed up and sleepless in his hotel bed, he had begun to have misgivings about this handbill campaign. Informers, tale-bearers, the sort anticipated by the printer: he could visualize the type, regretted doing a thing which would bring him into contact with such men. He had foreseen a slinky, shifty-eyed character sneaking up the back stairs of the hotel, slipping into his room, mumbling his sorry tale, holding out his hand—a man to whom Will Vinson had never done any harm; and he began to feel strangely beholden to Will, almost ashamed of leaguing himself with such a wretch against him. The morning light dispelled all such gloomy expectations, and now as he lathered his face my grandfather imagined quite a different sort of man who would come to his aid. He saw a fellow who, despite the printer’s cynical predictions, rather resembled himself, reading his bill and saying to his wife, “Mae, you recall them strangers with that big collie dog that stopped at our place one day last spring and asked us to boil their baby’s bottle? How many younguns did they have all told? Wasn’t it four? Wasn’t it three little boys and that little baby girl? And the man, you recollect him? What does it say here—thirty-five, medium build … Why, I do believe …”

  “There’s a reward,” the wife might say.

  “Mae! I am ashamed of you! You can’t take money for helping a man find his boy. How would you like it if somebody was to run off with Lester?”

  At half past seven he went down and had his breakfast. Returning from the dining room, he stopped at the desk and told the clerk that if anybody asked for him to send them right up, no questions asked. At the foot of the stairs he had another thought and went back to say that should some second person ask for him while he was still with the first, to keep him waiting, then send him up after the first had left.

  … That man who perhaps even now was reading his handbill and scratching his memory, and who in a few minutes might come knocking on the door which my grandfather sat watching—he would insist of course that he take money. All the more if the man was the sort to decline it. “I only wish it was more,” he would say. Naturally he would not give him the money here and now. But if on the basis of his information he found Ned, he would stop off in Paris on his way home, go call on the man, and say, “See, I have my boy back, and I owe it to you.” Then he would say, “You wouldn’t claim the reward, but here: you can’t refuse this.” And he would present the man with a bankbook in his son’s name, showing a savings account with a $125 balance.

  Musing on that journey home with Ned, my grandfather got out his photograph of him. He laid it face down on the table beside him while he returned his other papers to his pocket. When he went to pick it up he could not succeed in getting his fingernail under its edge. He would almost have it, then it would elude him. He tried sliding it to the edge of the table, but what a ham-handed thing he was! At last, by dog-earing a corner somewhat, he got it—only to turn it back over instantly and slap it down on the tabletop. For in that instant he had had a vision of Ned clinging convulsively to Will Vinson as he tried to pull him away, burying his face in Vinson’s neck and crying, “I don’t want to go with you! I won’t! I won’t! Don’t let him take me away! Don’t let him take me!”

  A gasp of amazement at his own fatuity escaped him. He had been seeing himself all along as Ned’s deliverer, had envisaged a touching scene of reunion. He had imagined his son pining for him. Had he forgotten the pleasure with which Ned always anticipated being left with the Vinsons for the day? He had imagined his son enduring an odyssey of hardships with the Vinsons on their flight. Fool! Weren’t people who loved him as they did going to cushion him against every hardship? They would go hungry, would take food from the mouths of their own children, so that he might not want. They had sacrificed everything in order to have him; would they hesitate to beg or to steal in order to provide for him? Swaddled in such devotion, why should Ned ever want to leave them? If by now he remembered home at all, what were his memories? An indifferent stepmother and a father who had been willing to put him off regularly on the neighbors, a father who (for so a child of three would see it) had neglected for six months—a lifetime at that age—to come and reclaim him. If right this minute some man was to walk through that door bringing news of where he might find Will Vinson and his boy, what good would it do him?

  My grandfather got up and went to the window. He gazed down the gray empty air shaft, and his mortification was transmuted into bitterness towards the man whom he imagined his son preferring to him. He would find him! He would find him if he had to search to the end of the world. And if that was what it took, he would tear Ned screaming from Will Vinson’s arms. Blood is thicker than water. He was his boy, his, and he meant to have him back. And he would return him to a very different home from the one he had known before. Hester was changed. So was he. He would smother the boy with attentions, would let him want for nothing. There we would see whether in a short time he still pined for Will Vinson!

  The knock which came upon the door felt as if it were upon his breast. He leapt across the room. But the door opened before he could reach it. It was the chambermaid, who said, “Do your room now?”

  He swallowed his heart and said, all right. He vacated the room. Downstairs he told the clerk whereabouts in the lobby he would be sitting in case anyone as
ked for him. After half an hour he judged that the maid would be finished. “I’m going back up to my room now,” he informed the clerk.

  “All right, Mr. Ordway,” said the clerk with a faint smile.

  Nine o’clock struck. Nine thirty. At ten he braved the desk clerk’s amusement and went down and inquired whether anyone had been in to ask for him.

  “I’ll send them right up if anybody does, Mr. Ordway,” said the clerk.

  He remembered having heard of boys hired to pass out handbills throwing half the stack down a culvert or into a vacant lot. He could not believe that his boys would do a thing like that. He left the hotel. The streets of town, the side streets even, such as the one his hotel sat on, were littered with handbills (he remembered then that other name for them: throwaways) as with leaves on a windy autumn day. Surely everybody in Lamar County had seen one of them, had read it, then dropped it to the ground. For everybody in the county, everybody who lived along every road, including the one down which Will Vinson must have gone, was in Paris that day. In the square the streets were like cattle chutes, packed with a milling throng. Men stood along the curbs—no room to squat—spattering the gutter with tobacco juice. Farm women bucked the current, their small fry clinging to their skirts. By this time of day already the cobblestones were so layered with horse dung as almost to muffle the clop of hooves; the wagon beds as they went past rattled and popped. Around the corners of the streets leading off the square there hung upon the air the raw fumes of corn liquor. On one corner stood a big black-brown man, a Negro but with Mexican, maybe Indian blood in him, carrying a large tin-bound box hanging from a strap around his neck, crying “Mollyhot! Hot tamales!” All about him the sidewalk was strewn with the cornshucks his tamales came wrapped in. Whenever he lifted the lid of his box to make a sale he momentarily disappeared behind a cloud of pungent steam. Above the din that reverberated in the bowl of the buildings occasionally there rose the voice of the self-appointed evangelist threatening the crowd out in the plaza with hellfire and damnation.