The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  Or, that their old daddy had died, leaving money to be divided between his brother and him, and a reward to anyone who could locate his wayward son. Or, suddenly: “What? What town did you say? Not Fat Chance, Texas! Let me see, where did I put that letter? Fat Chance. … Why I do believe this is the very town my cousin Everett’s boy Will come out to. Fellow about my age. Wife and four younguns. Big collie dog. Where is that letter? Got it right here. Got it somewhere. Well, never mind. I’m sure of it: Fat Chance. No? Don’t know him? Just come out. Fellow about my build. …”

  Or sometimes he would introduce himself as Dr. Samuel Hemingway of the State Board of Health, and say, “Now don’t go spreading this around, ’cause we don’t want to start a panic. But if you do see this fellow, take him into custody immediately and send for me. Just to be on the safe side, I wouldn’t touch him if I was you. However, don’t be alarmed. You probably won’t catch it unless you actually drink from the same cup.”

  “Tor God’s sake, Doc! What is it? What’s he got?”

  “Leprosy, poor devil. But keep this to yourself, hear? Some folks, they just have to hear that word and they go into conniptions.”

  And as he was strolling away he would hear, “Holy smoke! You know what I just heard? Be on the lookout for a feller with four collie dogs and a wife and kids! Only don’t touch him if you value your life. Hold him off with a gun and run for that man there. He …”

  But in order to get his mail c/o General Delivery my grandfather had to show identification, to use his own name. There were letters from home awaiting him in Cisco. Said the clerk brightly as he passed them through the bars, “Any relation to Will Ordway, from somewheres back in your parts?”

  “My brother,” said my grandfather. “And if you can tell me where to find him I’ll be much obliged to you. I’m ashamed to confess it, but I’ve lost touch with him. To tell the truth, Will and me had a falling out, as brothers sometimes will, you know. The dispute was all my fault, I realize that now. I’m out here now looking for him, to make things up. Blood is thicker than water.”

  It was not presence of mind which prevented him from crying out or cursing aloud; it was dismay, chagrin. He had thought he was so clever, taking Vinson’s name. Will had outsmarted him at his own game. Ordway! It was the cleverest, the most impenetrable alias he could have adopted, the last that anybody would ever have thought of. But my grandfather’s consternation was soon elbowed aside to be replaced by another emotion. Just what it was would be hard to say, for it went beyond mere anger, went beyond umbrage. Not content with stealing his son, the man had taken his very name!

  My grandfather returned to the scene to hear the postal clerk saying, “… and nobody knows where they went to. I’ve expected to hear from them, ’cause being neighbors, even though it was only for a short while, we got quite friendly, especially Mrs. Ordway and my mizzus. But they haven’t wrote. What a shame! If only you’d been three months sooner.”

  “Three months,” echoed my grandfather dully.

  “Yes, well anyhow you’ll be glad to know that your brother was looking very well.”

  “Was he? Yes, I’m very glad to hear that. Thank you. And the children, my nephews and my little niece?”

  “All fine. All in the pink of health, last I seen of them.”

  “Little Ned, how was he?”

  “Ned? Let’s see now, which one was he?”

  “Ned’s the one that takes more after me. I guess that’s why I’m partial to him.”

  The clerk studied my grandfather’s features. However, it did not seem to help him distinguish Ned. “Well anyhow,” he said, “they were all fine. Well, probably you’ll catch up with him before I hear from him,” he concluded. “Tell him when you do that we’d enjoy getting a postcard, will you?”

  “Yes, I’ll do that,” said my grandfather.

  Around midnight that night there popped into my grandfather’s mind a new and altogether different explanation of Will Vinson’s having adopted his name. He had lain there until that hour rigid with indignation, when suddenly he realized that Will had not done it as a ruse. Indeed, Will had not chosen to do it at all. My grandfather visualized a little scene. He saw the Vinsons on their flight, perhaps somewhere near the very outset, forced to stop for something, food, water, and saw Ned momentarily slip the leash and saw a stranger, just as Vinson was on the point of retrieving him, chuck Ned underneath the chin and say, “What’s your name, sonnyboy?”

  “Nedordway,” piped Ned.

  And then and there (pretty quick thinking for a stupid man) Will Vinson had become Will Ordway.

  And my grandfather had the answer to the question whether his boy had known his family name before being taken from home.

  He had known it, all right, and had bestowed it upon his foster father. For on reflection it must have seemed to Will (1) that he needed an alias; (2) that this one could hardly be improved upon; (3) that such a declaration from Ned was bound to recur and that he could then either (1) try to persuade Ned that his name was not Ordway, but Vinson, or (2) that he could bring up his own as yet unconscious younger two under whatever name he chose, and that he could more easily persuade his own, less intelligent, Felix, if Felix was even aware of a last name, to a change, than he could persuade Ned.

  My grandfather sat up in bed. His anger had vanished. Will Vinson would be forced to go through life (assuming that he did not succeed in tracking him down) and to bring up his children with his name! Oh, no, he was not angry at him for taking it any longer. He wished him joy of it. What triumph! What unimaginable retribution!

  He pictured another little scene. He saw Vinson introducing himself to a man—preferably one a little hard of hearing. Heard the man say:

  “Pardon me, but I’ll have to ask you to speak up. I’m a little deaf. I didn’t catch your name. Would you mind repeating it?”

  “Ordway.”

  “How’s that again?”

  “Ordway. ORDWAY. ORDWAY!”

  “Mind spelling it, please?”

  “O-R-D-W-A-Y. ORDWAY.”

  “O-R-D-W-A-Y. ORDWAY? Oh, yes! Ordway. Of course. How do you do, Mr. Ordway. And this is Mrs. Ordway?”

  “Yes. My wife.”

  “Come again?”

  “I SAY, YES. THIS IS MY WIFE. MRS. ORDWAY.”

  “Very pleased to make your acquaintance, Mrs. Ordway. And what is your name, little man?”

  “Felix Ordway.”

  “You’ll have to speak louder, sonny.”

  “FELIX ORDWAY.”

  “Oh, yes! Well, how do you do, Master Ordway? And what have we here? Two more little Ordways, I believe.”

  My grandfather knew how to relish this. Having traveled himself under Vinson’s name (with this difference: that he had chosen it, not had it forced upon him, and knowing that he could drop it and reassume his own whenever he pleased, that his was a name that did not have to be kept hidden), he knew what it was to have to answer to your enemy’s name. Even temporarily, even when practiced out of guile, it was galling. Between the two cases there was this further difference, that he was beholden for nothing to the man whose name he had appropriated. On the contrary, he could despise the name Vinson as belonging to the man who had wronged him. What must it be like to have to answer to the name of the man whom you had wronged? Moreover, my grandfather knew how hard it was to remember, how even after weeks of it he still had to remind himself constantly to remember to answer to that assumed name. And he had had nothing to lose if his deception had been disclosed, suspicions aroused. Imagine having to remember to answer to the name of all names that you wished to forget! And imagine having your children answer to it.

  My grandfather could almost see Will standing at the foot of his bed, those eyes of his that would always widen with the effort to comprehend any new thing, appealing to him to explain what had happened to him. What had he gotten himself into? Forced to go through life as his creature. His conscience in his enemy’s hands. The child he loved never, no m
atter how long he might have him, never really his, but the other man’s, with the other man’s features, the other man’s blood in his veins, and now his very name forfeited, that of his wife, his own children. No, he had not assumed the name Ordway; it had assumed him. It had consumed him.

  Sometime during the night my grandfather was shaken out of a troubled sleep. He awoke to find the hotel night clerk bending over him, shaking his shoulders.

  “You were having nightmares,” he said. “Talking in your sleep. Yelling. You’ve woke up everybody in the place.”

  “What was I saying?”

  “You was saying over and over again, ‘You damn fool, you brought it on yourself. I never asked you to take him.’”

  So now he had to say to people—oh, how queer it sounded!—“I’m looking for a man named Ordway.” And they began to say, “Yes, I met up with a man of that name. Your brother, was he?” And one even said, “Yes, I can see the resemblance.”

  In the town of Tuscola, just south of Abilene, Will Ordway had worked for a man named Bryant.

  “He come here looking for a job,” said Mr. Bryant. “I needed a hand, but I told them the only house I had for them wasn’t much of a place. They looked poor enough theirselves, but decent, and I was ashamed to show them that house. We ain’t choosy, the man said. If it keeps out the weather. So I took them to look at it. I could see the wife turn kind of sick when she seen it, and he went kind of green when he looked at her. But she said, well, go bring the wagon. From what you tell me I guess she must have known they wouldn’t be stopping here long, but that never kept her from doing what she could to fix the place up pretty. And he was a worker, mister, that brother of yours!”

  My grandfather tried to look proud but not too proud.

  “The way he worked and the time she put in on the house and yard I took for granted they meant to stay on. So when he come to me one day after just two months and said he was moving on, I couldn’t understand it. Was something bothering him? I asked. No, he had no complaints. Was his wife unhappy? No, but he was moving on. I made him the offer of a raise in pay—highest wages I had ever offered a man. He turned it down. I asked him, wasn’t that enough? It was more than he sometimes cleared farming for hisself, he told me. Not many men would have admitted that, I thought.”

  This tale of the privations which the Vinsons had endured, of Will’s industriousness and his honesty and the loyalty he had inspired in only a short time in his employer, all made my grandfather extremely uneasy. Meanwhile he had to pretend to be gratified by it.

  “Nothing would hold him. I’d seen it before, and I knew what was itching him. They get it, some men, like others get the drink or the gambling fever. It’s a disease. Where you going? I said. West, he said. This is west, I said. Not west enough, he said. What ain’t it west of, I said, California? I guess he was thinking it wasn’t west enough of the home he had left behind him. He drawed the pay he had coming and I made him take a loan of twenty dollars to help him on his way, seeing as he was bent on going. He sent five of it back to me. I mean, it must have come from him. I can’t think of nobody else I would get an envelope with a five-dollar bill in it from.”

  “Postmarked from where?”

  “Well, I remember,” said Mr. Bryant, “because it was such an odd name. It come from a place called Utopia, Texas.”

  Seeing as it was his own brother, and him so very hard up, my grandfather felt obligated to pay Mr. Bryant the fifteen dollars still owing on Will’s debt.

  After poring over his map for a solid hour that evening my grandfather concluded that Utopia, Texas, must be too small a place to be shown. He studied the Sweetwater area, the Abilene area, the Big Spring area, the Lubbock area, the San Angelo area, and spaces intervening; he unfolded his map all the way out to El Paso: no Utopia.

  He began to trace back his own path. The X’s marking his wanderings had turned the map into something resembling a stitched sampler. How many towns he had been in, he who until now had never been anywhere! Lake Creek, Howland, Broadway, Charleston, Cunningham, Ladonia, Klondike, Birthright, Peerless, Cumby, Brashear, Campbell, Weaver, Sulphur Bluff, Hagansport, Bonanza, Cash, Cut Hand: all these (and many more) during his time with the circus. Weatherford, Millsap, Mineral Wells, Breckenridge, Lusk, Throckmorton, Olney, Graham—the list ran on. Honey Grove, Paris, Detroit, Bagwell… his eye idled back towards home. It seemed he had been gone forever. He began to count the months. Doing that made him realize afresh how near it was to the time of Hester’s confinement. And that, despite all he could do, turned his mind to thoughts of Agatha’s death in childbirth. He relived that terrible day.

  It had been a long one, beginning early, at breakfast, when, getting up from the table, Agatha gave a startled cry as her water broke, flooding down her legs in a scalding gush. But this was known sometimes to happen (although it had not her two previous times) and, once the surprise was over, was nothing to be alarmed about. Shortly afterwards she felt her first pain. He harnessed the team and drove into Clarksville for the doctor, stopping by the Vinsons’ to leave Bea, and to ask Mrs. Vinson to meet Winnie when school let out and bring her over also to spend the night at their house.

  The doctor, in his wire-wheeled buggy, overtook and passed him on the road coming back. When he arrived home Agatha had taken to bed. The doctor allowed him only a moment with her, then, jovial and bawdy, shooed him out. On the table outside the bedroom door stood three stiff white bands, the doctor’s shirt collar and cuffs.

  For the next couple of hours, during which time nothing happened, he busied himself puttering about the barn and the barn lot. Before putting herself to bed Agatha had set out a lunch of leftovers and at two o’clock he and the doctor sat down and shared it. There was a cake which she had begun before breakfast and which before going to bed she had filled and iced. The last cake she ever baked, he had thrown it out days later, uncut, the icing gone hard and crystallized and cracked. Just as he was about to slice it came a moan from the bedroom. He knew that sound, that unanswerable plea, that undeniable reproach; he had heard it twice before; still it shook him, shamed him. He was to hear it again, and yet again, and again; after this time, up to the last, he cringed from it as from a blow in his organs of manhood.

  The doctor, getting up with a smile, said, “That sounds like she means business.”

  But hours passed and still the baby did not come. Twice he went and knocked timidly at the bedroom door and was let in and went and stood for a moment at the side of the bed, feeling useless to help, and each time she gave him a rueful little smile and shook her head at herself, as if to say she was ashamed of taking so long, of making such a fuss over nothing. From time to time as he came up to the house in the course of doing his evening chores he heard her cry out. He slopped the hogs and gave the chickens water, scattered oyster shell for them, though it was plain that she herself had done so only yesterday, fed the dog, milked the cows, fed the cats, prolonging each task in an effort to distract his mind and to deceive himself as to the hour. Coming up from the barn just as twilight was beginning to settle, he was frozen by a sudden scream from the house. As he stood trembling, it rose to a shriek, seemed to pass beyond the realm of hearing. Until now he had been able to tell himself that it had been like this, or very nearly like this, those other two, successful times. But nothing like this had he heard before. This was not what the doctor described as a good healthy, angry, fighting cry. This, and the broken whimpering which succeeded it as he ran towards the house, were sounds hardly human, wrung from a body tortured past endurance.

  As he went through the back door another groan commenced, animal-like, unearthly, something to make the scalp prickle, rising again, louder than before, to that intolerable shriek. He bounded through the kitchen and into the hall and down the hall to the bedroom door. As he reached for the knob that terrible shriek abruptly broke off. He faltered, his breath coming in sobs, and as he stood there, irresolute, he heard the wail of an infant. Weak and trembling with re
lief, he grasped the knob, opened the door, and went in. The doctor, his broad stripe-shirted back bent over something live and kicking at the foot of the bed, did not look up. The baby commenced to squawl. His wife lay unconscious. A last tear ran from the corner of her closed eye and into her ear, over which her hair had been drawn back. She lived for another hour, regaining consciousness only at the very end, and then only momentarily, and whether in that moment she had recognized, or even seen him, was impossible to tell. Her lids fluttered open and an expression of pain began to gather about her mouth. Then suddenly the color drained from her flushed and swollen face, leaving it pallid and glistening with a mist of fine cold perspiration. Her lids fell open wide and in the depths of her eyes the light went out as though behind them the shades had slowly been drawn.

  For some while my grandfather sat staring at the map spread before him, his own eyes glazed and turned inward, fixed upon that image of his dead wife. Then, just as the color had paled from her face while he watched, so now her face paled from his mind. There was no recalling it; he soon ceased to try. He sensed that his life was about to take a new turn, to close a phase and enter another one. “I must put you out of mind,” he had said to Agatha at her graveside; now belatedly that renunciation was accomplished, and Agatha passed over into that region of his memory where all his dead lay lastingly at rest. “Hester is my wife now,” he had further said to Agatha, and now Hester took her place. Rather, Hester at last took her own place. Her appearance now in his thoughts caused him a moment’s confusion, so altered did he find her. He set his mind to visualize her more clearly, to recall her as she really was. But this was a new Hester, different from the former one, nor would she reassume her old shape. Outwardly she was unchanged, yet in some important but indefinable way she had been transfigured. My grandfather did not know this yet, but it was not Hester who had changed; it was himself. A new love for his wife entering into his heart had made him a different man; it would require a period of adjustment to this new self which had replaced his old familiar one.