The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  Meanwhile his first, his immediate impulse was to get up and harness the team and start for home, for her, that very night, that very moment. With a longing so intense it passed into conviction, he saw himself arriving unannounced and saw Hester opening the door, surprised, overjoyed, standing back until the girls freed him, then falling into his arms. No words were spoken. Between them passed a new understanding which rendered words unnecessary. And then they stood back from one another and he surveyed her figure and saw its swollen condition and in upon his reverie broke a shiver of apprehension and dread. Calculating rapidly the date she was due to deliver, he vowed to be with her when that time came, to let nothing, nothing, detain him.

  This resolution sent him back to the map still spread before him to search again for that town—what was it called? But all he saw now was a tangle of lines in red, blue, and black, creases and penciled crosses and blank unlined gaps. He was tired. He had better give it up for the night, he decided, and began folding away his map, and then his eye dropped down—down practically out of the United States and into Mexico—and there it was: Utopia. It was not to the west of him at all, but away down in deep South Texas, not less than two hundred miles away. His heart sank. Two hundred miles! That would put him six hundred miles from Clarksville.

  He rebelled. He would not, he could not go. There were other claims upon him. He must get home. He was needed at home. He felt certain that could she have been appealed to, Agatha would have agreed that his place now was at home with his wife. And with Agatha’s two other children, dependent upon him for support. It might seem callous to turn his back upon a place where Will was known definitely to have gone. But what reason was there to suppose that the chase ended there, that Will had stopped in Utopia any longer than it took to mail Mr. Bryant his five dollars? The trail, so far as he was concerned, came to an end right here.

  He emptied his pockets for bed: his watch and chain, change, pocketknife, his billfold, and what proved to be a lone loose jujube, so fuzzy with pocket lint that it resembled a cottonseed. And the photograph of Ned.

  He had last shown the photograph to a man just a few days before, and asked his old question, whether he had seen a little boy who looked like that.

  “Like what?” the man had said.

  It was then for the first time that he had seen how creased and cracked, how dog-eared and tattered the picture had gotten in his travels.

  He had not seen this at once, though. “Like that,” he had insisted, and looked at the photograph himself. Only then had he learned that when he looked at the picture now he no longer saw it. He saw instead an image in his mind, an image which, oddly, seemed to have grown sharper as the picture faded and peeled.

  How many hands had handled it now!

  He remembered when he was just starting out, one of the first men he had shown it to, the joker in Paris, who, asked had he ever seen a little boy who looked like that, had replied that he had never seen any little boy who didn’t look like that. Well, he had seen many little boys now who looked different, many who, though seen for only a moment, were no doubt better-looking than his, quicker-looking too. How was it that the Vinsons, people with children of their own, children whom obviously they loved, had been so captivated by that quite ordinary little face, had endured what they had for his sake? He still could not understand that. A little thing, short for his age, scrawny. All legs, like a newborn calf, and feet that were forever in his own way. Hair of no particular color, eyes, like his father’s, set too close together. A nose that was not cute, not anything, just a nose. Not by any means always a good boy, but often willful and stubborn as a mule, with a look in his eyes as if the whole world was against him, a tremor in his chin. …

  And there his child all but stood before him, and my grandfather knew at last why the Vinsons had been unable to give him up.

  Reminiscing on his quest in after years, my grandfather recollected this final southern expedition with a vividness surpassing all the rest.

  Torn between two calls, two longings, he set off down there with this plan in mind: to go just as fast as his footsore and sorry old team could carry him, to search up to the last possible moment, then, with Ned or without him, to sell his wagon and team, wire Hester for the balance if necessary, and buy passage home on the train, arriving in time for the birth of her child. So, pointing himself about, he drove south into another landscape, another season, another world, finally into another age.

  For the first hundred miles, or in other words for the first five days, he traversed more of the same country with which he had grown familiar: flat, treeless, boundless plains swept by a steady cold north wind often snow- and sleet-laden, differing here from the land behind him in being divided between cattle range and stretches green with winter wheat. Swedish Texas, this was; a country of tall, thatch-topped, pale-eyed people with fair freckled complexions like buttermilk, hearty, laughter-loving, heavy eaters themselves and prodigiously hospitable. Then he came to the Concho River. He had crossed the Colorado, and would later cross the San Saba, the Llano, the Frio, the Nueces; but the Concho in particular my grandfather remembered because there he had been astonished by an unexpected, an awesome sight. The river there was banked by steep rock cliffs and along the face of one of these cliffs, near the top, in the shelter of an overhanging cornice ledge, ran a frieze of hundreds of savage figures painted in red, black, orange, and white, so uniform as to seem to have been stenciled on the rock, or as if in addition to serving as art they served also as the alphabet of a primitive tongue. They depicted stick-figure men chasing animals, throwing spears, running, and dancing a dance in which their limbs were flung out in X’s. Though their colors had retained their strength, their great antiquity was felt nonetheless, felt powerfully in the wild stillness of those surroundings. Closer inspection revealed others so very ancient that they had faded almost away. Revealed too a story: the coming of a more sophisticated race, bringing with them their creed, and with it the passing of the people whose artists had scaled these walls to paint these pictures as their ancestors had always done. By the relative vividness of the pigments one could trace a great span of time between the earliest and the last, but in all that while no change had been made in their content or their manner. For centuries they had simply added more of the same stick-figure men chasing similar buffaloes. Then, in a manner crudely imitative of white man’s art, appeared a mission church, a priest in a cassock, and a Christian devil with pointed tail and a pitchfork. After that, bare rock.

  There at the Concho River the plains ended below brown hills in ranges piled one atop the last, and from that crossing overwatched by those painted figures the road wound up among the rocks. This section which my grandfather now entered, called on the maps the Edwards Plateau, was, and still is, a rugged, wild, and beautiful place, dry and barren, covered with scrub oak and low olive-dun-colored cedars, broken by rock-walled canyons in the beds of which rush clear, cold streams strewn with boulders. There may be seen armadillos, deer, and the clownish chaparral bird or road-runner, and though seldom seen, there may be heard by the camper at night the scream of panthers, the howling of wolves, and when he awakes early in the morning, the gobbling of wild turkeys. Among those silent hills as he rode along one day my grandfather heard a man singing, in Spanish, a sad and lonesome lament, forlorn as the cry of a muezzin, accompanied by the tinkling of bells. It was a goatherd, a Mexican with a face like leather, wrapped in a cape, shod in sandals, and his flock of silky long-haired Angoras. It was a sound and a sight which seemed to awaken in him some deep-buried memory, something retained from earliest childhood, perhaps the memory of Sunday-school days and lithographs of the Bible lands, or possibly not a personal memory at all, but some inherited sense of what the world was like in the childhood of the human race.

  Undiscovered country: that was how my grandfather described that region, or described his feeling on passing through it. Some days he had driven from sunup to sundown and seen not one human being.
From the crest of one of those bare hills he had looked in all directions and seen not a single habitation. Then he would go down into one of those canyons, along a road of sorts, just wide enough for the wagon, but which looked like a game trail that had been there forever, down alongside one of those bounding, clear, cold streams between narrow, steep rock cliffs, and he had the feeling that from up there his every move was being watched by slit-eyed sentinels in war paint and feather bonnets, but otherwise he was the first person ever to venture there. At first, seeing it with the eyes of a farmer, my grandfather had been put off by the desolation of that country. He had found it unproductive, therefore unlovely. Even to him the high plains had seemed drearily monotonous, but he was a native and lifelong resident of the prairies, and his first hills gave him claustrophobia. But by the time he quit the place he had come to love it, and now as he recalled it he sighed to think that he would never see it again.

  The perhaps somewhat over-enthusiastically named town of Utopia lay down in the southernmost range of those hills. It was quickly canvassed, and as my grandfather had suspected, Will apparently had stopped there just long enough to lick a postage stamp. He must have had his own stamp, for any stranger buying one from the postmistress anytime during the past ten years would have been remembered.

  From Utopia, lacking directions, there were two ways to go, west or south. With no clue to point him in one direction or the other, my grandfather elected to go south. That was the way which, had he been Will, he would have gone from there. To the west rose more of those rocky brush-covered hills over which he had just come; to the south the land opened up. One way the living looked hard, the other way it looked easy.

  South of Utopia, just when it seemed that those hills were going to go on forever, they came abruptly to a stop at the edge of a precipice below which for as far as the eye could see stretched a rolling, fertile plain. The Balcones Escarpment, that natural wall is called; it rises above the valley of the Rio Grande like a sea cliff. Below that cliff the tide of Spanish America, in its long withdrawal southward before the advance of the gringos, came finally to a stop. Down onto that plain and into that other world my grandfather next went, and conscious though he was that every mile would have to be driven back over, enchantment led him on as far south as Uvalde, Crystal City, Carrizo Springs, to the river itself and the border with Mexico. Enchantment, not evidence. Few enough were the people even to ask, and most of those spoke only Spanish; but if he received no encouragement to believe that Will had in fact come this way, his senses told him that this was the place to which all men yearned to come. The spell he felt was that which everyone feels in places blessed by yearlong sun, but which a dirt farmer, whose one crop a year was watered with his sweat and then was pinched in the bud by a belated winter blast, or dried up by drought, or drowned, or flattened by hail, would feel as few other men could. Here one did not wait helplessly for rain which came too late, or else washed away one’s labor in a flood; here one brought water from that mighty river where and when it was needed. Here the weather was not a man’s enemy but his friend, and in that rich alluvial soil beneath that gilded sky grew not one but two and even three crops per year. The winters here were green. This was citrus land, banana-palm land, where fruits grew for the plucking which he knew only as treats at Christmastime.

  Down there in that old hot country where the tempo of life made even that of Mabry seem hurried and changeful, among that settled and traditional people, my grandfather felt, even in the anxiety of his search, made all the more urgent by the earliness of the spring, a mood of peacefulness beginning to steal over him. Even while it defeated him, this land reconciled him to his defeat. He sensed there a different way of feeling about life, about time, about fate. Seeing those dazzling little low white adobe towns crowned by their brown weathered mission church, from the twin towers of which at evening bells as soft as the cooing of doves throbbed upon the purple air, those slow-moving, big-eyed, copper-colored women in their fringed mantillas carrying their water jugs balanced gracefully on their heads, the priests in their soutanes, the men in the fields dressed in their white pajamas working at their leisurely pace, beneath that clear sky, he felt not only better reconciled to the loss which life had recently brought him, but felt himself eased of some lifelong, some inherited deep, dull ache. This land, because it lay outside your own bloody national past, and you were ignorant of whatever bloody past it had, seemed, despite its great age, strangely new, fresh in its very antiquity. The hatred, the dissension, the fratricide of America had not reached this corner of America. Blood had been shed here, no doubt, since blood has been shed everywhere; and since it never stops, no doubt it still cried out; but it cried out in tongues which there was no one left to understand. Exposed daily to this hot sun, that old unhealed historical wound seemed at last to dry up and to cease to ache.

  The days were getting longer. Warmer too; and sometimes as he was walking up a flower path (here already abloom with color) wading through the yapping dogs to knock at yet another door, he would find himself in shirtsleeves and have to go back to the wagon for his jacket to make himself presentable. The skies shone with a hard polished gleam. It’s getting on, he said to himself; then said instantly after, but it’s not too late. There was still time. Still hope. Perhaps in the next settlement, at the next house, perhaps from the next man he met on the road …

  One day he drove all afternoon to reach the only habitation visible in the landscape, a hut, a jacal of willows daubed with mud, in the dirt yard of which fat brown babies, scrawny chickens, and hairless black dogs frolicked in equal profusion, where he was greeted by a walnut-colored man with a gap-toothed smile and a barefooted woman who shook constantly with laughter, between the two of whom and him not one word of communication was possible. When he showed the man the photograph of Ned, the man slapped him on the back and pointed to his yardful, and when he made motion to go on his way he was dragged down off the seat and made to come in and have something to drink which tasted like turpentine, every sip of which one followed by sucking hastily on a lemon, then made to stay for supper off one of those chickens and then to sleep in the only bed in the house while the family stretched out along with the pups in the yard. This experience was repeated, and while he enjoyed the hospitality, he was forced to ask himself how he could hope to get anywhere in a place where no one spoke his language. Here Will Vinson had not only fallen out of sight, he had fallen out of English.

  He was following a lead picked up in the hamlet of Catarina. Hardly a lead: a half hint, a maybe. But he was following it, as he had so many, because he had no other. One morning first thing on awaking he saw a robin perched upon the tailboard of the wagon, head cocked, round button eye shining, a wisp of grass in his bill, green grass, eyeing the straw upon which he slept. True (as he was constantly reminding himself), things here were ahead of things back home; but there too the robins would be coming back and nesting before much longer.

  Such observations only made him drive himself, and the weary old team, the harder. As the days lengthened and his time ran out, and as the trail disappeared into the blank uncolored areas of his map like trickles of water in this dry soil, he told himself that here was just the sort of unlikely place where success was most probable, and that the eleventh hour was the time when everything always happened. A nod encouraged him now, an expression of the face, even a hesitant “no.” He had reached that state of hopelessness when hopes shimmer ahead like a mirage.

  There came a blazing dry day when by two in the afternoon, having been on the road since dawn, he had not seen a single soul, no sign of life, only signs of death in the buzzards which patrolled the wide, hot, empty sky. Desperate by noon, he had not stopped to eat, and now the team was dark with sweat and he himself looked like a tired baker, with brows and nostrils caked with floury white dust, eyes heat-glazed, face flushed as if reddened at an open oven door. At last, topping a rise, he saw below him one of those sudden cool green valleys scored with brow
n irrigation ditches, and in it saw a man plowing. He stopped to watch. The man was just opening the field, the plowshare set to run deep. He meant to wait for the man to reach the end of the row and come back, then speak to him. But the rows were long out here and the man simply plowed over a rise and out of sight while my grandfather sat watching the firm earth curl back along the furrow in an unbroken strip like an apple peel and smelling the fresh damp smell. That brought him to himself, and he turned around and headed back north, still searching up to the last, as he made his way to the nearest railway town.

  Although unaware of the fact, he was actually on a different search now. He had ceased looking for Ned some days back, when he began trying to imagine him at the age of six, as a boy of twelve, as a young man; attempting, without much success, to fit him into the background of this country. When he had wondered whether that Ned would retain any memories, however vague, of him, of home, the red hills and the terraced green valleys and the tall blue sky answered: no. He was looking now for a place to stop looking. Some spot so trackless, so untamed that he could say (not to Agatha; she had long ago released him from his vow) to himself, “Beyond this point there is no going further. This, for me, is the end of the world.”

  Somewhere west of the Nueces River, east of Del Rio, north of Uvalde, south of Sonora, where the Balcones Escarpment rises sheer as a rampart above the hot plains of the Rio Grande Valley, he found it, recognized it: the spot where he could say, “If I had to lose him, if I just had to lose him, I’m glad at least to think that Will made it to here.” It was a land of strong contrasts, of bright sunlight and deep cool shadows, of dry rocky hills and lush verdant valleys. A land so old it had come round new again, lost its records, forgotten its age, and started over. Whose battles had been fought in forgotten tongues by vanished races over dead issues, where the bitterness of old divisions lay buried in unmarked graves. It was good country to grow up a boy in. My grandfather’s last regret was that Will would never know how hard he had tried to find him. He hated for him to go on forever thinking that he had cared so little for his son. But there was nothing could be done about that, and so with one last lingering look at the country he was leaving him to, he bade Ned goodbye and turned the team around and started on his long journey home.