The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  “I kind of feel that my new brothers and sisters would like it better if I was to disown Mr. Vinson, so to speak,” said Ned to my grandfather once, after he had been back a few days. “I can understand their feelings, of course. I hope, sir, you don’t think …”

  “My boy,” said my grandfather, “whatever I may once have felt about the man, it was all a long time ago.” It was also a lot less vehement than this left implied. But to that day my grandfather had retained his sense of apology for the weakness of his resentment against Will, and while he knew that Ned had loved the man, and that for him to have said he once meant to do him harm would have pained him, he felt too that to say he never meant to harm him would be painful, and would lower him in his son’s esteem. “A long time ago, and now all I can think of is that he told you about me before he died. I’m not sure I would have done it in his place. It means a lot to me to have all my children near me once again, here towards the end. You must not think that I expect you to change your feelings about him. I don’t expect you to love me overnight as you love the man who was a father, a good father, to you all your life. I don’t hate Will myself, and I certainly don’t expect you to.”

  Ned stayed a week, during which time all his brothers and sisters, with their children, came home to meet him, singly and in pairs and all together for a grand family reunion. On Sunday we went in a body to church. Though it was not Mabry’s day, the preacher came out specially for us. To celebrate the occasion he preached on the text: “And Israel said unto Joseph, I had not thought to see thy face” (Gen. 48:11). Which, considering its overtones, was perhaps not the happiest choice he might have made. After church my grandmother took my grandfather aside and suggested that Ned might like to visit his mother’s grave. Ned, of course, had evinced no such desire. With all the new knowledge of himself which had recently been revealed, he had trouble remembering about Agatha Ordway. He had learned that his mother was not his mother; to have to bear in mind that his father’s wife was not his mother either was rather like learning the same thing a second time. “I am sure he would welcome the suggestion,” said my grandfather. “And all the more if it came from you.”

  “Well, if you think so,” said my grandmother, “then I’ll speak to him.” She had of course meant from the start to be the one. Having by now succeeded in convincing herself that Ned had come back expressly in answer to her prayers, she felt a proprietary interest in him, and she intended to offer him up at his mother’s grave in discharge of her old debt to Agatha. She would have liked to conduct him there personally. Restoring her lost son did not settle the issue between Agatha and her, to be sure; but it cleared it up considerably, and greatly reduced her disadvantage.

  “I expect he would have asked himself,” said my grandfather, “but for consideration of you.”

  “He needn’t have—”

  “Of course not. But he can’t be sure of that, you see. So it will be better if you suggest it. And then … well, maybe I ought to be the one to take him there? What do you think?”

  “Yes, I think so,” said my grandmother without batting a lash. “Unless …”

  “Unless what?”

  “Unless you think he might rather be alone with his thoughts?”

  “My dear,” said he, patting her hand, “count on you. You always think of everything.”

  The time came for Ned to return home. He invited his entire family to come down and visit him on his ranch. All said that would be very nice. Ned said, good, let’s go. They had not understood that he meant right then, that very day, with him. That was impossible. School was out and the children free, true; but that many people could not just pick up on the spur of the moment and set off seven hundred miles, be gone from home for two or three weeks. Men could not just take off from their jobs, shut down their businesses. My grandfather said nothing. Neither did my grandmother. When they were turned to for appeal against this madness, it was evident that she wished to go, never having been anywhere, and that try as he might to take no sides, my grandfather would like to go back out there once again. Another time might be too late for him: that thought could be read in his eyes, and that decided it.

  There were sixty-two of us, all told, and we went in a caravan of fourteen cars, Ned and Grandpa and Grandma and I in the lead—Grandpa and I together in the back seat, Ned and Grandma in front—then Aunt Flo and Uncle Cecil, Uncle Ewen and Aunt Jewel, Uncle Ross and Aunt Edith, Aunt Winnie, Uncle Herschell, and so on down the line.

  Roads then were not what roads are now, and neither were cars. We had that first day alone no fewer than five blowouts among us, three boiling radiators, a broken spring leaf, a stripped rear axle, and a burnt-out coil. In those days, though, every car carried a spare car in parts, and every driver was a shade-tree mechanic. Ned’s car was new, a new Ford, a sedan, marvelous to me because it was his and because it was new and because the horn, with which he was wonderfully liberal, went ah-oogah! ah-oogah! Behind us Uncle Ewen percolated along in a 1927 Moon, and though I now forget just who had which, I recall such other defunct marques as a Durant of dim vintage, a Whippett, and a Star. This last was the caboose of our train, belonging to my Uncle Malcolm, the baby of the family, and as we made a long curve I would hang out the window and wave back to my little cousins Dorothy and Matt.

  Down through Jefferson and Marshall we went, through Henderson and Lufkin, and Grandpa, beside me in the back seat, thinking of Will Vinson and his pursuit of him, kept musing aloud, “Del Rio! So that’s where Will was!” He seemed to lack only one thing now to make his enjoyment complete; that was to have Will himself there to share it all with him.

  What with car troubles and carsick children and frequent stops to go behind the bushes and the business of meals and getting through towns and stopping for soda water for all the children and stopping at roadside cafés to ask them to boil the babies’ bottles and frequent herds of cattle taking up the road and detours where the highway was under repair, we were able to make only about a hundred miles a day. Which of course was about ten times better than Grandpa had done in his old wagon, and as we went through Kilgore at dusk, or rather at the hour of dusk, for the thousands of blue gas flares roaring upwards from alongside the derricks prevented night from falling, he asked what town this was, and when he heard, responded with a look of delighted disbelief.

  We saw oil wells in the middle of main streets in some of those towns, the traffic flowing unconcernedly around the derrick. We saw whole forests of them, like trees blackened and branchless after a great fire. We saw them by the hundreds standing amid the cypresses in bayous, up to their knees in water, the men who tended them, a special breed of men, burly and blackened, going about their work in motorboats, the water thick with a greasy scum, so that it looked like a lake of crude oil, which it very nearly was. We had always in our ears the steady pounding of the pumps, the rattle and clank of the drilling rigs, the constant grinding of heavy truck gears. We saw capped wells working away in cottonfields that were sown right up around the pumps, derricks in front lawns on city lots, in schoolyards, towering like skeletal spires over greasy churches. Oil was everywhere. The roads were black with it, slick with it, from the drip of the convoys of tank trucks. Pools of it stood like mud in the fields, and roadside ditches ran black. It was in the water you drank (at a dollar a gallon some places) and in the food you ate. Touch something, anything, and yourfingers came back to you oily; touch nothing, they were oily all the same. It clouded your eyeglasses like a spray. The very air seemed oily. You could taste it, couldn’t not taste it.

  It was a world on fire. The smoke turned the day into night and the fires turned night into day. A garden of flames, like species of flowers: the pointed blue smokeless gas flares roaring upwards against the night like blowtorches; the blue intense heatless glow of the sulphur fires; the leaping yellow and red and orange of the crackling oil flames, billowing vast black rolls of smoke; near fires with men silhouetted against the flicker like busy demons, distant sputter
s like a match struck in the dark, small far-off steady flames like candles burning on the ground.

  Towards nightfall I rejoined my family in our car, for in the matter of a place to sleep for the night priority went by seniority. The lead car, Ned’s, took the first tourist home that offered, peeling off like a plane dropping out of formation, the rest drove on and the then lead car took the next, and so on. The following morning, starting out from the rear, Ned came down the line gathering up the van, and we were on our way again. Meals, after the first day out, were a picnic. For although anxious mothers had started off insisting on dull balanced diets, this was at once found to be impracticable, and afterwards we gorged on baloney and crackers and pickles and weenies and Vienna sausages and potato chips and buns and bottled pop and bananas and peanut butter and sauerkraut and marshmallows and other ready-prepared and portable poisons. The men of our clan had all pooled their home brew, which we transported in tubs of ice in the trunks of several of the cars. For though national prohibition had recently been repealed, our men scorned near-beer and three-two, which was all you could get at that time, and you could not get even that in dry areas of local option. Ice notwithstanding, it traveled poorly, and as many bottles blew up as got drunk. Every once in a while one or two or even three of them at a time would let go, and it sounded as if the car was backfiring. Those in the rear of the van said they were not much worried about getting lost, for we laid down a trail of scent like a brewery, and going through towns we were often sniffed at by lounging locals.

  And so we made our way down through the state, taking turns, we cousins, in one another’s cars, stopping in some town in midmorning and buying out some little grocery store, stopping to picnic at some pretty roadside spot just whenever we felt like it, singing songs, waving and shouting to everybody we passed, and playing Alphabet, getting separated and put into different cars when we quarreled, and instructing our parents on the historical associations of the places we passed through.

  Lovely old somnolent Jefferson, that one-time inland port on lotus-choked Big Cypress Bayou, with its crumbling wharves where gaudy stern-wheelers had docked in the days when the Red River ran navigable down to the Mississippi and New Orleans. Where we crossed Trammel’s Trace, the old Indian trail over which Sam Houston and later Jim Bowie on his way to the Alamo had entered Texas. Marshall, stately and plantational. Fragrant, floral Nacogdoches, sedate old Nacogdoches, so improbable a brawling ground and yet the scene of six revolutions. Then Navasota, where La Salle was killed by his own men. Huntsville, where old Sam Houston died, disregarded, dishonored, and despised. Washington-on-the-Brazos (off the route, actually, so that when, at the junction of highway 6, Ned signaled for a turn, everybody began to honk. So Ned signaled for a stop and pulled over to the side of the road and everyone else pulled in behind us. All the drivers piled out and came to the head of the caravan, saying, “What’d you turn off here for? You’ve made a wrong turn. We want to stay on 190. This goes off to—”

  “You don’t even know where it goes off to, I bet,” said Grandpa.

  “Well, it goes off the route, that’s for certain.”

  “It goes to Washington-on-the-Brazos,” said Grandpa. “And do you want us to pass this near to the spot where the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed and not have our children see it? We can’t do that. Can we, sir?” he said, turning to me, who had shrunk into my corner, seeing what a to-do I had caused.

  “How far out of the way is it?”

  “Never mind that,” said Grandpa. “It’s educational.”

  So although at first, like all Texans behind a wheel, we had thought we were in a hurry to get where we were going, we realized that we were not. My grandfather was enjoying the sights, and even before that detour to Washington-on-the-Brazos he kept putting on the brakes. It was a wonder we did not have a dozen fourteen-car pile-ups, the way he was always saying to Ned, “Stop!” so he could get out and have a look at a creek which he maintained was running north, or a mare and her foal in a pasture, or to strike out across a field and satisfy his curiosity about the workings of a new-fangled farm implement in use there, and only by deception and distraction could he be gotten past any state historical marker. When such ruses failed and he had his way, he would get out and go over and read the plaque, every word down to the erected-during-the-administration-of-governor-so-and-so, and would come back and take his seat without a word. “Well?” someone would ask. “Oh,” he would say in surprise. “I thought you-all weren’t interested.” And he would leave it to me to tell them that Anson Jones had slept there. Anson Jones? Just the last president of the Republic of Texas. And trying not to look too smug, he would indicate that we might now proceed.

  It came over us all that we had as much time as space, and after dinner we would take a short siesta, the older folks and the infants napping while the boys and girls romped and played and explored the neighborhood. On one of those days, after noon, while the women were shaking themselves awake and beginning to gather up the leftovers and tidy up the grounds and the men examined tires before proceeding and measured with sticks the gas levels in tanks, suddenly Marie, Uncle Ewen’s married daughter, said, “June? June? Where’s June?” (Not a girl, but William Junior, aged three, called June.)

  At that the women all raised their heads as one, like a flock of sheep, and instantly began to echo the call:

  “June? June? June! Where’s June?”

  By this time Cousin Marie was darting distractedly here and there, looking behind rocks and underneath cars, and all the other mothers, first making sure of their own children, were joining in the search.

  “One of the children is missing,” Grandma was explaining to Grandpa. “June. Marie’s boy, June. Ewen’s Marie.” And he, still full of sleep, was saying, “What? Missing? What do you mean, missing? Where is he?”

  Now the men had left off their chores and joined in. Various ones were trying to bring some system into the search, others were trying to calm the women. Just then up strolled Ned with June riding on his shoulders. Ned was wearing the broad grin without which he would have looked undressed. “Hello, everybody!” he sang out. “Have a good nap? Ready to hit the road?” From that time onward the Ordway women were less hysterical about one of their children repeating that old scare story of our family’s.

  Then we became strangers in our own home state. We began to see Mexicans. Once Ned stopped to buy fruit from one. Ned spoke in Spanish. My grandfather listened in amazement. That a son of his could speak a foreign tongue astonished and delighted him. At Castroville, west of San Antonio, we saw a European village, settled by Alsatian immigrants in 1848, who survived Indian raids and droughts, grasshopper plagues and cholera, and whose strong old fachwerk houses with their peaked dormers and long upper-deck galleries still stand, and whose descendants still speak a mixture of French and German with a strong Texas twang.

  West of San Antonio we entered another world. A spiny land, all pointed and prickly, with plants like those sea animals that look like plants. Weird growths with names, reeled off by Ned to our gaping admiration, as twisted and fragrant and exotic as the things they signified: huisache with its lacy blooms, its dizzying scent, ocotillo, and maguey, yucca, greasewood, mesquite. Then we headed into the Valley, where, right on the border of Old Mexico, Ned had his ranch.

  It was a real ranch, like the ones in the pictures. It had a big adobe hacienda, square, flat-roofed, white as a lump of sugar, with the butt ends of the rafters sticking out of the walls, which were two feet thick, and little round-arched windows without any panes. There was a corral with horses in it. There was also a pervasive and rutty odor of goat, and to everything, much like cotton on the weeds and wires back home, clung strands of goat hair. We were put up in bunkhouses, ate our meals out of doors. Grandpa followed at Ned’s heels, and I at his, beaming at the way he talked Spanish with the hands. One day while we were there one of the goatherds, a Mexican wrapped in a serape and wearing a big-brimmed sombrero, came d
own from the hills bringing on the rump of his horse the mangled carcass of a kid. He and Ned talked for a while and then Ned said, “With all these extra hands here, it’s a good time to get rid of some of these pesky coyotes.” So there was a big coyote roundup and all the men got to shoot one and the dead coyotes were hung up in the trees and on the fenceposts to scare others away. One day my grandfather expressed the wish to visit Will Vinson’s grave. It turned out that the Vinsons were buried right on the place, a common practice out there still, as it had once been around Clarksville, where the ranchers lived too widely scattered to maintain a community cemetery. They went down back of the house and along an arroyo, over a rise and down again into a little draw where, in a cleared spot among the creosote bush, overhung with mesquite, were three graves, Will Vinson’s, his wife’s, and their little girl Grace’s. On the graves of the latter two were stones on which only their given names appeared. So the question which had drawn my grandfather there was still unanswered, and he had to put it directly to Ned. What name did he intend to put on Will’s headstone? Vinson or Ordway?