The Ordways (12 page)

“‘Oh, no!' she cried. ‘No, thank you just the same, I'm fine! Just fine!' You'd have thought she swum the Red River every day just for the fun of it. And then she bust into tears.

“The man said, speaking to Pa, and you had to remind yourself (remind him, too, it seemed) that he had just lost a child, for even in thanking you he had a tone to his voice that rubbed your fur the wrong way, ‘We haven't got no time to waste. I would be obliged to you for one thing. We lost something overboard. Something worthless to anybody else but precious to me. A keg is what it was, a nail keg. It floated off down the river and my wife wasn't able to recover it.'

“‘Your
wife
wasn't able to!' cried Ma.

“‘A nail keg? And it floated?' said Pa.

“‘It had something else in it besides nails,' said the man.

“‘It's Great-grandpa,' said the little girl to me.

“‘Huh?' I said.

“‘In that keg,' she said.

“‘Little girl,' I said, ‘what are you talking about?'

“‘We got all the rest of them back again but him,' she said.

“‘What on earth are you talking about?' I said.

“‘I'll tell you something I bet you don't know,' she said.

“‘What?'

“‘My papa,' she said, ‘is blind.'

“I looked down. By then they had made a regular mud puddle in the road in front of our gate.

“‘If you or any of your neighbors find such a keg,' I heard the man say, ‘just hold on to it. I will send you a letter as soon as we get settled. Maybe then I will be able to offer a reward. One thing more. If you do find it, do not open it.

“‘I bet your papa still don't know,' said the little girl. There in the middle of a smile she bust out crying again harder than ever. Then they set off down the road towards Clarks ville, the woman poking the oxen with her stick and the mar setting on the wagon seat and the little girl, still wet, follow ing along behind, her thin little shoulders shaking as she cried. When I told Pa, he said he thought he noticed something the matter with that man's eyes. Ma said the same We never talked about nothing else for days but that blind man and that big-bellied little woman crossing the Red River in a wagon. About a week later we was running our line when we seen something caught in the bushes along the bank. It was that lost keg. Painted on the lid was some letters. I couldn't read them and neither could Pa. Pa, he shaken it and it rattled, and then I told him what that little girl had told me was in it. He said, why didn't I tell him that before he shaken it? He wouldn't let that keg in the house but kept it out in the hayloft until one day about three months later them folks came back to ask if anybody had ever found it. They come in the same old wagon, only this time instead of oxen a span of mules was hitched to it. They had a new baby with them.

“‘What did I tell you?' I said to the little girl.

“She grinned, then went red in the face.

“‘Brother or sister?' I asked her.

“‘Little brother,' she said. ‘We call him Sammy.'

“That time again, even knowing now that he was blind, Pa come close to losing his temper with the man. That was when he took out his billfold and commenced taking out bills. He took out three and asked his wife what they were. She said it was three ones. He held them out in the air and asked, ‘Is that enough for your troubles?' Pa set the keg in the wagon and told him to put his money back in his pocket. He took out two more bills and asked his wife what them were—two more ones, she said—and held out the five and said, ‘Will that cover it?' Pa just backed out of range. The woman thanked him. I come to know your daddy later on, Sam, and he was like that, proud, despite his blindness, or maybe I ought to say, on account of his blindness. It went hard with him to accept a favor. And there the old gentleman lies,” Uncle Dave concluded somewhat unexpectedly, nodding towards Old Tenpenny's grave, “'longside the rest of his folks, where he belongs.”

Clarksville, as I began by saying, is only barely in Texas, and originally Thomas Ordway stopped there—or rather in Mabry—for cemetery plots, even small ones, in the town were not to be had on credit and he refused the offer of a patch in the potter's field—only long enough to bury Dexter, then, mothlike in pursuit of that flaming sun, pushed on beyond. How far beyond they never knew; far enough for the sounds and smells of things to turn unfamiliar and frightening to that lost veteran of a lost cause. Out of the woods they came and onto the plains, where the wind blew not in gusts but endlessly, unintermittently, coming unchecked, out of nowhere, with nothing to rustle on its way. The earth stood still all day and crackled beneath that burning sun. The rattle of thunder was distant and dry; rain, when it fell, was preceded for hours by a smell arising from the hot earth as if rain had already fallen; when it came, it fell with a noise like water galloping from a bottle, splattered in great warm clots against your face, rattled like buckshot on the hard-baked ground, and then abruptly ceased. In that parched and alien soil, would the bones of his ancestors take root and flower? It was a place without echoes, and when at times the wind died, you could hear forever—hear nothing. Then in his darkness, listening, Thomas Ordway knew that he had crossed a line. He had stepped beyond the bound of recorded time, into a land waiting for history, into the long unbroken hush of antiquity. And there came to the blind cripple then a realization of his place in the record of things. Men like himself had bled and died unknown in battles since the dawn of time; but behind him at least were pages in which the dates had been preserved; and there was consolation, he found now, in that anonymous immortality, in knowing that though the battle might have been lost, the cause itself lost, the wrong cause, perhaps, from the start and one's own part in it insignificant, that the day which had cost a man his eyes would not be forgotten, but would go down in history. Here there was time for an army, a race to have fought and died, but no tongue to remember them in. Listening to that ancient silence, Thomas Ordway seemed to hear, seemed almost to feel brush past, a throng of ghosts: the unrecorded legions of the nameless, unlettered dead. Then after a long space of silence he came again among living men and heard them speak. It was Spanish, and he shrank back as if a second bomb had burst, blinding his ears. Then while coyotes howled about him in their moonlit night, he, in his, turned, lonely and frightened and fumbling, to his wife, and found her big with child.

In his later years Thomas Ordway's son Samuel often imagined that night on the plains when his father's groping hands first found him in his mother's ripening belly. And that other, earlier, related night in Tennessee, when Thomas Ordway had turned to his wife and she had not flinched, though he thought she had, but, clumsy, fumbling, noisome as he was, had taken him to her breast.

No man wants his children to be born foreigners. One of his strongest desires is that his sons have the same boyhood, the same memories, only maybe happier, as his own. The following morning Thomas Ordway turned and retraced his faltering steps to Clarksville, where already the only absent member of his whole clan lay buried.

And there we were still, we Ordways, above ground and below, where old Thomas had brought us, our wanderings over; and once a year, on graveyard working day, that son whom he never saw but knew only by touch, now grown old, would, like a Jewish patriarch at the Passover
seder
answering the questions of the youngest male child, recount our exodus, led by that blind and crippled Moses of our tribe. The tale told, work was resumed. But I, from an early age, was always left feeling restless and dissatisfied by the way the story ended, and would wander off by myself to the churchyard, there to stand with the wind in my face gazing wistfully towards the country which had almost been my birthplace.

To grow up a boy in Clarksville in my time was to be a double dreamer. For there where the woods joined the prairie was the frontier where two legends met. At one's back one heard the music of a banjo and the strains of “Dixie,” the tramp of marching men, the roll of drums and bugle calls, the rattle of musketry, the thunder of cannonades. A boy gazing in that direction saw proud, tattered ensigns streaming above the haze of battle; saw burst from the clouds of gunsmoke gray-uniformed figures waving sabers and long horsepistols, shouting the rebel yell, grinning at death, glory-bent and beckoning him to follow. Those wooded hills rang all the way back with the names of Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson and Texas's own Albert Sidney Johnston and the hapless but courageous John Bell Hood, and the sonorous Miltonic roll of place names where battles were fought: First Manassas, Antietam, The Wilderness, Chickamauga, Chattanooga, Shiloh.

In the other direction stretched Blossom Prairie, the vastness alone of which would have drawn out the soul in vague yearnings, even if beyond it had not lain a place already fabled as a land of romance and the home of heroes. What the ocean is in that once-famous picture of the boy Raleigh shown sitting on the shore with his knees drawn up to his chin and his eyes fixed on strange distant lands below the horizon, my prairie was to me. Except that I knew what lay beyond my ken. Just beyond the range of my vision the prairie became the plains, and there another world commenced. It was a new world, and in it a new man had come into being, the most picturesque the world has ever produced: the cowboy. There was no place there for old men or for women. Life was spiced with danger there. A man wore his law strapped round his waist out there. Strong fearless, taciturn, the cowboy was a natural aristocrat chivalrous towards women, loyal to his friends unto death reserved towards strangers, relentless towards his enemies a man who lived by a code as rigid and elaborate as a medieval knight's. The cowboy was a man whose daily occupation was an adventure, whose work clothes a sultan might have envied. A man lifted above the plodding pedestrian world: a horseman—just the best ever known. On that wind which blew in my face off Blossom Prairie I seemed to catch the lowing of vast herds of cattle and the strumming of a guitar to the tune of “The Old Chisholm Trail,” and along that flat rim where the earth met the sky there would sometimes appear in silhouette a lone rider sitting tall in the saddle, wearing a broad-brimmed sombrero and chaps, a bandana knotted round his throat, the sunlight glinting on the pearl handle of the pistol slung low on his thigh.

Lee surrendered to Grant on April 9, 1865. The news was two months reaching Texas. I did not hear about it until 1931. I learned by reading on to the end of my school history book. Before that time I had sensed that we were in for a long struggle, but I had no idea that things were going that bad. We had suffered setbacks—that was war; but we had given as good as we had gotten, and, no one having told me any different, I supposed that the fighting was still going on. Suddenly at the age of ten I not only had snatched away from me any chance ever to avenge my great-grandfather and redeem our losses and cover myself with glory on my country's battlefields, I had to swallow down my pride and learn to live with the chronic dyspepsia of defeat.

Nothing had prepared me for this. My knowledge of American history up to that point had conditioned me to the habit of success and leadership. I had theretofore identified myself with my country's eminence and expansion, and as a Southerner I had belonged to the dominant party. The founding fathers, the early generals, the great presidents, were Southerners. In the War, as presented to me, we had fought the better fight. At the point at which the account of it had always previously left off, we were winning. Now all of a sudden it was over, and we had lost. For me, a Texan (which is just another word for “proud”), this was even harder to accept than for most Southerners.

I say that, yet is it true? The moment when he discovers that the Civil War is lost comes to every Southern boy, and proud Texan though I was, it was perhaps less shattering for me than for most. I had, right on my doorstep, another myth to turn to. When the last bugle call went echoing off into eternity and the muskets were stacked and the banners lowered and that star-crossed flag hauled down—in short, when Appomattox came to me and I was demobilized and disarmed and returned home, filled with wounded pride and impatient with peacetime life—like many another veteran—I began to face about and look the other way, towards Blossom Prairie, where the range was open and the fancy free to roam. In my fashion I was repeating not only the history of my family, but of the country. For the West provided America with an escape from the memory of the Civil War.

In one of its sons the Ordway clan had realized its manifest destiny. Somewhere out there I had an uncle—half-uncle, that is to say, and provided he was still alive. Rancher? Wrangler? Roustabout? Rustler? What was my unknown western uncle? By this time I knew, in bare outline, the true story of Little Ned. Unwilling as my father and all my aunts and uncles were to talk about it, my mother was nothing loath, for to her it showed my grandmother in a blameworthy role and my poor innocent grandfather suffering at her hands—with which interpretation, though my mother did not know it, my grandmother agreed entirely and my grandfather entirely disagreed. Without assigning any blame myself, I would have liked to comfort my grandfather for the loss of his son, to let him know, as we stood side by side gazing silently off into the distance (for he too used to leave the cemetery after dinner, drawn to the churchyard and its view), that after all these years of enforced silence he had in me someone to whom he might open his heart and speak of Little Ned. But I was shy with him, and it was such a sad story that I was afraid to remind him of it. So we stood there sighing, he for his lost youth (I only thought it was for his lost son), I for I did not know what. For a Shetland pony and saddle. For adventure. For my interminable childhood to be over and my life to begin.

Actually my grandfather joined me in the churchyard to get away from the sight of his wife at her grave-cleaning chores.