The Ordways (15 page)

Going courting again, spending all that time just getting into town and back, idling on the corners of the square inspecting the girls who passed in review there on Saturday afternoon, going to dances and cutting a figure, to graveyard workings and over the still-unflowered mound beneath which his wife lay, striking up a courtship with another woman, going to call on her under the watchful eyes of her father and her brothers, provided he was able to find one who encouraged him that far, and squiring her to church suppers and play-parties. Sam Ordway had thought he was done with all that, at thirty-three felt foolish even to think of himself in the role, had no heart for starting life all over again. He was used to one woman's ways, she to his; now he would have to learn a new woman, train her to his ways. And he was afraid of making a mistake in his choice, especially as he had so little time in which to make it.

He would have preferred a young widow woman. Such a one, herself tried by loss, would better understand and appreciate his predicament, his frame of mind. The first bloom rubbed off her own passion, she would not be disappointed to find his gone from him. Trained already in being a wife, she would fit right off, broken in, comfortable, not pinch and cramp like a new pair of shoes. If she had a child, or better still two, of her own, that would be all right, that would be all the better. The risk that she would favor her own, he was willing to run, to try and cope with; he would feel less beholden to her for taking on the care of his three.

Hester Duncan was not a widow. In fact she was, at twenty-eight, an old maid. She was a plain woman, though no plainer than many a one who had found herself a husband. Sam Ordway was no beauty himself, and did not expect to find one, did not want one, who might think she was wasted out here in the country. Hester Duncan was country-born and -raised, and not afraid of dirtying her hands, though at the time he first met her they were employed in nicer work. And though she was an old maid, being a schoolteacher she understood and liked children. She had come to teach the Mabry school just that year. She had taught before, in Clarksville, but when her old mother was struck helpless she had given it up and come home to take care of her. Her father was long dead and the farm run down and triple-tied in mortgages, and when during the previous spring her mother died, she had sold what little equity remained to her in the old place and taken the vacant job at Mabry's one-room six-grade schoolhouse.

That was Winnie's first year in school. She liked it and she liked her teacher. She would set off in the morning with her books and the lard pail containing her lunch, which she as well as her teacher called her dinner, looking in her bonnet and ankle-length dress like a spry little old woman setting off down the road on a visit. Unlike other girls, she never ran or skipped but walked with a dignified matronly tread. On the papers that she brought home from school was written in a fine, careful hand, “Good.” She was quick and studious, and after Christmas, just before the mid-term vacation, Miss Duncan had come over one afternoon to visit Mrs. Ordway and compliment her on her clever child and to offer, if closer inspection of the family and its circumstances seemed to warrant, a suggestion about her future. In those days, at the first sign of intelligence in a little girl people began asking her if she meant to be a schoolteacher when she grew up. The age of eight was not thought any too young to begin preparing for such a career, as it was often entered upon at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Moreover, it was a solemn step, rather like pledging a daughter to take nun's vows, for state law forbade teachers to marry. Most promising girls were taken out of school after just two or three years as little sisters and brothers began to multiply. Three years' schooling was considered by many farm families quite enough. In many cases it was three years more than either parent had had. It was to judge if this was likely, and if possible to prevent it in the case of bright little Winifred Ordway, that her teacher came over that afternoon to praise her.

It was not the first time that Sam Ordway had ever seen Miss Duncan. She rented a room and took her board with the people who owned and ran the Mabry store. Saturday, unless something urgent came up, was the only day of the week when the Ordways ever went to Mabry, or past it on their way into Clarksville, and school was out then, so during the past months they had sometimes seen the new teacher cleaning out the schoolhouse, which was part of her duties, but which she looked the tidy, conscientious sort to have done whether it had been stipulated or not, or hanging out her skimpy virgin's wash on the line (though never her undergarments; these she apparently hung inside the house to dry, out of sight of the farmers who on Saturday gathered to pitch washers alongside the store across the road. And every third Sunday they had seen her regularly at church, where once already she had passed them a compliment on their Winnie.

It was wintertime and my grandfather not in the field but at home, and after giving the women a while to talk between themselves, he had come in from the tool shed. It had been a pleasant visit. It was flattering to hear one's child called clever, and he had vowed to see that Winnie went as far in school as she wished to go. The child who was to be Ned was already beginning to show on Aggie. My grandfather had pitied Miss Duncan for having to interest herself in other women's children instead of having a child of her own. The next time he saw her Aggie was dead and in her grave.

It was in the churchyard that they met, or rather in the field below the churchyard, after services every third Sunday. Below the burial ground lay a hollow where wildflowers flourished in almost macabre profusion, phlox and swamp pinks, verbena, Indian blankets, which went largely unpicked, most survivors preferring to bring garden flowers from home to decorate the graves of their kin. This year for the first time around the Ordway house there were no flowerbeds, and so it was down to the hollow that my grandfather and the girls would go after church to pick a bouquet for Agatha's grave. There they found Miss Duncan, who also had no flower garden of her own, picking a bouquet for the grave of her mother. She had been devoted to her mother and missed her terribly. The note of loneliness which sounded in her voice struck in Sam Ordway, like the second tine of a tuning fork, a sympathetic vibration.

This was during the summer and into the fall, before he had undertaken his quest for a wife, while he was still just thinking about it, or rather putting off thinking about it, dreading it.

It was the girls who brought them together. Winnie had been the teacher's pet. “Are you picking flowers for your mother's grave?” she asked. “So are we.” In an impulse of motherliness Miss Duncan had hugged the two orphans to her. At the appearance of their father she grew flustered. However, she quickly regained her composure.

Once started, Sam found it easy to talk to her. It was not like talking to a woman. She had resigned herself to life as an old maid schoolteacher and expected to pass unnoticed by men. Thus she was unguarded and without airs and coquetry and he could talk to her simply as to another person. Meeting there on a common errand of sorrow, they were unembarrassed by their encounters. Shortly Sam Ordway began to visit his wife's grave also on Sundays when there were no services. Miss Duncan too came regularly. Once she was sick and did not appear. That day he picked an extra bouquet and put it on her mother's grave. The following Sunday she found it there and met them at the gate and warmly thanked the girls for it. On a Sunday in September he did not appear in the hollow. Winnie and Bea were there and they told Miss Duncan that their father was busy putting up a tombstone on their mother's grave. He had picked it up in town the day before and brought it home in the wagon. That morning he had come in overalls and with pick and shovel, and instead of going to services had planted the stone. When she and the girls came up from below he had it finished. The girls invited her to come and look. She said it was a beautiful stone. She was still standing over her mother's grave when he gathered up his tools and left. Her loneliness struck him as never before, and it occurred to him to wonder who would put up a stone for her when her time came, and to wonder if she was thinking the same.

He learned that she had a married sister living in Clarksville. She saw her seldom because it was hard to get in. He offered to take her when he went in once a month. She colored. It was with pleasure but he took it for embarrassment and wondered why. He realized she was thinking that she was a single woman and he a single man. He had not yet grown accustomed to thinking of himself as a single man, and he had not yet thought of her as a woman at all.

She was, and no sooner had he realized it than she began to seem the ideal woman for him. Her easy availability figured in his interest. She would save him the search he dreaded even to begin. He liked the fact that with her the field was clear, that he would not have to compete with other men for her attention. Her affection for children was evident. No doubt one of her own was what she longed for, perhaps at her age with not much remaining hope, but she liked them all, and had a special fondness already for one of his. The risks and disadvantages of marrying a widow became apparent to him. The time in which he had to find one was short, and he might get one who later would be forever throwing her first husband in his face. If she had children of her own she would need to be a saint not to be partial to them. He was not eager to raise another man's children.

Sam Ordway had not had much schooling himself, and did not greatly miss it; he appreciated it in a woman, though, and it flattered his self-esteem to think of having an educated wife. The idea strongly appealed to him of being able to give Aggie's girls, as well as those who were sure to come later (with boys of course this mattered less), not only an educated mother but one experienced in teaching children.

He believed he would stand a chance with her. He was no prize catch, but an old maid could not be too choosy. Unless (this struck him now for the first time, and whetted his desire to have her), unless she was an old maid out of choice, unless no man could ever hope to win her.

Though plain in a schoolmarmish way Miss Hester was not at all sour or severe, certainly not outside her classroom. On the contrary, she could be spirited and lively, and he had found she was not nearly so bossy and not nearly so infallible as he had supposed all schoolteachers to be, a discovery which it pleased him to make, as before he too had stood somewhat in awe of her. When it got so they could trust one another's devotion to his dead then they could afford to forget them sometimes, and he found that she enjoyed a quiet laugh and was capable of making him laugh. He found her natural and unaffected. He began to like her pleasant, square, unadorned face. On the basis of her plainness he made the common, and commonly erroneous, assumption that she was free of vanity. He admired her for this.

In his proposal he was forthright and frank. He told her precisely what his assets were, listing the house, his acreage, his stock, his age, the state of his health: the list of credits was not long. Indeed, whether they—house, land, and stock—belonged on the credit or the debit side of the ledger was open to question. Debits certainly were three small step-children to have to take on, and he dwelt at length on that, though pointing out that Winnie at least was remarkably self-reliant. The boy as yet was neither fish nor fowl, but the girls were good girls. He said it who shouldn't; but the credit was none of his, it was his wife's—Aggie's—Agatha's.

He knew he ought to have taken longer about this than he had. But he knew too that she was a sensible woman. She would appreciate the fact that he could not wait. He did not know that no woman likes to be told that she is sensible. Especially one who has heard it all her life.

It was coming home from Clarksville in the wagon one Saturday afternoon that he proposed to her. Even as he spoke he was conscious of the thawing fields alongside, already summoning him. The first robins were back, were busy scavenging for straw to build their nests. The sides of the road were bearded now with the first shoots of grass and patches of yellow-green fog hovering above creek banks showed where the willows had leafed out. The seed for his crops was already laid in. In the wagon bed rode a bright new plowshare.

He said he believed he could say he was as good a worker as the next man, a good provider, and that while he had his faults in plenty, at least he did not drink nor gamble and—

He stopped, turned, and found her crying, silently, bitterly, and through her tears regarding him with a look which he could not fathom. She could not tell him what was wrong. No, he had not offended her. She answered yes, and he put down her tears to joy. It never once occurred to him that what he had done was not propose to her but offer her a job, trying honestly not to conceal its disadvantages but still offering her a job, and not nearly as good a one as she already had, that he had never once said he loved her nor given her a chance to say that she loved him, no chance even to preserve her self-respect, only to say yes, she would be his wife, while saying to herself, yes, she would be any man's wife who asked her rather than go on as she was, lonely, barren, unwanted—an old maid.

Sam Ordway expected his new wife to realize that he was so hard-pressed for time that he would get around to loving her later, after he had gotten around to grieving for Aggie and gotten that out of the way. He did not phrase it to himself this way, but if he had it would certainly not have seemed unreasonable to him. Hester should realize that a part of his grieving for Aggie would have to be done, so to speak, on her time. That he had not been able to do it, farming, looking after two young children and worrying over a third, courting her.

But she could not forever walk on tiptoe, speak in whispers, as though in a shrine or a tomb. She expected him sometimes to entertain her, to be demonstrative and affectionate, sometimes gay, forward-looking, full of plans for their life together, a man whose life lay in the future, not buried in the past. She had a sense of her life's beginning, a late flowering that like a retarded spring was all the more efflorescent for having been kept back. She was determined to think of her husband as hers, resented the notion of his ever having been anyone else's, refused to share him with a memory, a ghost. She did not want a mere provider, a partner, who in fairness for his own lack of ardor excused her from showing any. He had awakened her love, and love was what she wanted in return.