The Ordways (23 page)

He decided to suppress all mention of Hester in future. No point in exposing her unnecessarily to the censure of strangers.

“Morning, ma'am. Hope I'm not disturbing you. My name is Ordway? I'm looking for a man.”

She giggled and said, “So'm I.” At least, that was what it sounded like.

“Pardon?” said my grandfather.

“I said, ‘Oh, my!'” she said.

“Oh. Well, as I was saying, I'm looking for a man. The man that stole my little boy and run off with him. I wonder if you—”

“That
what!
Stole your little boy and run off with him? You don't mean it!”

“Yes'm, I'm afraid I do. Man by the name of Will Vinson. You see, him and his wife had kids, and we were neighbors, and I would leave my boy with them when I went into town, and that night when I stopped to get him they were gone. I wonder if by any chance—”

“Gone!”

“Gone. Soon as I was out of sight that morning they must have grabbed up what things they could and threw them into the wagon and lit out. I'm not sure they came this way, but maybe you—”

“How on earth did you stand it? And the child's mother! Why, if such a thing was to happen to me I think I would just—”

“Dead,” said my grandfather. “Died giving birth to him.”

“Oh, you poor man! Oh, won't you step in?” she said. “Do step in and tell me all about it.”

“Well, I ought to—”

“Maybe I do remember some people going past here, now that I think of it. When did you say it was?”

“I didn't say, but it was early May. They were driving a wagon and team of two brown four-year-old mules. I've got a picture of my boy. Here it is.”

“No wonder they stole him, a little angel like that!” she said. “You ought to 've known better than to trust that boy out of your sight with anybody.”

“Well!” said my grandfather, blushing. “Thank you! Thank you very much!”

“Undoubtably the cutest little tyke I believe I ever seen in my life. Putting aside my own four, you understand.”

“Four!”

“Four boys. No more where those come from, alas.”

“Your husband…?”

“The same as you, Mr. Ordway. No longer with us. It was last spring a year that poor Eubanks went to meet his maker. He was called in the very Maytime of life, Mr. Ordway, as fine a figure of a man as you'll meet in a long day's riding, though I say it who shouldn't.”

“I'm very sorry to hear about it, Mrs. Eubanks.”

“Thank you, Mr. Ordway. I know that you will appreciate.”

My grandfather then glanced, slightly, so as to bring the subject back around to his personal concerns as unnoticeably as possible, at the photograph of Ned, which the widow Eubanks still held. Seeing his glance, she said, “I declare, this boy sure does look familiar.”

“Does he? You don't think—”

“Do sit down, Mr. Ordway, and excuse me for just one minute. I'll leave the picture here. I want to study it some more. But right now I smell my pie ready to come out of the oven. Just make yourself right at home, I won't be but just a jiffy.”

When Mrs. Eubanks returned from the kitchen she was carrying a large tray on which was a coffeepot and service, and, on a dish almost the size of a dinner plate, the biggest piece of pie that Sam Ordway had ever seen. This was yesterday's, she said, and though it had not turned out as she had hoped, she would be hurt if he refused it. He accepted, told her he took two spoonfuls of sugar (she herself took four), and commenced eating. It was very good pie. Pecan.

“Yes, indeedy,” said Mrs. Eubanks. “Anybody looking for a boy would sure find them here!”

She took up the photograph and looked hard at it and said, “I would almost swear I had seen that little fellow, sometime, somewheres.”

But just as my grandfather, having finally managed to swallow, was about to say what exciting news that was: “Oh, dear me!” she said with a laugh. “Well, I guess I have! He looks just like my own Kermit at that age. Why, you wouldn't be able to tell them apart! No wonder I thought he looked familiar! Can I slice you another piece of that pie, Mr. Ordway?”

“Oh, no, thank you. Thank you, no. I couldn't.”

“I'm afraid you didn't care for it.”

“Not care for it! On the contrary! It was delicious. But, I—”

“Ah, it does my heart good,” said Mrs. Eubanks, though the sigh she fetched sounded as if her heart was breaking, “to see a man eat my baking again!”

My grandfather swallowed noisily, and said the most consoling thing he could call to mind on the spur of the moment, which was, “Awful good pie, Mrs. Eubanks.”

“I thought the crust was a little tough.”

“No, no! Exactly right.”

“Well, it's nice of you to say so, but it's not as good as I generally do. My friends are forever telling me I ought to go into the bakery business. ‘You've won all them prizes,' they say.” And she indicated with a wave of the hand the row of red ribbons, blue ribbons, white, green, yellow, hanging on the wall behind her.

“You really ought,” said my grandfather.

“It's something to fall back on, I suppose. But what would I do with the money? Eubanks left me very well provided for. Clear title to the house and sixty-four acres making half a bale to the acre in a good year. Eight heavy milkers and six heifers. A team and all the farm implements. Not that I mean to brag, you understand. Anyhow, I wouldn't care to do that—take a pie or cake of mine out of the oven and think of some other woman's husband sitting down to it.”

“Have you ever thought of getting married again, Mrs. Eubanks?” my grandfather asked.

“Not,” she said with a demure downward glance, “up to now.”

“Well, it ain't for lack of offers, I'm sure,” said my grandfather. “And I'm not just thinking of that half a bale to the acre. A woman that can bake like—” With his fork loaded and halfway to his mouth, he stopped. Something was troubling Mrs. Eubanks's eyes. Suddenly they ceased batting and fluttered open and the look she sent his way seemed to wing over and hover above him and alight like a butterfly upon a blossom.

“What was I saying?” said my grandfather.

“Oh, Mr. Ordway!” she said. “What
were
you saying?”

“I was fixing to say, Mrs. Eubanks, don't hesitate to remarry on account of your children. My two daughters—”

“Your two daughters?” she said faintly. For a moment her eyelids beat rapidly, but recovering herself quickly, she said, “Oh, how I always prayed for some girls! To pass on my cooking to.”

“—have got on very well with their stepmother. Oh, I don't say it's been a bed of roses, but by and large …”

He let his words trail off. In the silence which ensued he took a vow never again to accept any housewife's invitation to step inside, unless the man of the house was in evidence. He found himself still holding his fork and laid it down. Then it seemed that the least he could do, out of common courtesy, was not to leave that last bite on his plate, gorged as he was. He ate it, and he felt he had brought the interview around to about as neat a close as could be expected under the circumstances, by saying, “Mrs. Eubanks, that was without doubt the best pecan pie I ever tasted.” And this, he fully meant her to understand, was including his two wives'.

Next day, the next road, results the same as the day before. He was like a fisherman casting over a stretch of water, beginning nearby and working outwards, and reeling in and casting again, each cast longer than the last.

On the morning of one of those days, as he went along the main Paris road he had ahead of him—not much bigger than a bobbing cork when he first glimpsed it—a wagon piled high with furniture and bedding, a highboy mirror flashing in the sunlight, tubs and washpots clattering and banging against the sides. There was a boy trudging alongside and a little girl holding a baby on her lap sitting with her legs dangling over the tailgate. Tenant farmers, maybe, on the move to a new situation; but to my grandfather for a moment they were the Vinsons, setting out, heading west; and seeing the slow, ponderous sway of the wagon, creaking and wallowing like a sailing ship all but becalmed in an ocean of grass, that broad horizon before them, he felt as never before the immensity, the hardihood of what the Vinsons had undertaken.

Overtaking them, he rode alongside. “Hidy,” he said.

“Hidy-do.”

“Moving?”

“That's right. Yessir, moving. From Oglethorpe County, Georgia.”

“All the way from Georgia!”

“Yessir. Been a-coming since around the first of the year. And I ain't there yet.”

“Where?”

“Where I aim to get to. But I'm getting near. Look at it! Fur as the eye can see, not a stump. Not one solitary back-breaking, gut-rupturing, plow-busting stump! You could open up a furrow clear to the Psific Ocean!”

“Yes,” said his wife, sitting beside him, “but what do you build your house out of? What do you burn in your stove? And whereabouts do you draw your water from?”

“Always complaining,” said the husband.

“Well, what do you build your house out of?” she said.

“Sod. Mud and straw. Live in a tent for a time if you have to. Land like this ought to grow you such crops you can send back to Georgia for a load of them damn rocks that come up in the fields ever' spring, and make you a house out of them.”

“Yes,” said she. “If the rains come. And the grasshoppers don't. And—”

“Why, lady,” said my grandfather, “you ain't out west yet at all here.”

“Mister, I'm a lot further west than I ever meant to be,” she replied. “You mean it gets worse?”

“I swear, if you was ever to find yourself getting low on trouble you would send out to borrow some, wouldn't you, Thelma? Look at this country! It took my old daddy all his life to clear forty acres back home in Georgia, him and three boys. But look! God has cleared the land out here for me and mine. A man can
see
out here!”

“See what?” my grandfather heard the wife say, as, waving goodbye, he whipped up and pulled ahead.

Was it that same day—or had those early days of his search gotten mixed together when he told me the story thirty years later?—that he pulled up late, exhausted, discouraged, covered with dust, thirsty, to a farmhouse of dog-run construction with a crippled davenport on the front porch, broken window lights covered with pasteboard, rusty parts of worn-out farm tools lying scattered about the yard like the bones of a dried and rotted-apart skeleton, the home of real puppy-loving poor whites, a pack of some nine to a dozen of which (dogs, that is) came out from under the porch to moil about his feet as he made his way up the path. The man of the house lounged out and leaned against a pillar grown Pisa-like from such usage. You'd think, said my grandfather to himself, that he wouldn't have much else to do but notice and remember anybody that goes down the road. My grandfather begged a drink. They went out to the well, where a fresh bucketful was drawn for him. The dipper was one of that year's gourds and imparted to the water its own sweet flavor, like new-mown hay. My grandfather flung out his dregs, then told his story, showed his photograph, and wearily asked his everlasting question. The mouth was an organ of perception with this one as with most of them, and he listened with it all agape, closing it as my grandfather wound up. Then he put his tongue in his cheek like a quid of tobacco and scratched the beard on his throat. How many times now my grandfather had seen that train of gestures! Now he would scratch his nape, ruffle up his back hair, spit and drag dirt over it with his toe. And now—yes—he would ask to have the whole thing repeated. Sometime last May, was it? Hmmm. Man about thirty-five years of age, you say? About that, give or take a year. Four younguns? Four, yes, running from nine months up to three years, his own Ned, then Felix, Perry, and baby Grace Vinson. And this one here in the picture was yourn, you say? Now he would thrust out his jaw and stare off into space, would squinch up one eye, put his tongue, like a dip of snuff, down inside his lower lip, would begin slowly, slowly to shake his head, and would finally drawl, “Naw, sir. Naw, sir, I sure wisht I might say yes, but I'm afraid I have got to say no.” Except that what this one said was, “Never had ere big collie dog with em, did they?”

How could he have forgotten Rex? How many people might have answered yes if only he had included Rex in his description! How many dogs there were who stood out in his own memory more vividly than their owners! How much easier to describe, and more memorable Rex Vinson was than Will! He did not forget Rex afterwards, when putting his question to any country man or boy.

Now my grandfather bade the Ingrams goodbye and moved on. But he came to another fork in the road. And having chosen, he came to another fork, and having chosen, another. And now a change came into his little set speech. He no longer ended up with, “I wonder if you happened to see them?” but instead, “I don't suppose you seen them,” his own head already shaking.

This is crazy, he would say to himself in whatever farmhouse bedroom he found himself at night, the children having been turned out to sleep on pallets on the floor or in a trundle bed underneath their parents' bed. I can't go from door to door across the state of Texas, especially here where the doors are five miles apart. Why didn't he give up and turn around and go home where he belonged?

Ordinary men were struck with wonder and respect for him, which made him blush with shame. They marveled at his pertinacity. When instead of displaying his affection for his boy or his grief at the loss of him, or flaunting his determination to revenge himself bloodily on his enemy, he said, well, it was the off season, there wasn't much to do around the place just then, and he might as well look a little further, that he wasn't as discouraged as they supposed because he had never much expected to succeed, then their admiration knew no bounds. As a matter of fact, he considered giving up and returning home daily. He could be out on the Paris-Clarksville road in a day, then home in a matter of hours. He was sore tempted. If he kept on going his reasons were precisely those that he gave, and which were put down to his modesty: there was not much to do around the place just then, and though he did not expect to succeed, still he had promised Aggie's spirit to give it his best, and while this might seem to be the end of the world, it wasn't, and he was ashamed to go back emptyhanded and face his friends quite so soon.