The Ordways (32 page)

They went in. Every crib was occupied and the floor alive with babies on blankets. “So many!” my grandfather exclaimed.

Mr. Marchbanks nodded. He nodded and nodded. Which manner of orphans these were, his expression left no doubt. He nodded eight or ten times more, and said yes, they were so overcrowded they had recently had to add another night watchman to the staff. Patrolling the fences to keep the ones inside from trying to break out, one man could not also guard the gate to keep the women from leaving more there. And not only women. Men too had been caught sneaking away after leaving babies at the gate, after the mothers had left them on their doorsteps. Yes, men. And though he named no names, some very highly placed and respectable men around the town among them. Caught sneaking away, leaving their little bundles of joy to be brought up at the expense of the county taxpayers. Forced to come back and pick them up and take them off. At the picture which this conjured up my grandfather could not help smiling. Mr. Marchbanks couldn't either, though he quickly wiped his off (my grandfather followed suit) and said, peering down at the mass of babies squirming on the floor, “I leave it to you, sir, to judge the state of morals in northeast Texas.”

Only this morning they had caught a young hussy making off after leaving hers at the gate. Big, strapping, rawboned country gal, perfectly capable of working to support it; but if she didn't make another try tonight, he would be very much surprised. Well, he said with a comprehensive look around, they couldn't catch them all.

Mr. Marchbanks paused for a closer look at the occupant of one crib. “This young gentleman here,” he said, “I've got my eye on him.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Something tells me he is not going to be with us much longer.”

“Oh, really!” said my grandfather. Peering in, he saw a fat, rosy-cheeked baby. “Gee, he sure looks healthy enough.”

“It's not his health I'm watching,” said Mr. Marchbanks, “it's his complexion. I suspect that boy may have had a passing swipe of the old tarbrush. Too early to be sure; but he is definitely a shade darker than he was the last time I looked. If he keeps this up, why he will have to be sent down to the other place, of course.”

“It must be awfully hard to be sure in some cases,” my grandfather observed. “I wouldn't want your responsibility. Don't you worry sometimes that you might have made a mistake?”

“It is hard to be sure sometimes,” said Mr. Marchbanks. “I can recall babies that had the board of trustees in here hanging over the crib for as long as half an hour shaking their heads and trying to make up their minds. There have been cases where they never did. Whole board split right down the middle. There are eight of them. I'm the ninth—honorary—and in case of a tie I cast the deciding vote. It is, as you say, a responsibility, and I do worry sometimes that I may have made a mistake. For this reason, whenever there is the least shadow of a doubt I always cast the black bean. You can't be too careful.”

Mr. Marchbanks pointed out the large number of women attending the children. They had found, he said, and not only they but other orphanages as well, that up to the age of one year, without the attentions of a foster mother children just died. From plain lack of affection.

Next they went into the sick ward, a long room with rows of beds along the walls and an aisle running between. The sick boys lying or sitting up in bed all turned towards the door when it was opened, but their faces did not light up as the face of a child expecting its mother to come to the sickroom would have done. Down the aisle they went, then back up it again, while my grandfather inspected the patients. Boys of all ages they were, in identical nightshirts, beneath identical gray blankets, with bed tables on which stood identical water bottles and tumblers. None of them was Ned, though it was disconcerting how many of them reminded him of Ned. My grandfather found himself smiling a frozen fatuous smile at them, which they returned coolly. In their eyes all natural childish curiosity had been snuffed out; instead they looked out upon the world with a cynical indifference. Or was it, my grandfather asked himself, simply the lonely self-preoccupation of children with no one to think of but themselves and no one to think of them?

The day being Sunday and the weather fair, the boys were all out of doors. All, that is, that were allowed out; some were confined to quarters for misbehavior. They toured the dormitories for a glimpse at these, and were glowered at like visitors to a zoo. My grandfather felt pleased and proud to find that Ned was not among these.

From there they went out into the yard in front of the church. Services were just about to begin. The orphans stood in the yard waiting. Mr. Marchbanks pointed out some of the more interesting cases. He had said he could hardly tell one from another, but he did distinguish two types, the well-born and the troublesome. These two types were sometimes united in one inmate. “Take that boy there,” he said, indicating one who had already caught my grandfather's eye, and whom he had taken to be a little girl suffering from her hideous haircut. “His daddy would have been mighty surprised to be told, as recently as just six months ago, that his son and heir would soon be in the orphans' asylum and he himself in his grave with his own bullet in his head. Mr. Stanley Blankenship, he was, a big man in local affairs, chairman of the board of directors of one of the banks, officer in any number of county corporations, treasurer of his church funds. Got to dabbling in west Texas oil rights. Found himself short and mixed his accounts with his church's. The auditors came in at just the worst possible moment. A familiar story. Put a pistol to his head one Tuesday morning. The shock of it carried off his wife, ruined any number of investors in his various enterprises. Now there's his boy. An only child and spoiled rotten, as you might imagine, and don't take to his new life here at all. I look for trouble from that boy.

“And over there now, that red-headed one” (my grandfather was a little at a loss to find hair enough to identify its color), “now there's a boy with a history, Mr. Ordway. Remember the Earlham case of a few years back? No? Well, maybe it didn't reach Clarksville but it was big news here in Paris. This Marylou Earlham caught her husband two-timing her with her own sister and killed them both. Caught them in the act and stabbed them both with a saddle awl. Well, she couldn't get herself another husband after that, and she couldn't support the children herself and the one she had killed was her only sister, so here they are. The boy's twin sisters are those two over there by the steps—always off to themselves. Now then, you see that boy over” yonder. That boy's daddy was hanged for armed robbery and murder. He's much looked up to on that account by all the other boys and it's gone to his head, and if he don't come to the exact same end himself, then I'll be very much surprised. And now over there is one who … No, over there by that tree. That boy …”

The moment was inopportune, but something which Mr. Marchbanks had dropped had been weighing heavily on my grandfather's mind, and he interrupted now to say, “You spoke of a home for insane children. I guess I had never realized that there were insane children. Feebleminded, yes. But you don't mean that? You mean insane?”

His imagination was already busy answering his own question. Insane children? Yes, of course there must be. If the minds of grownups buckled and gave way beneath their troubles, why not the softer and more exposed ones of little children? One with no mother, for instance, and who suspected (for even the youngest were terribly sharp in such matters), who suspected that his own coming had been the cause of his mother's death. Suspected perhaps that his father resented him on that account. Suspected that his stepmother would sooner not have him around. And would it not unhinge a child's mind to be whisked away from home and familiar sights and faces and share the harried life of fugitives on the road? Maybe to have the man who had taken you begin to regret the madness of what he had done, or what he had let his wife talk him into, and turn mean and cruel, finally abandoning you, turning you loose to wander alone and lost in the streets of a big city, being found and passed from hand to hand, questioned by policemen in uniforms, put into a dormitory with a gang of tough, dirty-talking boys, hazed and tormented by them, your head shaved, your…

“Haven't seen any yet that looks like yours?” Mr. Marchbanks inquired.

“No!” said my grandfather. “No!”

“Well, don't give up hope yet,” said Mr. Marchbanks. He looked at his watch. “Services will start soon. Attendance is required. Just stand right here and you'll have a chance to look them all over. Too bad this neighbor of yours didn't know about us. If it was a boy he wanted he could have come here and had his pick.”

“Yes, well he had boys of his own,” my grandfather replied. “He seems to have taken a particular fancy to mine, I don't know why.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Marchbanks, though with his job-lot attitude towards boys he seemed to find it hard to credit.

As one by one the orphans filed past him into church a change stole over my grandfather's feelings. As they went past in their shapeless garments, their high-top shoes and dirty-brown cotton stockings, their cropped heads (which had the effect of making their eyes enormous), and my grandfather searched their faces without discovering Ned among them, he grew more and more anxious. But his anxiety was not lest the next one should not be his, but that it should. And once again his mind was defending his enemy Will Vinson, magnifying his fondness for the boy, convincing himself that no matter what, Will would never have abandoned him, turned him loose to be picked up and brought to this place. When the last bunch had passed by and gone inside and the yard stood empty, so great was my grandfather's relief that when Mr. Marchbanks said he was afraid that was all there were, he heaved a loud sigh of thanks. Mistaking this for a sigh of disappointment, Mr. Marchbanks said he was sorry. He had been hoping for once that they
did
have a child, he said.

Singing broke out inside. Mr. Marchbanks invited my grandfather to stay and attend the services. Their choir was very good, he said. My grandfather replied that he would like very much to, only he had not gotten any sleep that night, and he was having a little trouble with one of his legs. He thanked him for all his help, and assured him again that he was not too disappointed. He really had not expected to find his boy here, it was just something he felt he ought to try. Mr. Marchbanks seemed not to be attending. He was studying my grandfather from out the corner of his eye. A picture took shape in my grandfather's mind of Ned being examined by that board of trustees, all eight of them shaking their heads while Mr. Marchbanks stood off to one side, weighing his decisive vote and cautioning himself that you couldn't be too careful. He wondered if he hadn't ought to ask where the “other place” was. A shake of Mr. Marchbanks's head, as though dispelling his own self-doubts, did not altogether quiet his mind. He thanked him again and left, followed by the piping of high thin voices praising God, from whom all blessings flow.

Now my grandfather realized that he was in for a long search, and accordingly outfitted himself. He had hoops made for his wagon, bought a tarpaulin and covered it, bought a secondhand mattress, a pair of blankets, and a few pots and pans. He called it his bachelor wagon. I have a photograph of it with him standing alongside before me as I write. Underneath the bed can be seen the rawhide sling for throwing in any bits of wood found in the course of the day's travel, for you could not count on finding a supply waiting for you at whatever spot you stopped to make camp for the night. In the picture the tailboard is down, horizontal, supported by a leg. This was the kitchen worktable. By his own account, my grandfather's cooking was elementary. But at least he could push on now, not be forced to stop early because the next settlement was too far to reach before nightfall. It was comforting to hear the jangle of his own housekeeping vessels as he rode along, especially as there was nothing much else to hear.

When darkness overtook him he looked for a place where there was water and bedded down for the night. He wished instead of that pistol he had brought his old shotgun. There was plenty of wild game. Along the road he often saw prairie hens and whole coveys of quail and, at dusk, doves settling in trees to roost as thick as leaves. As it was, he opened a can of hash, fried a pan of bread, boiled a pot of coffee, and had what never failed to seem the best meal of his life. Night fell, and when he had washed his utensils he would pile his fire high, and to stave off loneliness and homesickness he would get out the little French harp and play to himself for an hour. Since the instrument had only eight notes, his repertoire was at first severely limited, and the unresolved chords were maddening. But it was surprising how much you could do with eight notes, and before long his inner ear transposed the octaves and he was hardly conscious of the lack. The tunes he played were from the prisoner's repertoire, as the instrument was the prisoner's instrument: “Birmingham Jail,” “If I Had the Wings of an Angel,” “Hand Me Down My Walking Cane.” The moon rose and the stars came out to shine, his fire blazed and crackled, and beyond it, just inside the encircling darkness, bright pairs of little eyes glinted curiously. From time to time out of the darkness came the contented whinny of old Dolly, tethered nearby. The nights were chill, and when he turned in he would stretch out in the crisp, clean-smelling straw and pull the blankets up to his armpits and put his hands behind his head and lie counting the stars until he fell asleep. And as he was drifting off, it seemed that he had been set down among the stars with the task of finding a certain one lost among the millions all alike.

My grandfather was like every farmer in not feeling much affection for animals. They were his natural enemies, on whom he was dependent. Cows were mainly good for kicking over the milk pail, swatting you in the face with a cowpisssoaked tail. Mules were contrary brutes, would balk, would not budge though you beat them till your arm dropped off. So you did not beat them. You knew they were more efficient if contented, knew they were contented only if given their own way in everything, knew they would have their way whether you liked it or not. So you treated them with care; you had money in them. But now he grew genuinely fond of old Dolly. Slue-footed, clumsy, spiritless old nag that she was, she was a tie with home. They had plowed many a furrow together. The mule, too, seemed to sense that they all had to stick together out here, and shed some of his reserve, becoming the first mule in Ordway memory to pardon us that old injury of Ella's to his kind.