The Ordways (38 page)

In such a landscape to come upon an anthill was a welcome diversion. One day riding along, my grandfather came upon about a thousand anthills. Beginning at some distance from the road, they covered a large tract of land, so thick it looked like a field hilled up for planting table corn. My grandfather stopped for a look, stood up in the wagon bed, and stretched his neck. As he did so, dozens, hundreds of hitherto motionless and invisible little furred animals, their pelts the same ginger color as their dirt mounds, stretched themselves up for a look at him. The next instant, as one, as if all the target animals in a shooting gallery had been popped off with a single shot, they flipped over, the dusty white soles of their hind feet flashing as they somersaulted, and disappeared. It was a feature of the West that he had heard of: a prairie-dog town.

Inquisitive creatures, they were already poking their noses out of their holes again as my grandfather approached what might be called the city limits of their settlement, where he meant to sit down and watch. Instantly they drew in again, like turtles withdrawing into their shells. Soon, however, their curiosity brought them back out. From where he sat my grandfather could see that the town was intersected with beaten paths. Some were main thoroughfares, others side streets, still others mere back alleys. Comically humanlike, two or three of the creatures would collect on the front stoop of one of their neighbors' houses and gossip, their heads bobbing in solemn agreement, jerking up all together at anything untoward happening down the street. Now and again a spat would develop among their children and with a burst of yelps they would break off and dash over and separate them and box their ears. Sometimes a truant youngun would scamper down the block for home ahead of a scolding mother. Others meanwhile appeared repeatedly at their holes like an industrious housewife coming out to the front porch to shake out her dust cloth or her mop. Quick, nervous, excitable, they could not keep still for a moment. With their queer little bark and their humorless, almost petulant expression, they appeared to be destroying reputations and always lecturing one another, and constantly taking offense, abruptly turning their backs on their interlocutor and going off in a huff into their holes. Rumors seemed to fly through the town. One would say something to another, then duck into her hole, and out of three or four neighboring ones inquisitive heads, as at the windows of a house, would pop up, whiskers twitching, as if they had been told to go have a look at what was going on out outside, and believe it if they could. My grandfather had been so entertained that when he rose to go, and looked at his watch, he found he had wasted the better part of an afternoon.

Five days beyond Mineral Wells my grandfather saw another feature of the West.

Seen from a distance, the town had looked like a mirage. Up close it looked still more unreal. He was not sure he was seeing it when he first saw it. Lying along the horizon, colorless, close to the colorless earth, it appeared and disappeared, throbbing in and out of vision like heat waves. Across the plain the only movement was an occasional restless and lonesome tumbleweed. As he rode into the main street he sensed an eerie quiet, as if it were a town in quarantine. He thought at first that he had entered by the bad end which every town has: the first places he passed were stores that had gone out of business years before, a little grocery on one side of the street, its sign dangling drunkenly from off the building's high false front; across the street a place, no knowing what it had been, the porch roof of which sagged in the middle like an awning full of rain water. It was an old town, with board sidewalks, and in this end of it the walks had rotted and caved in and an occasional plank stuck up crazily in the air. The stalks of weeds poked up through cracks in the walk and in the street itself weeds grew in clumps. Not a sound was to be heard. Then he heard the plaintive creak of something, something wooden, swaying and rasping in the wind: a signboard, a loosened shutter, or the rocking of an unsteady wall. The source of that sound he could not discover, but the lonesomeness of it he never forgot: a thin rusty wooden creak in the wind, audible at noon in the street of a hushed town. Past more abandoned stores he drove in the deepening silence. Now he could see the other end of the street, could see where the plains recommenced—indeed, the grass had overgrown the road and ran a way into town, tall prairie grass growing between the last few buildings. He came abreast of the tallest buildings, those which rose three stories, and looking into one on his left, he saw that the interior was lighted, and saw why, how: the roof had fallen in. The wind soughed and the old, paintless, dry walls groaned.
HOTEL
said the dim sign which hung above the building across the street, B
LACKSMITH
said another on the side of the building and below it an ectoplasmic hand with a finger pointing down the alley. Silently reining in his team, my grandfather sat and looked around. Where there were windows you could see nothing inside the buildings, so beclouded with dirt were they, but where the windows were broken you could see inside. The walls were tattered and peeling and on the floors a layer of dirt had grown weeds from seeds blown in by the wind.

“Welcome!”

My grandfather bounced on his seat, spun about, and saw down on the ground alongside the wagon wheel an old man with a dirty white beard and flowing long white hair, dressed in rags and camped under a tentlike hat.

“What place is this, uncle?” asked my grandfather. “Or was it?”

“Why, this here is what they call a ghost town,” said the old man, chortling. “I'm the head haint. Pretty spooky, ain't it?” This sent him sputtering off into a fit of bronchial laughter. “Don't know where you're at?” he said when he had recovered, and this sally sent him off choking again. “Wellsir, suppose I tell you that right here”—and he hopped with unexpected spryness onto the board walk—“on this spot Pat Garrett stood one day and just stomped his foot at a man that'd just been threatening to whup any man in town, and that feller turned tail and run and was never seen here again?” He unexpectedly lifted his foot and stamped his heel. The echo seemed to search out every cranny in the empty town, reverberating, echoing upon itself. The old man, obviously demented, cackled with laughter. “There,” he said, pointing up the street, “that was the Silver Dollar Saloon. One night in there I seen a man lose eighty-six thousand dollars at three-card monte.”

“Pat Garrett?” said my grandfather. “Wasn't that the man that killed Billy the Kid?”

“He wasn't the one that killed Cock Robin,” said the old-timer, and went off into another peal of laughter. “You look like an all right feller. I‘ll let you in on it. This here”—he put his hand to his mouth, rolled his eyes in both directions, and whispered hoarsely, “this here is old Fort Griffin. Don't tell nobody.”

Fort Griffin! Famous frontier outpost. Scene of the great Comanche Indian Wars. Cattle drovers' town. …

“They was all here,” said the old-timer. “Pat Garrett. Billy Dixon. Bat Masterson. Jesse Chisholm. Charley Goodnight. Care to see the place? Here,” he said, hopping back into the road and holding out his hand, palm up, empty, “here's the key to the city. That'll unlock all the doors. Be my guest.”

When they had walked up and down both sides of the street and gone into several of the buildings, my grandfather said, “These were the places of business. Where did the people live?”

“Nobody stayed long enough to call it living. Them that did was single men that lived for the most part in little shanties made of hide. Wasn't much else to build out of and it never mattered if they didn't last. Like to know what become of all them shacks?”

“Yes,” said my grandfather. “What?”

“Guess.”

“Rotted away.”

“Wrong!” His eyes watered with amusement. “Guess again.”

“Blew away.”

“Wrong! Try again.”

“I give up.”

“I bet you do. I bet you do! Wellsir, I'll tell you. I et em. That is to say, I et all of em I could before the coyotes et em, and then I et the coyotes. And let me tell you, they tasted good that winter of eighty-six! Bet I'm the first man you ever met ever et a town, ain't I?” And he laughed till he choked.

This was the history of Fort Griffin. The soldiers came to kill the Indians and make the place safe for human habitation. The job done, the troops were ordered farther west, the post abandoned, and the town, with nothing left to live for, died. The hide hunters came while the soldiers were there. They exterminated the buffaloes, and moved on. Some stayed on a while to gather the bones which littered the plains, as if that barren soil had grown a crop, the great cages of bleached ribs, held together by sinews which in that dry heat hardened into glue, sticking up like the branches of some ghostly plant. When the bones were gleaned the pickers pulled out, leaving then only the old, the crippled, and the crazed.

Early one cold windy Monday afternoon my grandfather drew up before a naked little house floating on the plain like a solitary chip on the ocean. It hardly deserved the name of house: a low little shanty, new and raw and yet already shabby from neglect. The window lights were already frosted from the driven sands and the blistered paint was peeling from sunburn. The surprising thing, here, however, was that it had ever been painted. It was the first habitation my grandfather had come upon for miles and miles, and he was glad to see it, to see any sign of humanity, anything, glad, as he went round to the leeward of the house, to find some shelter from that stinging wind if only for a moment.

As he stepped out from the shelter of the wall there crashed against his eardrums a series of cracks like shots from a repeating rifle. There was a wash hanging on the clothesline (so dingy that even a man must be struck by it) and the wet heavy bedsheets were whipping and popping like loosened ship sails in a storm. Out of one of them came, fighting and flailing to extricate herself, a woman, her hair streaming, her skirt blown full of wind. She bent to her basket and brought up another sheet, spread it, and was lifted off her feet by a sudden gust that inflated it and dragged her along like a ground-crewman trying to anchor a balloon.
Crack! crack!
went the wash on the line. And suddenly the clothesline broke. The line of wash was raised on the wind and hung fluttering like the tail of a kite—towels, union-suits, dresses—then in a momentary lull fell to the ground and tumbled over in the dirt. In the lull the woman was just gathering in the sheet she was clinging to. Then she turned and saw her wash on the ground all muddied. She just stood there looking down at it with a wan impassivity which to my grandfather spoke of the hours bent over the washboard, of the difficulty of heating the wash water in this land so scarce in firewood, scarce in water too, and of the number of previous times this very same thing must have happened. She did not cry or curse, she just looked down at the mess with a numb and weary resignation, almost satisfaction. Then, still without any sign of emotion, she deliberately dropped the sheet she was holding.

My grandfather dashed over, lifted his hat and jammed it on again, and said, yelling into the wind, “Let me help you, ma'am!” and began gathering up the clothes and the line.

It was only after watching him struggle with it alone for a minute that she volunteered to help. Starting at the other end, she too began gathering up the clothes, line and all. They met and stood up and she said something but he could not hear. She carrying one part, he the rest, connected by the line, they made for the house. When they were inside the kitchen he said, “DOES IT ALWAYS BLOW LIKE—” And then with a laugh, “Does it always blow like this out here?”

“No,” she said. “Sometimes it veers around and comes out of the west.” Then, nodding at the clothes, “Just throw them in the corner there. I ain't going to do them again today.”

My grandfather began his little spiel. He got no further than “I'm from Clarksville.”

“I'm from Red River County too!” she cried.

“Fancy that!” he said. “The two of us meeting away off out here—” He was about to say “in the middle of nowhere,” and only just stopped himself.

“I'm from Box Elder,” she said.

“Is that a fact!”

“And you're from Clarksville! Mrs. Blainey, my neighbor, is from Clarksville.”

“Blainey? I know the Blaineys in Clarksville. That is, I don't know them—much too high-quality for me—but I know of them. Very well-to-do people, the Blaineys.”

“Yes. My Mrs. Blainey is one of them.”

“I didn't know any of them had come out here,” said my grandfather.

The lady knew of something to help him in his search. Not down her road—in fact, nearly fifty miles away—but some people who might be the ones he was after had passed through some months ago. It had reached her because news of strangers traveled far, if slowly, out here, and these particular ones were said to have come from somewhere back in their parts. She had regretted bitterly not meeting and talking with them. Now she asked, she almost begged my grandfather not to hurry off. “You don't know what it means to me to see somebody. Somebody from back home, I mean,” she said. “If you would only sit and talk a while, tell me about things back there, you would be doing a charity.”

“Well,” said my grandfather, “I'm afraid I don't know Box Elder. I've never been there.”

“Oh,” she cried, “Clarksville is near enough to Box Elder to seem like home when you're away off out here in the middle of nowhere.”

So, putting aside his vow never to enter a house when the man was absent, my grandfather allowed himself to be shown into the parlor (the sand on the rugless floor gritted underfoot like spilled sugar) and sat down while she went out to the kitchen to heat the coffee. She hoped he didn't mind condensed milk? From out in the kitchen she suddenly dashed back in. She did not say anything, just stood looking at him, as if she wanted to make sure he was still there. She smiled a nervous smile. Then she caught herself smiling and dashed back out. From the kitchen she called, “I can hear you from here. Tell me all about Clarksville.”