The Ordways (42 page)

The perhaps somewhat over-enthusiastically named town of Utopia lay down in the southernmost range of those hills. It was quickly canvassed, and as my grandfather had suspected, Will apparently had stopped there just long enough to lick a postage stamp. He must have had his own stamp, for any stranger buying one from the postmistress anytime during the past ten years would have been remembered.

From Utopia, lacking directions, there were two ways to go, west or south. With no clue to point him in one direction or the other, my grandfather elected to go south. That was the way which, had he been Will, he would have gone from there. To the west rose more of those rocky brush-covered hills over which he had just come; to the south the land opened up. One way the living looked hard, the other way it looked easy.

South of Utopia, just when it seemed that those hills were going to go on forever, they came abruptly to a stop at the edge of a precipice below which for as far as the eye could see stretched a rolling, fertile plain. The Balcones Escarpment, that natural wall is called; it rises above the valley of the Rio Grande like a sea cliff. Below that cliff the tide of Spanish America, in its long withdrawal southward before the advance of the gringos, came finally to a stop. Down onto that plain and into that other world my grandfather next went, and conscious though he was that every mile would have to be driven back over, enchantment led him on as far south as Uvalde, Crystal City, Carrizo Springs, to the river itself and the border with Mexico. Enchantment, not evidence. Few enough were the people even to ask, and most of those spoke only Spanish; but if he received no encouragement to believe that Will had in fact come this way, his senses told him that this was the place to which all men yearned to come. The spell he felt was that which everyone feels in places blessed by yearlong sun, but which a dirt farmer, whose one crop a year was watered with his sweat and then was pinched in the bud by a belated winter blast, or dried up by drought, or drowned, or flattened by hail, would feel as few other men could. Here one did not wait helplessly for rain which came too late, or else washed away one's labor in a flood; here one brought water from that mighty river where and when it was needed. Here the weather was not a man's enemy but his friend, and in that rich alluvial soil beneath that gilded sky grew not one but two and even three crops per year. The winters here were green. This was citrus land, banana-palm land, where fruits grew for the plucking which he knew only as treats at Christmastime.

Down there in that old hot country where the tempo of life made even that of Mabry seem hurried and changeful, among that settled and traditional people, my grandfather felt, even in the anxiety of his search, made all the more urgent by the earliness of the spring, a mood of peacefulness beginning to steal over him. Even while it defeated him, this land reconciled him to his defeat. He sensed there a different way of feeling about life, about time, about fate. Seeing those dazzling little low white adobe towns crowned by their brown weathered mission church, from the twin towers of which at evening bells as soft as the cooing of doves throbbed upon the purple air, those slow-moving, big-eyed, copper-colored women in their fringed mantillas carrying their water jugs balanced gracefully on their heads, the priests in their soutanes, the men in the fields dressed in their white pajamas working at their leisurely pace, beneath that clear sky, he felt not only better reconciled to the loss which life had recently brought him, but felt himself eased of some lifelong, some inherited deep, dull ache. This land, because it lay outside your own bloody national past, and you were ignorant of whatever bloody past it had, seemed, despite its great age, strangely new, fresh in its very antiquity. The hatred, the dissension, the fratricide of America had not reached this corner of America. Blood had been shed here, no doubt, since blood has been shed everywhere; and since it never stops, no doubt it still cried out; but it cried out in tongues which there was no one left to understand. Exposed daily to this hot sun, that old unhealed historical wound seemed at last to dry up and to cease to ache.

The days were getting longer. Warmer too; and sometimes as he was walking up a flower path (here already abloom with color) wading through the yapping dogs to knock at yet another door, he would find himself in shirtsleeves and have to go back to the wagon for his jacket to make himself presentable. The skies shone with a hard polished gleam. It's getting on, he said to himself; then said instantly after, but it's not too late. There was still time. Still hope. Perhaps in the next settlement, at the next house, perhaps from the next man he met on the road …

One day he drove all afternoon to reach the only habitation visible in the landscape, a hut, a
jacal
of willows daubed with mud, in the dirt yard of which fat brown babies, scrawny chickens, and hairless black dogs frolicked in equal profusion, where he was greeted by a walnut-colored man with a gap-toothed smile and a barefooted woman who shook constantly with laughter, between the two of whom and him not one word of communication was possible. When he showed the man the photograph of Ned, the man slapped him on the back and pointed to his yardful, and when he made motion to go on his way he was dragged down off the seat and made to come in and have something to drink which tasted like turpentine, every sip of which one followed by sucking hastily on a lemon, then made to stay for supper off one of those chickens and then to sleep in the only bed in the house while the family stretched out along with the pups in the yard. This experience was repeated, and while he enjoyed the hospitality, he was forced to ask himself how he could hope to get anywhere in a place where no one spoke his language. Here Will Vinson had not only fallen out of sight, he had fallen out of English.

He was following a lead picked up in the hamlet of Catarina. Hardly a lead: a half hint, a maybe. But he was following it, as he had so many, because he had no other. One morning first thing on awaking he saw a robin perched upon the tailboard of the wagon, head cocked, round button eye shining, a wisp of grass in his bill, green grass, eyeing the straw upon which he slept. True (as he was constantly reminding himself), things here were ahead of things back home; but there too the robins would be coming back and nesting before much longer.

Such observations only made him drive himself, and the weary old team, the harder. As the days lengthened and his time ran out, and as the trail disappeared into the blank uncolored areas of his map like trickles of water in this dry soil, he told himself that here was just the sort of unlikely place where success was most probable, and that the eleventh hour was the time when everything always happened. A nod encouraged him now, an expression of the face, even a hesitant “no.” He had reached that state of hopelessness when hopes shimmer ahead like a mirage.

There came a blazing dry day when by two in the afternoon, having been on the road since dawn, he had not seen a single soul, no sign of life, only signs of death in the buzzards which patrolled the wide, hot, empty sky. Desperate by noon, he had not stopped to eat, and now the team was dark with sweat and he himself looked like a tired baker, with brows and nostrils caked with floury white dust, eyes heat-glazed, face flushed as if reddened at an open oven door. At last, topping a rise, he saw below him one of those sudden cool green valleys scored with brown irrigation ditches, and in it saw a man plowing. He stopped to watch. The man was just opening the field, the plowshare set to run deep. He meant to wait for the man to reach the end of the row and come back, then speak to him. But the rows were long out here and the man simply plowed over a rise and out of sight while my grandfather sat watching the firm earth curl back along the furrow in an unbroken strip like an apple peel and smelling the fresh damp smell. That brought him to himself, and he turned around and headed back north, still searching up to the last, as he made his way to the nearest railway town.

Although unaware of the fact, he was actually on a different search now. He had ceased looking for Ned some days back, when he began trying to imagine him at the age of six, as a boy of twelve, as a young man; attempting, without much success, to fit him into the background of this country. When he had wondered whether that Ned would retain any memories, however vague, of him, of home, the red hills and the terraced green valleys and the tall blue sky answered: no. He was looking now for a place to stop looking. Some spot so trackless, so untamed that he could say (not to Agatha; she had long ago released him from his vow) to himself, “Beyond this point there is no going further. This, for me, is the end of the world.”

Somewhere west of the Nueces River, east of Del Rio, north of Uvalde, south of Sonora, where the Balcones Escarpment rises sheer as a rampart above the hot plains of the Rio Grande Valley, he found it, recognized it: the spot where he could say, “If I had to lose him, if I just had to lose him, I'm glad at least to think that Will made it to here.” It was a land of strong contrasts, of bright sunlight and deep cool shadows, of dry rocky hills and lush verdant valleys. A land so old it had come round new again, lost its records, forgotten its age, and started over. Whose battles had been fought in forgotten tongues by vanished races over dead issues, where the bitterness of old divisions lay buried in unmarked graves. It was good country to grow up a boy in. My grandfather's last regret was that Will would never know how hard he had tried to find him. He hated for him to go on forever thinking that he had cared so little for his son. But there was nothing could be done about that, and so with one last lingering look at the country he was leaving him to, he bade Ned goodbye and turned the team around and started on his long journey home.

*
“Cooling time”: a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before he has had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder.

PART FOUR

Family Reunion

M
Y UNCLE
Ned Ordway was a little boy in a picture in a flowered pewter frame which stood next to the ivoryfaced marble clock with the spidery numerals on the mantelpiece in my grandfather's room, a boy much younger than I already was, when I first became aware of him, and inherited his story. Once having heard it, I was not long in learning to dislike that picture, nor much longer then in persuading myself that it was not a good likeness. For just as the photographs of me accorded not at all with my own picture of myself, which is to say with my notions of the great deeds I was to do and the fine man I was to become, so that sad-looking, pinch-faced, whey-colored little boy with the tow hair parted in the middle and so thoroughly wetted down that he appeared to be bald, was not my Little Ned. Such a wretched boy was not worth stealing and running off with into the Wild West. Or maybe he had looked like that before he was stolen, but certainly not for long afterwards. For Ned had been taken to a land where surely even mothers grew sensible and no longer wetted down one's hair, a land where it never rained and there were two Saturdays a week instead of Sunday, and there he must have blossomed like a desert flower, overnight acquired a big, lean, loose-jointed, muscular frame and a mustache as black and thick as a shoe brush, a rangy gait like a mountain lion on the prowl, skin the color of a new saddle, sharp steady eyes the color of a western sky which seemed to notice nothing while taking in everything, and a ready broad smile instead of the frightened pucker on that little boy's face as he sat for the itinerant photographer that day long ago.

He was my constant companion. Despite the photograph he was the elder of us, and on our expeditions was always the leader. This phase passed, and though I went on calling him Little Ned, he was no longer a boy in my mind, he was a grown man, only without all those depressing anti-children, or more particularly anti-boy attitudes which all other grownups seemed to have been born with. At about this time I began to go to the picture shows, and my image of my uncle took definite shape. That is to say, his costume and his character took shape; his face underwent regular weekly change. One week he would be a dead ringer for Johnny Mack Brown. The following week he looked more like Buck Jones. Or Hoot Gibson. Or Ken Maynard. Or Fred Thompson. Or Tim McCoy. Or Bob Steele. It all depended on who had starred in the preceding Saturday's feature film. The image stuck with me pretty well through a week of long division and sentence diagramming, as I was always first in the line at the old Capitol, waiting for the ticket window to open at a quarter to ten, with my lunch in a paper bag, and in the front row of seats I stayed until my mother came and dragged me out at half past six that night, dazed, half blind, and still clutching the bag with my lunch, which I had forgotten to eat.

I felt no disloyalty towards my father (Earl Ordway, third of the ten children of Samuel and Hester) for wishing sometimes that I had had another. The one I would have preferred was his own brother.

Little Ned! How glamorous to me it was, that name! Not a name, not just something to answer to when roll was called or sign on checks, like Archie Ragsdale or Luther Haines, but a title, an appellation, like Wild Bill Hickok or Indian Jim Bridger or Lone Wolf Gonzales. The “little” would be, of course, in a country of tall men, a way of signaling his towering height. A hard man, Little Ned Ordway, but with a fondness for small boys, especially if related to him. He spoke little, and then in a quiet commanding drawl, like Randolph Scott's, never raising his voice, not even when riled, especially not then, though the quietness then had a different ring, like the three mild little clicks which the hammer of a pistol makes on being cocked, or the initial premonitory rattle of a rattlesnake. He wore saddle-whitened blue jeans, a clay-colored Stetson sombrero, a fringed buckskin jacket, and a pair of hand-tooled Nocona boots. There clung to him the smell of horse sweat and leather and camp-fire smoke. When not riding herd or making a drive up to Dodge City or Abilene, he was in the saddle night and day rounding up the cattle, lassoing and branding dogies, broncbusting. Then there was vigilante duty and gangs of rustlers to have to catch, necktie parties to have to attend, towns to be cleaned up and establish law and order in. A wanderer, or as they said in the pictures, a drifter, constantly saddling up and moving on to avoid the gratitude of the lovely virgins whose fathers' ranches he had saved from the designs of a villain in a black hat and a flowered waistcoat named, invariably, Kincaid. For me my western uncle was Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Pat Garrett,
and
Billy the Kid. He was, under a thick coat of moral whitewash, Cole Younger, Sam Bass. Sometimes on rainy days when I could not go out he was the young cowpuncher on the street in Laredo, all wrapped in white linen and dying that day.