The Ordways (44 page)

That spring the tax assessment on Will Vinson's house and land was sent to Samuel Ordway, and he went into Clarksville, to the courthouse, and paid it. Thus was the place of the man who had stolen his son, and whereon he had raised and harvested a crop, tacitly acknowledged to be his. He installed a tenant in the Vinson house, brought over one of Vinson's cows and gave him the milking of her, for he had a peaked and stringy little boy about Ned's age who could do with a drop of milk, helped put the now listing chicken house to rights, and agreed with his tenant to share work on the two places. Being already behind, he was out of the house at dawn, in the fields until after dark, could not even come home for his dinner. My grandmother would bring it down to him. She would come carrying the baby and would yodel to him and he would stop plowing and come to the fencerow. She would give him the baby to hold while she spread his dinner on the ground. Amused at what she took for his clumsiness, his timidity, she would say, “Not that way, goose. You'll drop him for sure. Hold him close to you, like this. I should think you would know how by this time.”

For some years afterwards, with the first breath of cold weather in the fall, a change would come over him. He would be picking or weighing in a sack, and would pause, lose himself, not know where his mind had been. My grandmother knew. It was like a seasonal instinct, like that of migratory birds; and as the fields were stripped of their whiteness, leaving the brown empty hulls of the cotton bolls to rattle drily in the wind, as the frost tingled in the air and ice as thin and clear as a watch crystal appeared on the cow tracks, he would pause, bemused, and as though at some instinctual stirring in his blood, insensibly turn to westward. Across the prairie, heading out, the train hooted and cried, and the smoke left a trail on the air. Then as to birds there comes, after weeks of restlessness, a day of decisive frost, the last bale of cotton was ginned, the last cane of sorghum was pressed, and the vague prompting in his heart rose, a clear call, into his mind. This time he would go just a little farther, go just beyond where he had turned back before. … And then Hester would announce that another child was on its way. The coming of others, among them other boys, took from Ewen the onus of being the sole interloper, and my grandfather accepted him, and grew to love him.

Then there were two Little Neds, the one I shared with Grandpa, and the one I shared with no one. Grandpa's and mine had fixed features, though they had come to be fixed somehow without ever being discussed. But when we fell silent and together stared off in Ned's direction, when we had conjured him up and, as I think back on it now, must have felt we were gazing into his eyes, we were both concentrated on a spot about six foot four off the ground. I never wanted us to differ, and so I was never sure whether this Ned still boasted the bushy black mustache he had acquired so early in life. On my side he did, and I left it at that. It went without saying that Ned's handshake was a real bone-crusher. This Ned had ceased to roam and settled down and now had about four thousand mixed head of Hereford white-face and Santa Gertrudis cattle on his ten-thousand-acre spread. And someday I was going to go out there and pick up the trail and go just a little farther west from where my grandfather had turned back, and find him. The second Ned, my own, was protean. He changed with me, and I changed with the weather.

My grandfather retained the old fashion of saying “sir” to boys. “Do you know what this is, sir?” he would often ask, and I, even when I knew very well what it was, would answer, “No, sir.” In one such instance, on a memorable day, though I felt he would hardly have asked unless the answer had been less obvious than it appeared, I could hardly help answering, “It looks like a French harp, sir.”

“It is,” said he. “What more can you say about it?” And he handed it to me.

I could have said it wasn't much, as French harps went, and I almost did. That was the judgment of a boy who just the past Christmas had received a Hohner chromatic and who had already mastered (as nearly as he was ever to master any music in his life) “La Cucaracha,” “Old Rattler,” and “The Cowboy's Lament.” Possessed of just eight notes, it was a baby's toy, and it was anything but new. In fact, it was green with age. I hoped my grandfather was not fixing to make me a present of it. “Sure is a small one, isn't it?” I ventured.

“Bought for a small boy,” said my grandfather. “I got that for Ned. Picked it up in town the day he was stolen, meaning to give it to him that night. When I went looking for him I took it along, to show him I hadn't forgotten to get him something that day, should I ever find him. Well, Ned never got his play-pretty. It's yours, if you think you can find a use for it. You'd be surprised how many notes you can get by without in playing a French harp if you have to.” Instantly my gaudy note-bloated Hohner became a thing of dirt and indifference to me. He took it from me and rendered a few bars of “Red River Valley.” He said it was “Red River Valley,” and of course after he said so, why I could hear that it was. It became doubly precious to me when he told of playing it to himself at night on the plains in front of his campfire, and what a comfort to him it was in his loneliness. My preference for Ned's French harp to the fine one she had given me puzzled, and I am afraid hurt, my mother. No doubt she would have understood if I had told her that it was Ned's, or intended for Ned; but I did not tell her, not even her, for it was my secret, mine and Grandpa's.

So I would spend the summer on the farm, and after dinner, in the heat of the day, we all took a nap. Dinner was the big meal of the day, as it is on a farm, and we could scarcely rise from the table. Grandpa would stagger off to his room, Grandma to hers (for he snored so loud they slept apart), and if there were any cousins of mine, other grandchildren, staying on the farm, and often there were, we shared a bed—not for lack of space, far from it, but for company and fun. The dogs slept underneath the porch, popping their chops and munching in their sleep, or yapping and twitching sometimes as they ran rabbits in their dreams. The cats curled up inside their fur and disappeared. The pigs snoozed in the shade, what shade was cast beneath that blazing sun which hung directly overhead until late in the long afternoon, and the occasional clucking of a hen or the rusty creak of one of Grandma's drowsy-headed guinea fowls out in the yard sounded like a person talking to himself in his sleep. The flowers drooped on their stalks like umbrellas in a stand, and even the houseflies stopped buzzing and dozed on the windowpanes. Only the honeybees worked through the heat, and their intermittent hum as they hovered about the clematis outside the windows and doors was like the sound of regular deep breathing and made your brain reel with heaviness. The windmill creaked to a stop. Occasionally a locust snored, a sound like my grandfather's whistle as he turned over in his sleep. We kids were always determined to stay awake. But you would watch a housefly on the pane rubbing its head and stretching, and your face would grow hot with drowsiness. Looking out, you saw the gourds sagging on the vines and the chinaberry tree hanging limp, and you yawned, sighed, and passed out.

On one such afternoon, lying half awake, alone in my bed and listening to the breathing of the house, I heard from a great ways off the buzz of a car engine. It pulsed and faded and seemed to stand still and seemed to have been going forever and never to have been going at all and then it was hours later and I heard it, or dreamed I heard it, outside the gate. Then I heard a car door slam and a man's voice call out from below:

“Mr. Ordway? Mr. Samuel Ordway?”

“Yes? Yes, Samuel Ordway—that's me.”

“Then I have come to claim kin with you. Seems I am your son and not who I always thought I was at all.”

“Now, sir, before we go any further I want to say that I won't hear a word said against Mr. Will Vinson. It's true he done you wrong, and I reckon he wronged me too. But he was always good to me, and I will thank you to cuss him when I'm not around. Begging your pardon, sir.”

This speech (which shocked me—I was upstairs looking down on their heads) pleased my grandfather, warmed him instantly towards the man. “When did Will pass away?” he asked. And there was nothing in his tone to have offended any child of the blood of Will Vinson.

Sensing which, and softening his tone, Ned replied that Will Vinson had passed on that spring. That it was with his dying breath that the man he had thought was his father had confessed the truth of his birth. “He told me,” said Ned, “if I found you alive to ask you to try to forgive him.”

He had forgiven Will Vinson years ago. He did not know that he had, until now. More than that—this too he realized only now—between him and the man who had stolen his son there had been a kind of bond, and far from exulting now at the death of an enemy, he felt as if he had just been told of the death of an old, old friend. No, nearer than that: as if word had been brought of a death in the family. No, nearer than that: he had lost his old, familiar, only enemy. Something had gone out of his life. Something which, to be sure, he had not known was there until it was there no longer, but which had been there nonetheless, and the loss of which left a vacancy, and left him feeling old. Will Vinson was dead. He could see him in his mind as plain as if he stood before him. Now he was dead. The last link with the years of his prime had just snapped. Certainly it was not affection he had felt for the man who had wronged him. It was a feeling he could not put a name to. But it was real, for all that; a bond more real than this flesh-and-blood stranger, this cowpoke, standing there and claiming to be his flesh and blood.

He started from his reverie. He put out his hand and Ned put out his. Then my grandfather's eyes filled with tears, he opened his arms, and embraced his son. Then embarrassment overcame him and he said in an offhand manly tone, “Well, the climate out there seems to have done you good.”

He'd have come sooner, I heard Ned say (he spoke loudly, apparently thinking that his father was somewhat hard of hearing), but first he had had to wait until after the shearing, and then …

As every American boy knows, the enemy, or rather, since that term confers a certain dignity, even almost an equality of status, the pest, the plague of the cattleman was the squatter, the nester: the sheepherder. And just as the cowman, horsed on his mustang, booted and spurred and six-gunned and sombreroed, that hater of barb wire, champion of the open range, derived his costume and his outlook and his glamour from the noble beast he drove, so too the sheepherder took his qualities from the creature he tended. Object immemorial of the cowman's scorn, the sheepherder was tame and timid and anonymous and woolly as his stupid, blatting, cowardly flock. A veterinary barber. A ewe midwife. A pedestrian. A colleague of Little Bopeep. No picturesque trappings on him. No swagger. Imagine a sheepherder saying with a cold glint in his eye, “You want to smile when you say that, pardner”? True, that noblest of cows, the longhorn, had, like the buffalo, like so many noble things, gone to greener pastures by my time. But memory was there. And for present-day consolation there was the proud and independent whiteface, the cantankerous and exotic Bramer. They might not be longhorns, but you would never think of counting them to bring on sleep. Having gone to such lengths to show my contempt for sheep and all they stood for, it will hardly be necessary to add that it never occurred to me that my Uncle Ned might be a sheepherder. Well, he wasn't. Oh, how glad I would have been, when I learned the awful truth, if he had been!

“Shearing?” said my grandfather. “Sheep?”

No. No, what Ned raised were to sheep what sheep were to cows.

“Goats?” I heard my grandfather say. And I thought he checked an impulse to turn and look up at my window, hoping to find that I was safe asleep.

Goats? Raise goats? I never knew that anybody raised goats. I thought goats just grew. On garbage dumps. In vacant lots.

“Angora goats,” said Ned. “Three thousand of them.”

He was not the Gary Cooper of my daydreams. Instead of tall, dark, and silent, he was average, florid, and talkative. He was not proud and dangerous, hair-triggered, but (like both his fathers) incapable of anger, likable to a fault, a grin of unruffleable good nature always on his lips, the sort of fellow that dogs turned belly-up to and little old ladies asked to run errands. Petted by those people who had doted on him to the point of criminality, yet denied material indulgences by the roughness of life out there, he was a happy man and kept a summery disposition in all sorts of weather. A perennial boy, restless, prankish, barely housebroken, he had never married and never would. He seemed to have been on holiday all his life, including the time he had helped old Jack Pershing in his scuffle with Pancho Villa. I held out against him for about an hour. No boy could resist him longer than that. On consideration I found that the West which my uncle represented was not so very different after all from the one I had pictured to myself, only maybe more fun, and certainly a good deal safer.

My grandmother's reaction to Ned's return was watched closely by all. Though it lightened the burden of her old guilt, it brought her fresh misgivings too. How could this help but reawaken all her husband's tender memories of Agatha, his youth with her, and his sad memories of her death? How could it help but blow into flame his old resentment of her for the loss of his and Agatha's son? Suppose Ned had turned out well: would this not make the years of his absence all the more painful? Suppose he were a disappointment to his father: would he not think this the fault of his upbringing by strangers, and blame her all the more?

Dormant for so long, while she was busy with raising twelve children and the house rang with their clamor, this guilt of my grandmother's had revived in the time since silence had fallen on the house and her mind and her hands been overtaken by idleness. Her own thoughts having reverted to those early days, she supposed that her husband's thoughts had too. His avoidance of the subject, which she had always attributed to consideration for her, she now began to find suspicious, oppressive. Was it still so painful? Did he still feel too unforgiving to trust himself to mention Ned's name to her?