The Ordways (47 page)

“What? What are you talking about? When did I root against Ross?”

“When he and Edna's husband Ira were wrestling.”

“Oh. Well, he won, didn't he?”

“Not with your help, he didn't, poor boy.” This poor boy was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and was the father of four.

“To listen to you anyone would think he'd lost.”

“No, he won, all right! But not with any help from his father, poor boy.”

To her children my grandmother's predilection for them over their brothers- and sisters-in-law had long been a source of amusement, affection, and embarrassment. That she should not betray her bias that time the family games were played down on Ned's ranch concerned them every one. They feared that, win or lose, Ned was sure to feel her displeasure, and this was sure to be felt by their father. All were relieved when Ned, conscious of being something of an outsider, as well as being the host and the eldest son with a dignity to maintain, placed himself
hors concours
and took a seat alongside the old folks to look on.

But Ned was never cut out to be an onlooker when any sort of games were being played. Dignity fitted him like a hand-me-down, and the diadem of seniority had sat for only a brief while on his unruly curls before it began to slip down over his eyes. He could not even be an aloof spectator, but must loudly take sides in every contest, his favor going sometimes inside, sometimes outside the fold, with himself in consequence seesawing in my grandmother's favor. In between events he put on an exhibition of Western rope tricks that would have done a cowboy proud. Finally the running, the jumping, the weight-lifting and the rifle-shooting had been settled. Then, despite pleas from the women and a positive prohibition from my grandmother, they began to wrestle. Ned could sit on the sidelines no longer. He was matched against none other than my grandmother's favorite, Uncle Ewen. No one could watch them for watching her. When the third straight fall was scored for Ned, my grandmother rose to the occasion by emitting a cheer. It was not the loudest cheer ever raised, but falling as it did upon a silence fraught with some uncertainty, her thin, cracked old woman's voice carried and was heard. The two contestants, naked to the waist, bathed in sweat and streaked with dirt, got up to take their bows, saw that the applause was not meant for them, and joined in it. My grandmother received the acclaim with mixed feelings, smiling yet frowning to find her frailty so generally known, at having attention called to her unusual generosity. But as the clapping swelled she accepted it gracefully, and shared it with her husband. He sat glowing with pride in his strong bare-breasted sons. Loud and long was the applause that day for the man who had fathered them and the woman who had borne them and brought them up.

Early next morning (the men all stiff and sore) we left for home. On saying goodbye to him I gave Ned his French harp, and told him its history. The cars were lined up pointing east. There were promises to write and to come back soon and to visit together often. But it was a long way from Clarksville, no matter by what means you traveled, and as I waved back to my Uncle Ned and watched him grow small, I knew in my heart that it would be a long time—that I might even have to be my own man and could come out by myself—before I saw him and his part of the world again, and so I was.

Acknowledgments

For their efforts in recovering the manuscript of this book, left aboard the Rome–Milan Express on March 15, 1963, the author wishes to thank the Italian National Railways, and in particular Capostazione Michele Fortino of the Stazione Termini in Rome.

A Biography of William Humphrey

William Humphrey (1924–1997) was an American author and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1959 for his classic book
Home from the Hill
, which told the story of a small-town family in rural Texas. Indeed, themes of family life, hardship, and rural struggle are the defining characteristics of his writing, appearing in all thirteen of his works.

Humphrey was born on June 18 in Clarksville, Texas, to Clarence and Nell Humphrey. Nestled in the heart of Red River County, Clarksville in the early 1920s resembled the Old South more than the Texan West. It is from this time and place that Humphrey drew inspiration for much of his writing career. Daily life in rural, isolated Clarksville was built around cotton farming and was emotionally and physically taxing. Neither of Humphrey's parents attended school beyond the third grade, and the family moved frequently during his childhood: fifteen times in five years. His father, an alcoholic, hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed his wife and son. Although Clarence was a difficult and quick-tempered man, Humphrey cared deeply for him, and his love for his father had a profound impact on his writing.

As the Great Depression progressed into the 1930s, so did the strain on the Humphreys' already-precarious finances. Clarence worked as a shade-tree mechanic, yet was too poor to buy a car of his own. He would test-drive the cars he fixed as fast as they could go, taking them screaming down the back roads of Red River County.

In 1937 Clarence was killed in an auto accident. Humphrey was just thirteen at the time. Much later, in his memoir
Farther Off From Heaven
(1977), Humphrey commented on this period, which was to be the end of his childhood: “What my new life would be like I could only guess at, but I knew it would be totally different from the one that was ending, and that a totally different person from the one I had been would be needed to survive in it.” Soon after his father's death, Humphrey and his mother moved to Dallas to live with relatives. He did not return to Clarksville for thirty-two years.

Humphrey exceled in school and was able to attend an art academy in Dallas on a scholarship. At the onset of the Second World War, Humphrey attempted to join the navy but was rejected for being color blind. Having seriously considered being an artist up to this point, Humphrey decided to focus on his writing instead. He attended the University of Texas and the Southern Methodist University for short spells during the early 1940s but did not graduate from either college. In 1944 he left SMU in his final semester and headed briefly to Chicago and then went on to live in New York City's Greenwich Village.

In 1949 Humphrey published his first short story, “The Hardys,” in the
Sewanee Review.
He was so excited to receive the letter of acceptance that he tripped and fell as he was running up the steps to his house to share the news with his wife, the painter Dorothy Cantine, and broke his ankle. On the strength of that story, Humphrey was hired to teach creative writing and English literature at Bard College. Starting around this time, renowned writer Katherine Anne Porter, Humphrey's contemporary and a fellow Texan, became a close friend and a firm supporter of his work, and remained so for many years.

The 1950s were a period of prosperity for Humphrey, who continued to publish stories in magazines like the
New Yorker
and
Harper's Bazaar.
These works drew on Humphrey's childhood in the Texan scrub, and many were collected in
The Last Husband and Other Stories
(1953). During this early stage of his career, Humphrey also formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Theodore Weiss and mentored playwright and author Sherman Yellen.

In 1957 Humphrey's debut novel,
Home from the Hill
, rocketed him into modern conversation and defined him as an author. Previously regarded as a Western writer due to his Texan roots and their resonance in his work, Humphrey now became firmly grounded in the Southern literary tradition. Comparisons to Faulkner were constant throughout his life and long after his death.

Home from the Hill
was an instant success and was made into a motion picture in 1960 starring Robert Mitchum.
Variety
reported that the film rights sold to MGM for $750,000, to which Humphrey humorously responded, “Unfortunately, they had one zero too many.” Still, it was enough money for Humphrey and his wife to travel extensively in Europe, moving to England in 1958 and later to Italy. Humphrey also used this time to focus on one of his greatest passions: fly-fishing.

In 1963 Humphrey returned to the United States and over the next few years partially returned to the world of academia, taking up short-term positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Smith College, and Washington and Lee University. But he continued to publish short stories and essays in major magazines such as
Esquire
,
Sports Illustrated
, and the
Atlantic Monthly
and in 1964 was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Short Story for his work “The Ballad of Jesse Neighbors.” In 1965 Humphrey bought an apple farm in Hudson, New York. Though he would travel extensively in the coming years, the apple farm was to be his home for the rest of his life.

During the same year, Humphrey published his second novel,
The Ordways
, which received extremely strong critical reviews and was compared to the writings of Mark Twain. A second collection of short stories,
A Time and a Place
, was published in 1968, and two essays
, The Spawning Run
and
My Moby Dick
, which first appeared in
Esquire
and
Sports Illustrated
, respectively, were eventually expanded and published as short books.

Over the next few years, Humphrey continued to publish with discipline, writing books that incorporated his signature microcosmically expressed theme of family values. These included
Proud Flesh
(1973),
Hostages to Fortune
(1984),
The Collected Stories of William Humphrey
(1985), and
Open Season
(1986). His last novel,
No Resting Place
(1989), was based on the forced removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears and was heralded by the
Los Angeles Times
as “a novel every American should be required to read.”

Humphrey's final collection of short stories,
September Song
(1992), conveyed his mounting sense of frustration at his declining health. By his seventieth birthday, Humphrey had undergone treatment for skin cancer and was hard of hearing. Diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, he died on August 20, 1997, at his home in Hudson. He was seventy-three years old.

William Humphrey in the 1960s, shortly after returning to the United States.

The author in Alsace, France. The image was taken in 1965, the year
The Ordways
was published. Two years prior, the manuscript almost disappeared when Humphrey accidentally left it aboard an express train from Rome to Milan. He added a prefatory note in the published edition thanking “Capostazione Michele Fortino of the Stazione Terminal in Rome” for his efforts in recovering the manuscript.

By the 1970s Humphrey was well established within contemporary literature.