The Ordways (11 page)

The cover was removed from the wagon, leaving the four hoops sticking up in the air like an arbor on which no vines had yet grown, spread on the bank, and freshly coated with waterproofing compound. Overnight this dried and next morning the canvas was given a second coat. Slits were cut in it for the four axletrees. Then it was spread underneath the wagon and drawn up over the sides. The seams were tacked to the sideboards and sealed with the last of the waterproofing compound. Inside the box a rope was passed through the grommets and the tarpaulin tied down all round. All was ready. Only then did Ella broach the question which had troubled her mind from the start. “Just one thing worries me,” she began, speaking across that space which she kept always between them.

He said nothing, did not even nod, though it was plain from the set of his face that she would not even need to name it, that his mind was made up, was not to be budged. He is a man, said Ella to herself; he understands such matters better than I do. He must know it is safe, reasonably safe. Proud as he is of those stones, he would not endanger us all for them. She heaved a sigh and said, “It would be a shame to leave them behind here, after bringing them all this way. Worse than a shame,” she added, meeting with her own his fixed, unblinking gaze, “be a sin.” She rubbed her tar-stiffened hand along the side of the wagon. “Three feet,” she mused. “That ought to be deep enough to float a pretty heavy load.” Still getting no response from him: “Well,” she concluded, “there is one way to find out!”

Thomas Ordway sat with a child on either side of him on the wagon seat. Ella, barefooted and stockingless and with her skirt tucked up to where it barely covered her big belly, prodded the oxen, and the wagon rumbled down the bank. At the water's edge the team drew up. They had not balked; it had not yet penetrated to their brains that they were expected to enter the water, to swim that river; they just stopped, and when they felt the goad they turned upon Ella a patient look from out of their big lash-lidded liquid eyes, then lowered their heads to take a sip to drink. She stung the near one with so sharp a jab that it started, giving the wagon a lurch and taking itself and partner knee-deep into the water. Finding themselves there, they at once began backing out. But already the wagon wheels had begun to settle in the mud. Ella waded in after them and jabbed both in the rump. They balked. They would not go ahead, they could not go back. She prodded them until they set up a lowing, and tossing their heads, made the yoke clatter against their horns. Ella waded farther out, and reversing the goad, snapped the swivel in the nose ring of the inside ox. She gave it a twist. The ox bawled with pain; still he would not budge. The water now lapped their sides. Ella herself was in up to the armpits. The warm water was the color of coffee thickened with cream.

“Stubborn creatures!” Ella cried, and she gave the goad another wrench. Again the ox bawled, but it only set its hooves deeper in the riverbed. From its nose blood began to drip, spattering as though on solid ground on the surface of the water, red on red.

“Ella!” her husband called. “Stop.” She had already. She was about to say that maybe the oxen knew best what they could and could not do. “Listen now, and do as I tell you. Take Helen, and the two of you go back up to the woods. Gather all the dry brush you can find and bring it here.”

The brush was laid in two large piles on the bar just behind the wagon, one on either side. This done, he ordered them back into the woods with instructions to gather pine boughs, dead but with the needles still on. These he wanted in the wagon. He had Ella set fire to the brush piles. Then she climbed over the tailgate.

The fires began to crackle and the oxen to shake their heads. Torn between two fears, they could neither go ahead nor stand still. They rocked the wagon forward and back, rolling their eyes behind them at the fires. These were now burning at their pitch, snapping and popping, almost igniting the wagon. Still the oxen shifted and hesitated. Striking a match to one of the pine boughs, which roared aflame, Thomas Ordway dropped it across their backs.

With a deep double bellow like twin blasts from a steamship's stack, the oxen bolted, jerking the wagon so violently that Ella was flung flat, Thomas Ordway thrown off his balance, and the two children, both crowing with delight at their father's cleverness, sent flying backwards off the seat. The wheels tore free of the mud, the wagon shot from shore, and promptly sank. Sank to within six inches, that is, of the tops of the sideboards. To that level, but no higher, the waterline rose. They were afloat.

But the oxen, when they had swum out some fifty feet and began to recover from their fright and found themselves where they were, swung about and headed back towards the Oklahoma shore. Directly in their path another blazing branch was tossed. This turned them, but then they swung completely around the other way. To right and to left of them Thomas Ordway threw his burning boughs, while both children jumped for joy and begged to be allowed to throw one. Ella was kept busy with a pole preventing the boughs from washing into the wagon.

Resigned at last to crossing over, the oxen pushed out towards midstream. They swam scared, but powerfully, straining into the yoke, which rode far down their necks. Then, about a hundred yards out, they struck the current. Those in the wagon felt it. It came with no sudden jolt; to look at, the river here was hardly faster than inshore. But against the side of the wagon it bore down with tremendous pressure, like a bed of lava in its slow inexorable advance. They had their ballast of tombstones to thank that they were not tipped over. It was as if the water were rapidly congealing, and the oxen, rearing themselves in leaps, their humps breaking water like fishes' fins, appeared to be struggling to extricate themselves from some thick and sticky fluid. They began to lose headway and were borne irresistibly downstream. The landing, the road between the trees on the Texas shore, slipped behind. Yet the wagon still did not pitch, scarcely rocked, and although the waterline now lapped up to within a scant two inches of the top, inside all was dry.

Midway across, maybe a bit farther, the oxen faltered. They sank back. The yoke rode up their necks until it caught on their horns. When this happened the wagon was spun round, astern to the current. Its broadside relieved of pressure, it rose, and with it, floundering helplessly, rose the oxen. They shot downstream. Throughout all this, and all that followed, hardly a sound broke the stillness. Like molasses, the smooth brown river flowed heavily on its way, indifferent to its passengers, and along both wooded shores a drowsy stillness reigned.

The oxen tried to break out of the current. When they veered aside (and the Ordways were willing now to let them choose their bank) the strain bowed the wagon tongue. Then could be seen how powerful the silent and scarcely visible current was: breaking over the bent and quivering wagon tongue the water rippled like shot silk, drawn taut. For an instant then the wagon would hang broadside in the current, shaking, while the team churned up and down, getting no place; then they would fade, sink back, spent, wheezing for breath, tongues lolling, drift helplessly around, and again be sped downstream.

After about three quarters of a mile of this they were carried around a bend. There the banks rose, the river narrowed, and the current quickened. Into this narrows (actually the banks were still two hundred yards apart, but to Ella they seemed to be rushing together, closing upon them) they shot as into the neck of a bottle. Presently the river took another, reverse bend. Here the main current ran not in midstream but close inshore. Still in that dreamy silence, wagon and team swung in a wide, accelerating arc towards the deeply undercut and overhanging bank along the Oklahoma side. Now the oxen dangled uselessly, held afloat by their yoke. The speed was dizzying and Ella closed her eyes, expecting to be dashed against that red wall. They were swept around this bend as though on rails, and when she opened her eyes Ella found herself clear across the river, close to the Texas side. She caught a glimpse of what lay beyond. From between the tall bluffs the river emptied into a broad shallows. It was lighter in color there, and from the Texas shore it ran far out in a flat stretch, as calm as a plate of soup. Then she became aware of the fact that she was standing halfway up to her knees in water. Over the back it was pouring in and the wagon was filling like a bucket. Mattresses, pots and pans, kegs were rising off the floor, floating. Up front on the elevated spring seat neither the children, whose legs were too short to reach, nor her blind husband, his braced against the dashboard, was yet conscious of what was happening to them.

With a final shove the wagon was shot out of the fast water into the calm, where it plunged to a dead stop. Ella, as she went down, saw Dexter slip, sweep under the seat, saw Helen shoot upward, saw her husband clutch at the gaps in the air where the instant before the children had been sitting. The wagon took a last gulp, filled, brimmed over, and sank. A rectangular swell conforming to its outline rose momentarily upon the surface, then flattened away in outgoing ripples. The oxen went down rearing, their forelegs pawing air, until over them too the dark waters closed.

Saved by the same thing which sank it, those stones, the wagon settled upright and as gently as a bucket in a well, the four wheels coming simultaneously to rest upon the riverbed, in eight feet of water, leaving the three cover hoops above surface, looking like croquet bails. While Ella Ordway, her open eyes useless to her in that red opacity, searched the inside of that flooded box for her children, for her blind husband, the kegs containing all the dead Ordways, strung out like stumps in a field, sailed slowly downstream. At a certain point the first one stopped, hung on something. Down floated the second one, and it too caught, just a few feet away, on the same thing. The third, the fourth one floated down and they too stopped. Then at a distance of some thirty feet from where they had gone down, the oxen, horns first, broke water. They clambered up the rising river bottom. The top of the wagon box emerged. Three of the Ordways, all but Dexter, came up for air. They stood up and found themselves in a brimming boxful of water, but above the surface of the river. By then all but one keg, which had floated past and out of sight, were strung in a line not far downstream, a line which bellied slightly in the middle, gently bobbing.

“That trotline that them kegs with all you-all's dead kinfolks in them caught on was ours.”

Uncle Dave Crenshaw is the speaker. Uncle Dave (no kin: everybody's Uncle Dave), an old-timer who, when I was very young, used to turn up regularly at Mabry graveyard working, claimed to have been on hand that day in October 1863 to see my great-grandparents' entry into Texas. Beyond question, he was old enough; but as he
was
that old, and the story pretty well known thereabouts, it is possible that Uncle Dave was confused. Perhaps, poor lonely old soul, he had made up his tale in payment for the invitation to partake of our dinner which my grandfather always pressed on him. Though why I should doubt him now I don't know; I didn't then.

“We was staying on the ferry road down near the river,” said Uncle Dave. “As near as you dared, that is. Trying to make a crop between flood stages. How old I was at the time I can't exactly say—old enough to know I was just too little to go off and join the fighting with my big brothers. One day—it was towards the end of cotton-picking time—we heard a wagon coming up the road from the river. We dropped our sacks and run to look, for they wasn't no ferry running and hadn't been for the past year. Up the road come a wagon dripping water like an ice wagon, drawn by a pair of oxen. Leading them was a little bitty woman who oughtn't to been on her feet. Sopping wet she was, and her dress sticking to her showed her to be about seven months gone with child. Setting on the wagon seat where she ought to been, was a man. Walking along behind the wagon was a barefoot little girl dripping water in the dust of the road. They pulled up at our gate.

“‘Where does this road go to?' the man called down from his wagon seat. He never said mister, nor please, nor even hidy, and his look had a way of missing you by just about a head, then when he lowered it, of kind of stopping just before it reached you, as if not wanting to soil itself, which brought the blood to my pa's face. Pa had been going to ask them to come in, maybe offer them a bite to eat. He was certainly curious to know how they had gotten across that river. But Pa was a quick-tempered man, and when his temper was up it put even his cur'osity down. ‘I reckon that depends,' he said, ‘on how long you stay on it.'

“Meantime I sidled up to that little girl and said, ‘Yawl got kind of wet crossing over, didn't you?' I grinned, but she commenced to cry. ‘Well, don't cry about it,' I said. ‘This ain't no time for that. Here you are, safe on dry land. You have made it across.'

“She sobbed and said, ‘Yes, but poor little Dexter, he never.'

“Taking that for the name of a pet, I said, ‘Was Dexter your puppy dog?'

“She said, ‘Dexter was my little brother, and now, poor thing, he's dead. You can look at him if you want to.'

“I stood on tiptoe and looked in the wagon and seen a little dead boy.

“I said to comfort her, ‘Well, don't carry on, sweetheart. You're fixing to have another one soon to take Dexter's place. That, or you a little baby sister.'

“She quit crying and looked at me big-eyed through her tears. Maybe she is younger than I took her for, I thought. The woman was the same. I mean, but for that little girl you might have suspected she didn't herself know that she was in the family way. They don't sometimes. It was enough to make you rub your own eyes, the way she acted like they wasn't a thing in this world to see down there at her waist.

“‘Honey,' said my ma to her, giving Pa a dirty look, ‘wouldn't you like to come in the house and lay down and rest yourself a little?'