The Ordways (16 page)

She began to resent the children. Between her and Winnie things did not work out as expected. The forwardness which she had shown when she was Miss Duncan's pet pupil disappeared when Winnie became her stepdaughter. Sam grieved to see this, and believed that Winnie disapproved of the match. Winnie neither approved nor disapproved. It was simply that she continued to treat Hester with the respect and awe appropriate to a teacher, and which towards a mother seemed like coldness. For a time she even continued, despite herself actually, but seemingly with intention of keeping her at a distance, to call her Miss Duncan. The child's precocity with the housework caused friction. In her well-meant efforts to help Hester find her way about the new house in her new role, she touched unwittingly upon a raw spot: the former old maid brought with her into marriage a sensitivity in the presence of any other female of whatever age, and to her even little Winnie was not too young to patronize her for her supposed lack of womanly skills. To make matters worse, whenever Winnie discerned that she had offended her by offering to help with the cooking and the housework or telling her where something was to be found or how she made a thing, and sought to apologize by effacing herself, she did so by saying that she only knew because that was how her mother had always done it.

Then there was Bea. Bea had never been quick, but as a pupil at Mabry school she had suffered even more by comparison with a brighter older sister. This too carried over into the new arrangement. The stepmother could not cease overnight to be the schoolmistress, and the schoolmistress had been one known for her impatience with slow pupils.

But none of these matters was grave, and all would in time come to be smoothed out. It was little Ned who from the start was the thorn in Hester's side. Though the two events, Agatha's death and Ned's birth, were one, and neither could be thought of without the other, Sam Ordway certainly did not blame the boy for his mother's death. It was Hester to whom he was a living reminder of his mother's martyrdom.

She ached for a child of her own. It was as if she felt challenged to emulate the dead Agatha, to pass through the same trial, ached for the pain itself as for a purifying flame to test and demonstrate her love, believing it would stimulate her husband's love for her, that love which she would be obliged to share with Aggie's ghost until she had done what Aggie had done for him.

It was not just a child she longed for, not just the pain and the proof, but for a son, a namesake to give him. Then, she believed, she would come to love Ned as well. While pregnant she was noticeably more affectionate towards the boy. When hers turned out a girl so keen was her disappointment that little Florence counted in her mind almost as a fourth stepchild.

You could see a long way if, like Winnie and Bea facing backwards at the tailgate of the wagon, you were looking westward. But facing forward, as the little nucleus of the second Ordway family faced, your view was more restricted. Ahead there the land rose and broke in waves like the offshore lapping of the sea. In the shallow valleys the soil was black, and when turned up in moist furrows by the plow, shone with a waxy iridescence like tar. Here grew cotton which when ripe blanketed the ground like a heavy fall of snow. Sloping upwards the soil changed colors, shading from black to brown to a golden red the color of bread crust. On the hillsides grew corn. A pale green fuzz upon the land now in May, it would stand taller than a tall man in August, with ears like clubs and long, broad leaves like banners.

And yet, facing forward as you went east into Clarksville, you had the odd sensation that you were going backwards. Perhaps it was just that you were meeting the sun as it went its journey in the opposite direction, giving you the sense that you were traveling counter to the course of time. Or was it a lingering sense that time and the course of history lay west, in that open space at your back towards which all the morning shadows pointed, a sense inherited from your forebears—not very remote from you in 1898—and that eastward, in the direction from which they had trekked, lay your family's past, yours and everybody else's you knew, that place of the past, the South? Whatever the cause, hearing the bells of the Clarksville courthouse clock you felt that they tolled a time already reckoned, already lived and buried, as the clock itself, though the tower rose eight stories high, lay buried in the folds of the hills.

The clock caroled every quarter hour and the notes came at you over the undulant hills like a series of balls sent rolling your way, fading as they struggled up the intervening inclines, then rushing at you two or three together as they rolled down the slopes. In a wagon you were making good time if, after you first heard them, the bells rang just twice more before you topped the hill from which you could see the belfry with its gleaming brass weathervane in the shape of a feathered arrow. By the time they tolled again you could see the pointed yellow tower rising out of the trees like an ear of corn half shucked, and the great white western face of the clock; and if just then the bells should strike again you could see the birds of the belfry from there. For the swallows that made their nests and roosted there had never grown accustomed to the noise that time makes, and every quarter hour with the throbbing of the bells they scattered out like the notes made visible on the air. As the sound died away they swooped back in.

On coming into town farm families like the Ordways drove straight to Market Square, two blocks northwest of the public square. There the farmer unhitched his team and reversed them towards the wagon bed, and if he did any truck gardening he arranged his goods and took up a stance alongside to await the coming of the Negro cooks and the housewives of the town. My grandfather was strictly a cotton and corn grower. His life was spent among hard things, things of iron, hickory, of thick unbending hide. Yet hard as they were, they were never hard enough, but were always breaking, wearing out. And so his one morning a month in town was spent in the hardware store and the blacksmith shop. Like every farmer of his time, he had a little home forge, and could shoe a horse in an emergency. But when a clevis snapped, or a whippletree, or when a colter hit a rock, then it was a job for the blacksmith. He liked going there. He liked to watch the iron redden in the forge, enjoyed the explosive
whoosh
and the billow of steam when the burning metal was plunged into the cold tempering bath. He liked also to linger in the hardware store, making his purchases of harness, rope, nails; loved especially to buy himself a new hand tool, such as a new handsaw or a new axe, handling them all though in the end always buying a Diston saw, a Plumb axe, a Stanley plane; for his loyalty to certain brand names was religious, and went to the point of giving him an almost religious intolerance of men who swore by other makes.

Around ten o'clock he rejoined the family back at the wagon for dinner, for they ate even earlier than usual, having breakfasted earlier that day. My grandmother would have spent her morning shopping, without having bought anything. She knew just what she wanted, and spent the morning in the stores comparing prices. Then in the afternoon, having nursed the baby, she would go back to the best place for each item on her mental list, and giving her order to the clerk in a tone which discouraged any salestalk, would complete her purchases in half an hour. They ate sitting in the wagon bed: cold fried ham, biscuits, fried fruit pies.

After his dinner my grandfather liked, in wintertime, to stroll over to the courthouse and up to the trial room and listen for a while to whatever case was on the docket. In the spring now, with the court calendar recessed, he would saunter downtown, and after a turn or two around the square, join one of the groups of men on the corners, and taking out his billet of cedar, would settle down to an afternoon of whittling and talk. There the girls would find him and they were given a nickel and set free, and spent the next three or four hours going round and around the square working themselves into a frenzy of indecision over how to spend their money. Bea was to mind Winnie when they were alone, and did, according her sister an authority which, now that she was no longer the woman of the family, and now that Bea was older, she knew better than to try to assume at home, or even outside the city limits. On that particular Saturday my grandfather closed his knife at half past three by the courthouse clock and stood up and brushed the shavings off his lap and set off towards the blacksmith shop to call for the part he had left. Passing the variety store he remembered his promise to bring Ned something from town. The gift he chose, perhaps reminded of the medley of songs that had come drifting out of the jailhouse as he sat eating his dinner, was a little French harp.

Back at the wagon the team was hitched and the family drove to the grocery store, around to the loading platform on the side, where Negroes lounged, eating cheese and crackers and sardines and bananas. Haines's, with whom the Ordways had always traded, was dark as a root cellar, and even more redolent. The first thing to hit you on entering was a tingling sour smell which was not the smell of pickles but of the pickled oak of their barrel. Then coffee and the strong yellow smell of soap in unwrapped bars laid up like masonry and the slightly rancid smell, like a new copper penny, of the leathery bacon flitches hanging from the rafters, between which hung spiraling flypapers encrusted with dead and struggling flies. Beneath the long counters on each side ran rows of bins with sloping hinged glass covers containing cookies and dried fruits. On the floor, squat barrels of salt cod like flakes of slate; fat sacks with tops rolled back of beans and rice. On the counters sliced hams the color of cedar, the yellow bone like a knot in the wood. The Ordways bought flour and cornmeal in hundred-pound barrels, sugar in fifty-pound sacks, coffee in the bean, and such things that Hester could not make for herself as bluing, baking powder. While their parents gave their order the Ordway girls would bashfully peek into every bin, dragging their feet in the sawdust sprinkled on the floor.

When the wagon was loaded and while my grandfather settled his bill (he had refused for years Mr. Haines's offer of credit), the sordid side of the business which was left to the wife of the firm, Mr. Haines gave the girls their treat. They were no longer invited as they once had been to name their choice. This they had never been able to do, but were overcome with such a paroxysm of shyness that Mr. Haines used to just fill up a bag with assorted candies and force it on them. Then one day the truth came blurting out. They really did not want candy, being by that hour of the day already glutted, sometimes a little sick, on their nickel's worth. It came out that each had long suffered a suppressed passion, Winnie for dried apricots, while Bea burned secretly, shamefully for cheese. So now each got what she craved; and going home they sat on the tailgate dangling their legs, each extolling her treat and wondering loudly how the other could
stand
hers, and nibbling small so as to make it last all the way home.

The Ordways were a bit late coming back that day and by the time they turned down the road home it was past milking time. The cows would long since have trundled to the barn, spraddle-legged and rolling with each pendulous sway of their swollen bags. As milking time neared their teats stiffened and rose outward like a bunch of carrots drawn together by the tops, and oozed and dripped, and by now a puddle would be standing under each, the color of porcelain, bluey-white. But though my grandfather could see all this in his mind, still he did not whip up the team. You did not wind one animal for the sake of another.

They went up and over Latimer's Hill and the Vinson house came in sight. “Oh, Pa!” said Winnie from the back of the wagon, her voice bouncing, “I promised Ned we'd bring him something from town.”

“Rather late for you to think of it now, ain't it, precious?” said my grandfather, while to himself he smiled.

Mrs. Vinson was not at the gate and for once her Felix was not out in the yard to run shouting to the house. The Ordways drew up and sat waiting to be discovered, and my grandfather reached under the seat and drew out the striped paper sack filled with coconut bars, peanut patties, jawbreakers, licorice sticks, and jellybeans which he always remembered to bring the Vinson children, his way of thanking their mother for minding Ned, and which they were generally at the gate waiting for. Now, however, no one appeared, and when the front door suddenly blew in and banged against the inner wall and echoed through the house, that brought no one out either. A bellow from the Vinson cows reminded my grandfather of his own waiting, and tying the reins to the brake handle, he leapt down from the wagon.

He went through the gate, which hung open, and around to the back of the house. No one was in sight. There was no sound.

“Hello!” he called. He waited a moment but no answer came. “Hello!” No answer. He opened the door, stuck his head in, and called, “Hello?” Just from the sound of his voice dying away through the rooms he could tell that the house was empty. He shut the door, stepped back a moment to ponder, and he heard a cow bawl.

Still carrying the sack of candy, he went out to the barn. There, unmilked, stood Will Vinson's three Jersey cows, as he had imagined his own cows waiting for him. Just freshened for spring, they were heavy with milk. The knotty veins on their bags stood out like hemp ropes. Their hind hooves stood in pools into which a steady drip fell from their bursting teats. As soon as he stepped into the barn they let out a groan as if all three were having calves.

Something must have come up. My grandfather was slow in the extreme to suspect anything out of the common run, but being one himself, he knew that a farmer did not lightly go off and leave his evening chores undone. And he knew that like himself Will Vinson made just one regular trip a month into Clarksville. Something must have come up. One of the children, possibly his, hurt or suddenly taken sick? Why take along the whole family? An accident to Will Vinson, necessitating his wife's driving the wagon, which would mean taking along the children, as none of them was big enough to leave in charge of the rest? Yet why had he not met them in town or on the road?