The Ordways (19 page)

He left Hester among the women and, not to attract her notice, postponed his mission for a few minutes, joining the men and listening, or pretending to listen, to their talk. He knew that Hester begrudged him none of his memories. Still he saw no point in spreading them out, so to speak, and fondling them while she looked on. She knew he made an occasional pilgrimage to Aggie's grave; she must know too that he made them more and more infrequently as time went by. After a while, unable to see Hester anywhere about, he drifted away from the group. He went around back of the church, behind the privies and down along the graveyard fence to the hollow.

Among the wildflowers he found a ragged aster or two left over, and a few snaggle-toothed daisies. Passing a pine tree on his way back to the graveyard, he broke off a branch and added this to his bouquet, saying to himself, evergreen for remembrance. He was creeping along the fence, trying not to notice his stealth, when, at the gate, just as he was about to slip in, whom should he meet but Hester, just coming out. She was alone, having left the baby with some woman friend to mind. In his confusion my grandfather let drop about half his flowers. As he stooped to gather them up, the warmth rising around his stiff collar, he felt a momentary resentment against Hester, not because she might resent his coming here, but because of his own unmanliness in hiding it from her. This feeling passed, his awkwardness returned, mounted, and rising—and again dropping a flower or two—he stammered, “A few flowers. To lay on poor Aggie's … Agatha's grave.”

“Oh, no!” cried my grandmother. “Don't!”

He was too astounded to be angry. Apparently astounded at herself, my grandmother gasped, and squeezing past him, rushed out.

Then he was angry. He would go and lay a few flowers on his first wife's grave if he wanted to! It was nothing much. He was only too conscious of that. It was nothing much, after letting her child, the child she had given her life for, be taken away. And who was more to blame for that, him or Hester? And had he ever breathed one word of reproach to her? And she begrudged him coming to lay a few flowers on poor Aggie's grave!

And small cause she had for her jealousy! For look, he could no longer even remember where Aggie lay. That showed, ah, showed all too well, how little time he had spent here of late. He was torn between resentment towards Hester for not appreciating his neglect of Aggie, and guilt towards Aggie that he could longer even find her. In his search his eye fell again on the grave with the fresh little bouquet lying on it. That was Aggie's! (“Weep not for me,” to his shame it said.) That was Aggie's: the one with the bouquet. No wonder he could not find her!

Who could have put that there? Who was there to remember poor Aggie but himself? The girls? But they had gone directly indoors to their Bible class. Puzzled, and vaguely irritated, he knelt and laid aside his own bouquet and took up this interloper. It had been picked—just picked, still damp—in the same place as his, for it was composed of the same flowers as his. Then looking closer he perceived that this bouquet was not, after all, quite the same as his own. For it contained a flower that his was missing, and which told him who had laid it there. Told him, too, in what spirit it had been brought. For it was a plant whose single shy syllable in the language of flowers was a pink whisper of remorse. It was a tendril, carefully twined about the daisies and the phlox, of the plant, peculiar to the region, known as shame vine.

That was what Hester had been doing in the graveyard, and the reason she had wanted him not to come. She had not put it there for him to find. On the contrary. This was something between herself and Agatha. For a moment my grandfather felt himself the husband of neither. They were together, and both beyond him: two mothers.

Forgetting the bouquet that he himself had brought, and rather untenderly returning to Aggie's earthen bosom the one that Hester had brought her, he rose to go and find his wife, tell her that she was not to blame herself, comfort her and tell her that it was not her fault. He turned and found her there behind him, hanging back, uncertain of him, eager but afraid to approach, tears trembling on her lashes, ready to fall as soon as he had shown her what kind of tears they must be. He held out his arms to her. She sobbed, ran to him, and flung herself quaking against his breast.

“Oh, Mr. Ordway,” she sobbed, “can you ever forgive me? Not now, but someday? I was jealous of her, and I didn't love her child enough, but oh, Mr. Ordway, try to forgive me. If you knew how tormented I've been you wouldn't be hard on me.”

“There, there,” he said, patting her back, his own eyes brimming. “There now. It was nobody's fault. Certainly not yours. There's nothing to forgive.”

“It was my fault!' she cried. “Oh, blame me! Blame me! Do! Only, give me a chance to win my way back to your heart. Don't cast me off. Give me a chance, that's all I ask. I'll give you other boys—many boys—fine boys, Mr. Ordway. Oh, I don't mean that the way it sounds, for I know they won't be the same to you. But they will be yours too, Mr. Ordway. They will be yours too and you will love them too. I'll raise them so carefully and they will be good boys, and I won't expect you to love them as much as Ned. I won't expect it. But they will be good boys, and I will be a good mother to your boys, and more careful, as I should have been of poor Agatha's little Ned, and not let anybody steal one of them and run away with him. Oh, God forgive me for saying it, but why couldn't it have been mine they wanted? Or why couldn't
she
have been where I am, and I where she is now?”

Then at last my grandfather knew what Will Vinson's crime had been.

He stiffened and Hester felt it and stiffened too. His arms slackened and fell from about her and he turned his face to hide his emotion. She cried, for she misinterpreted his turning from her. The church bell, rather the triangle, rang just then. He said, “You go in. I'm not coming. I'll stay out here. Go on now. And don't torment yourself any further. I forgive you for your part in it.”

He knew now what Will Vinson had been running away from. He was running away from him. He had seen the theft of his son as a mere accident attendant upon some crime, and for weeks and months had waited for the crime to come to light. Now he knew, as Hester, feeling herself, poor thing, to be an accomplice to it, had known all along, that Will Vinson's crime was the theft of little Ned. She was less to blame than himself. She had never loved the boy; but it was not to be expected that she should. And though she had not loved him, she could imagine what his father could not—that someone else might. She could blame herself and could suffer under the burden of his unspoken accusation, could credit him with kindness in not speaking it, when the truth was, he had not suspected that he had been done a personal injury.

At the strains of singing from the congregation floating out through the open windows of the church, my grandfather stirred himself and wandered away through the graves to a farther part of the cemetery. He could have borne it easier if the Vinsons had been childless. Not, of course, that that would have made him any more willing to give them one of his. But that they could love the child for himself, and not just because he was a child, made their theft of him more of an accusation than ever. They had children, they wanted this child; and to have him they had been prepared to give up everything—everything, as he remembered saying to himself before: their home, their stock, a crop in the ground, their good name, their own children's future—and fly to an unknown country still only half tamed, sooner than give him up again at the end of the day. He knew he had never loved the child that much, and it was almost enough, he said to himself, to make you let them have him.

He could see his boy clearly in his mind's eye. Clearly, for he was no foolish father. A little thing, pallid, plain, ordinary. What had the Vinsons seen in him to make them commit such folly? I don't mean that I didn't love him, said my grandfather to the gravestones, ranked in clans, his own included, that accused him with their bleak and stony stares. Only that you wouldn't think anybody else would except me, and his mother.

Thus he was recalled to the spot on which he once again found himself standing. He looked down at the grave, with its two bunches of wildflowers, of the woman who had died young giving birth to the fruit of his pleasure. At that moment the organ inside gave out with a wheezing chord. The congregation would be bowing their heads. At the foot of the grave, facing the stone, my grandfather also bowed.

“Aggie,” he said, “my dear, I have two things to confess to you. The first is about Hester, my wife. I don't compare the two of you. You're as different as two women picked by the same man could be. I loved you, Aggie, in your time. But the world moves on, though you have left it. Hester is my wife now, and I have to put you out of mind.

“That brings me to the second thing. I have lost our boy, Aggie. The child whose coming put you where you lie. You mustn't blame Hester; it was more my fault than hers. I didn't appreciate him until it was too late; but, Aggie, you couldn't want me to miss him more than I do now. Please, try to forgive me. And though I must forget you, I vow never to forget our boy again, and not to rest till I have found him, Aggie, though I have to search to the end of the world.”

PART THREE

Sam Ordway's Revenge

S
INCE
my grandfather, so many lone avengers in western romances, films, and TV serials have buckled on their holsters and mounted horse and set off across the plains in pursuit of the man who wronged them, that it will be necessary to distinguish him from the type. Sam Ordway differed in certain particulars from the heroes of television. First of all, Texan-born though he was, he was no horseman; he was an
East
Texan. The hind end of a plowhorse as he plodded behind it breaking a furrow was about the extent of his knowledge of horseflesh. Like any dirt farmer, given the choice between going somewhere on foot or riding horseback, he would have walked any day—the longer the distance, the easier the choice. It was in his creaky old all-purpose farm wagon, drawn by Dolly, his swaybacked, slue-footed, one-eyed mare, then already long in the tooth, and the mouse-gray mule whose only name was a cuss word, that my grandfather went after his man. He was not very fast on the draw either; that was another difference between my grandfather and John Wayne. In fact, up to that time he had never fired a shot at anybody in his life. So if I say that he packed a pistol when he went after Will Vinson, the reader is not to picture him taking down from its accustomed peg his cartridge belt and holster and strapping it around his waist and spinning the cylinder of his six-shooter; when I say he packed one, I mean packed it on the bottom of his gladstone bag, wrapped in his extra union-suit, so as not to alarm his wife. Anyhow, it was too big to carry any other way—or, I may say,
is
too big, as it lies on my desk before me as I write: the same old percussion cap and ball horse-pistol given to his mother by that brevet major on the battlefield at Shiloh. It is seventeen and a half inches long, and tips the baby scales at six pounds three ounces. When my grandfather took it west with him in 1898 it was still loaded from that brevet major's hand. Caps were still available, a good many old muzzle-loading shotguns being still in use at the time, and black powder was still stocked by the hardware stores, but he lacked the mold for casting balls. So those five shots (it's a five-shooter) were all he had, and they were thirty-six years old. Since 1862 the pistol had not been fired nor the charges drawn. My grandfather did not know how to draw them. Whether the gun would go off or not there was no knowing, unless, of course, you were to test fire it once, but this my grandfather did not bother to do, as he had no intention of shooting anybody. Even to think of pointing that cannon at a man he had known, worked alongside of, like his ex-neighbor, made him feel like a fool. Just how he was going to deal with Will—supposing he succeeding in finding him: he had faced, or rather had glanced sidelong at that question once or twice, but had said to himself, well, it'll probably never come to that, the chances are I won't find him. He took the pistol along just because he figured it was something a man traveling in strange, out-of-the-way places with close to three hundred dollars in cash on him probably ought to have. And the wisdom even of this was unclear to him. As he was packing it, “My Lord,” he said, “that would sure be a lot to get down if somebody was to make you eat it!”

Nor was my grandfather, in setting out on his quest, so singlemindedly bent on vengeance, as the heroes in the movies always are. As he later said, it wasn't easy to hate a man who had wronged you by loving your child enough to steal him. A man who loved him more than you yourself ever had. “For I might as well admit,” my grandfather told me, “that I didn't really miss the boy as much as I told his poor mamma's spirit I did. How could I? I hadn't had time to take much notice of him. He wasn't but two years old. A mother can love them at that age, but to a father they're not yet either fish nor fowl. In the second place, by then I was more or less beginning to get used to the idea of him being lost. In the third place, little Ned up to that time had been mainly a worry to me and little else. Not that I held his mamma's death against the poor child, you understand. But put it this way: if I just had to lose my wife, then I wouldn't have sorrowed long, I would have counted it a blessing, if the motherless child had been taken at the same time. I expect that sounds awful, but just remember the fix I was in: a man with a crop to make and two little girls on my hands. Well, the child had lived, and though it was no fault of his, had made trouble on all sides. I was obligated to my neighbors on his account, and your grandmother. … Well, your grandmother. … Naturally. Any woman would. All this is not to say I was glad to lose him, and later on I came to miss him sincerely; but at the time I was madder at Will Vinson for taking him from me than I was grieved at the loss of my boy.”