The Ordways (2 page)

As though the prairieland had been a pool into which the town was dropped, Clarksville was ringed with low wavy hills, flattening, growing fainter as they spread away. Mabry, ten miles due west, sat on the outermost ripple; beyond stretched Blossom Prairie, endless, treeless, smooth as water. The settlement consisted of just four buildings: the store and the house of its owner squatting along the narrow dusty road, and behind them, thrown down like a pair of dice upon the faded green baize of their yard, the one-room schoolhouse (in which my grandmother, years ago, before she married my grandfather, had once taught for a time) and the church. Lacking a bell, they shared between them a large iron-rod triangle suspended between two wooden trestles, of the kind sometimes to be seen outside farmhouse kitchen doors by which the men are summoned from the field for dinner. The length of rod for beating the triangle was kept inside the schoolhouse, the temptation to bang out a triplet or two being more than passing boys could be expected to resist. Tempo quickening as schoolmarm or preacher got into the swing of it, like a locomotive accelerating from a dead stop, its ringing tricornered clang grew hexagonal and finally circular, rolling westward unobstructed into infinity, and long after the beating had ceased the triangle went on vibrantly humming to itself. The church, simple as a child's drawing, the architectural semblance of the elemental creed it housed, needed only a span of oxen yoked on in front to pass for one of those prairie schooners which had brought its builders to the spot, and, lent a footloose and somewhat reckless air by its poverty, appeared to be sniffing the wind blowing in its face from off the wide open land stretching before it, and thinking of trying its luck farther on. Inside, the walls were as bare as outside. A rusty potbellied stove sat on a tattered zinc mat in the center of the room; supported by wires dropped from the ceiling, the rusty, flaking stovepipe ran overhead and out the flue at the rear. The benches were each the handiwork of a different member of the original congregation, in a variety of woods and workmanship, heights and depths, uniform in one thing only, the perpendicularity of their backs. The altar was a kitchen table, the altar cloth a yellowed lace doily. On it always stood, one inside the other, the two wooden collection plates lined with faded and moth-eaten purple felt into which one dropped one's penny, then passed it on down the row, where at one end my grandfather and at the other Mr. Bartholomew, the elders, stood waiting with abstracted mien to receive it. On the back wall behind the rickety low pulpit hung a notice board with replaceable letters whereon, beneath the chapter and verse of the day's sermon text, was published the attendance and the always miserably small collection which had been taken up on the preceding Sunday, or rather the last Sunday on which services had been held, for, being so poor, Mabry was obliged to share its preacher in rotation with two other settlements—a forced economy which did not much sadden me when later on I went to spend the summer with my grandparents on the farm. A small parlor organ completed the furnishings. It required pumping by hand, a job which, performed by some strapping farm lad, made the little building rock like a churn. The congregation's aim was not to sing with the organ but above it, and I can still see my grandfather, his chest expanded, neck stretched forward, and his elbows out at his sides as he held his hymnbook, like a rooster about to flap its wings and crow, waiting to come in on the beat with “When the roll is called up yonder.” When one got done singing he stood with his eyes fixed straight ahead, waiting for the others each to finish, then all sat down together.

Mabry people all had small farms, large families. To get a start in life many of their children had had to leave home. Many had left the land altogether. Not all had been drawn into Clarksville; with the coming of the automobile some had gone as far away as the distant cities, Paris, Sherman, even Dallas and Fort Worth. On graveyard working day they all came home. To see the country folks reunited then with their grandchildren from the towns was to see evolution in action. They might have belonged to different epochs, different strains, the farmers with flaming cheeks and red ears and leathery brown necks, work-swollen hands, slitted eyes from squinting at the sun, with wrinkles at the corners so deep they seemed to have been drawn on in warpaint; the women bent like the rare prairie trees beneath the prevailing wind, gnarled, sinewy, dry, with pale, wind-cracked, chapped and peeling lips, more than one of them with that lichenlike splotching of the skin which denotes Texas sun cancer, and which may end by eating away the septum of the nose right up to the very bone. From long seething in caustic homemade lye soap, and from a lifetime of scrubbing the overalls of a family of working men against a washboard, their hands looked as if they had been cooked, and when they extended them in one of their shy, faint handshakes, they felt feverish to the touch. They spoke a different language, too. Slow-talking, unused to having to shout to make themselves heard, speaking little in any case, they spent their hoarded and antiquated words as my grandfather in town in the stores counted out his old-fashioned Indian-head pennies and his nickels and dimes from deep in his long stocking-shaped purse and stacked them in neat deliberate stacks on the counter. Alongside their grandchildren they presented a picture of wild flowers, more like weeds than flowers, stubborn, tenacious, tough, and a domesticated seedling of the same species, shade-grown and delicate.

Though Mabry itself was small its graveyard was quite large. It served a numerous community scattered among the piney woods and the red hills to the north and east, and out on the prairie, who, while they preferred not to be jostled by neighbors in this life, craved close companionship in death, or else feared they might be overlooked on Judgment Day unless they were found in God's own crowded back yard. They had been burying there for a long time. One passed under a roofed gateway where, on those drizzly days that funerals are always held on, the coffin rested on sawhorses while the service was read. Down the path, padded when we used to go there on graveyard working day in the fall with brown pine needles, on the left, beneath a broad knotty oak which peppered them with acorns, lay the Jervises, whose care and upkeep devolved upon the community, the family having “died out.” Beside the burial plot of this extinct clan, though strongly impelled to hurry past, I used often to linger, trying to give features and a voice to the host of spirits who hovered there, beseeching me, on that day when all the dead were resurrected by the memories of those who had known them, to grasp their hand and save them from sinking deeper and deeper into oblivion. Hastening on, one passed the Leonards, a son of which tribe on one memorable graveyard working day was to disabuse me of the notion that I had nothing to learn from country boys, to teach me the most unsettling things about myself, and to make it hard for a time for me to look any girl in the face. Then came the Claibornes, all, according to their tombstones, asleep in Jesus, a state of repose which I never could succeed in picturing to myself. The next large plot on the right was ours.

The monuments in Mabry graveyard reflected the poverty, and the taste, of the survivors of the dead. Small, with minimal inscriptions. In many plots there were no stones but instead homemade wooden crosses, the hand-carved legends full of quaint misspellings and highly personal abbreviations. On some graves stood upended fruit jars, purplish through exposure to the sun's rays, inside which, through beads of moisture, one saw bouquets of faded crepe-paper flowers. Children's graves were numerous, and on them were often to be seen china dolls, perhaps one of those pistol-shaped bottles filled with colored candy pills, a celluloid fish or duck, on the still humbler ones simply a glass or porcelain doorknob or a few marbles, sometimes a teething ring, a pacifier. Among some family plots one saw, left over from Memorial Day and by October bleached, color-run, and tattered, the flags of three nations: the Republic of Texas, the Confederacy, and the United States.

We used to arrive early, first among our own family and among the first of those car-borne, before work had begun, oftentimes before sunup, when Mabry was a sketch in grisaille upon the immense blank canvas of sky, at an hour when it was truly as if the dead, as so many of their monuments testified, lay asleep—still forms beneath patchwork quilts of leaves drawn up to the chins of their headstones. Wagons and buckboards stood in the road and in the schoolyard, their nodding teams hitched to the fence palings, the beds piled high with baskets of food, thermos jugs, cushions and old blankets, campstools, rakes, brooms. From scattered parts of the graveyard came the steady grate of files on hoe blades, and the long-drawn slash of a whetstone down the edge of a sickle or a scythe. The country folks—among them my grandparents, he in overalls and jumper and a collarless shirt, she in a mother hubbard, for protection against the briars, which allowed only her head and her hands to show, and a poke bonnet of flowered gingham, the ribbons tied underneath her chin—chatted in groups while awaiting their children and grandchildren from the towns.

I loved both my grandparents dearly, but of the two I loved my grandfather more, despite the fact, or possibly because of it, that he liked me least of all his grandchildren, whereas I was my grandmother's favorite. This difference was always marked in their respective greetings. She gave me a big hug and kiss and made a great fuss over me, while my grandfather not only suffered with visible impatience the shy, fervent, and hopeless kiss which I implanted on his wrinkled cheek, just at the tip of his wiry mustache—he hardly bothered to conceal his disapproval of my grandmother's affection for me. It was not merely that, being a man, he was less demonstrative. Towards others of his grandchildren he was affectionate enough. He just did not care for me.

“Silly boy! Whatever put that foolish notion into your head?” my mother cried when finally, unable to suffer in silence any longer, I spoke to her about it. “Why, of course your grandpa likes you! He loves you!”

“He loves me, all right,” I remember saying. “I'm his grandson and he has to love me. But he doesn't like me. If only he did! Oh, if only he liked me as much as Grandma does, how happy I would be!”

To understand the reaction which this produced in my mother the reader must know that, along with the rest of their sons- and daughters-in-law, she was devoted to my grandfather, somewhat less than devoted to my grandmother. Ever ready to leap to my grandfather's side in the rare and insignificant differences between his wife and him, she would attack my poor father, who sought to maintain a strict neutrality and who knew how unimportant his parents' quarrels were, as if he had automatically taken his mother's part. My mother's cause was fraught with frustration because my grandfather would never stand up for himself. The soul of discretion, he retired from the field as soon as battle was joined. He would rather be wrong than wrangle; what was more, it did not bother him not to have the last word, even when he was in the right. This placidity of temper, which was precisely what she loved him for, used to provoke my mother to exasperation.

After giving an angry snort, shaking her head, jumping up from her seat, and pacing rapidly around the room, my mother sat down again and drummed her fingernails on the table, looking hard at me. I no longer recall her exact words, but this is the gist of the little family secret which she decided to let me in on that day. She did not say that my grandmother loved me less than she appeared to—this was merely implied in the way in which she said that my grandfather loved me a great deal more than he showed. It was my misfortune always to be the first of the grandchildren to arrive at any family gathering.

Knowing that his wife suspected him (quite unjustly) of a preference for her stepdaughters, and thus of her stepdaughters' children, and also because he wished to counteract the flagrant partiality which she showed among her own children and her children's children, my grandfather always determined beforehand to be unimpeachably equal in the warmth of his welcome to each and every one. In practice this worked out to mean equally cool to all. Quite possibly—for he was like that—he was particularly on guard against being driven by his wife to favor those whom she favored least—which would include my father, and therefore me. But being affectionate by nature, he was able to sustain this pose only through the first two or three arrivals, unbending all the while, until finally he dropped it altogether. As I came first, I felt the full brunt of his fairness; those of my cousins who came later not only got their proper share of his affection, they got my share as well. My grandmother, on the other hand, knowing how he disapproved of her favoritism, was always resolved for once to show none, with the result that she effused most over those for whom she cared the least. My grandmother had her fixed and permanent favorite (my Uncle Ewen, her first-born son); after him she valued her children in proportion to the distance by which they were separated from her and the worry they caused her. We lived closest by of all, and so, not having far to come, we gave her no particular concern, and were therefore less precious to her. The kiss I got from her, so unlike that unrequited one of mine on my grandfather's cheek, had more light than warmth in it; those she bestowed on my cousins who had had to travel farther to get theirs were too heartfelt for outward show.

On graveyard working day, as at any family gathering, as one by one her children came home, my grandmother grew more and more fretful over those still missing. As the number narrowed, instead of taking comfort she merely transferred the anxiety released by the arrival of the latest one onto those still to be accounted for. Other families were already assembled and at work. Scythes hissed in the dry grass, the rhythmical chopping of hoes was heard on all sides and the scratching of rakes among the papery leaves. Already brush fires had begun to crackle and the air to thicken fragrantly with smoke.