The Ordways (22 page)

“Nails? Then stay away from west Texas. Not much doing in your line out there. To need nails you've got to have planks, and to have planks you need trees. Why, I was to a fat-stock show once out there, and sue me if afterwards I didn't see them sweeping up the sawdust and putting it in crokersacks to use over again. No, no. West Texas is no place for you. And your friend?”

“Mr. Tullamore here is in ready-made clothing. Travels for a Birmingham, Alabama, concern. But say! Didn't none of them fence-cutting cowpunchers out there take a potshot at you?”

“Barb wire is not popular in some quarters. But you can't stand in the path of progress. The cowmen're fighting a losing battle, and they know it.”

“Country opening up fast, is it?”

“Yes, well I'm in the business of enclosing it again once it's opened up. I took orders for nearly seventeen thousand ton of wire this trip. But I wouldn't hardly call it crowded yet. They say out there that when you set off to visit your neighbor you ride a pregnant mare so as to have a way of getting back home again.”

“Big country.”

“Too damn big.”

“And hot.”

“And cold. Hot and cold.”

“Yet people will go out.”

“Hah! When I was there I seen them coming out pushing a wheelbarrow. You won't believe that, Mr. Webb, but I seen it with my own two eyes. A wheelbarrow, or I'm not sitting here this minute. I heard of one nut going it on a bicycle. One man and woman in Wichita Falls was setting off afoot leading an Ayrshire cow. They had it figured that that cow was going to be a kind of walking canteen to get them across the great plains. What she was going to drink, well, they hadn't given any thought to that. The man had been a copy clerk up to the week before, but he'd had enough of that. Now he was going out and live next door to God. What was he aiming to do out there? Why, farm. His notion of farming was, he would stake a claim to about two thousand acres, sprinkle him a few handfuls of wheat, and in about two weeks' time it'd come up covered with blossoms in the shape of little Parker House rolls. I talked to one poor sonofabitch on his way back. He'd went out a couple of years before in a big new prairie schooner, drawn, he told me, by a fine fat span of mules. Well, he never had nor wagon nor team when I spoke with him, and he didn't have the wife and two younguns he'd went out with neither. He'd lost everything. Wiped out. Drought. Grasshoppers. Dust. Cholera. And do you know what the poor fool told me he was on his way to do then? Going back—back home to Mississippi—and find him a new woman and get him a job tapping turpentine and save up enough money to buy a new outfit and try it again. I seen one family going out with a big glass-doored break-front taking up about three quarters of the wagon and sticking up in the air about a story and a half high and I thought to myself, now you're going to need that in a one-room sod shanty. Well, you remember what General Sheridan said.”

“What'd ole Phil say?”

“Said if he owned Texas and hell he'd live in hell and rent out Texas. And you know what? People being what they are, he would find tenants. Won't you join us, mister?”

“Oh! Excuse me!” cried my grandfather. “I never meant to eavesdrop on you gentlemen. I got so interested in what you were saying I seem to have forgotten my manners.”

“Glad to have you join us at our table,” said Mr. Hewlett, the barb-wire man, and he cleared some additional elbow space among their dirty dishes.

“I will then, if you're sure you don't mind? And, mister, I'm burning to ask you a question. Here. In your travels out west, I wonder if you remember ever seeing a little boy that looked like that?”

“In all my travels I've never seen any little boy that didn't look like that,” said Mr. Hewlett after a glance at Ned's photograph.

His two colleagues looking over his shoulder at the picture chortled, and my grandfather fetched up a smile and joined in—though he found an unintended meaning in the words which pained him. The three men then chased the levity from their faces and composed them for listening to his story. My grandfather cleared his throat and said, “The boy in that picture is my boy.”

In a chastened tone, Mr. Webb asked how he had come to be separated from his boy.

My grandfather told them. They shook their heads, clucked their tongues, and the second two shot reproachful glances at the original joker, Mr. Hewlett. He took another look, said no, he had been just about all over the West and never seen that boy. My grandfather said he really wasn't surprised to hear it, because actually he didn't believe his boy was out in the West. He expected Will had not gone much farther than right here in Lamar County.

“Don't you believe it,” Mr. Hewlett said. “Once they get started they just keep on. He won't stop this side of Plainview. He'll have to go that far to find a bush to go behind.”

“Can he read?” asked Mr. Tullamore.

“Read? Why, no. He wasn't but two and a half years old.”

“No, no. The man, I mean.”

“Will? Why, of course
he
can read,” my grandfather replied.

“Then you wouldn't want to do what I was fixing to suggest.”

“What?”

“Run a notice in the various newspapers throughout the western part of the state. But if he can read, why he might see it, so never mind.”

“Well, of course he can read!” my grandfather said. Odd, though, that he should feel so sensitive to aspersions cast by a stranger upon his enemy.

The hardware man, Mr. Webb, now accepted the photograph from Mr. Hewlett, and to my grandfather said, “Your first, I take it.”

“First boy,” he replied.

“Always the hardest one to lose,” said Mr. Tullamore.

“I haven't lost him yet,” said my grandfather.

“‘At's the spirit,” said Mr. Webb. “Never say die.”

“And all this happened six months ago?” said Mr. Tullamore.

“Yes, well you see, I couldn't do anything until my crops were in,” said my grandfather. “I've got three other—”

“I never meant to reproach you,” said Mr. Tullamore. “I just mean to say that while I admire your spirit, the same as Mr. Webb here, I wonder how much you can hope to accomplish if in six months the law had never found a trace.”

“The way I feel is, it's my off season, I've got nothing to lose by trying,” said my grandfather. They had piqued him somewhat, though, and privately he felt, momentarily at least, much less modest about his chances.

“'At's the spirit,” said Mr. Webb.

“Had no youngsters of his own, this neighbor of yours?” asked Mr. Tullamore. “Wife barren? Case like that, was it? Figured he would need him a boy to help work the land out there?”

“No. No, they had three of their own, two of them boys, youngest child still a babe in arms, wife a perfectly sound woman to all outward appearances,” said my grandfather. Then he noticed that even as he asked the question Mr. Tullamore had been studying the photograph.

“You'd think,” said Mr. Webb, “that the law would've turned up something in all this time.”

“You wouldn't if you'd been where I've been,” said Mr. Hewlett. “My friends here haven't been out in west Texas, Mr. Ordway. I have. They ain't no law out there. My advice to you is, turn around right here and now before you've gone any further. Go home and get started having yourself some more boys. I do hate to discourage a man of pluck, but frankly I think you stand about as much chance as a snowdrop in hell.”

“I appreciate your advice,” said my grandfather. “But you know how it is. As the blind eye said to the good one, I'd like to see for myself.”

“I've got a suggestion,” said Mr. Tullamore. “whyn't you take on a line?”

“A line?”

“Line of goods. Sell as you go. Then if you don't find them, why at least the trip won't be a total loss.”

“Not a bad idea,” said Mr. Webb. “Say something in the farm-implement line. You understand that.”

“Well, I've got a much better idea,” said Mr. Hewlett. “You just go home and sit tight, Mr. Ordway, and one day about a year from now, after he's been through a drought, a plague of seventeen-year locusts, a dust storm or two and a couple of cyclones and an epidemic of yeller jaunders or something, why you'll see your man coming back down the lane, bringing your little boy with him. If he don't, just look me up—Chester B. Hewlett—and I'll give you one of mine. You can take your pick.”

Damn you, Will Vinson!
said my grandfather to himself as he undressed for bed in his hotel room that night.
Damn you!
He hoped that a rattlesnake had bitten him. That a tornado had struck him. That he had died a slow death of thirst. That he had been spared none of the hardships which came to his mind when he thought of west Texas. And finally he cursed him for having to take it all back and wish Will Vinson prosperity in his new home—to have to pray, in fact, that Will (until he caught up with him, at least) would have the rare luck to make out in that harsh place. For emptying his pockets for bed and glancing down at the photograph of Ned, my grandfather had a vision of that little dependent of Will's, ragged and barefoot and scrawny from hunger.

To turn around and go back east towards home when the man he was after was somewhere in the west was rather dispiriting, but early the next morning my grandfather returned to Bagwell and began exploring the side roads leading off to the southwest. The Ingrams took him in and gave him board. Mrs. Ingram would put him up some dinner in his pail and he would set off early every morning and try a different road, returning for supper at night. He would come to a fork in the road miles from nowhere and would whoa to the team, would decide to go this way and start to flick the reins, change his mind and decide to go the other way, start, stop, until finally he was shaking with indecision like an old woman on a curb at a busy intersection. For a day was involved in each choice. A day of jouncing down rutty lanes, of fording washouts, getting mired in the mud, getting out to push, often a day of meeting no one even to ask the time of day, much less whether another fool had come this way sometime last spring.

And even down these roads, where people lived like the Swiss Family Robinson, where the passage of a strange cat could not have gone unnoticed, where his own approach seemed to have been telegraphed ahead by smoke signals or jungle drums, so that on the sagging gallery of the general store he would be met by a delegation of the open-mouthed and the slit-eyed, the curious and the hostile, of the Vinsons nobody remembered seeing hide nor hair. He was going farther and farther out now, leaving the Ingrams' in the dark of the morning and dragging in after dark at night. Improbable as it seemed that he would ever find anyone who had seen them, it seemed equally improbable that no one had. A loaded wagon with a man and woman, four children, did not pass like a canoe over the water without leaving a trace. It must have been seen by someone.

“Are you sure it's not for the best?”

“How's that, ma'am?” said my grandfather.

“Oh, Mr. Ordway!” cried Mrs. Ingram, dropping her dishcloth. “Oh, Mr. Ordway, I was only more or less thinking to myself out loud. I don't mean to go poking my nose into your family affairs. I was just wondering … I mean, if they're so fond of the child, and his mamma is dead and his stepmother … I mean …”

“I suppose,” her husband interposed, “that if you was to die and I was to marry again and somebody was to steal one of yours you'd want me to just let them have him, eh? Why, I'd sooner bury one of them. Yes, I'd sooner bury one of them than know he was growing up among strangers.”

Yes, so would he, thought my grandfather. So should any father. But he knew perfectly well that he would not. He wished he had Ned back. But that fierce paternal possessiveness, that deep dynastic jealousy which made a father sooner wish his son dead than growing up among strangers, that was beyond him. No, he had to admit he would sooner Will Vinson had him than that—another evidence of the indifference which had originally cost him his boy. How it shamed him that he should have to be shown by another man the way he ought to feel!

“Ah, dear, dear, it's a cruel old world,” sighed Mrs. Ingram as the two men got up from the table. Then lighting her guest up the stairs, puffing at each step, “I guess you're not the first poor widower to marry again thinking to provide a mother for his orphaned children, then discovered your new wife had a mind of her own, eh, Mr. Ordway? Well, good night, and sleep tight.”

My grandfather sat on the edge of the bed unlacing his shoes, the picture of Ned along with his watch and change and pocket knife lying on the nightstand at his side. He was rather shaken by this unexpected moral which Mrs. Ingram had drawn from his story. Beyond mentioning that Ned's mother had died giving birth to the boy, and that he had remarried, he had told her nothing to lead her to these deductions. Women all commenced nodding their heads knowingly, however, at the mere mention of a stepmother. In every father married to second wife they saw a man helplessly torn between the two. He remembered to have been himself the object of such sympathetic sighs and tongue cluckings and headshakes on the part of Mrs. Vinson. And thinking of Mrs. Vinson and that sad sympathetic look she always used to wrap him in, my grandfather suddenly found quite another thought in Mrs. Ingram's words. Had he married Hester without caring for her, merely in order to provide a mother for Aggie's children? Or to express it still more searchingly, not even thinking of their welfare, but merely in order to get them off his hands? He had always supposed he loved Hester. But had he when he married her, and had she believed he did? And the Vinsons, had they thought he married her only for the children's sake, and that she knew it, and took it out on them, especially Ned, and was that what had made them …?