The Ordways (30 page)

“I won't wait for you. I'll go at once. But there's no chance of Will himself being in town here today, you don't think?”

“They never come into Paris,” said Reverend Teague. “I had noticed that. Now I know why. But I see you're impatient to be on your way.”

“Not for a minute yet,” said my grandfather. “Reverend, now don't take this amiss. I know that preachers are not well paid and they're human like the rest of us and have to eat and … well, I hope you will let me …”

“Just stop right there. I don't take it amiss, but that's enough. Ssh! I'm going right this minute and I don't want to hear another word. No, no. I'm the one who ought to thank you, for putting me in the way to help a fellow creature in distress. The happiness this has given me, words cannot express it. No more. Goodbye, good luck, and God go with you.” And with that he was out of the door and gone, leaving my grandfather with a lump in his throat the size of a turkey egg.

He glanced at his watch. First to the livery stable, then—

There came a rap on the door. It opened, and Reverend Teague stuck his head in.

“Won't keep you a minute,” he said. “It just occurs to me (I almost left without thinking of it—what a pity that would have been) that once you've gotten your boy back you might welcome the opportunity to make a small donation to our Baptist Boys' Orphan Home, of which I am the director. I says the
Baptist
Boys' Orphan Home—it's called that, but of course it's open to orphans of all denominations, including Methodist. Now please don't feel under any obligation. It just occurred to me that if I was in your place I would be wanting to show my gratitude to the Lord for restoring my little boy to me so soon, and what more fitting way than by helping these poor little fellows who will never in this life be reunited with their fathers? Well, again, good luck and—”

“Wait. Reverend Teague, I want to thank you for this suggestion,” said my grandfather, taking out his wallet. “Would you be so kind—”

“Well, I suppose … Very well, if that's what you would like. I could convey it,” said Reverend Teague. Then he said, “The amount, Mr. Ordway, is entirely up to you. Those poor fatherless waifs will be grateful for any little—”

My grandfather had taken four or five bills from his wallet. At these words he took a couple more.

“It's impossible, I know,” the Reverend continued, “to express in dollars and cents how much it's worth to get back your lost child.” (My grandfather added another bill or two.) “I don't know, of course, how much you were intending to offer as a reward” (he took two more) “but I am sure it will be better spent than on some whom I can imagine bringing you the information you were seeking. With Thanksgiving Day coming along soon … Christmas …”

To this last appeal my grandfather felt an unworthy impulse to close his ears. He had already dipped pretty deeply into his funds. Yet he had meant to pay a hundred and twenty-five dollars reward, and he had anticipated a longer and more costly search. The stern faces of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson (there were two-dollar bills in those days), Abe Lincoln, and a solitary Alexander Hamilton accused him with their high-minded looks. He took six or eight more bills and added them to the sum. And it was worth it. He felt good all over. Then the grisly apparition which that Lieutenant Loftus had implanted in his mind rose up, and he extracted some more bills and added them to the stack. Then he hastily shut his shrunken wallet.

Reverend Teague did not look down at the money as he took it; he appreciated the amount, though, and his eyes moistened. So did my grandfather's as the Reverend said, “Sam Ordway, God will bless you for this. You have found yourself more than one son this day.”

So wrought up was my grandfather that he was downstairs in the lobby before he remembered his pistol. The remembrance brought a glow to his face. He had known Will Vinson too long to go pointing a pistol at him. Much less that blunderbuss. But suppose Will pulled one on him? This was the thought which struck him now for the first time. Was it possible that Will wanted his boy bad enough to shoot him for him? Painful as it was, my grandfather had to confess that it was possible. And Will would expect him to come shooting. Any man in Will's place would.

He returned to his room. He took his pistol from his satchel. He hefted it, looked at it, and said to himself, how am I going to get out of the hotel with this thing? He tried sticking it in his belt inside his shirt. That did not work. Had it been just a few inches longer he might have passed it off as a walking cane. He could not carry it out in his satchel: they would think he was trying to leave without paying his bill. Pay his bill? That was just what he ought to do. He would not be returning here. He packed his grip, putting his pistol in on top, went downstairs, and checked out.

The town was emptying now as the country people left for home. My grandfather made his way quickly to the livery stable. He settled his bill there and harnessed Dolly and the mule. The stable owner said that Ben Franklin was down south of Roxton, somewhere over in Delta County. Himself, he had never been there.

The streets leading out of town were jammed with wagons and my grandfather lost some little time getting beyond the city limits and out into the country. At last he was on his way. The road was a good one, hard and smooth. Well rested now, the team paced briskly. He began to pass farms. Dusk was settling now and he could hear folks calling their cows and sometimes the tinkle of a cowbell. Several times he was slowed down by herds of cattle taking up the road. He gave a ride for a couple of miles to a hunter coming home with a mess of squirrels. Bullbats came out and circled in the air, catching bugs on the wing. Lights came on in farmhouse windows and smoke stood up from chimneys and sometimes on the air came a whiff of frying meat. Then the road turned bad. They had had a rain out there during the day and the road was muddy, and in places the culverts had clogged up with trash and the road lay under water. The wagon wheels began to clot with mud, slowing down the team. Towards nightfall the sky clouded over. It got so dark you could not see the team. You could hear them, could hear the
slurr-plop
of their hooves as they drew them out of the mud. It sounded as if they were wearing rubber boots. Away off in the darkness dogs barked and were answered by still more distant dogs.

Sometimes the barking was near at hand. Then a light would flare up alongside the road just ahead. It was past eight o'clock now and farm folks were in bed. Roused by their dogs, the farmers came to the door holding the lamp over their heads and hitching up their trousers and peering out into the night, calling, “Here! Queen! Here! Spot!” My grandfather would call out and ask if this was the road to Roxton, and hearing a strange voice, the farmer would raise the lamp still higher in hopes of a glimpse of his face. It was just so—half asleep, half dressed, half blind—that my grandfather pictured Will Vinson answering his call.

After Roxton, which he passed through at around ten that night, my grandfather began to fear that he might miss his turning in the dark. Every few hundred yards he got down from the wagon seat and walked ahead of the team for a ways. Twice he slipped and fell; soon he was covered with mud. Around two a.m. he came to a hamlet. By the time he entered it the howling of dogs had awakened everybody. Lights shone in every house.

“This Ben Franklin?” he called to a man in a nightcap leaning out of his window.

“Yes. Who do you want to …?”

“Then I'm on the right road. Much obliged to you, and sorry to have disturbed your sleep.”

“Where is it you want to …?”

“Good night!”

Now as his meeting with Will Vinson loomed imminent my grandfather's conscience began to prick him for his indifference to Will's fate. Everybody was expecting him to shoot Will. Everybody. Even Reverend Teague had taken it for granted that he meant to kill Will and felt obliged to warn him against this natural inclination.

For what he had done to him Will Vinson certainly deserved to be shot, my grandfather thought; and if he was to, there was not a man in the state of Texas who would not approve. Not one. That in fact was not the question. The question was, what would they say if he didn't? When friends back in Clarksville said, “So! You got your boy back! Good! Now then” (their faces lighting up), “now then, what about Vinson? What did you do to him?” how could he just smile and say, “Oh. Will. Well, I let him go”?

My grandfather reached under the wagon seat and found his grip. He put it on the seat beside him, opened it, and took out his pistol. In the darkness it seemed to have grown still heavier, still longer. It felt like a plow handle, he said in recalling the moment to his grandson. He held it out before him. “Will Vinson,” he said, “if you have got any last words now is the time to say them, only be quick about it.”

“I know I deserve it, Mr. Ordway,” said Will. “I done you wrong. But I've got a wife and three kids of my own with nobody to look after them but me.”

“Too late for that. You ought to have thought about them before you went stealing mine.”

“Well,” my grandfather told me, “I tried to picture myself pulling the trigger and enjoying the sight of Will lying dead at my feet. I knew it was what I ought to do, what any other man in my place would have done. I knew that if I didn't I would despise myself to my dying day. It was not only my right, it was my duty. Why, Will Vinson himself would despise me for not doing it. Unless I did, little Ned would grow up hearing people say of his daddy, ‘There goes Sam Ordway. The man that tracked down the fellow that stole his boy, then was too chicken-livered to shoot him.'”

I interrupted at this point. “Grandpa?” I said.

“What?”

“Never mind,” I said. “Go on. Go on.” I had been about to suggest an alternative. That he might have turned Will Vinson over to the law. Luckily I reflected in time that this would have been just as shameful as not shooting him, if not more so, and held my tongue.

“I tried to worm out of it by telling myself that the pistol probably wouldn't have gone off anyhow. But it was me that wouldn't go off. I strained and I heaved and I called myself names—no use: it just wasn't in me. ‘Are you a man or a mouse?' I asked myself. I was glad it was dark and I was all alone. ‘Mouse,' I said, and put the pistol back in the grip and put the grip back under the wagon seat. I would just have to live down the shame of it as best I could.

“I'd have shot that Reverend Teague with pleasure, though, if I could have found the dog,” he said.

“What! Shoot Reverend Teague, Grandpa! But why?”

“Because when I had snuck up on that cabin which was the second place on the right beyond the bridge five miles (not two—five) after the right-hand turn over the creek and through the swamp after the crossing beyond the general store around four in the morning, and this was after leaving my wagon and team and doing the last three miles on foot in the mud, not knowing how near the house was and wanting not to give them any warning by the noise of the wagon, and threw rocks at the door and took off my shoes and crept along the porch in my stocking-feet and the man came to the door and I slipped behind him and grabbed his arms, even from the nape of his big bull neck and even in that half light I knew he was not Will Vinson and never had been, and that when I let go of his arms I was going to have some mighty tall explaining to do, and that I had come somewheres in the neighborhood of thirty miles on this wild-goose chase and been taken for a fool, much less being out of pocket one hundred and forty-two out of the two hundred and twenty dollars which was all I had to my name. That's why.”

“When did you ever see a Baptist preacher wearing a clerical collar?” asked the Lamar County sheriff.

“I'm a Methodist,” my grandfather replied somewhat surlily. For already in the hands of these two he was beginning to feel as if he were the suspect, being grilled, instead of the plaintiff.

“Well,” said the sheriff with a sigh of deep disgust, “what did he look like?”

“Like a Baptist preacher,” said my grandfather. “You'd have said so too. Nicest, kindest-looking old Christian gentleman you ever—”

“How old a man was he?”

“Early sixties, I would say. I could be way off, though. I'm not too good at judging people's ages, it seems.”

“Did he by any chance have a mole right about here?” asked the deputy sheriff, touching a finger to his forehead just above the eyebrow.

“I never noticed,” said my grandfather.

“Then did you notice this? Did he have a habit of plucking at the hairs growing out of his ears as he talked?” the sheriff asked.

“I'm sorry,” my grandfather replied. “Again, I just never—”

“For an amateur sleuth you ain't very observant, are you, mister?” said the deputy.

“Well, tell me this, if you can,” said the sheriff. “Did he have a way of breathing sort of heavy and asthmatical, like this” (huffing) “through his mouth?”

“Yes! Yes, he did! Exactly!” my grandfather cried.

“Uh-huh. He also had a mole just over his left eyebrow and a habit of plucking at the hairs in his ears as he talked,” said the sheriff. Turning to his deputy he said, “Suds Folsom?”

The deputy nodded. “Sure sounds like old Suds,” he said. He got up and went to a filing cabinet, pulled open a drawer and thumbed through some folders, withdrew one and handed it to his boss.

“This your man?” asked the sheriff. And he held out a wanted notice. There, big as life, was Reverend Teague. He was dressed in broad stripes and across his chest ran a sign reading 341-22-0908. My grandfather would have given a dollar to be able to say no, it wasn't; but he had to nod.

“Poor old Suds,” said the deputy. “He must be on the skids to make him go after such peanuts.”