The Ordways (39 page)

“Well, I don't know how long it is since you last seen Clarksville,” said my grandfather. “However, I don't expect it's changed much. Same old creek still runs through it—about two feet across in the wide places. A big new confectionery has just recently opened up on the west side of the square, about in the middle of the block, run by a nice young Greek fellow named Athas. From Greece, he is.” He looked up and to his surprise found her standing in the doorway.

“Oh,” she said, “I wish I had knowed you was coming! I am so ashamed for anybody to see this house. So ashamed! Such dirt, such untidiness! I hope you won't think I was brought up no better than this. I grew up in a nice home, Mr. Ordway. My mother taught me better. I myself kept a nice house in De Kalb for the first year of our marriage, before he brought me out here. I had flowers and shrubs. Everything. All so neat. You had such a lot of fresh water to wash things in back there. Here I just can't seem to keep ahead of things. Its only the two of us, but I don't know, I don't know …”

She returned to the kitchen, came back with cups and saucers, then made another trip for the coffeepot.

“Been out here long?” my grandfather asked when they had begun to drink. She could not have been there very long; she was quite a young woman.

“Yes,” she replied. “Nearly two years.”

“I see,” said my grandfather, hiding his smile in his cup.

He almost dropped his cup at the violence of her next exclamation. “Oh, I hate this place so! When we come out on these plains and I caught my first sight of them I said, ‘I'm not going any further.' But I did, and we come on out here and I swear to you, Mr. Ordway, I cried without stop for three months. I don't think I'll ever be able to cry again over anything. I haven't got any tears left. I hated it the minute I set eyes on it and I hate it the same this minute. Always alone, but yet never private. No trees, no flowers, nothing but earth and sky. I always did love flowers so! I tried to grow a few little bushes but the poor things just wilted and died. I went without bathing to water them plants, Mr. Ordway, but the poor things just turned brown and dried up and I watched them going and couldn't do anything to save them and I felt like I was losing all the friends I had in the world. Oh, give me a home,” she said in a sudden change of voice, “where the buffaloes roam—except there ain't even any of them any more, and I ain't seen no deer nor antelopes playing either—where seldom is heard a discouraging word, or any kind of word, and the skies are not cloudy all day. Oh, what I wouldn't give to see one of them big creamy white clouds back home, a great big cool white thunderhead floating on the skyline. And songbirds. Oh, if I ever do get home again I want to lie in the shade of a green tree and listen to the mockingbirds singing! I'll wear a whole bouquet of flowers in my hair—none of these burnt-up odorless prairie flowers, but sweet garden flowers, roses, carnations, gardenias. I was quite a nice-looking girl just a few years ago, Mr. Ordway. Almost pretty, though I don't expect anybody to believe that.”

Squirming with discomfort, my grandfather said, “Why, you're a very nice-looking young woman now.”

“Oh, you don't have to say that to me. I don't even care any more, that's the trouble. I've let myself go just like I've let the house go. My husband's tired of me and I don't blame him. Poor Phil. He's beginning to let things slacken too. A man without a wife pulling right along with him out here is like a one-armed man. But I haven't the heart for it. But I'm sorry! Burdening you with my complaints, when you have got such much bigger ones than me.”

My grandfather was about to ask if she had had no children, when she said, “Children haven't come. It's a blessing. This is no place to bring up children.” Then she burst out, “Do you know what I yearn most to see? A woman! How I long to see another woman!”

“What about your friend Mrs. Blainey?” asked my grandfather.

“Oh, yes,” she said. “Yes, she comes over when she can. Of course, she's older than me. But she's real nice. She has such nice hair, nice soft hands. She keeps herself so neat. I don't know how she manages it out here. Yes, we talk. We talk about her children, and patterns, and recipes. Yes, I don't know what I would do for company if it wasn't for Mrs. Blainey.”

My grandfather set down his cup and saucer.

“Don't go!” she cried. She did not even try to cover over her astonishing plea. She was almost weeping. “Don't go.”

“Well,” said my grandfather uneasily, “well, if you've got it there already in the pot, why maybe I will take just another half a cup.”

They chatted for a while. She asked him questions about his family life, his wife, his other children, and more about the Vinsons and the missing Ned. Then again she said, “How I yearn to see a woman! One with a big soft bosom I could lay my head on and cry.”

“Ain't your friend Mrs. Blainey the kind you can tell your troubles to?” said my grandfather. “Don't you all ever have yourselves a good cry together?”

“Oh, Mr. Ordway!” she then cried, almost screamed, “there ain't no Mrs. Blainey! I made her up!”

She had gotten so lonesome, she said, by herself in the house all day long with no one to talk to, listening to the wind blow. She had fallen into a make-believe. She invented a neighbor for herself, a woman from back home, someone from a real nice family; that was how she had given her the name Blainey, for she remembered there was a real high-class old family back in Clarksville by that name. “She would come over and visit with me in the afternoons and we would talk, lady-talk, you know—about fashions and cooking and flower gardening. Oh, it got so I even give her a made-up daughter at school back in the east and she would come over and read me her latest letter from her daughter. But I'm not crazy, Mr. Ordway. I know there is no Mrs. Blainey. Sometimes we'll be talking, she and I, and a storm blows up and the window lights go dark and I catch a glimpse of myself in the glass, talking to myself in an empty house, and I think, you're losing your mind, there's nobody here but you. But I'm not losing my mind, I'm just so lonesome! I look at that chair, the one you're sitting in now, and I can see plain enough there's nobody there. There's no Mrs. Blainey. Oh, how I wish there was! It would make all the difference to me. I sit by the window all through the afternoon—I ought to be cleaning up this dirty house, trying to fix a little different supper for poor Phil—but I sit here looking out, looking at nothing and listening, and I start seeing things out there: houses, streets, lawns of grass, wagons and teams and people. It's only make-believe, I know, but I keep looking and I see it all, people coming to call, and I hear them laughing and talking. Then it all vanishes. It's all a mirage, and the sound I hear is nothing but the wind. …”

In the letter he had been writing home these past few nights my grandfather had said, “I like it out here. The towns are all new, some would say raw and ugly, but I just say new and leave it at that. They look like children's alphabet blocks bunched together on the floor.” He enjoyed the sense of being present at the beginning. Like every son, or every son of a son of the old South, he had had enough history. The less history a place had, the happier its past. The cemeteries out here were not yet crowded. Nobody seemed to have any ancestors out here, they were the first. “But,” he added, in closing his letter that night, “it is a hard life on women.”

It was a hard life on an a man too; or at least it was on him, as he soon began to feel. Like St. Anthony in the desert, my poor grandfather, during those days and nights he spent alone on the desolate West Texas plains, was beset by all seven of the deadly sins, come to tempt him from his vows. Gluttony. How he used to long, as he sat eating sardines and Vienna sausages out of little tins, for some of my grandmother's good home cooking! Sloth. How he yearned to be back home beside the fire in his old rocker, wearing his old run-over felt carpet slippers, waited on by his wife and daughters. Avarice too. He really ought to be home. Here it was now into February. Every day he wasted out here not getting ready for spring planting was costing him money. Despair. He would never find Will Vinson. That was perfectly plain now. He would never see his boy again. There wasn't a hope left in the world that he would. Envy. The sight of other men (the few men to be seen out here) with their little boys holding their hands made him gnaw the dry bone of envy. Lechery, above all. For though his desires were perfectly licit, the temptress who came to him by night intent on weakening his resolution and turning him aside from his quest being his own lawfully wedded wife, this only made her all the harder to resist. Against all of these things he had to struggle, and since he had never been very strong in his faith, it was uphill all the way.

“Watch him, Jake! Watch him, boy. He's slippery. Oh, look out! Look out! Oh! Oh! Oooooh! Well, all right, come on, get up. All right now, go for him. There! There! That's the way, Jake, boy! You've got him down, now stomp on him!”

It was a real good fight. Two heavyweights, and very evenly matched. It would have drawn everybody in Clarksville, and here they had not even brought it out of the back alley. It was being fought behind a disused shed on the edge of town, and only two men were watching. Only one of them was doing any cheering.

“Which one you for?” said he to my grandfather, apparently ready to start another bout if he did not like the answer he got.

“Oh, why, I'm a stranger here,” my grandfather replied. “I don't know either of them.”

“Hell, that don't make no difference, you can still enjoy yourself. The one on top right now is named Jake, and the other one's name is Chuck. Root for Jake. Give it to him, Jake! 'Attaboy! Hold him down till he hollers hogtie!”

“What's it all about? What are they fighting over?” asked my grandfather.

“Him,” said the man, pointing to the other spectator, a smooth-faced youth who stood to the side, looking on the fracas with a placid, disinterested gaze.

“Why, what did he do?”

“Oh, he didn't do nothing. They're fighting over him.”

“Well, why?”

“Tell you when it's over. Oooh, Jake! Didn't I tell you to watch that left of his? Keep your guard up, fool! All right now, close in on him! Why ain't you rooting?”

“Why, I can't take sides without even knowing what it's all about,” said my grandfather.

“Well, stranger, I'll tell you. It's what they call a triangle. He was Jake's friend, his boy friend, and Chuck tried to steal him.”

“You don't mean …?”

“Yes, I do mean.”

“Well!” said my grandfather. “Well! Hmm. I'd heard of that, but frankly I never believed it.”

“Oh, it happens all right, and not uncommon out here on the range. No women, you see. And then some of the boys seem to acquire a taste for it and come to prefer it to the real thing. And if you was to see some of the women that's available you wouldn't hardly wonder. Incidentally, I'm married. Get him, Jake! 'At's the way, Jake, boy!”

My grandfather shook his head. Strange places bred strange ways. But he had learned in his travels to be circumspect in criticizing the customs of people he fell amongst, so he confined himself to the observation that this was not what he had always thought of when he thought of cowboys. “I suppose,” he said, “that one of them sort of fellows must come in for a good deal of bullyragging from the other men?”

“Ya-as,” his new acquaintance drawled, “if you'd like your jaw broke, why, just sashay over there and wag your wrist at either one of them.”

My grandfather regarded the scene. The two were charging one another and colliding with a leathery thud, like two range bulls locking horns over a heifer.

“I wouldn't jump to the conclusion if I was you,” said his friend, “that either of them boys is any pantywaist.”

“I see what you mean,” said my grandfather.

After the fight was over and Chuck and the contested youth had ridden off together into the sunset, my grandfather was told over a drink in the saloon by his new acquaintance, “Mister, you've come to the wrong place to look for a man on the lam. Everybody more or less is on the lam out here.

“Let me give you an illustration of what you're up against. See that fellow down there at the far end of the counter? About as close a friend as I've got. Name's Bill. Bill what? Couldn't tell you. Where's he from? Well, I've been riding with Bill for going on ten years now, but I don't know nothing about him. Never asked. You ask him about me he'll tell you the same. Now it just happens that I was born about ten miles north of here. I never come out because I had to. I haven't got anything in particular to hide, and I wouldn't mind telling Bill my surname. It may be the same with him for all I know. But he's never going to tell me his name and I sure as hell ain't going to ask him. Out here a man's name is his business. So there's a very good chance your man is in these parts, but finding him is not going to be easy. We got lots of Will Vinsons of one sort or another out here, and they all stick together.”

So my grandfather began to wise up. He grew a disguise, a beard as kinky as karakul and a big soup-strainer mustache. “Guess who this is hiding behind the shrubbery?” is written across the back of a photograph which he sent home from out there at this time. A good question. It was not Sam Ordway, it was Samuel Hathaway hiding back there. Or Ridgeway. Or Holloway. Or Sidney Latimer. Or Thomas Mabry.

Or Sam Vinson. …

Come Saturday he tried always to find himself in a town, for that was the day the farmers and ranchers and cowhands flocked in from the surrounding countryside. He would check into the hotel, if the place had a hotel, on Friday, giving as his name one of the above, and he would pass the afternoon and evening seeking out drummers, surveyors, railroad men, peddlers, buying postage stamps he did not need and drinking alkaline coffee so as to strike up conversations with waiters and postmasters, all whose work brought them into contact with people. He was out in the town early the next morning, hanging around the market square as the country folks came in, or the depot, if the town had one, or the stock auction ring or the saloon or the domino parlor or on the curb of the courthouse, wherever men collected, posing as a cattle buyer or as a man scouting out the land for a place to settle in. When he overheard men speaking of some community that he had missed, he would break in boldly, saying, “Excuse me, gentlemen. I couldn't help overhearing you all mention Scattercreek. You all from out that way, I take it.” They would look him coldly up and down and would answer not a word. He was already on thin ice. He talked fast. “I'm trying,” he would say, dropping his voice to just above a whisper, “to locate my brother.”