The Ordways (45 page)

At least Ned's coming broke this silence. The man himself was nothing that his father need feel ashamed to own; that much was evident on first inspection. This Ned, Agatha's son, her own mistreated or at least neglected stepchild, this as yet abstract Ned, had done well—better, for that matter, than any of his unstolen brothers. Life had not treated him badly out there, no need to torment herself on that score. Nor had he himself any regrets for what had befallen him. He made it pretty plain that he would not have traded places with any man. As it had turned out happily in the end, he looked upon himself as doubly lucky; he had had two fathers, one to step in exactly on the death of the other. In himself he saw nothing to sadden anyone for losing him. After all those years of not being able to mention the subject, my grandmother was startled, but very agreeably startled, when he said, “Well, ma'am, I reckon you are about the luckiest woman I know, to have had somebody take me off your hands.”

In fact, she was beginning to regret not having had the pleasure of rearing such an agreeable young man. Not the least of her reasons was her belief that she could have done an even better job of it than had been done.

All these things I have listed up to now only prepared my grandmother to welcome Ned—any Ned; not necessarily to like him. This particular Ned, whom no one could dislike, my grandmother soon began to like very much. In fact, he soon had her eating out of his hand. She liked his rowdiness, both for itself and because it contrasted nicely with the polish of the sons she herself had brought up—a contrast which did not, she believed, go unremarked by their father. His simplicity appealed to her. She did not like him one bit the less for being able to look down on him a little. The immaturity of his ways made her feel young. He flirted with her and he flattered her flagrantly—and flattery was one good thing of which my grandmother could hardly have too much. He noticed, and in the week he spent there, patched up and mended things for her around the house which my grandfather had been going to get around to one of these days for years. He observed that, being rather above average woman's height, my grandmother was forced to stoop over the kitchen sink, where so much of her time was spent, and while she was out one afternoon he raised it. When she realized it (two days later) she cried. The backache of which she had complained for years was never again mentioned. And Ned knew when to stop. Before she would have had to compare her own sons unfavorably to him, to reproach them in her mind for having neglected her. Finally, she admired his loyalty to Will Vinson and defended it against his half-brothers' and half-sisters' criticisms—not, I truly believe, only because she wished my grandfather to have a share of Ned's love with another father. But even more was she predisposed in Ned's favor by his loyalty to Mrs. Vinson (who, I have omitted to say, had died a year or so before her husband). For men who never married, my grandmother cherished a particular regard. Her secret hope had always been that one among her own sons would choose to stay single, remain at home. A son whom no other woman could make to forsake his home, which is to say his mother, and cleave unto her, was the kind of son my grandmother admired the very most.

“I kind of feel that my new brothers and sisters would like it better if I was to disown Mr. Vinson, so to speak,” said Ned to my grandfather once, after he had been back a few days. “I can understand their feelings, of course. I hope, sir, you don't think …”

“My boy,” said my grandfather, “whatever I may once have felt about the man, it was all a long time ago.” It was also a lot less vehement than this left implied. But to that day my grandfather had retained his sense of apology for the weakness of his resentment against Will, and while he knew that Ned had loved the man, and that for him to have said he once meant to do him harm would have pained him, he felt too that to say he never meant to harm him would be painful, and would lower him in his son's esteem. “A long time ago, and now all I can think of is that he told you about me before he died. I'm not sure I would have done it in his place. It means a lot to me to have all my children near me once again, here towards the end. You must not think that I expect you to change your feelings about him. I don't expect you to love me overnight as you love the man who was a father, a good father, to you all your life. I don't hate Will myself, and I certainly don't expect you to.”

Ned stayed a week, during which time all his brothers and sisters, with their children, came home to meet him, singly and in pairs and all together for a grand family reunion. On Sunday we went in a body to church. Though it was not Mabry's day, the preacher came out specially for us. To celebrate the occasion he preached on the text: “And Israel said unto Joseph, I had not thought to see thy face” (Gen. 48:11). Which, considering its overtones, was perhaps not the happiest choice he might have made. After church my grandmother took my grandfather aside and suggested that Ned might like to visit his mother's grave. Ned, of course, had evinced no such desire. With all the new knowledge of himself which had recently been revealed, he had trouble remembering about Agatha Ordway. He had learned that his mother was not his mother; to have to bear in mind that his father's wife was not his mother either was rather like learning the same thing a second time. “I am sure he would welcome the suggestion,” said my grandfather. “And all the more if it came from you.”

“Well, if you think so,” said my grandmother, “then I'll speak to him.” She had of course meant from the start to be the one. Having by now succeeded in convincing herself that Ned had come back expressly in answer to her prayers, she felt a proprietary interest in him, and she intended to offer him up at his mother's grave in discharge of her old debt to Agatha. She would have liked to conduct him there personally. Restoring her lost son did not settle the issue between Agatha and her, to be sure; but it cleared it up considerably, and greatly reduced her disadvantage.

“I expect he would have asked himself,” said my grandfather, “but for consideration of you.”

“He needn't have—”

“Of course not. But he can't be sure of that, you see. So it will be better if you suggest it. And then … well, maybe I ought to be the one to take him there? What do you think?”

“Yes, I think so,” said my grandmother without batting a lash. “Unless …”

“Unless what?”

“Unless you think he might rather be alone with his thoughts?”

“My dear,” said he, patting her hand, “count on you. You always think of everything.”

The time came for Ned to return home. He invited his entire family to come down and visit him on his ranch. All said that would be very nice. Ned said, good, let's go. They had not understood that he meant right then, that very day, with him. That was impossible. School was out and the children free, true; but that many people could not just pick up on the spur of the moment and set off seven hundred miles, be gone from home for two or three weeks. Men could not just take off from their jobs, shut down their businesses. My grandfather said nothing. Neither did my grandmother. When they were turned to for appeal against this madness, it was evident that she wished to go, never having been anywhere, and that try as he might to take no sides, my grandfather would like to go back out there once again. Another time might be too late for him: that thought could be read in his eyes, and that decided it.

There were sixty-two of us, all told, and we went in a caravan of fourteen cars, Ned and Grandpa and Grandma and I in the lead—Grandpa and I together in the back seat, Ned and Grandma in front—then Aunt Flo and Uncle Cecil, Uncle Ewen and Aunt Jewel, Uncle Ross and Aunt Edith, Aunt Winnie, Uncle Herschell, and so on down the line.

Roads then were not what roads are now, and neither were cars. We had that first day alone no fewer than five blowouts among us, three boiling radiators, a broken spring leaf, a stripped rear axle, and a burnt-out coil. In those days, though, every car carried a spare car in parts, and every driver was a shade-tree mechanic. Ned's car was new, a new Ford, a sedan, marvelous to me because it was his and because it was new and because the horn, with which he was wonderfully liberal, went
ah-oogah! ah-oogah!
Behind us Uncle Ewen percolated along in a 1927 Moon, and though I now forget just who had which, I recall such other defunct marques as a Durant of dim vintage, a Whippett, and a Star. This last was the caboose of our train, belonging to my Uncle Malcolm, the baby of the family, and as we made a long curve I would hang out the window and wave back to my little cousins Dorothy and Matt.

Down through Jefferson and Marshall we went, through Henderson and Lufkin, and Grandpa, beside me in the back seat, thinking of Will Vinson and his pursuit of him, kept musing aloud, “Del Rio! So that's where Will was!” He seemed to lack only one thing now to make his enjoyment complete; that was to have Will himself there to share it all with him.

What with car troubles and carsick children and frequent stops to go behind the bushes and the business of meals and getting through towns and stopping for soda water for all the children and stopping at roadside cafés to ask them to boil the babies' bottles and frequent herds of cattle taking up the road and detours where the highway was under repair, we were able to make only about a hundred miles a day. Which of course was about ten times better than Grandpa had done in his old wagon, and as we went through Kilgore at dusk, or rather at the hour of dusk, for the thousands of blue gas flares roaring upwards from alongside the derricks prevented night from falling, he asked what town this was, and when he heard, responded with a look of delighted disbelief.

We saw oil wells in the middle of main streets in some of those towns, the traffic flowing unconcernedly around the derrick. We saw whole forests of them, like trees blackened and branchless after a great fire. We saw them by the hundreds standing amid the cypresses in bayous, up to their knees in water, the men who tended them, a special breed of men, burly and blackened, going about their work in motorboats, the water thick with a greasy scum, so that it looked like a lake of crude oil, which it very nearly was. We had always in our ears the steady pounding of the pumps, the rattle and clank of the drilling rigs, the constant grinding of heavy truck gears. We saw capped wells working away in cottonfields that were sown right up around the pumps, derricks in front lawns on city lots, in schoolyards, towering like skeletal spires over greasy churches. Oil was everywhere. The roads were black with it, slick with it, from the drip of the convoys of tank trucks. Pools of it stood like mud in the fields, and roadside ditches ran black. It was in the water you drank (at a dollar a gallon some places) and in the food you ate. Touch something, anything, and yourfingers came back to you oily; touch nothing, they were oily all the same. It clouded your eyeglasses like a spray. The very air seemed oily. You could taste it, couldn't not taste it.

It was a world on fire. The smoke turned the day into night and the fires turned night into day. A garden of flames, like species of flowers: the pointed blue smokeless gas flares roaring upwards against the night like blowtorches; the blue intense heatless glow of the sulphur fires; the leaping yellow and red and orange of the crackling oil flames, billowing vast black rolls of smoke; near fires with men silhouetted against the flicker like busy demons, distant sputters like a match struck in the dark, small far-off steady flames like candles burning on the ground.

Towards nightfall I rejoined my family in our car, for in the matter of a place to sleep for the night priority went by seniority. The lead car, Ned's, took the first tourist home that offered, peeling off like a plane dropping out of formation, the rest drove on and the then lead car took the next, and so on. The following morning, starting out from the rear, Ned came down the line gathering up the van, and we were on our way again. Meals, after the first day out, were a picnic. For although anxious mothers had started off insisting on dull balanced diets, this was at once found to be impracticable, and afterwards we gorged on baloney and crackers and pickles and weenies and Vienna sausages and potato chips and buns and bottled pop and bananas and peanut butter and sauerkraut and marshmallows and other ready-prepared and portable poisons. The men of our clan had all pooled their home brew, which we transported in tubs of ice in the trunks of several of the cars. For though national prohibition had recently been repealed, our men scorned near-beer and three-two, which was all you could get at that time, and you could not get even that in dry areas of local option. Ice notwithstanding, it traveled poorly, and as many bottles blew up as got drunk. Every once in a while one or two or even three of them at a time would let go, and it sounded as if the car was backfiring. Those in the rear of the van said they were not much worried about getting lost, for we laid down a trail of scent like a brewery, and going through towns we were often sniffed at by lounging locals.

And so we made our way down through the state, taking turns, we cousins, in one another's cars, stopping in some town in midmorning and buying out some little grocery store, stopping to picnic at some pretty roadside spot just whenever we felt like it, singing songs, waving and shouting to everybody we passed, and playing Alphabet, getting separated and put into different cars when we quarreled, and instructing our parents on the historical associations of the places we passed through.

Lovely old somnolent Jefferson, that one-time inland port on lotus-choked Big Cypress Bayou, with its crumbling wharves where gaudy stern-wheelers had docked in the days when the Red River ran navigable down to the Mississippi and New Orleans. Where we crossed Trammel's Trace, the old Indian trail over which Sam Houston and later Jim Bowie on his way to the Alamo had entered Texas. Marshall, stately and plantational. Fragrant, floral Nacogdoches, sedate old Nacogdoches, so improbable a brawling ground and yet the scene of six revolutions. Then Navasota, where La Salle was killed by his own men. Huntsville, where old Sam Houston died, disregarded, dishonored, and despised. Washington-on-the-Brazos (off the route, actually, so that when, at the junction of highway 6, Ned signaled for a turn, everybody began to honk. So Ned signaled for a stop and pulled over to the side of the road and everyone else pulled in behind us. All the drivers piled out and came to the head of the caravan, saying, “What'd you turn off here for? You've made a wrong turn. We want to stay on 190. This goes off to—”