The Ordways (5 page)

Consideration for the feelings of others could not keep him from attending Clarksville's annual Memorial Day services. There his wounds entitled him to the place of deference. It was he, blind and lame, who set the pace of the veterans' parade. This used to start from the square, where in their grays and butternuts, brushed napless, smelling of cedar chests, the old soldiers gathered to await the commencement of the day's ceremonies. There was still no monument to their honor there at that time. From the square they marched, limped, straggled out south, over the bridge to Washington Street, where they did a right turn up the hill and past the tabernacle to the cemetery for the speech-making and the wreath laying.

Intended as a day of mourning for the war dead, Memorial Day, in the South, had quickly become a day for celebrating, rather, the glorious cause for which the dead had fallen. Orators, for whom the occasion was not without bearing on the next elections, fanned more and more patriotic fire out of the ashes of sorrow, and they began to find the presence of Thomas Ordway there in the front row of seats, a ring of vacant ones setting him apart, with that fixed and empty gaze of his, an accusation and an embarrassment. So did the other, unwounded veterans. They had come to think of the day as their annual get-together rather than one to honor their dead comrades-in-arms, and to their reminiscences of youthful highjinks and derring-do they found that broken, groping, stinking figure a hindrance. They suspected him of subversive reservations as to the truth and beauty of what they had done, even of doubts as to the justice of the cause for which they had fought. They did not know that to those speeches which his presence alone was enough to render tawdry and indecent, no heart among them swelled more enthusiastically than his. That when a man has given everything to a cause he cannot disavow it, but must cling to the last to that which has betrayed him.

When the war memorial was unveiled Thomas Ordway was present, and it was this, his last appearance in public (he died shortly after), which lingered in the memory of many of our visitors on graveyard working day.

A motion to commission and erect a monument had been made, seconded, and, with one abstention, unanimously approved at a meeting of the Board of Aldermen several years before—in fact, at the very first meeting following the departure of the district Federal commandant and the return of the town to self-government. A committee was appointed to investigate and make recommendations. After a year's study they reported a wish and a will among all classes of the people for a memorial to commemorate the fallen and to honor the survivors of the conflict. That there was a general readiness to bear whatever costs were encountered. That, as to the most suitable location for a memorial, this question was no sooner asked than answered: in the most conspicuous spot in town, the center of the public square. The committee envisaged a raised plaza, or small floral park, circular in form and perhaps enclosed by a draped chain. A pedestal rising from the center. The horse rearing to charge. The rider with saber drawn, symbolizing the indomitable—

“Horse?” said one alderman—the original abstainer, and the only former infantryman on the Board. A man not born to rule, but who had become a power to reckon with in the town and county just during the past few years, and who retained a certain amount of the enlisted man's rancor against his former mounted officers. “Rearing to charge? I reckon you mean, charging to the rear.”

And so for some years nothing came of the proposal. For though overruled by his colleagues, the one old foot soldier let it be known to his former comrades throughout the county that they were being asked to buy a brass horse for a brass lieutenant or captain or worse to prance on in the middle of the town square, and the motion went unimplemented. And there the matter might be resting to this day had the westbound train not stopped one morning in the fall of 1884 and let off a passenger. This in itself was an event, the stranger was a marvel. He wore a cape, a furry soft hat with a wide floppy brim, a yoke collar, a ribbon tie, and carried a thin gold-headed cane, although he walked without a limp. He spoke a language which none of the usual half dozen men lounging on the platform waiting to watch the train throw off the mail sack could understand (it was English) and he produced a calling card which rendered illiterate even those among them who were not. As they could not make out where he wished to go, they took him to the courthouse, which in fact was where he had asked to be taken, though as they could have told him, he found no one at work in that vast edifice but one aged female, the town clerk. The stranger succeeded in making her understand that he wished to see His Honor the Mayor. She directed him to the place where except for one morning a month His Honor was always to be found, keeping store. By now there were about three dozen men outside on the courthouse grounds, and they accompanied the stranger on this second leg of his quest. The Mayor had been born to better things than keeping store, as had many another whom the war had brought still lower than feed-and-grain, and could even get a piece of his tongue around the name engraved on the stranger's calling card:

M
AESTRO
M
ICHELANGELO
P
ADELLA

D
ELL
' A
CCADEMIA DI
S
AN
L
UCA

A meeting of the Board of Aldermen was called to announce that the very first Italian sculptor ever to visit the town had come, at which meeting the old dispute between former officers and former enlisted men was settled at long last. An equestrian statue would cost five thousand dollars, an unmounted soldier could be had for one fifth the cost and in one fourth the time. The Maestro spent the rest of the day seeing the sights of the town. He climbed to the top of the courthouse tower and stood for some time looking westward. From there the railroad tracks could be seen winding over the prairie and out of sight like the trail of a man who has disappeared into the desert. So when he left the following morning it was back on the eastbound train. He promised to submit a design. In due course this arrived, was approved without abstention, and the formal commission and a deposit of half the fee sent off. A year passed. Then one day the westbound train pulled into the depot, uncoupled the last boxcar and shunted it onto the siding, and out of the coach came the Maestro. The aldermen were summoned and when all were there the boxcar door was unlocked and they all disappeared inside, from whence issued the sound of crowbars and the screech of nails being drawn, then silence, then hammering. Everyone came out smiling and nodding, and the next day the Maestro took the train back the way he had come and was never seen again.

A good many years were to pass before anybody from the town made the same trip (those who left went west, and did not come back) and returned to report that there was hardly a town of monument-aspiration size along the railway line from Clarksville to Atlanta—which was as far as that particular eastbound traveler had gotten—without its copy of our soldier. Still later, in the piazza of many a small Italian town, the touring descendants of that generation were to be reminded of home by the statue commemorating the march of Garibaldi and his Thousand. But at the time of the unveiling (which was three years after the delivery of the statue, one for the erection of the plinth and, prior to that, two years before the Board of Aldermen would give in to the fact that the only place from which a column of marble of that size could be had was Vermont) no one knew this. The entire county, black and white, young and old, was there that day. From the platform on the plaza, draped in Confederate flags, visiting dignitaries made dedication speeches lauding those who had made the supreme sacrifice, and those there present, more fortunate but no less courageous, who had survived the crusade. Then the rope was pulled, the veil came fluttering down, the applause went up, subsided, and as the first of many pigeons alighted on the soldier's head, a solitary off-key voice accompanied by the tapping of a stick on the wooden paving bricks began to sing:

In Dixie Land where I was born in
,

Early on one frosty mornin
',

Look away! Look away! Look away! Dixie Land
.

Often we were joined at our work by strangers. Along would come a man in a collar and tie and town suit who, after a glance at the name on our tombstones, would salute my grandfather with a “Good morning, Mr. Ordway,” in which the joviality was edged in black, and would pitch in as if he were one of us, as if he were that long-lost son and brother returning to claim kin and catch up in one day on his lapsed duties to his dead. Such feverish work could not be kept up for long; they soon tired, then they introduced themselves, said what office they were running for, and solicited my grandfather's vote. (Not my grandmother's; female suffrage had been won, but country women still thought it was not ladylike, nor properly respectful towards their husbands, to exercise the right.) For graveyard working day always fell just a week or so before elections, and candidates used to make the rounds of the country churches and bid for support by pulling weeds.

Then the children were called in from play, the women stacked their rakes and brooms, the men climbed down out of the trees where they had been sawing off dead limbs, the fires of brush and leaves were allowed to die, and between the graveyard and the cars and wagons streams of women and children carrying food plied back and forth like ants. Campstools, car cushions, blankets were brought, tablecloths were spread, the baskets opened and the food set out. This was before the days of luncheon meats and bottled cheeses. Knowing that one of these Saturdays would be graveyard working day, the women had cooked each Friday for weeks in possible readiness, and among those in our family there was keen emulation. There were whole baked hams and roast joints of beef, fried chicken, cold turkey, fried squirrels. There were great crocks of potato salad and macaroni salad and chowchow; brandied fruits, and pies of every sort: chocolate, pecan, lemon meringue, coconut custard, banana, sweet potato, peach, berry cobblers—each the best of its kind, the product of that one of your aunts known for that dish, and you had to have a little of each for fear of offending any one of them. You were allowed to pass up only the things your own mother had brought. When it was all laid out we bowed our heads and my grandfather asked God's blessing on us and thanked Him for His bounty and for bringing us all together again another year.

We Southerners are accused of living in the past. What can we do? The past lives in us. And not just that single episode which those who accuse us have in mind: the Civil War—but all of the past. If the Civil War is more alive to the Southerner than to the Northerner it is because all the past is, and this is so because the Southerner has a sense of having been present there himself in the person of one or more of his ancestors. The War forms merely a chapter—the most vivid single chapter, it is true, but still just one chapter—in his book of books, the bible of his family—which is not to say the family Bible, but rather that collection transmitted orally from father to son of proverbs and prophecies, legends, laws, traditions of the origins and tales of the wanderings of his own tribe. For it is this, not any fixation on the Civil War, but this feeling of identity with his dead (who are the past) which characterizes and explains the Southerner, which accounts for his inflexible conservatism, his lawlessness and love of violence, his exaggerated respect for old age, his stubborn resistance to change, his hospitality and his xenophobia, his legalism and his anarchy. It is with kin, not causes, that the Southerner is linked. Confederate Great-grandfather lived in stirring and memorable times, but he is not remembered by his descendants for his (probably undistinguished) part in the Battle of Bull Run; rather, the Battle of Bull Run is remembered because Great-grandfather was there. For the Southerner the Civil War is in the family, and if he belongs to the generation now forty or older, then he was in time to hear about it from the lips of elderly relatives who had lived through it. A man, or men, had fought in it who bore his own name. That very blood which stirred in his veins had been shed at Shiloh, at Chickamauga, at Gettysburg.

“Well now, the men who fought on the other side in that old war had families, left descendants, too,” says one of them, a friend of mine. “You didn't lose it without our help. It was our war, too. As the winners we cut a pretty sorry figure by comparison, no doubt; but please remember that though the poetry be all on your side, we
were
there. I heard those old Civil War tales too when I was little. Us Yankee boys had great-grandads the same as you-all. But we never thought the world began at—where was it? Appomattox? Why should you think it ended there? For Christ's sake, did all your clocks stop down there that day? My great-grandfather! May the old gentleman rest in peace, but what has he got to do with
me
?”

Now that is a question which a Southerner could never ask. He might wish to, might envy the man who can (while despising him for it at the same time), but he could never do it. He is conscious of his great-grandfather as a constant companion through life. He will seek his counsel in moments of moral perplexity, his guidance in the choice of a career (if the family tradition leaves him any choice), will borrow courage from him on going into battle and will expect to join him in eternity in whichever place he and the majority of the family men (the women are one and all in heaven) are judged to have gone. No, the clocks of the South did not all stop in 1865; they have gone on ticking; but they are all grandfather's clocks.

Scotch, in good likelihood, by blood, the Southerner has retained the Scottish clan spirit. It is inculcated in him from birth. At his numerous family gatherings the stories told are of his ancestors, who in the retelling are purified of all superfluities and become heroes, and like figures out of legend, beyond good and evil. The manner in which they deceived or in whatever way triumphed over their and their family's enemies is the important thing; that they may have been the ones originally in the wrong is lost sight of. Mark Twain is dead serious—and dead right—when he suggests that reading Sir Walter Scott helped condition Southerners to fight the Civil War, but he got the reasons wrong why this was so. In Scott they read of the exploits of their own clansmen—or the clans they liked to claim kin with. What is more, they knew from Scott's tales of the border wars that they were destined to lose—another inducement, given their contrary and quixotic turn of mind, to fight. They had an affinity for lost causes.