The Ordways (7 page)

Meanwhile Thomas Ordway lay in his bed in the improvised hospital secure in the knowledge that he was safely buried by now, and that the unknown soldier whose memory had been destroyed along with his sight, and whose breath he drew, would not be long in following. For he did not know that in the darkness (his own, his personal and private darkness: to the rest of the world, as he had learned from overhearing the conversation of two orderlies who were carrying away those who had died in the night, it was morning, broad daylight) he had gotten the two watches confused. They were indistinguishable to the touch, and he had had to hurry. While they were carrying away the dead man on his right he had put his letter from Ella in the hand of the one on his left and exchanged watches with him. Or thought he had. Instead he had returned his own watch to his pocket and the dead man's to his.

He also did not know that the brevet major in charge of the casualty records (he who had given Ella Ordway her husband's effects), when those who had been turned away at the cotton shed, then had searched the battlefield without success, came to him, took them to look at this patient, first warning them what they were about to see, and admonishing silence. Around this one patient's bed a screen of blankets had been hung, for as he refused to eat, he had to be forcefed: the screen was to protect the other patients from this sight. Around himself the man had hung a curtain of despondency which nothing, not even yesterday's news that his legs would not have to be amputated after all, could draw aside. No identification had been found on him, nothing but a watch of ordinary make and middling value, and he could not remember who he was or where he came from. The people who were brought to look at him one and all shook their heads and the curtains were dropped and they turned away, whether disappointed or relieved would have been hard to say.

The brevet major had argued with him—or, rather, at him. To despair like this was wrong, he maintained. Things would not look so black, he said, conscious too late of the pun, when he was once more among his own people. They would restore his memory, and with it his will to live. Under the loving care of his mother, sisters, a wife if he had had one, the shock would gradually wear away. If it was earning a living that worried him, he was sure to be pensioned. Nor was his own usefulness at an end; there were lots of things he could still do. All the brevet major's arguments met with silence. The young soldier's face never changed expression, that is to say, never assumed any: it was like stone. And so these sessions always ended the same way, with the brevet major coming out from behind the curtains and ordering the patient to be fed. It took three men to do it.

At noon that day the little woman who looked hardly big enough to open a sardine can without help pulled up at a farmhouse gate and asked the man who came out and stood staring at the pine box riding amid the hay, soaked with water to keep it cool, for the loan of a crowbar.

“It ain't just curiosity, mister,” she said. “I have got reason to doubt.” She heaved a sigh and said, “I ought never to have taken it without first making sure. I ought to have made them open it back there at that cotton shed. Here I've come all this way towards home. I can't go no further till I know, one way or the other. There ain't no getting around it.”

“Little lady,” the man had said, “it ain't likely they would make a mistake like that.”

“You wouldn't think so, would you?” she said. “But with so many of them, you can see how it just might happen.”

The women of the house stood looking on from the doorway, an older one, the farmer's wife, and a young one with a baby on her hip, his daughter-in-law or his own daughter come home to stay while her husband was away.

“I expect they just give you the wrong watch,” the man suggested. “Or like you yourself say, maybe he swapped watches with one of his buddies since leaving home.”

“I'm hoping that's all it is,” she said.

The man studied her for a while, looked again at the coffin, then darting a glance up and down the road as if afraid of being observed, and impatiently motioning his women indoors, he told her to drive around back into the lot. He opened the gap for her and she drove through. He went into his toolshed, emerged carrying a rusty crowbar and a claw hammer. He came to the side of the wagon and stood looking over the sideboards at the coffin, at the rim of its lid studded with bright new nails. He shook his head. “I'm liable to split them boards,” he said.

“I never meant for you to do it,” she said.

“Be a shame,” he said. “I don't see how I could help but split them with this dang crowbar.”

“I'll be much obliged to you,” she said.

Next I imagine—remember—see the wagon crawling along the road, headed east once more, away from Mabry, the one undersized and undernourished mule hitched to the tongue, on the seat holding the reins the tiny woman in the sunbonnet and the rusty black dress. Behind her a stretched tarpaulin forms a pup tent over the forward section of the wagon bed. The mule's gait is spastical. The wagon creaks, the bed rocked like a boat by the regular-irregular turning of the wobbly wheels, the worn eccentric hubs grating and screeching on the dry ungreased axletrees and flinging the light little woman about like a rag doll. Yet despite this shaking, her head nods steadily lower, and as hers does, so does the mule's. Then when a wheel rides over a bump and the wagon groans and then settles with a crash and from underneath the tarpaulin comes a human groan, she jerks awake, casts a quick glance over her shoulder, then shakes the reins and the mule starts and lunges into the traces. Gradually her head begins to droop again, again the mule nods with her, his pace slackening like a wind-up toy running down. Once he comes to a dead stop. For some time the wagon sits in the road, the mule asleep in the traces, the woman asleep on the seat. Then she comes awake, casts a hurried and frightened look beneath the tarpaulin, then slaps the reins, turning the mule aside and off the road. She climbs stiffly down, planting her small foot carefully in the spokes of the wagon wheel. She goes to the rear of the wagon, lets down the tailgate, fills her arms with hay and returns and throws the hay down in front of the mule. She gathers sticks and a handful of dead grass and carefully strikes one of her few matches and blows up a flame. From underneath the wagon seat she takes a blackened pot and from her pocket extracts a large black iron spoon. She sets the pot on the fire and slowly stirs the contents, the spoon making a dull clatter against the sides. For a moment, lulled by the sound and the flames, she relaxes the taut grip she has kept on her face, her eyes glaze, her lips part, and over her features spreads an expression of dumb resignation, bleak hopelessness. She sighs, or starts to sigh and catches herself, gives her head a shake, and the pot having begun to steam, lifts it by the bail with the handle of the spoon. She goes to the rear of the wagon, darts a look up and down the road, finds it empty and lifts her skirts and clambers into the wagon bed. Underneath the tarpaulin a man lies in the hay. A bloodstained bandage like a turban is wrapped around his head. His trousers are slit and both legs wound in bloodstained bandages. His eyes stare unblinking at the sunlit white cloth overhead. She crouches, raises his head, dips the spoon in the broth, and holds it to his lips. His mouth clamps shut. She holds the spoon there. After a while she spills that spoonful back into the pot, refills the spoon, and again holds it to his lips. His mouth remains shut tight. She lays him back in the hay, rises and goes to the rear of the wagon and climbs down and puts the gate up again. She eats, mechanically, a few mouthfuls herself. She scatters the fire and climbs back on the wagon seat, shakes the reins, and once again the mule lunges into the traces and resumes its stagger. The wagon creaks. From underneath the tent the man begins to speak, his voice worn and dry, like the sound of the hubs grating on the worn axles:

“You're a young woman still. After the war is over you'll get married again, a man that can look after you, provide for you and the children. If you loved me you would. It would be a kindness. I beg you. I'm not asking you to do it yourself. Just leave me something in reach, something I can do it with myself. It would be done in a minute. No one else need ever know. If you loved me as you say you do …”

She sits erect and impassive on the wagon seat, bouncing and swaying violently with the motion, dry-eyed, her lips set, shaking her head, turning finally to say, “Hush, now. We're coming to some people on the road. You don't want them to hear you taking on thisaway. Try to rest. It won't be much longer now before we're home. Ssh. Hush, now. Just lie quiet and try to get a little sleep.” At the word “sleep” her own eyes close longingly. But when shortly the road begins to climb, she gets down from the seat (as if her weight made any difference) and walks alongside the slowly turning, grating wagon wheel.

Women must feed us. At the breast, with the spoon, at table. Food is their medium, their meaning; rejection of it therefore strikes at their deepest urge, denies their function, and thus arouses their determination, calls up all their stratagems. Not only Ella Ordway but soon a conspiracy of all the menless women on the mountainside was bent on getting the invalid to eat. Never, even in the best of times, with much to spare beyond the needs of their own families, they nevertheless came bearing tempting gifts, whatever art and cunning could contrive of the sparse and simple materials at hand: baked bread, still smoking from the oven, which made the children swallow hard; hot honeybuns, savory soups, spiced meats. When it became known that his fast was broken every woman felt a share in the triumph, and a vindication of her kind.

When they were unable to aid her in any other way the neighbor women gave Ella Ordway a morning's or an afternoon's work in the garden or in the field, or helped get out the wash, knowing she was tied indoors. For she seldom let him out of her sight, never out of the girl's easy call. She did not fool herself. She did not trust him. She hid his razors and refused to shave him. She hid the knives, even hid her sewing scissors. At night she slept on a pallet on the floor in the hall outside his door.

Meanwhile the war went on. There were scarcities in the stores. Prices soared. With the able men away the crops were thin, and that portion of them which ought to have been set aside for seed was eaten. Since February, Nashville had been under enemy occupation. Rumors of Federal requisition parties caused stock to be killed out of season, the meat quickly crammed into hungry mouths before it could go bad in the heat. And with each such alarm the lonely women whispered among themselves tales of rape.

Ella Ordway got him up at last, set him to sun himself on the porch, and smiled for the first time in months at her accomplishment. The bandages were removed from his head. His legs improved to the point that he could get about a bit. And so it vexed her especially that just as his appetite was improving the food should begin to give out. Then she awoke to realize that in her concentration on him the children had been neglected, had grown thin as two shadows. She felt their round hungry eyes following her as she carried the tray into their father's bedroom. And as the food worsened he developed a convalescent's finickiness. Visitors, hearing that he was up, came to call. He dreaded being seen. They tried not to notice the smell. The war had come closer and they could not keep it out of their conversations. If they tried to avoid it he noticed the effort. It was going slowly. At the mention of each reversal he seemed to shrink, as if he felt personally responsible, as if he knew that the sight of him must be dispiriting, a portent of defeat, something which might happen to their sons and husbands. As his strength returned he grew restless. His capacity to do himself mischief increased. It was more and more difficult to keep him under surveillance.

Unleavened bread, yes; they were unused to any other kind. But it was not the paschal lamb that the Ordways slaughtered before the flight from Tennessee, it was the family mule.

The milch cow had already been eaten. That was early in the fall, when Thomas Ordway had still to be watched over constantly, could not be trusted alone with himself, the ten-year-old girl relieving her mother at the post in full awareness of what she was on guard against, freeing Ella to go out to the barn to milk, out to the shed to split wood for the cookstove. Then the scrawny cow went dry and no bull was left in all the countryside to breed her to. So Ella Ordway sent down and got a neighbor who in exchange for the hide and one forequarter came up and killed and butchered her.

But in the spring she was ashamed to ask the man to come up again, or even send down and beg the loan of his block and tackle. For he knew there was only one animal left on the place. She was further ashamed, ashamed for her neighbor this time, foreseeing that he might offer to do the job for her on the same terms as before.

The crows had settled thick and bold upon the meager stand of corn. They perched upon the scarecrow's head and laughed. The boy was put to frighten them off, came home crying with humiliation for the contempt they showed for his size. What the crows did not get went for cornmeal for the table, the poor mule got none. By February its ribs were showing like a washboard and it had begun to gnaw the wooden railings of its stall.

Nobody loves a mule, and a farmwoman loves no animal, except perhaps her cow. But she knows that upon the family mule depend their crops and their transportation. But now the Ordways faced starvation. Ella's pantry, her root cellar, her smokehouse were bare, no longer even smelled of food. One night after serving a supper which wrung her heart with shame, Ella Ordway made up her mind. Terrified of that long horsepistol which that brevet major had given her, she spent the following morning at the grindstone sharpening a new point on the kitchen knife which she had deliberately broken off. That night after a still more wretched supper, and after the house was asleep, she got up and slipped outdoors. She took from underneath the washstand outside the back door the things she had secreted there earlier: the knife, two raw turnips, and one wrinkled apple. She went out to the barn. She fed the mule the turnips and the apple and listened to him munching in the dark. She waited until he had finished, then as he nuzzled her begging for more, she felt along the bony ribs until she discovered the beat of the heart. She placed the knife between two ribs and shoved with both hands, then fled from the barn and ran to the house, where for the rest of the night she lay shivering on her pallet on the floor. Next morning she found herself spattered with blood.