The Ordways (13 page)

Though it was hardly to be expected that my grandfather would still mourn for his Agatha after thirty-five years, especially as her death had given him the opportunity to marry my own dear grandmother, it went without saying that he felt the care and upkeep of her grave to be his responsibility, his duty, and that he had taught their two daughters to feel the same. So you would think; but sad to relate, none of those three ever went near that grave on graveyard working day, the weeding of which was left year after year entirely to the one person who might have been excused for neglecting it, namely my grandmother. In a man of such patient disposition, so forbearing, so utterly unvindictive as my grandfather, and in whom the day otherwise awoke a host of tender memories, this dereliction could be explained only by supposing that Agatha had been a wife whom he was not sorry to have lost. Still it was surprising in him, who took forgiveness almost to a fault, and who was ordinarily incapable of nursing a grudge even overnight. I loved him no less for it; indeed, I pitied him, for even a child could see that it mortified him to be unable to render the outward forms of honor to the memory of a woman he had once been married to, who had borne him children, who, in fact, had died giving birth to one of them. But, seeing my grandmother down on her knees unselfishly plucking weeds from her predecessor's grave (she did a thorough and conscientious job, leaving not one unsightly stalk), I admired her all the more. I agreed with the Maynards and the Claibornes, the families whose burial plots adjoined ours, who called her, to her face, a saint. I admired her still more for the frown of unfeigned displeasure with which she always received the compliment. Even when it was a case of being lauded for her goodness in remembering the woman whom she herself had displaced in his heart, and that was what this amounted to, my grandmother could take no pleasure in anything in which was implied the least dispraise of her husband. How many women in her position but would have rejoiced in the evidence that her husband had so completely forgotten his first wife? My grandmother not only did not, she maintained his fidelity to Agatha's memory to the point that sometimes she had to break off in confusion, sensing that if all she claimed was true, then he ought never to have married
her
.

Imagine my astonishment, my indignation, the first time I heard my grandmother accused, by her own children, my father among them, of jealousy of the dead Agatha Ordway! What could they mean? Had they not seen her, as I had, on graveyard working day, down on her hands and knees tending that grave the care of which belonged by every right, custom, and duty to others, whom she was the last to be expected to look after, which but for the goodness of her heart would have been waist-high in weeds, a scandal to the neighbors and to the whole community? Then I saw that it was a joke (a very poor one, I thought); my grandmother herself joined in the pretense.

Her children thought, as children will, that they themselves had superseded their parents' love for one another. Deep mutual affection, of course, they were supposed still to feel, and mutual trust—not to say, a mutual taking of one another for granted. Passionate love at their age was unthinkable; passionate jealousy would have been ridiculous, almost indecent. They were merely having a little fun with her.

Which, I wonder now, was more painful to my grandmother—to be accused of jealousy, or to be accused of it in a manner which made it seem a joke? Which implied that jealousy at her age was such an improbable, even such a comical thing that one might tease her with it without fear of being taken seriously? For, alas, my poor grandmother was more in love with her husband now than ever, though prevented from showing it as she would have liked because she too believed that at her time of life it was unseemly. Left alone with him now that the last of the children was married and gone from home, she was more than ever dependent on reassurances that he loved her. My grandfather, that gentle soul, that devoted husband, gave her all the reassurances any man could, but she admired him too much to believe in them. That is to say, she prized constancy above all qualities, and as he was her model for all the virtues, he was also her model for that. She knew that thirty years of living with another man would never have altered her love for him; she feared that thirty times thirty years could never abate his love for Agatha, who, having died young, and who being dead was placed beyond all rivalry, remained eternally young while she herself grew old and even plainer.

Now jealousy was simply not in my grandfather's nature. He was utterly incapable of it. He did not even despise it. Instead of sharing the world's contempt for that ignoble and degrading passion, he profoundly pitied anyone afflicted with it—or would have, that is, if he had known anyone so afflicted. Consequently he was incapable of imagining that he might inspire it in anyone.

Thus those loud sighs which she would heave at night after supper, when he was settled down with his copy of
The Dallas Morning News
(there was rural free delivery in Mabry now), were all lost on him. “Mr. Ordway?” she would have to say at last.

“Mmmh.”

“Mr. Ordway, if I was to die … Are you listening, Mr. Ordway?”

“Yes, dear. What was that you said?”

“I said, if I was to die—”

“Oh, don't talk like that!”

“But if I was to?”

“Well, you're not going to anytime soon, let's hope.”

“But if I was to, would you miss me, Mr. Ordway?”

“Miss you? Why, of course I would miss you! What a foolish thing to ask.”

“Well, why don't you ever say so then! Would you” (this after a momentary pause) “get married again?”

“What! At my age?”

“If
you
were to die and
I
was to remarry, you wouldn't like that, would you?”

“On the contrary, my dear. It's exactly what I would want you to do. I wouldn't like to think of you all alone.”

There the conversation would come to a halt. He would resume his reading, she her sewing. After a time she would say:

“Mr. Ordway?”

“Dear?”

“Mr. Ordway, you do love me, don't you?”

“Love you? Well, what a silly thing to ask!”

“You're not ever sorry you married me?”

He would lower his paper, and peering over his glasses, would crane around the back of his armchair and say:

Well, in fact, he would not say anything. For before he could: “Are you sorry you married me?” she would demand. What she really meant, what in thirty-five years he had never understood that she meant, was: Are you sorry Agatha died?

“My dear! Of course I'm not sorry I—”

“Then why don't you ever say so!” she would cry, and flinging her sewing behind her, the wooden darning egg bounding across the floor, would jump up from her seat and storm off to bed.

“But what did I say?” he would call after her, chasing the darning egg.

“Nothing! Nothing!” she would call back. “You never say anything!”

True, on one occasion his second wife had revealed her jealousy of his first wife in a manner unmistakable even to him. But that was long ago; Hester herself had remorsefully confessed it; she had seen what calamity it could lead to (though he blamed himself for that calamity more than Hester); he had pointed out to her the foolishness of being jealous of a dead person, and she had promised never to be jealous again. Hester's tending of Agatha's grave he looked upon as her little yearly act of atonement for that one old injury. Little yearly act of atonement it was indeed, but for a jealousy which after thirty-five years still burned with a flame like a blowtorch. None of her children suspected that what they treated as an endearing little foible, which perhaps they even sought to encourage so as to prevent her discovering that she had grown old and incapable of passion, was a nagging torment, and that she endured their teasing and smiled the arch and roguish smile which was expected of her while writhing with anguish that they should treat it as a joke, and at the same time trembling with fear lest they discover the ravages which her affliction had made upon her soul, as a sick person will dissemble the extent of his illness from those who love him.

My grandfather had his own reasons for being just as glad to leave the care of Agatha's grave to someone else, and never, as I have said, went near it. Thus he was unaware of one result of Hester's long loving upkeep. In selecting his wife's tombstone my grandfather had unfortunately forgotten the pressing necessity he even then lay under of taking a second wife and providing a foster mother for his three children, and in the stonemason's yard in Clarksville had given way to his feelings and picked a monument with this inscription, ready-carved:

Weep not for me, but be content
.

I was not yours, but only lent
.

Wipe off those tears, and weep no more
.

I am not dead, but gone before
.

In appointing herself sole custodian of her rival's grave, my grandmother, hardly noticing what she was doing, had encouraged the mound to rise over the years until now all that was visible was the top line. She had succeeded in fooling everyone but herself; for she, and she alone, knew that, like an iceberg, the dangerous three quarters of the verse lay below the surface.

My grandmother's one remaining wish was that she might predecease her husband. To get to heaven and have it out with Agatha before he got there. (She was to outlive him by fifteen years—too ornery to die, as she would say; fifteen years of agonized suspicions of how he and Agatha were carrying on up there in her absence.) For she was as certain as that she was alive on this earth that there was a life to follow this one. Certain too that if Agatha's childbed martyrdom were not enough, then the very fact that she herself wronged her daily in her thoughts would have secured for Agatha a place in paradise. She was certain that she herself would go there too. For though, unlike her children, and her husband, she believed jealousy to be a sin, and her own a very great sin, she believed it had caused her enough hell on earth to open the gates of heaven to her when she died. Not that in this she found much consolation. Even if she got there before he did, she was still uncertain what her rights would be. She foresaw the possibility that she would be given a shanty on the outskirts of heaven and have to rear all thirteen of their combined children by taking in wash through eternity, while across town Mr. Ordway and Agatha lived in a towered and turreted mansion like those lining Silk Stocking Street in west Clarksville.

The shame, the guilt, the remorse one feels for doing something wrong can be genuine and deep without in the least restraining one from doing it again: such was my grandmother's state of soul as she cleaned her rival's grave on graveyard working day. Having borne (in the same room) ten children herself, and come near death in at least one of her deliveries, she pitied the poor girl who had died in childbirth at the age of twenty-seven. A girl who, moreover, sinned against her only in having loved the man whom she believed the whole world ought to love as if married to him. For nearly thirty-five years her conscience had been in pawn to the woman, the mother, who lay beneath that mound. But for her resentment of him, the child whose coming had put Agatha Ordway in her grave would be here today, not—if he were even still alive—separated from his father, his whereabouts unknown. It was like Mr. Ordway to say that it was not her fault, that he was more to blame than she was. Like him too never afterwards to reproach her, to avoid as far as possible all mention of Ned's name out of consideration for her feelings, to relinquish to her, in misplaced trust, the care of Agatha's grave. She knew whose fault it was. And even so she could not only continue to be jealous, but could suspect and resent the fact that he had never allowed any of the six sons that she had given him to take the place in his affections of that one he had been deprived of through her antagonism.

PART TWO

The Stepchild

A
FTER
the long spring rains the road was rutted as deeply as the furrowed fields alongside, and the wagon, drawn by a lean, mincing mule and a flat-footed, one-eyed mare, swayed and lurched, axles groaning, tongue, sides, and dry weather-warped bedboards popping and cracking as if ablaze. While my grandparents, she clutching the baby with one hand and the rattling egg basket with the other, jogged along on the spring seat, Winnie, Bea, and little Ned, the dead Agatha's children, sitting along the tailgate with their legs dangling, were flung from side to side and bounced up and down like Mexican jumping beans. The Ordways were going into town, all except Ned, who at two going on three had never yet been taken, and all were dressed for the day, my grandmother in her good green calico, my grandfather in fresh faded overalls and a collarless shirt fastened at the throat with a bone stud and striped like the paper that a barber wipes his razor on, the girls in sunbonnets and full, ankle-length slate-gray dresses, high-button shoes, and coarse coffee-colored cotton stockings that gave them the look of a pair of miniature nuns. Ned, towheaded, whey-faced, solemn little Ned, also wore a dress, one similar to his sisters'; in fact it had been Bea's, to whom in turn it had come down from Winnie. In the wagon bed rode two empty barrels lashed with plowline to the sideboards. Underneath the seat sat a wet cedar firkin covered over with a damp white cloth. It contained butter, and as the sun broke over the low hills away to his left, my grandfather reached down and felt to make sure it was sitting in the shade.

In the lee of the hills, shaggy with pines, dogwood blossomed in white puffs and redbuds flamed amidst the fresh green of sweetgums and oaks and the pale inconstant smudge of willows. Below the hills the land flattened; covered now with bright young cotton, it seemed to lie under a sheet of clear shallow water. Westward to the right of the road the land stretched away unbordered to the skyline. No hedgerows separated the road from the plowed ground here, and over these fields now rippled the shadow of wagon bed and elongated spokes, of mule's ears and bonnet wings. A wheel would ride up out of the rut, the wagon would tilt, protesting in every joint, then settle with a crash which flushed sparrows and mourning doves and once a booming covey of quail out of the roadside drainage ditch. The team plodded on, heads bobbing. From time to time my grandfather slapped them gently across their rumps with the slackened reins and clicked his tongue at them, and the mare would half turn and roll her one good eye at him.