The Ordways (14 page)

They were still half a mile away when the clatter of the wagon brought Mrs. Vinson out onto her front porch. My grandfather saw her and saw out of the corner of his eye that my grandmother had seen her, saw the quick irrepressible little toss of the head with which, as he had learned, his wife betrayed her dislike. Mrs. Vinson, her Felix toddling ahead of her down the flower path, came to the gate and stood waiting for them, shading her eyes as she watched the wagon's ponderous and creaky progress down the road.

My grandfather felt deeply obligated to his neighbors the Vinsons, and the coolness which had come between them since his remarriage pained and embarrassed him. It was Mrs. Vinson, whose Felix was at the breast at the time, who had taken the newborn motherless Ned home with her and nursed him along with her own. She had offered to take the girls home with her too, only Winnie, then barely eight, not only would not go, she would not let them take Bea, and if only she could have found a way to inspire milk in her own flat little bosom she would never have let them take her new baby brother either. Mrs. Vinson was one of those broad-breasted, patient, cheerful, tireless, almost mindless women made for breeding and bringing up children, to whom, as she said now whenever my grandfather apologized for always putting Ned off on her for the day, one more—she might equally well have said half a dozen—did not matter. During that spring and summer and fall when he was going it alone, a widower with a crop to make and gather and two little girls on his hands, she was forever sending over some baked dish or a dress she had whipped together for Bea or for Winnie or for both. And one day he had gotten caught up on housework and the wash and gone down to turn under the last few acres of his cover crop of rye, and had found the job finished and done. Will Vinson, incapable of accepting thanks for any favor he ever did you, had steadfastly denied knowing anything about it, insisting that Sam Ordway had more friends than he realized. And he had no call on the Vinsons. They were neighbors to be sure, but only of short standing, and prior to their taking the place next door down the road, my grandfather had not even known Will Vinson, who came from some some other, distant part of the county. He still did not know him, after all the man had done for him. Picking side by side in the cotton rows as Vinson helped him gather his crop, eating side by side with their backs against a tree on the edge of the field, sharing the doughnuts or the fried pies of which Mrs. Vinson had sent one for him, they called one another, if by any name at all, Mr. Ordway and Mr Vinson, having gotten started that way and having gone or until it became impossible for either to say to the other call me Sam, or call me Will. Vinson was a shy, untalkative man by nature, so for that matter was Sam Ordway, or perhaps it was not nature in either of them but rather a lifetime spent following a plow, hoeing, dragging a cottonsack over the silent, empty fields; but now he had placed weights or his already heavy tongue out of consideration for his neigh bor's grief. So to this day the only thing that either man knew about the other was the only thing which mattered to either of them to know about a man, that he could work and that in time of need he would not even have to be called on for help. There had been an extra-good crop of cotton that season, the picking and ginning and baling of which, even with his neighbor's help, had put off until late in the year, almost November, the time when my grandfather could begin to look around for a new wife, shortened the already brief period before next planting time during which to woo and win her. Again it was Mrs. Vinson who by minding the girls had freed him to go looking, and it was she who had made him presentable, trimming his hair and mending his suit and sewing on the buttons which, because it was to go courting her a stepmother, my grandfather felt shy of asking Winnie to sew on his shirts for him. All this was known to Hester; still she could not conceal her dislike of her neighbor.

“Now, son,” said my grandfather, “be a good boy and mind Mrs. Vinson.”

“Ned always minds me,” said Mrs. Vinson, accenting the “me,” as she handed him down from the wagon bed.

“That's more than he does me,” said my grandfather.

If she heard the remark Hester did not let on. But sensing that she had gone too far, Mrs. Vinson said, “Ned minds me better than any of my own.” To which her Felix, peeping out from behind her skirt, grinned corroboratively.

“We'll bring you back a play-pretty from town, Ned,” said Winnie. And with an uncertain glance up front, where her mother used to sit and where for a time she herself had sat as the little woman of the family, and where now her stepmother sat on the seat beside her father, “Won't we, Pa?”

“We'll see,” said he. And he again told Ned to behave himself.

My grandfather looked at his watch. It was just six. You had to get an early start if you were to get into Clarksville and attend to everything you had to do there and get back in time to milk again at evening. He asked Mrs. Vinson if there was not something they could bring back for her. Thank you just the same, Mrs. Vinson said, or rather shouted, for the baby, little Florence Ordway, had begun to cry again: she had cut her first tooth only the day before; thank you just the same, they would be going in themselves next week. In those days farm folks like the Ordways and the Vinsons went into town just once a month.

Then my grandfather flicked the reins and snicked to the team and the wagon lumbered off. The girls bounced along on the tailgate, waving back every now and again to their little brother. You could see a long way there on the edge of the prairie and it was a quarter of an hour before you went over the first hill. Ordinarily Mrs. Vinson turned back into the house after a short while, but that morning she stayed until the wagon was going over the rise and held Ned up to wave a last goodbye. The girls waved and he waved. And then at the last minute, just as the wagon was dipping down out of sight, Ned struggled out of Mrs. Vinson's arms and started running after them. According to Winnie and Bea, at any rate. Seated backwards at the tailgate of the wagon, they were the last to see him, and as the legend grew in later years, so they always maintained in telling of that morning, the seventh of May 1898.

A breech delivery, the doctor had called it in explaining the failure; the words often echoed in Sam Ordway's mind when looking at his motherless son. He had come hind-foremost into the world and he seemed framed, at three seemed almost resigned, determined to go through it that way. An awkward child, always underfoot, by turns stubborn and sniveling, with round reproachful eyes and a lower lip triggered permanently for a pout. He was a constant reminder of his mother's death, of obligation to the neighbors, and now he was a source of tension, unspoken but unremitting, between his father and his stepmother. But whenever my grandfather found himself losing patience with him he had only to remember that if he had lost his wife through his coming, Ned had lost his mother, and that he had gotten himself a new wife.

The one he had gotten was a good one, though she had her faults of course, like everybody else. Sam Ordway felt lucky to have found any woman who would have him, a poor widower with three small children and no counter-attractions. To say, though, merely that he might have done worse was to do Hester an injustice, and certainly it came nowhere near expressing my grandfather's appreciation of her. A better wife could not be found, nor, on this side of the angels, a better stepmother. She took excellent care of her predecessor's children and she did it ungrudgingly. If only little Florence had been a boy! Then perhaps she would have been a little less resentful of Ned.

She was a jealous woman by nature, a discovery which at first had rather flattered him, yet for which he pitied her at the same time. It was a trait of which he himself was blessedly free, could scarcely comprehend, and he pitied anyone who suffered from it. Alas, though he did everything in his power to spare her, Hester's situation was ready-made to exasperate a jealous woman, coming as she had into a house still redolent with the memory of a rival who was all the more formidable through having escaped beyond rivalry, beyond comparison.

He himself did not compare the two of them. One was one, the other the other, and they were as different as two women picked by the same man could be. Aggie, for instance, had been a placid and easygoing sort of person, seldom carried away and just as seldom downhearted, quiet and even-tempered in her affections as she was in all things. Hester on the other hand was as changeable as the weather, and required constant encouragement and reassurance. He could tell that his neighbors the Vinsons thought he was fonder of Hester than he had ever been of Aggie, and seemed to reproach him for it. He was not; he was fond of them in different ways and in their turns. And Aggie had not needed the open demonstrations of his affection that Hester had to have.

It had been hard on Hester, coming into a house already made. A woman liked to set up housekeeping with little things of her own choosing instead of ironing curtains made by the dead hand of the previous mistress of the house, finding on the backs of shelves months after taking possession scraps and tatters of things saved by the other, sleeping in another woman's bed beneath quilts patched from another woman's discarded garments, the very bed in which that woman had died giving birth to your husband's child, above all raising the other one's children. In the case of Ned she was not to be blamed for resenting a child of whom she had had everything but the joy. Without having conceived him, borne him, nursed him, named him, before her own marriage was yet consummated, stopping by on the way home from church, in the graveyard of which her husband's first wife lay beneath a still grassless mound, she had put her bridal wreath under the wagon seat and taken him, just weaned, squawling, from Mrs. Vinson's arms, home to the house waiting pre-equipped by her predecessor, whose dresses, waiting now to be made down for the children, still hung in the closet, still diffusive of her personal scent. The girls had ducked their heads and said hello, and climbed up on the tailgate, where they sat bouncing, clutching hands.

For Winnie it had been a demotion, going back to the tailgate of the wagon. She had sat, a diminutive replica of her mother, in her mother's place on the spring seat alongside her father, until that day. Already an accomplished needlewoman, expert at the churn, she had been quick around the house as she was quick at school, following like a duckling at her mother's heels, so that she knew without ever being taught how to mix biscuits, how to bake cornbread, how to pluck and singe and draw a chicken. At hog-killing time in the fall she stuffed sausages and rendered lard, helped make the harsh brown sudsless lye soap with which later, every Monday morning before she started school, standing on a bench over a tub alongside her mother sousing the heavy overalls and the bedsheets, she had scrubbed them up and down against the washboard until her knuckles were skinned and red, breaking off only to prevent her little sister, whose self-appointed guardian she was, from falling into the washpot where the clothes bubbled and boiled over a fire for which she herself had collected the kindling and toted the wood. Hardly big enough to lift a flatiron, she knew to lift one and lick her finger and touch the iron and listen with her ear cocked to the hiss of her spittle and judge the heat accurately before touching it to cloth. And so on the day following the funeral she had gotten up in the dark of the morning and dressed herself, and instead of going to school had started a fire in the range and mixed a pan of biscuits, set coffee to percolate, sliced bacon and put it on to fry in the skillet, and when the meat was done, standing on a chair above the stovelids, had dusted flour into the sputtering grease and added milk and stirred it into white gravy and had it all on the table and her little sister washed and combed and the beds made when her father came in from the barn. When the Vinsons rode over later to get the two girls and take them away she had met them at the door in her apron, her sleeves rolled above her knobby elbows and her hands and forearms clotted with dough, a smell of boiling greens and pork wafting out from the house behind her, and sent them home again. “Pa needs somebody to look out for him,” she said. “Ma wouldn't want me to leave him alone.” Thereafter she would get her little sister ready for school, to which she was admitted ahead of time out of consideration for Mr. Ordway's difficulties, even more for Winnie's, and walk her the two miles there because she was afraid of the Vinsons' dog and walk back home and take her basket and go down to the garden and pick the vegetables that her mother had planted, would return and shell the peas and peel the potatoes and the onions, then go to the smokehouse and choose meat and make her father's dinner and set it to cook and sweep the house and dust, and in the afternoon go fetch Bea, and in the evening help her with her lessons. “What about your own schooling, Winnie?” the teacher, Miss Duncan, asked her once when she came to meet her sister. “I'll catch up, Miss Duncan,” she replied. “Soon as Pa has found us a stepmother.” In town in the store she would gravely advise her father what things she was low on, and would frown when the grocer grinned fatuously at her over the counter-top. But she would accept his gift of candy, and coming home seated beside her father in her mother's place on the seat, holding on to her little sister, would studiously suck lemon drops as if she had but this short while to be a child in before getting home to her chores again. Then it was she and her father who did the week's wash together, while she broke off now and again to shoo Bea away from that washpot, which exerted a fatal fascination upon the child, and it was she who instructed him, pursing her lips in repressed impatience for his clumsiness as they scrubbed side by side at the tubs or wrung out a sheet together, and he would sometimes catch in those wise, already worn, women's eyes of hers a look of pity for him, a man reduced to woman's work.

Fall came at last, freeing him, or rather forcing him to go in search of a wife.