The Ordways (20 page)

Disarmingly open and full as it sounded, this admission of my grandfather's actually obscured the truth. That he had yet to learn to love his boy and long to have him back was true; but even at the outset he missed him more than he told me; he was always shy of displaying his deeper feelings, and in telling me the story he minimized his loss. Also he wished to spare my grandmother, even at that late date, any self-recriminations, and to spare me having to judge her. And secondly, he was not mad at Will Vinson, as he said; he was mad at himself. Will Vinson had merely exposed to public view a lifelong failing of his: a character too easily put upon, trusting, unsuspicious, slow to anger, quick to pardon, incapable of imagining that anyone could mean him harm. Both his wives had found occasion more than once to tell him that he was a regular doormat. “Without me around,” each in her turn had said, “you would let people just walk all over you.” He made frequent resolutions to bristle more, to take exception to passing remarks—in vain. Not until days afterwards would he find the barbs of deliberate provocation buried in his thick hide. He could never nurse a grudge, could be joked out of anything, always saw the other fellow's side in any argument, was absolutely not to be stopped from admitting it and apologizing whenever he found himself in the wrong. In another place this weakness might have passed unnoticed; it was my grandfather's misfortune to have been born such as he was in Texas. Insults and aggravations there are possibly no more common than elsewhere, but it is a place where a man, where even a boy is expected to find quarrel in a straw when honor is at stake. My grandfather admired men who could take fire at a spark, who were not to be mollified by anything short of blood, who handed down the torch of their wrath to their descendants, but he could not emulate them. Now, like Hamlet, he had had a cause, and been unpregnant of it.

“Will had made me look like a fool,” he said. “I had let six whole months go by not only without doing anything, but without even suspecting I'd been wronged. What I mean to say is, I didn't know it was me, personally, that Will had wronged. I felt ashamed for the world to see that another man loved my son more than I did. And I had done something else to be ashamed of too. I'd done something I ought never to have done. Something I was going to have a hard time ever living down.”

“What, Grandpa? What had you done?”

“I had gone to law, sir. This was something to be settled man to man, and I had gone to law! I suddenly saw the sheriff's failure to turn up any clues in an entirely different light. He hadn't tried. He had refrained from interfering in the matter until I awoke to a sense of my duty. If I was ever to be able to hold my head up again I had to do something to make up for that.

“While I am at it, though,” he said, “I might as well also admit that I was not really prepared to search to the end of the world. That was only a manner of speaking. Nor did I believe that I would have to. Putting myself in Will's place, I figured that if I had been running to get away from me, I'd have begun to feel pretty safe after about thirty miles. So I really thought I would find Will holing up somewhere just the other side of Paris. Of course, in those days Paris was the end of the world, as far as I was concerned.”

He set off after breakfast one morning in October, two days after his last bale of cotton had been ginned, with tufts still clinging in the sideboards and the cracks of the wagon bed. He left home quietly, telling no one of his plans. It was sure to leak out, but the quieter he himself had been about it, the easier it would be to return home emptyhanded. He traveled light, trusting to the luck of the road, the hospitality of people: an extra shirt, pair of socks, union-suit, a complete change of clothes for Ned, let out to allow for six months' growth. “I may not have any use for them,” he had said wistfully. “You may not,” Hester all too readily agreed. “But if you do, then there you'll have them.” He shaved, then packed his razor and strop, brush, mug, and whetstone, and that little French harp he had bought to give Ned on the day he was stolen; harnessed Dolly and the mule, put his grip and the lard pail with his dinner in it under the wagon seat, kissed his wife and daughters goodbye, clicked his tongue at the team, and lumbered away. The baby was crying, the girls were puckered up, Hester had that now-don't-you-worry-about-us look. He did not look back until he was beyond the railroad crossing, then he turned on his seat and waved and they waved to him. A disheartening thought arose in his mind at this last sight of his family: how long would it be before he saw them again? A cold trail Will Vinson's was by now. In bed the night before, waiting for sleep, he had said, “Hester? Hester? Hester, what do you honestly think? Do you think I'll find them?”

“Well,” Hester had replied, “you won't if you don't look, will you?”

Driving past the Vinsons' house, he wondered where they were right that moment. He thought of the six months' head start Will Vinson had, and Paris did not seem so very far away. Six months! How far, even with a wagonload of younguns to slow him down, Will could have gotten in that time! From the inner pocket of his jacket he drew out a folded map, unfolded a section of it, and spread it on his knees. It was a map of Texas. His gaze went from right to left. Past Bagwell lay Detroit, Paris, Bonham. Southwest of it lay Fulbright, Bogota, Sulphur Springs. He unfolded another, more westerly fold of his map and allowed his left eye to stray over into that expanse of buff-colored blankness on which settlements were as small and sparse as flyspecks on a ceiling. What a haystack to have to search through for one little needle of a boy!

It had needed no report from Bagwell to establish the direction Will Vinson had taken. Men went west. Especially those with no place to go, but rather some place to go urgently from. You would as soon have looked for the sun to turn around at noon and start back, as to expect a man striking out from Clarksville on a new life to head any other way. How far west he had gone before deciding to stop, that was the question; and revolving it, with the map spread out before him on the kitchen table these past few nights, it had come to seem to Sam Ordway that he was studying a chart of Will Vinson's imponderable soul. The question
where
Will Vinson was became the question
who
he was. Had Will the nerve, the daring, the madness, whatever quality it required, to strike out into those unending, uncolored wastes? Sam Ordway was lost. For as Clarksville was only barely in Texas, the rest of the state stretching west of his ken, so he realized now that he had never gotten beyond the Clarksville of his former neighbor's character—a character which had suddenly opened out vast and blank, unmapped, unexplored. How smart was Will Vinson? Not very, Sam Ordway would have said. But then he would also have said that he was the last man on earth to turn baby-snatcher and run off into the wild West. And how brave and how smart was he himself? Again, not very, he would have said. Brave enough to follow Will however far he went, smart enough to find him in all that blank expanse?

At Mabry store, where his road joined the main road, while he was lost in his speculations, the team automatically turned left, east, towards Clarksville. It was only after the turn was made that my grandfather woke up. He pulled on the reins, backed the team into his road, and turned them the other way. The mare cocked her head and rolled her one eye at him.

Once started in that unaccustomed direction, with that flat and far horizon before him, he wondered what would make anyone ever stop. The road ran straight as a seam. The barb-wire fences alongside the road, wires drawn so taut they twanged in the breeze, ran on and on, straight as the ruled lines of a musical stave. Housetops appeared, then disappeared, like the small boats toiling in the trough of a wave. Beyond, the sweeping treeless terrain was furrowed in fine regular waves like water rippled by a steady breeze. Tufts of cotton clung in the weeds along the fencerow; and occasionally on a barb of the wire, like a dirty tuft of cotton, underfeathers loosened from the plumage and ruffled by the breeze, hung the corpse of a songbird, impaled thereon by butcherbirds.

My grandfather looked again at his map, drawing his eyes back right, away from those desert-colored western sections, and gazed again at PARIS. Will Vinson was a country boy, like himself; on reaching, say, Honey Grove, after a week or ten days in a wagon, would he not have felt that the chance of news of him getting all that far back was pretty slim? Settled in some place with a name like Gober, or Pecan Gap, would he not have felt himself lost to the world? But one is never more scornful of anything than of a just-lost illusion, and Paris, which only yesterday had seemed to Sam Ordway the point at which a fugitive from him would begin to feel himself safe, now seemed the mere gateway to the route Will Vinson had taken. Bobbing about on the wagon seat as the team inched along, he thought that Hester had been very naïve in agreeing with him yesterday when he said he expected Will was hiding out somewhere in Lamar or Fannin County.

He was reminded of Hester when, unfolding a further section of his map, he found a wisp of hair lying in the crease. It was his hair, must have fallen there yesterday as he sat under the chinaberry tree out back of the house with the map on his knees while Hester gave him a haircut in preparation for his journey.

“It is certainly too bad,” she had said, “that you haven't got a picture of Mr. Vinson to show people. How will you go about describing him? He stood an inch or two taller than you, didn't he?”

“Who, Will Vinson? He wasn't a bit taller than me. Inch or two shorter if anything.”

“I would have said he was taller. What color eyes did he have?”

My grandfather could see Will Vinson's eyes very clearly in his mind, the way they had of sometimes bugging at you, and he could see that they were light. But light what? Blue? Brown? “Brown, weren't they? Sort of a light brown? Hazel?”

“Keep your head down. I seem to recall that they were gray,” said my grandmother. “But of course you knew him a lot better than I ever did.”

As a matter of fact, he had never known him at all. If he now called him Will in thinking of him, it was a familiarity which had come in the time since he ran away, had come through frequent speculation on the man's motives, his character, his trail, his whereabouts. Five years of living as next-door neighbors had only made it awkward for them to mister one another, without getting them on a first-name basis, so that they had usually just called no names at all.

Noticing the hair lying on the map, he had said, “What color hair would you say the man had?”

“Oh, dear,” said my grandmother, pausing in her clipping. “Just that common sort of muckledy-dun-colored hair, wasn't it? No color at all, really.”

“I suppose that's the way to describe it. Only how can I expect anybody to remember seeing a man six months ago that they wouldn't have noticed in the first place?”

“Mr. Vinson was not the sort of man you would turn around to take a second look at, that's the truth. He wasn't tall and he wasn't short. He wasn't fat and he wasn't lean. He wasn't dark and he wasn't fair. Just middling in everything.” There was a moment's silence, rather a moment's snipping, then she said, “How old would you say Mr. Vinson was?”

“That's another problem,” said my grandfather. “Will was one of those fellows that don't really show their age. Two or three years older than me, I would guess. I would put him around thirty-seven, eight.”

“You never were much good at judging people's ages. I'd have said he was two or three years younger than you.”

“I don't know why we keep saying
was
,” said my grandfather.

“Be easier to describe her,” said my grandmother.

“Who?”

“Who? Why,
her
. Mrs. Vinson. Who else?”

“Oh. Why, how would you describe her? She never seemed much more noticeable than him, to me.”

“That's it. Why, she was plain as a mud fence. Great big ears and—”

“I never noticed her ears being particularly big.”

“Men never notice anything! Now I could never take my eyes off those ears of hers. Made her look like a horse wearing blinders. Her eyes were green. Her hair was a mousy yellow.”

“Well, I ought not to have any trouble finding her,” said my grandfather. After a moment or two, “Isn't it funny,” he said, “how little any description helps you to really see a person?” There was silence for another few moments, then, “You know how I would describe Will Vinson? I would say he looked like the last man on earth to ever do such a thing.”

“It's a good thing you've got a picture of Ned, at least,” said my grandmother.

Yes, it was a good thing he had a picture of Ned. Though looking at it now, and thinking for the first time of actually showing it to strangers, made my grandfather wince with shame, so neglected, so accusing did that pinched little face look out at him. But it was a good thing he had it. For he would certainly never have been able to describe Ned. He was a little boy; when you had said that you had said about all there was to say. Oh, you could add a few touches; such as, that he was skinny, had tow hair. Which was to say that in any collection of ten little boys Ned was not the fat one nor the redheaded one, but one of the other eight. He had a photograph, yes; but would anybody have noticed his boy? The Vinsons had, to be sure. But then the Vinsons had seen something in Ned which his own father had to admit that he had never seen.

“Whereabouts are we, Pa?” Bea had asked.

My grandfather had pointed, and his blunt square forefinger, in touching Clarksville, had shaded Arkansas, Oklahoma, and Louisiana. Bea put out her hand, entranced at the notion of touching the spot on the map which marked the spot she stood on. She was eating bread and butter and sugar, and seeing her buttery little paw, her father had jerked the map away. Not far enough away, however, and that was how the Panhandle area, which was covered with nothing much else, had come to be covered with a grease blot this morning.