The Ordways (4 page)

There was Inez Ordway, my grandfather's second cousin. One of her babies was eaten alive by a sow. For days the poor distraught mother refused to accept the fact and went about searching for her child in unlikely places and calling its name, asking the neighbors and even passing strangers if they had seen it. Then her mind cracked and gave way. She was hopelessly insane for months, never fully recovered. She would hum tunelessly without stop, even in church. Another baby was universally prescribed for her, but after the calamity she could never have another. In her later years she came to fancy that she herself was her own child, her own mother.

Then there was Dorcas Ordway. Listening to my grandfather recount her pathetic history, I used to thrill with indignation. The man she had been about to marry was shot dead on the very church steps by the suitor whom Dorcas had rejected for him. Within a week the killer was shot down by a kinsman of the slain man. Instead of being pitied, Dorcas Ordway was blamed by the community, led on by the women who had always envied her beauty, for these acts of madness which had cost the lives of two of its young men. She was accused of having cast a spell over them. Bitterest of all were the mother and sisters of her bridegroom. Cursed and shunned when she went out, she kept to the house. It became the rule, whenever a cow went prematurely dry or a person fell mysteriously ill, to expect signs painted on their door, rocks thrown through the windows. Her old father braved these attacks as well as he could, and her brothers fought many fights in her defense. Dorcas Ordway wasted away and died of unhappiness at the age of twenty-eight. A revulsion of feeling thereupon swept the community, all of whom came penitent and ashamed to her funeral. “You have hounded her into the grave with your unkindness,” said her father as the dirt was being shoveled in upon her. “May God forgive you. I never will, and I hope and pray that your consciences, if you have got any, will never stop tormenting you until you are all where my poor dear girl is now.”

In the entire history of the Ordways only Willis, my great-grandfather's eldest brother, was ever musical. Though no one had told him, he knew the name for a fiddle the first time he ever saw one, and how it was to be held and bowed. He could play any instrument, sang like a bird. Hearing him, they would ask what was that lovely tune, they could not remember ever hearing it before, and Willis would blush and admit that it was something he himself had just made up. Willis Ordway, born frail, died at twenty-three of galloping consumption. Only then did they realize that they had had another Stephen Foster in their midst. They tried to recall, to preserve his songs. In vain. They were too unmusical to reproduce them, and all were lost to the world forever.

But these were distant kin, and all that was long ago and far away, and nothing lasts forever, not even unexpiated wrong. Time redresses many grievances, the rest it wears out in sheer weariness, and even the most vexed and ill-used wraith lies down at last with a sigh—especially if removed to a second grave far to the west of the scenes of its unhappiness. Ours, like the lettering on their tombstones (also transported from Tennessee by my great-grandfather), grew dimmer with each passing year. Their characters flattened by time like flowers pressed between the pages of a book, they had become types, useful to point a moral, but powerless to scare. Progress and enlightenment, by rendering so needless their fates, so old-fashioned their attitudes and stances, had made them all quaint, slightly unreal, even faintly comical. Disappointed lovers nowadays seldom shot their rivals, certainly not with such a melodramatic flair for the setting. Today's tough-minded young women seldom perished of community opinion, nor did their fathers make brave speeches at their biers. The eating of an infant by a hog was horrifying, but it was too grotesquely rural to affright the modern mind, even the modern child's mind. These old ghosts had accepted the changes in the world, and no longer harrowed their kin.

The custom was for friends to assist one another at these family seances, in session throughout the graveyard that day. One rested from his labors by dropping in on others' plots, lending a few minutes' help with the weeding, and leaving behind a little wreath of remembrances of their dead. Something amusing, in a respectful way, by preference, or else sweetly sad—some saying or doing which revealed an endearing bias of character, or, overlooking all faults, which trained a light on the good side of his or her nature, something to bring a smile to the lips, followed by a meditative sigh. This my grandmother did—spent the entire morning doing, in fact, dispensing consolation wherever she went. My grandmother had few living enemies, no dead ones. She buried her enmity with the person who had earned it, and never afterwards could be brought to speak an unkind word of him. For her the good which men did lived after them, the evil lay interred with their bones. To one family on her round of visits she would recall some small characteristic act of kindness which she had once received at their mother's hands, sinking all mention of a long-standing feud between them, and would say, if any of us remonstrated with her afterwards for her hypocrisy, “Mavis Mahaffey and I may have had our little differences. But I was no doubt as much in the wrong as she was” (a concession which you needed to be dead in order to win from my grandmother). “In any case, I no longer even remember what the quarrel was about. She was a good wife and mother and an excellent housekeeper, and for my part, if the Lord forgives Mavis then I certainly do.” Cowardly herself—or so, despite having borne ten children in a farmhouse bedroom attended by a doctor whose preparedness for emergency consisted of eighteen months' training at a frontier medical academy fifty years before, she believed—she admired silent endurance of pain, and on graveyard working day liked to recall to survivors the patience and the fortitude with which their departed had sustained the illnesses which claimed them at the last. She would gladden a lonely widower (a class towards which she felt especially drawn) with praise of his dead wife, and stooping unseen, would pluck from her grave the one weed which he had overlooked, as during a sick call she might have plucked a loose thread from her invalid friend's skirt.

Repaying us these courtesy calls was not so easy for the friends of our family. None of course had known any of those old long-dead Tennessee Ordways, nor the tenant of our smallest grave (who would have made such a suitable text for the sort of homilies that were wanted that day), little Dexter Ordway, my grandfather's brother, who on the ninth of October 1863 had been recalled to heaven at the age of five. Agatha the Unwept was still remembered by many, but hers was a ghost deemed best left to lie. Some few professed to be able to recall my grandfather's sister Helen; but as she had died at twenty-six, and had been so self-effacing as hardly to have any character of her own, they could only nod over her grave, remember her devotion to her poor father and her usefulness to her mother, and sigh over the brevity of her life. That left my great-grandparents. There were still a good many old-timers who remembered them, but it was not possible to recount any amusing anecdotes of either of them, nor anything even tolerably melancholy. Only one thing kept the remembrance of Ella Ordway from being unbearably depressing, and that, an ambiguous sort of mitigation, was her own unconsciousness of anything especially hard about her wretched life. One might have admired her enormously, even have marveled at her adventures (I did), but those who had known her, and seen her wonder at their admiration, had ended by accepting her intrepidity, her endurance and self-sacrifice at her own low estimation. Her patient and obliging spirit would come when summoned on graveyard working day, as she herself had always come when called, and unlike
his
, would go away when sent; but it seemed to say that the afterlife was just as cheerless and exacting as this one. There were few solacing reflections to be drawn from her story, none whatever from my great-grandfather's.

From the time he settled in Mabry until his death twenty-five years later, Thomas Ordway was an all-too-familiar figure in and around Clarksville. He was a specter haunting the town, a reminder of events which everyone wished to forget, the symbol of their common defeat, an object of universal pity and of unconquerable aversion. Watching him, his boy leading him by the hand, drag himself along the sidewalk like a half-crushed insect, each slow deliberate step seeming to require a separate resolution and the remarshaling of all his shattered faculties, hearing the tap-tap-tap of his cane on the pavement and smelling that odor arising, despite the twice-daily changing of the wrappings, from his suppurating legs, men shuddered and turned their heads. Time passed more slowly in those days, brought fewer changes, hardly seemed to pass at all, and forty years later, standing over his grave, they shuddered afresh as that old lazarus of their youth rose up before their mind's eye. My grandfather, down on his knees tending his father's grave as in life he had tended the helpless man, was only repeating what as a boy he had overheard from them, when he said, “Better if he had never been born.” Even for me, who never knew him, who came long after, my great-grandfather cast a shadow (I am speaking literally) on my town, and I could not cross the square, as I did every morning on my way to school, without seeing it.

We lived across town from the grammar school. It was a long walk and I was usually behind time, often late. I was too young to own a watch and the bells of the courthouse clock were not much use to me; they measured time in gross quarter hours whereas I was either late or on time for class by minutes, and a minute was as good as an hour for earning a demerit from Miss Addie Dinwiddie. But I had my own way of telling time, at least on clear days. The square was my sundial, its needle the monument rising from the plaza in the center. My way lay diagonally across from the northeast to the southwest corner, and the moment I entered the square I always knew by where the shadow of the statue fell in relation to the doorway of, depending on the season of the year, Athas's Confectionery or the Duke & Ayres store or the Gas Company on the west side, whether to walk or to run, or, since one might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, to dawdle. It was instinctive for me then, whether betimes or tardy, to cast a glance up at the soldier on top of his column. High above the workaday world, attended by swifts and swallows, he stood bathed in morning sunlight, proud, erect, unscathed. But in the twisted shadow which he cast upon the pavement his rifle became a stick to lean on, the pack on his back a symbolic burden of pain and tribulation, and the hand with which he shaded his eyes to scan the far horizon a hand held over sightless eyes to shield them from the view of others.

Thomas Ordway's war against the Union was over almost as soon as it began. Hit by shrapnel in the first day's fighting at Shiloh, he had been blinded on the spot, and both his legs, which were never to heal, so shredded they had looked like boiled soup shanks. He had been a dirt farmer, had tilled the same small stony hillside plot that his father and his father's father had tilled, in Tennessee, before the war. In Clarksville he made a living caning chairs, my grandfather being put when he was old enough, which is to say before he was old enough, to gather and to peel the willow wands he used and to split the hickory splints. He wove baskets, plaited buggywhips, netted seines which were highly prized by fishermen up and down the river. He knitted: sweaters, socks, stocking caps. He became quite a knowledgeable man, and there were those who would have braved that odor for the pleasure of his conversation; but he took their overtures for pity, to which he was even more hyper-sensitive than to the repugnance he knew he aroused, and repelled them gruffly. Uneducated, barely literate, he turned in his blindness to books, and at night after Ella and the boy were asleep Helen would read to him until she began to drowse and lose her place. His reading added to the reputation which blindness had automatically conferred on him among the simple-minded of being somewhat of a wizard. Water-witching powers were attributed to him, but always out of his hearing, for he rejected the imputation with scorn and anger. His learning was fragmentary (which may have helped to make it seem oracular), broken by odd gaps, limited by the range of books available to him in the few private libraries of Clarksville at that date, and the fact that often the owner of a certain work possessed only three or four of the six or eight volumes of a set. Someone in town, taking the precaution to do it anonymously, had made him a gift of the one thing he was ever heard to wish aloud for, a dictionary. At first, instead of a key to other books, it was a joy in itself and he loved having it read aloud to him. But becoming discouraged at the number of words he did not know, he discontinued. His favorite reading was the Bible (which he was wildly credited with knowing by heart and being able to recite from any set passage on to the end), his favorite books Chronicles and Psalms. His greatest consolation was music—strange consolation, as even the sprightliest tunes saddened him—his greatest regret that he could play no instrument, nor even carry a tune (the family defect), for he would never permit himself to go where music might be heard, not wishing to spoil the pleasure of others by his presence.

He was not so hideously disfigured by his wounds as he imagined—though the first sight of him was always a shock—and the worst of them, that to his eyes, did not immediately show. Outwardly they were unimpaired, seemed in fact to have been miraculously spared by that shell fragment which had deeply gashed his forehead; and as his hearing, in compensation, had grown extra sharp, so that he turned with unerring accuracy towards every sound, it was possible for strangers to hail him, only to find that the bright brown gaze turned upon them was blind. The extreme instance of this dated from the time in Arkansas, on their way to Texas, when a chivalrous man on the gallery of a crossroads store where they stopped for a moment had offered to thrash him for letting a woman in his wife's condition lead their team while he sat in the shade on the wagon seat, not realizing until too late that he was blind, and never realizing that in his blindness he was ignorant of his wife's condition. Old Thomas Ordway was said to have been amused by the recollection of this incident, perhaps because it was a tonic to the pity, piety, and abhorrence with which, like the broken idol of a discredited creed, or as if he were the victim of a blood sacrifice that had been botched, he was generally treated.