The Ordways (41 page)

It had been a long one, beginning early, at breakfast, when, getting up from the table, Agatha gave a startled cry as her water broke, flooding down her legs in a scalding gush. But this was known sometimes to happen (although it had not her two previous times) and, once the surprise was over, was nothing to be alarmed about. Shortly afterwards she felt her first pain. He harnessed the team and drove into Clarksville for the doctor, stopping by the Vinsons' to leave Bea, and to ask Mrs. Vinson to meet Winnie when school let out and bring her over also to spend the night at their house.

The doctor, in his wire-wheeled buggy, overtook and passed him on the road coming back. When he arrived home Agatha had taken to bed. The doctor allowed him only a moment with her, then, jovial and bawdy, shooed him out. On the table outside the bedroom door stood three stiff white bands, the doctor's shirt collar and cuffs.

For the next couple of hours, during which time nothing happened, he busied himself puttering about the barn and the barn lot. Before putting herself to bed Agatha had set out a lunch of leftovers and at two o'clock he and the doctor sat down and shared it. There was a cake which she had begun before breakfast and which before going to bed she had filled and iced. The last cake she ever baked, he had thrown it out days later, uncut, the icing gone hard and crystallized and cracked. Just as he was about to slice it came a moan from the bedroom. He knew that sound, that unanswerable plea, that undeniable reproach; he had heard it twice before; still it shook him, shamed him. He was to hear it again, and yet again, and again; after this time, up to the last, he cringed from it as from a blow in his organs of manhood.

The doctor, getting up with a smile, said, “That sounds like she means business.”

But hours passed and still the baby did not come. Twice he went and knocked timidly at the bedroom door and was let in and went and stood for a moment at the side of the bed, feeling useless to help, and each time she gave him a rueful little smile and shook her head at herself, as if to say she was ashamed of taking so long, of making such a fuss over nothing. From time to time as he came up to the house in the course of doing his evening chores he heard her cry out. He slopped the hogs and gave the chickens water, scattered oyster shell for them, though it was plain that she herself had done so only yesterday, fed the dog, milked the cows, fed the cats, prolonging each task in an effort to distract his mind and to deceive himself as to the hour. Coming up from the barn just as twilight was beginning to settle, he was frozen by a sudden scream from the house. As he stood trembling, it rose to a shriek, seemed to pass beyond the realm of hearing. Until now he had been able to tell himself that it had been like this, or very nearly like this, those other two, successful times. But nothing like this had he heard before. This was not what the doctor described as a good healthy, angry, fighting cry. This, and the broken whimpering which succeeded it as he ran towards the house, were sounds hardly human, wrung from a body tortured past endurance.

As he went through the back door another groan commenced, animal-like, unearthly, something to make the scalp prickle, rising again, louder than before, to that intolerable shriek. He bounded through the kitchen and into the hall and down the hall to the bedroom door. As he reached for the knob that terrible shriek abruptly broke off. He faltered, his breath coming in sobs, and as he stood there, irresolute, he heard the wail of an infant. Weak and trembling with relief, he grasped the knob, opened the door, and went in. The doctor, his broad stripe-shirted back bent over something live and kicking at the foot of the bed, did not look up. The baby commenced to squawl. His wife lay unconscious. A last tear ran from the corner of her closed eye and into her ear, over which her hair had been drawn back. She lived for another hour, regaining consciousness only at the very end, and then only momentarily, and whether in that moment she had recognized, or even seen him, was impossible to tell. Her lids fluttered open and an expression of pain began to gather about her mouth. Then suddenly the color drained from her flushed and swollen face, leaving it pallid and glistening with a mist of fine cold perspiration. Her lids fell open wide and in the depths of her eyes the light went out as though behind them the shades had slowly been drawn.

For some while my grandfather sat staring at the map spread before him, his own eyes glazed and turned inward, fixed upon that image of his dead wife. Then, just as the color had paled from her face while he watched, so now her face paled from his mind. There was no recalling it; he soon ceased to try. He sensed that his life was about to take a new turn, to close a phase and enter another one. “I must put you out of mind,” he had said to Agatha at her graveside; now belatedly that renunciation was accomplished, and Agatha passed over into that region of his memory where all his dead lay lastingly at rest. “Hester is my wife now,” he had further said to Agatha, and now Hester took her place. Rather, Hester at last took her own place. Her appearance now in his thoughts caused him a moment's confusion, so altered did he find her. He set his mind to visualize her more clearly, to recall her as she really was. But this was a new Hester, different from the former one, nor would she reassume her old shape. Outwardly she was unchanged, yet in some important but indefinable way she had been transfigured. My grandfather did not know this yet, but it was not Hester who had changed; it was himself. A new love for his wife entering into his heart had made him a different man; it would require a period of adjustment to this new self which had replaced his old familiar one.

Meanwhile his first, his immediate impulse was to get up and harness the team and start for home, for her, that very night, that very moment. With a longing so intense it passed into conviction, he saw himself arriving unannounced and saw Hester opening the door, surprised, overjoyed, standing back until the girls freed him, then falling into his arms. No words were spoken. Between them passed a new understanding which rendered words unnecessary. And then they stood back from one another and he surveyed her figure and saw its swollen condition and in upon his reverie broke a shiver of apprehension and dread. Calculating rapidly the date she was due to deliver, he vowed to be with her when that time came, to let nothing, nothing, detain him.

This resolution sent him back to the map still spread before him to search again for that town—what was it called? But all he saw now was a tangle of lines in red, blue, and black, creases and penciled crosses and blank unlined gaps. He was tired. He had better give it up for the night, he decided, and began folding away his map, and then his eye dropped down—down practically out of the United States and into Mexico—and there it was: Utopia. It was not to the west of him at all, but away down in deep South Texas, not less than two hundred miles away. His heart sank. Two hundred miles! That would put him six hundred miles from Clarksville.

He rebelled. He would not, he could not go. There were other claims upon him. He must get home. He was needed at home. He felt certain that could she have been appealed to, Agatha would have agreed that his place now was at home with his wife. And with Agatha's two other children, dependent upon him for support. It might seem callous to turn his back upon a place where Will was known definitely to have gone. But what reason was there to suppose that the chase ended there, that Will had stopped in Utopia any longer than it took to mail Mr. Bryant his five dollars? The trail, so far as he was concerned, came to an end right here.

He emptied his pockets for bed: his watch and chain, change, pocketknife, his billfold, and what proved to be a lone loose jujube, so fuzzy with pocket lint that it resembled a cottonseed. And the photograph of Ned.

He had last shown the photograph to a man just a few days before, and asked his old question, whether he had seen a little boy who looked like that.

“Like what?” the man had said.

It was then for the first time that he had seen how creased and cracked, how dog-eared and tattered the picture had gotten in his travels.

He had not seen this at once, though. “Like that,” he had insisted, and looked at the photograph himself. Only then had he learned that when he looked at the picture now he no longer saw it. He saw instead an image in his mind, an image which, oddly, seemed to have grown sharper as the picture faded and peeled.

How many hands had handled it now!

He remembered when he was just starting out, one of the first men he had shown it to, the joker in Paris, who, asked had he ever seen a little boy who looked like that, had replied that he had never seen any little boy who didn't look like that. Well, he had seen many little boys now who looked different, many who, though seen for only a moment, were no doubt better-looking than his, quicker-looking too. How was it that the Vinsons, people with children of their own, children whom obviously they loved, had been so captivated by that quite ordinary little face, had endured what they had for his sake? He still could not understand that. A little thing, short for his age, scrawny. All legs, like a newborn calf, and feet that were forever in his own way. Hair of no particular color, eyes, like his father's, set too close together. A nose that was not cute, not anything, just a nose. Not by any means always a good boy, but often willful and stubborn as a mule, with a look in his eyes as if the whole world was against him, a tremor in his chin. …

And there his child all but stood before him, and my grandfather knew at last why the Vinsons had been unable to give him up.

Reminiscing on his quest in after years, my grandfather recollected this final southern expedition with a vividness surpassing all the rest.

Torn between two calls, two longings, he set off down there with this plan in mind: to go just as fast as his footsore and sorry old team could carry him, to search up to the last possible moment, then, with Ned or without him, to sell his wagon and team, wire Hester for the balance if necessary, and buy passage home on the train, arriving in time for the birth of her child. So, pointing himself about, he drove south into another landscape, another season, another world, finally into another age.

For the first hundred miles, or in other words for the first five days, he traversed more of the same country with which he had grown familiar: flat, treeless, boundless plains swept by a steady cold north wind often snow- and sleet-laden, differing here from the land behind him in being divided between cattle range and stretches green with winter wheat. Swedish Texas, this was; a country of tall, thatch-topped, pale-eyed people with fair freckled complexions like buttermilk, hearty, laughter-loving, heavy eaters themselves and prodigiously hospitable. Then he came to the Concho River. He had crossed the Colorado, and would later cross the San Saba, the Llano, the Frio, the Nueces; but the Concho in particular my grandfather remembered because there he had been astonished by an unexpected, an awesome sight. The river there was banked by steep rock cliffs and along the face of one of these cliffs, near the top, in the shelter of an overhanging cornice ledge, ran a frieze of hundreds of savage figures painted in red, black, orange, and white, so uniform as to seem to have been stenciled on the rock, or as if in addition to serving as art they served also as the alphabet of a primitive tongue. They depicted stick-figure men chasing animals, throwing spears, running, and dancing a dance in which their limbs were flung out in X's. Though their colors had retained their strength, their great antiquity was felt nonetheless, felt powerfully in the wild stillness of those surroundings. Closer inspection revealed others so very ancient that they had faded almost away. Revealed too a story: the coming of a more sophisticated race, bringing with them their creed, and with it the passing of the people whose artists had scaled these walls to paint these pictures as their ancestors had always done. By the relative vividness of the pigments one could trace a great span of time between the earliest and the last, but in all that while no change had been made in their content or their manner. For centuries they had simply added more of the same stick-figure men chasing similar buffaloes. Then, in a manner crudely imitative of white man's art, appeared a mission church, a priest in a cassock, and a Christian devil with pointed tail and a pitchfork. After that, bare rock.

There at the Concho River the plains ended below brown hills in ranges piled one atop the last, and from that crossing overwatched by those painted figures the road wound up among the rocks. This section which my grandfather now entered, called on the maps the Edwards Plateau, was, and still is, a rugged, wild, and beautiful place, dry and barren, covered with scrub oak and low olive-dun-colored cedars, broken by rock-walled canyons in the beds of which rush clear, cold streams strewn with boulders. There may be seen armadillos, deer, and the clownish chaparral bird or road-runner, and though seldom seen, there may be heard by the camper at night the scream of panthers, the howling of wolves, and when he awakes early in the morning, the gobbling of wild turkeys. Among those silent hills as he rode along one day my grandfather heard a man singing, in Spanish, a sad and lonesome lament, forlorn as the cry of a muezzin, accompanied by the tinkling of bells. It was a goatherd, a Mexican with a face like leather, wrapped in a cape, shod in sandals, and his flock of silky long-haired Angoras. It was a sound and a sight which seemed to awaken in him some deep-buried memory, something retained from earliest childhood, perhaps the memory of Sunday-school days and lithographs of the Bible lands, or possibly not a personal memory at all, but some inherited sense of what the world was like in the childhood of the human race.

Undiscovered country: that was how my grandfather described that region, or described his feeling on passing through it. Some days he had driven from sunup to sundown and seen not one human being. From the crest of one of those bare hills he had looked in all directions and seen not a single habitation. Then he would go down into one of those canyons, along a road of sorts, just wide enough for the wagon, but which looked like a game trail that had been there forever, down alongside one of those bounding, clear, cold streams between narrow, steep rock cliffs, and he had the feeling that from up there his every move was being watched by slit-eyed sentinels in war paint and feather bonnets, but otherwise he was the first person ever to venture there. At first, seeing it with the eyes of a farmer, my grandfather had been put off by the desolation of that country. He had found it unproductive, therefore unlovely. Even to him the high plains had seemed drearily monotonous, but he was a native and lifelong resident of the prairies, and his first hills gave him claustrophobia. But by the time he quit the place he had come to love it, and now as he recalled it he sighed to think that he would never see it again.