The Ordways (46 page)

“You don't even know where it goes off to, I bet,” said Grandpa.

“Well, it goes off the route, that's for certain.”

“It goes to Washington-on-the-Brazos,” said Grandpa. “And do you want us to pass this near to the spot where the Texas Declaration of Independence was signed and not have our children see it? We can't do that. Can we, sir?” he said, turning to me, who had shrunk into my corner, seeing what a to-do I had caused.

“How far out of the way is it?”

“Never mind that,” said Grandpa. “It's educational.”

So although at first, like all Texans behind a wheel, we had thought we were in a hurry to get where we were going, we realized that we were not. My grandfather was enjoying the sights, and even before that detour to Washington-on-the-Brazos he kept putting on the brakes. It was a wonder we did not have a dozen fourteen-car pile-ups, the way he was always saying to Ned, “Stop!” so he could get out and have a look at a creek which he maintained was running north, or a mare and her foal in a pasture, or to strike out across a field and satisfy his curiosity about the workings of a new-fangled farm implement in use there, and only by deception and distraction could he be gotten past any state historical marker. When such ruses failed and he had his way, he would get out and go over and read the plaque, every word down to the erected-during-the-administration-of-governor-so-and-so, and would come back and take his seat without a word. “Well?” someone would ask. “Oh,” he would say in surprise. “I thought you-all weren't interested.” And he would leave it to me to tell them that Anson Jones had slept there. Anson Jones? Just the last president of the Republic of Texas. And trying not to look too smug, he would indicate that we might now proceed.

It came over us all that we had as much time as space, and after dinner we would take a short siesta, the older folks and the infants napping while the boys and girls romped and played and explored the neighborhood. On one of those days, after noon, while the women were shaking themselves awake and beginning to gather up the leftovers and tidy up the grounds and the men examined tires before proceeding and measured with sticks the gas levels in tanks, suddenly Marie, Uncle Ewen's married daughter, said, “June? June? Where's June?” (Not a girl, but William Junior, aged three, called June.)

At that the women all raised their heads as one, like a flock of sheep, and instantly began to echo the call:

“June? June? June! Where's June?”

By this time Cousin Marie was darting distractedly here and there, looking behind rocks and underneath cars, and all the other mothers, first making sure of their own children, were joining in the search.

“One of the children is missing,” Grandma was explaining to Grandpa. “June. Marie's boy, June. Ewen's Marie.” And he, still full of sleep, was saying, “What? Missing? What do you mean, missing? Where is he?”

Now the men had left off their chores and joined in. Various ones were trying to bring some system into the search, others were trying to calm the women. Just then up strolled Ned with June riding on his shoulders. Ned was wearing the broad grin without which he would have looked undressed. “Hello, everybody!” he sang out. “Have a good nap? Ready to hit the road?” From that time onward the Ordway women were less hysterical about one of their children repeating that old scare story of our family's.

Then we became strangers in our own home state. We began to see Mexicans. Once Ned stopped to buy fruit from one. Ned spoke in Spanish. My grandfather listened in amazement. That a son of his could speak a foreign tongue astonished and delighted him. At Castroville, west of San Antonio, we saw a European village, settled by Alsatian immigrants in 1848, who survived Indian raids and droughts, grasshopper plagues and cholera, and whose strong old
fachwerk
houses with their peaked dormers and long upper-deck galleries still stand, and whose descendants still speak a mixture of French and German with a strong Texas twang.

West of San Antonio we entered another world. A spiny land, all pointed and prickly, with plants like those sea animals that look like plants. Weird growths with names, reeled off by Ned to our gaping admiration, as twisted and fragrant and exotic as the things they signified: huisache with its lacy blooms, its dizzying scent, ocotillo, and maguey, yucca, greasewood, mesquite. Then we headed into the Valley, where, right on the border of Old Mexico, Ned had his ranch.

It was a real ranch, like the ones in the pictures. It had a big adobe hacienda, square, flat-roofed, white as a lump of sugar, with the butt ends of the rafters sticking out of the walls, which were two feet thick, and little round-arched windows without any panes. There was a corral with horses in it. There was also a pervasive and rutty odor of goat, and to everything, much like cotton on the weeds and wires back home, clung strands of goat hair. We were put up in bunkhouses, ate our meals out of doors. Grandpa followed at Ned's heels, and I at his, beaming at the way he talked Spanish with the hands. One day while we were there one of the goatherds, a Mexican wrapped in a serape and wearing a big-brimmed sombrero, came down from the hills bringing on the rump of his horse the mangled carcass of a kid. He and Ned talked for a while and then Ned said, “With all these extra hands here, it's a good time to get rid of some of these pesky coyotes.” So there was a big coyote roundup and all the men got to shoot one and the dead coyotes were hung up in the trees and on the fenceposts to scare others away. One day my grandfather expressed the wish to visit Will Vinson's grave. It turned out that the Vinsons were buried right on the place, a common practice out there still, as it had once been around Clarksville, where the ranchers lived too widely scattered to maintain a community cemetery. They went down back of the house and along an arroyo, over a rise and down again into a little draw where, in a cleared spot among the creosote bush, overhung with mesquite, were three graves, Will Vinson's, his wife's, and their little girl Grace's. On the graves of the latter two were stones on which only their given names appeared. So the question which had drawn my grandfather there was still unanswered, and he had to put it directly to Ned. What name did he intend to put on Will's headstone? Vinson or Ordway?

Ned said he had spoken to his two brothers—meaning Felix and Perry (one of whom lived in Laredo, the other in Corpus Christi)—about this. They themselves intended to go on using the name they had grown up with. For himself, of course, there was no problem. But as for his … as for Mr. Vinson, he was puzzled to know what he would prefer. And now there was someone else to consider.

“Who?” asked my grandfather.

“You,” said Ned.

“Oh, son,” said my grandfather, “I'm not jealous of my name, and if you think Will Vinson would want to lie under it, it's his for the rest of time, insofar as it's mine to give him. I was only born to it, he earned it the hard way. But if you think he would want his own back now, then for God's sake and mine give it to him. It has been a burden on my mind for years. I never signed my signature without thinking that somewhere in the world was a man—never mind how he had wronged me—who bore my name like a brand.”

When we had been there a week there began to be talk of our returning home. Ned announced a barbecue. A truck-load of half-grown goats were brought in from the range and placed in a pen. A Mexican ranch hand would grab one of them, deceiving it with a soft murmur of Spanish the while, and holding it between his legs, would slit its throat, severing its terrified bleat in half, cursing it at the last moment so as to work up a righteous feeling in himself. They were hung, the hind legs spread by a stick, and skinned. The carcasses drained bloodlessly pale, almost white. Twenty of them, they hung like a day's bag of game. I vowed I wouldn't eat any of them.

Fires were kindled the following morning and over the coals were stretched grills of cyclone fence wire. The goats were thrown on the grills, basted with sauce. The smell spread on the air and we were all drawn nearer and nearer. Somehow the carcasses now looked as if they had been born that way, dressed to eat. The barbecue sauce was pure fire and to put it out much
cerveza
and
gaseosa
was needed.

When we had begun to recover from our dinner and to sit up and breathe once again, we felt the stirrings of another appetite which our family reunions always aroused. We children, when we saw the first of our fathers come alive, would be already aflame with excitement. We would have to contain ourselves yet a while, though. We understood, young as we were, that grown men, at childish moments, must be spared having to liken themselves to children.

One of the men would get to his feet, stretch, and as he flexed his arms and felt his biceps ripple, the cords of his neck bunch up, and looked about at the assembled men of his clan, he would feel swell within him a sense of his own singularity, a challenge to all his brothers, those who once had bullied him and those whom he had bullied in his turn (and who now thought perhaps that they were ready to shove him aside?), and that other crew, the ones to whom at all times he felt himself superior, his sisters' husbands. He—whichever of them it happened to be—did not then say aloud, “I can run faster (outwrestle, jump higher, shoot straighter) than any one of you.” He quietly went and picked up a horseapple and heaved it. He watched it fall with seeming indifference—lest it be thought that he had put all of himself into that one—but drew a line in the dirt with his toe to mark the spot he had thrown from, just in case somebody else should feel called upon to throw a horseapple.

Now a horseapple is a heavy thing, and it takes a good arm to throw one. For the benefit of non-Texans, it looks like a rough overgrown green orange (in fact, the tree is called the Osage orange, though we call it the bois d'arc, pronounced “bore dark”) and to pick one up is to get your hands covered with a sticky white sap which quickly turns black and which nothing short of turpentine will take off. Nevertheless you cannot resist a horseapple; it lies there, a perfect handful, just waiting to be picked up and chunked.

But now, that one thrown gauntlet of a horseapple would lie where it fell, disregarded, and nobody went to pick up another from the pile beneath the bois d'arc tree. Only after about five minutes would a second man rise and hitch up his trousers and saunter over and look down at the toe mark and out at the thrown horseapple, and say, if he bothered to speak at all, “Nice throw.” Then he too would pick up one, or first pick out one, as critically as if he were choosing one to eat. And he would play with it, tossing it into the air like a boy skipping home after school with his lunch-box orange. Then, stepping quickly to the toe line, he would rear back and heave.

By then there would be a squad of juvenile umpires officiating down near that first horseapple, and the moment the second one came to earth up would go a yell—cheers and jeers—no getting it straight for a time which of the two was the better throw. When it was settled, “Best two out of three,” the loser would demand, and the winner would reply, “Many as you like. Go ahead. You've got a throw to beat already.” By then too a crowd had gathered, everyone cheering, taunting, the men egging one another on to challenge the winner. A chair was brought for my grandfather, who liked nothing better than watching this annual rite, delighting in the strength and skill of his sons as they engaged one another in trials. Soon word would reach the women in the kitchen (“What're they doing out there?” “Oh, showing off, them fools”) and they would come flocking out, shaking their heads and pursing their lips in disapproval, but with their eyes kindling with excitement, hope, pride in their own men. All of them, like my own mother, country girls who, having left the farm and acquired townish notions, affected to find these old-fashioned amusements countrified and embarrassing. Actually what they were embarrassed by was their pleasure in them. For whether as participants or as spectators of the men's events, once the going got good they quickly shed their superciliousness.

Yes, we had contests among the women too. Only among the children was competition discouraged that day. They were such spoilsports and graceless losers they were apt to ruin the fun. But we children did not mind. Footraces and such among ourselves were everyday; only once a year, or rarely twice, did we get the chance to see our parents cut up. And nothing tickled us like seeing our mothers kick off their shoes and shake down their hair, their faces aglow with girlish fun, poise themselves on the mark and run a footrace. And nothing thrilled us like seeing our fathers peel down to their hairy chests and wrestle with our uncles. We were excused, of course, from the impartiality which was expected of the grownups, and we shouted and groaned, and sometimes we wept hot hidden tears of filial chagrin, along the sidelines, and sometimes we got into fights among ourselves, disputing the outcome of one of our fathers' matches. I never loved my mother so much as when, red-faced, panting, laughing, she fell on the grass and rolled with me in a hug and I felt the blood racing in her strong young body and she laughed at herself for being so childishly pleased at outrunning her sisters-in-law at the annual Ordway family reunion.

By now it was pretty well established in the family that certain ones excelled at certain things, and were expected to win. But it was a decathlon, with all expected to participate in each event. Besides, nothing was ever conceded. Time brought changes. Champions were made of flesh. And now a new contender had entered the lists—one of us, yet not one of us: Uncle Ned.

My grandfather, when it was a contest between two of his own children, always cheered the underdog. When it was between one of his own and a son- or daughter-in-law, he always cheered against his own. My grandmother was incapable of this detachment. At such times she preserved a kind of swollen silence, and when required to congratulate a victorious son-in-law, did so with what was called in the family her persimmon-eating smile. “You didn't have to root so hard against Ross,” I had overheard her say to my grandfather when they were alone together later at night.