The Ordways (8 page)

The children bowed their heads over their plates and closed their eyes, relishing the odor of hot meat, not only for itself but because it relieved that other odor which they spent their lives trying not to notice, not to flinch from, because already his hearing told him whenever anyone averted his head in speaking to him, that odor which was the War and her childhood to Helen Ordway. No grace was said. It was years later, in Texas, before Thomas Ordway thanked God for another meal. They had looked up after a time, and my grandfather could recall his sister telling how the tears ran down from her father's sightless eyes, and years later, and a thousand miles distant, remembering that sliced mule meat on her dinner plate and her father's dead eyes swimming in tears, she still wept. Retelling it to us on graveyard working day would bring tears glistening to my grandfather's eyes.

“I won't live in a country where things have come to such a pass the folks have to eat their mules,” Thomas Ordway said.

It was the first indication he had given that he meant to live in any country. So when he pushed away his plate and pushed back his chair and got up from the table and felt his way to the door and out of the house, and Helen rose automatically to follow, to trail him, her mother motioned her back into her chair. “Eat, children,” she said. And they did.

“What, Grandpa? Eat
mule
! Phew!” we would exclaim, sitting over the remains of our feast.

And my grandfather would say, “Ah, you-all have never known what it is to go hungry. May you never know! Your Great-aunt Helen, poor soul, there she lies, used to say she never in her life ate anything that tasted half as good to her again as that old mule.”

When a man decides to pull up his roots and set off in search of a new life, he instinctively heads west. No other point of the compass exerts that powerful pull. The West is the true magnetic pole. Ever since his expulsion from the garden to a place east of Eden, man has yearned westward as towards a state of remembered innocence, and human history is one long westward migration—or was until just the other day, when with no more West to go to, we began to look towards the moon. What housebound Northerner peering through his frosted windowpanes at the slushy street with its pack of shuffling, shivering humanity has not felt his thoughts turn, following the sun, westward? Has not longed to get away from self-searching and soul-twisting, away from factions and parties and monthly installments and jury duty and female equality and starched collars and business suits and steam heat and sinusitis and the subway rush hour and the dog's nightly walk around the block, to go West and get out of doors, doing a man's work among men? What Southerner, be he a South Carolinian or a southern Italian—for the South is the same the world over—has not yearned to escape his oppressive long hot summer and his long oppressive history and go where the wind blows free across the high plains and where a man is his own man? To escape the rigidity of his life, the sense that all his efforts are foredoomed, his place marked out for him unalterably. Away from that oppressive hospitality, that chronically inflamed sensitivity to slight and affront, that vendetta mentality, that all too well grounded political cynicism, that paternalism, that orgiastic religiosity, that hedonistic puritanism, away from those morose, mistrustful faces with their eyes slitted from squinting at the merciless sun. And which way does he turn? What Easterner has not longed to follow where the young and the adventurous have already gone, to be free to employ that exhilarating and patronizing phrase “back East”? Where everybody does not know everybody else's business and the sins of the fathers are not visited in perpetuity upon their children. To shake off the dust of age and overrefinement, to escape that worn-out land and its worn-out people. To go West! The West is the one unfixed pole of the compass. It has moved with man, always retreating before him. What was once the West is now the East. The West lies on the other side of that last range of hills, where the day still lingers, where the sun is still shining after it has set in the East, where there is still another hour to correct one's mistakes or begin a new project before nightfall. The West is where people go to start over, or to start out, the land of losers and beginners, of promise and of recovery. The West is unfenced, unfettered, unencrusted with history. Where never is heard a discouraging word and the sky is not cloudy all day. A man's country. God's country. Lit by a glow which even a blind man might see.

At that moment when old Thomas got up from the table that day we Ordways ceased to be Tennesseans. Five minutes more and it was settled that we should become Texans. This, however, was not Thomas Ordway's decision, it was Ella's, made as, unable to choke it down herself, she watched her children devour that proscribed meat which she had provided for them and hold out their plates to her for more. Had it been left to Ella, we Ordways would have been more Texan than we were, would never, once past Clarksville, have turned around and gone back. She wanted, as she was later to tell her son, to get clean out of mule country into cow-horse and cattle land. He, that son, was an added incentive for this. She knew about him before leaving home, claimed to have known from the start that he would be a boy, for like his brother and unlike his sister he announced his presence with immediate daily and violent spells of morning sickness. The time before, these had continued right up to the last; consequently she expected them to do so again, and so they did, from east Tennessee to Texas; notwithstanding this, she kept them from her husband's knowledge, fearing that he might think it a reason to postpone, or once underway to interrupt, possibly never to resume, the trip; to her it was reason the more to set off, to push on.

It took some time to find a buyer for the farm; meanwhile they made their preparations, made them in the knowledge that they were leaving not just a home but a life. On credit, pending the sale of the place, they bought a new, rather a newer wagon. It was delivered with a team of his own by the man from whom they had bought it. To avoid questions or any odd looks, they had him unhitch and leave it in the lot; then, lacking a mule, they themselves drew it down to the family burial ground. They attacked the graves with spade and grubbing hoe. The stones were uprooted and laid on the floor of the wagon, bedded in straw. Thomas Ordway was proud of those stones, all the Ordways had been, proud to the point of offending their neighbors, for there, as later in Mabry, real dressed marble tombstones with engraved lettering were an enviable mark of family piety. Their combined strength not being equal to that of a half-grown boy, they got them into the wagon bed by inching them up an incline. When the stones were out the graves were opened, the remains exhumed, packed, the containers labeled and stowed in the wagon. The children, watching forbidden from their hiding place, lost interest after a time and returned to their games.

No doubt the lingering aftertaste of that roast joint, along with the look of reproach which she read in the eyes of every mule, influenced Ella Ordway to spend half the money they got from the sale of the farm on a yoke of oxen. Gaunt, spectral white, draped in their ill-fitting hides, with deep dewlaps that swung like cowbells to their rolling gait, they looked, and were, half starved; still they represented a ton of butcher's meat, and by then the Ordways were not the only ones to have had a taste of mule. This was all they were waiting for, and so in mid-April (it was hot, and about his head already hovered the escort of blowflies which, in warm weather, was to accompany him for the rest of his days) the Ordways set out, afoot all of them, to lighten the load, she with the boy trudging in the rear, he on his stubborn festering legs and blind as a bat, leading the way. Oxen must be led; they stray from the track unless guided by frequent nudges and taps with the goad. They are too unintelligent to respond to reins. Patient creatures, an eternity of servitude in their yoke-bowed necks, their plodding gait. And he, asserting his mastery, his independence of her oxlike devotion, plodding alongside them, fleeing his darkened land and groping his way along the sun's path, a young man still, but one who looked and moved like the figure of Time and about whom there clung the odor of death and decay, leading the bony oxen and being led himself by the bony barefoot little girl.

Their body of red water would come later. They would have it to cross, and for them the waves were not to part, but in their case this was to come at the end of the trek. For the Ordways stumbling out of the mountain fastness of northeast Tennessee it was downhill at the start, and for a long way, so steeply downhill much of the time that in order to keep the wagon, with its ballast of tombstones, from overrunning the team, the brake levers had to be lashed down and the pads soaked regularly to keep them from bursting aflame. The wet brake pads steamed from the friction. The stiff-kneed oxen were pushed forward by their horns by the yoke. On these roads it was a good day when the Ordways made four or five miles, and including time out for rain, and more time after the rain had stopped, waiting for the road to dry, waiting even after other wagons were moving again, because those stones caused them to bog down in places where others got through, it was five weeks from the time of their leaving home that the Ordways reached Nashville.

The creak of any wagon whatever along the road sufficed to bring farmwomen, townwomen too, to their front doors, to straighten the backs of plowmen in the fields alongside, to draw upright men leaning in chairs against the wall along the porches of stores: a hush ran before the passage of the Ordways and lingered in their wake. Women lowered their eyes and shooshed their children, men got to their feet and bared their heads and sometimes then held their hats over their hearts as is done whenever the flag or a funeral passes by. Storekeepers wherever they stopped pressed candy and cakes on the children. Helen Ordway was to remember this as the time of her life when she had eaten them the most, and to wonder what people meant when they recalled the scarcity of sweets during the war. Ella tried at first to refuse them. The craving in the children's eyes forced her to relent—that and the craving in the eyes of the storekeepers to be allowed some outlet for the feeling which the sight of her husband aroused. She tried then to ration them. But the war had weakened her discipline, especially over the boy, had sapped her strength to say no, to deny them any little pleasure when they were denied so much already. The boy had learned to wheedle, and though she sighed that he would ruin his teeth, he got his way. Later she was glad he had. At least he had had that, and she took comfort in her last years in the picture she retained of him sitting on the tailboard of the wagon or else trotting along beside her in the road, his cheek rounded with a jawbreaker like the pouch of a squirrel.

It was a country of women, children, and old men through which they passed. Even boys of late adolescence—the “Seed Corn of the South”—were being called up now. To these fathers, mothers, and wives Thomas Ordway personified the calamity which they too had known, or the calamity which daily threatened them. That his blindness might have been congenital, or sustained in some private manner, seemed to occur to no one; he was taken automatically for a casualty of the war. Perhaps it was the conjunction with his limp, or the redness of the scars on his brow—more likely it was the times: there were others, few so badly hurt as he, but others like him in most communities now.

Stopping by water in the late afternoon, they would make camp for the night. The oxen were hobbled to graze. Ella and the children gathered wood. Two fires were built. Over one his bandages were boiled, then these were hung to dry overnight on bushes out of sight. Over the other fire supper was cooked. As they stopped rather early in the day, the evening was long, and sometime during it they could generally expect a call from the owner of the land, or from his wife or widow. They came, especially the women, bearing gifts, more sweets for the children, and almost inevitably one of the dead husband's shirts or a pair of socks that had been knitted for him or a new pair of boots which he never got to wear, with an accompanying tale of how these articles had been saved by hiding them from Yankee pillagers. To refuse these things was hard, was all but impossible. In the morning they would sometimes find hanging from a nearby limb, like a stocking on a Christmas tree, hung there out of reach of night-prowling animals, a sack containing more donations. Sometimes at their campsite, come to pay their respects, would arrive a whole congregation of people, especially when bad weather kept the Ordways on the spot for longer than one night and word of their presence spread into the surrounding countryside. Ella even found people there already when she got up in the morning. When she peeped out through the flap in the wagon cover, there they would be, men mostly but occasionally women among them too, standing patient as trees in the dripping rain or squatting silent and solemn and Indian-faced around a fire which they had gathered and started. Seeing her they would gravely bare their heads in wordless greeting. They too came bearing gifts. Jugs of corn liquor, combs of wild honey, twists of home-cured tobacco, bags of nuts, small dark close-grained hickory-smoked hams from half-wild razorback hogs as lean as marble. These could not be refused. The spirit in which these offerings were made was not charity, not propitiation, not even compassion. This was veneration. These pilgrims belonged to the timeless and universal tribe—especially numerous in the South—of leper-lickers and shaman-worshippers who see in affliction a sign of the special favor of God; in blindness vision, in witlessness wisdom exceeding the normal mind's, in epileptic seizure an orgasm of the soul in union with the otherworld, and they came to sit at the holy man's feet and listen to his oracles. Had he but cared to exploit his handicap Thomas Ordway might have gone far in his native land as a faith healer or a phrenologist, a preacher or a politician. Smartly handled, even that odor he gave off might have been made to pay during all those years when his adopted town wore him about its collective neck like a bag of asafoetida.