The Ordways (9 page)

This was in the beginning. After their adventure with one community on the road between Knoxville and Nashville the Ordways began to get up and even in bad weather eat their scanty breakfast in haste and yoke up and move off their campsite, fugitives from commiseration. A sudden storm had forced them one afternoon to stop on the outskirts of the town they had just passed through. As usual, their passage had been noted, and the next morning when the rain continued unabated they received the usual call. So confident was she of receiving it by this time that Ella Ordway, despite a particularly severe attack of her nausea, had tidied her temporary home as best she could in expectation. In midmorning, during a letup in the downpour, three ladies, the wives of the three local ministers, drove out from town in a covered surrey. Ella Ordway invited them into her tent kitchen, apologizing for the muddiness of the floor and for the lack of seats. Led by Helen, Thomas Ordway appeared. He seemed to feel a compunction to satisfy the morbid curiosity of people to see him, perhaps a morbid urge to show them more than they had bargained for, which alternated, and was always to do so, with an unwillingness to be seen. Satisfied that the travelers were decent, though poor, the ladies offered to take the children into their homes, suppressing by a common impulse the offer they had come prepared to make, to take in the entire family. The offer was declined, as was the basket of food which they had brought, and the ladies drove back into town.

The Ordways continued on the spot in the unabating rain, and as their predicament worsened, they saw themselves pass by stages from being a care which concerned the town to being an anxiety which engrossed it. One day brought the husbands of the three ladies, another day a doctor, still another day the county sheriff and with him a second doctor, who was also the district medical officer, and who told the Ordways that they could not stay where they were any longer.

“We are not breaking any law,” said Thomas Ordway.

“Now did we say that?” the sheriff demanded. “You never heard us say nothing like that. No. What we are here for is to say—”

“We don't intend to stay no longer than we have to,” said Thomas Ordway. “Just as soon as this rain lets up we'll be moving on.”

“Who said you had to move on?” asked the sheriff.

“Man, you are in no condition to move on anywhere,” said the doctor. “What you need is rest. Your wife too. Your children too, for that matter. Now we have got a hospital in this town, and while you're there your wife and your children will be taken in and looked after, and later on, well, we'll see. Maybe—”

Thomas Ordway had protested for a while, then he gave in. They said they would come for them tomorrow. That night the rain came on harder than before, and under cover of the darkness and the rain they pulled out. To elude pursuit they left the main road and traveled down rutted, back roads all that night, where the wagon wheels sank in the mud and the oxen grunted and wheezed and the flat heavy stones on which lay the thin flat mattress which she shared with her little brother heaved and bounced and Helen Ordway lay in the darkness listening to the bones rattle in their kegs like the seed inside a gourd.

Their route ran from one extreme corner to the other of the parallelogram which is Tennessee. As far as Nashville, Ella knew the way. She had come by that same road the year before to fetch him home. Out of Nashville they would take a slightly less southerly, more westerly route than the one she had taken, in order to reach Memphis.

Traffic along the main thoroughfare of Nashville stopped or turned aside as for a funeral at their passage, wagons reining up at intersections and a platoon of blue-uniformed soldiers being halted by command of their corporal at one corner to let them go by; for here too he led the way, having ignored her suggestion that perhaps they might get through the city more quickly if she were to lead the team. Nor would he allow her even to ask for directions. Turning the team off the street and parking the wagon in an empty spot at the curb following Helen's instructions, he bade Ella wait there with the boy and set off down the walk to make inquiries. He stopped a man approaching him and said, “Mister, could you—” He broke off as the man took his hand, the free one, the one she was not holding, and Helen Ordway never forgot the sight of her father staring down at it as if he could see the coin, a Yankee half dollar, which shone in his open palm. As he stood there bemused another passerby stepped aside from her path, approached, and, with a barely perceptible
chink
, carfully laid a second half dollar on top of the first one.

And so he had to ask Ella, after all, the way to Pittsburg Landing. The very information which she herself had sought at this same point almost exactly a year earlier. At that time Nashville people had all been asking themselves where the place was. Until just that week few had ever heard of it, and some she asked still could not tell her how to get there. But now, and forevermore, anybody in Nashville could have told you how to get to Pittsburg Landing. Or rather, no. Shortly the name would disappear again, this time for good, absorbed into that of the hamlet consisting of nothing but a one-room log meetinghouse just outside this village on the Mississippi border, near the Alabama state line, where the battle of Shiloh was fought. She neither argued nor questioned. She supposed he must know what he was doing, that it must be a strong urge, too strong to deny, which would drive him back there again. So she told him, or rather told Helen, and went back to the rear of the wagon, where she slogged along, fighting down her nausea, and where the boy tugging on her arm wearied her with endless questions about all the strange and wonderful sights through which he was passing.

Told one day that the bridge ahead of them is out, blown up to prevent its use by Yankee raiders, they are sent down a detour. This is long, sparsely settled, and somewhere on it they take a wrong turning; a few miles farther on the road suddenly comes to an end in a cow pasture. The land ahead being clear, however, and unfenced, they proceed. After a time they come to a creek, which they ford. Beyond the creek the land has recently been burnt over, not that very day, for it is cool, but no longer ago than the previous day—set afire by those same Yankees, as they will learn on coming out on the other side. Hayfields, these had been; now a layer of fine, soft, fluffy soot covers the ground like a fall of black snow. Stirred by their passage, it rises and hangs motionless upon the hot, still, windless air. The Ordways have to tie bandanas over their noses. Up the legs and wattles and up the bellies and the sides of the oxen the blackness spreads until all that remains is a white stripe down their backs like that of a skunk, then this closes and they are solid black, all but their polished white horns. To their own sweaty faces too the soot sticks, and the Ordways appear to be a family of Negroes.

Another day they ride all afternoon towards a storm. No clouds are visible anywhere in the sky but they can hear the rumble of steady thunder and when darkness begins to fall they can see the flashes of heat lightning low on the horizon. There comes one clap which shakes the ground they stand on, and against the evening sky bursts a flare which is not lightning but flames, illuminating the smoke billowing above them, and then they know that this is no storm but a town beleaguered. All night long the glow burns steadily on the horizon, is still glowing when they awake before dawn, and Thomas Ordway, told of it, says (as he is to say again more than once before he dies), “There are times when blindness is a blessing. Maybe I have been lucky.” And Ella, as she is always to do, whispers, “Ssh. The children. They may be listening.”

For Grant's drive down the Mississippi has entered its final phase. New Orleans has long ago fallen, Memphis is theirs, Natchez has surrendered without a shot being fired, only Vicksburg still links the Confederacy east and west, and now, in June, after thirty days of round-the-clock shelling, the people there are living on mule, some say on rats, the mules all eaten now, thousands of them having been driven out of the city into the encircling enemy lines at the start of the siege for lack of fodder to feed them. “Them two beeves of yawls'd set you up for life in Vicksburg now,” a man tells the Ordways. “If you was to live for life, that is. Fetch you,” he adds, looking at the team as if he can taste them, “a right fair price here, for that matter” (
here
being the town of Selmer, Tennessee, not far from Pittsburg Landing) “in case you was thinking of selling?” And that night, all night long, columns of soldiers in blue march past their campsite headed south down the Corinth Road, on their way to reinforce the besiegers of Vicksburg.

For me, as for every Southern boy, it was learning that the Civil War was lost which started it all over again; from that time onward each battle had to be refought. The finality of it being inadmissible, my mind drew up short, clinging to that last moment when there was still time. For me it was always noon of July 2 at Gettysburg, and now that the cost of delay was clear, Longstreet would delay no more. Pickett's charge still moved forever up Cemetery Ridge, and at Chancellorsville meanwhile there was still time to warn that sentryman that the figure on whom he was drawing a bead was his own beloved general, Stonewall Jackson. But of course it was not still noon at Gettysburg, and Longstreet had waited until too late. Pickett's charge had nobly failed, and Stonewall Jackson had crossed over the river to rest under the shade of the trees. I had to lose each of these heartbreaking battles not once but countless times. So it must have been for my great-grandfather. Each day as the sun rose he must have had to lose his sight anew and reconcile himself again to the loss. Listening to the story of his return to Shiloh, I felt I understood him. He could neither accept nor deny his fate, and he went back there out of an irresistible, childish, forlorn hope of either retrieving that terrible day, or of ending it once and for all. The minuteness with which he was said to have toured the battlefield resembled that of a latter-day Civil War “buff.” He was searching for some flaw in the sequence of events which would cancel it, which would declare that day void and bring it back to be played over again. He was hoping that on that spot where he had lost it, his sight would be restored to him by a miracle. Lacking that, he was hoping to learn to cease hoping.

That no step of his on that fateful day might go unretraced, the Ordways camped overnight on the same spot where his brigade had camped the night before the battle. Souvenirs of that earlier stay still littered the site a year later, and in the morning the children were left to collect them. They found a rusty bayonet, a rusty broken-bladed knife, a leather cartridge pouch, weathered and cracked. Meanwhile Ella, following his directions, led him over the route of his former march.

Thomas Ordway's brigade, the 52nd Tennessee, under the command of General Chalmers, had been ordered up early that Sunday morning, April 6. They were sent north along a creek towards a line of bluffs below which, on the low ground between yet another creek and the Tennessee River, a regiment of Yankees was encamped, their tents pitched amid a peach orchard then in full blossom. Down these bluffs and upon the waiting Yanks they were ordered to charge. At the first volley the brigade broke, turned and ran. Thomas Ordway saw it happening; for a moment he faltered, half turned, himself. The attack was repulsed and they were drawn back, and the 52nd Tennessee was ordered ignominiously from the line, denied any further share in the day's fighting. Two companies, for their soldierly conduct, were exempted from this dishonor and sent back into battle, one of them Thomas Ordway's. Let by the hand now back to the spot, he stood where by turning and running with the rest, he might have saved his eyesight. He wished that he had run, and the wish troubled him with not one twinge of shame. With his whole soul he wished that he had run.

The hardest fighting of the entire first day at Shiloh had taken place around an abandoned sunken road running from the meetinghouse down to the river, in which a Yankee regiment, falling back, had found cover. The approach to this natural fortification was uphill through a tangled thicket overlooked by enemy artillery which poured, in addition to the musket fire from the entrenched infantrymen, cannon-balls, canister, and shrapnel upon the attackers as they tore their way through the underbrush. It was in one of the many assaults upon this position, just past noon, that Thomas Ordway had been hit, and it was there that he directed Ella to lead him. But no such thicket as he remembered could Ella find. Indeed, there was none any more. For the Yankees caught in the sunken road had held out until evening of that day, and in that time the thicket had disappeared, cleared as though by fire by the shelling from the guns. Laid open to the red clay subsoil, the raw ground looked as if it had been picked by the buzzards still hovering overhead a year later, and the crows bickering in the woods along the creek bottom.

For a long time Thomas Ordway stood upon that spot which was the last he was ever to see. The unexpected miracle did not come. What came instead was an inkling of what he had been turned into. He wished again that he had run when he might have; as he had not, he found himself obliged to take pride in the courage, or that variety of fear called courage, which had blacked out his life past and to come and transformed him into a running sore. That was the worst part of wounds like his, that the only way to live with them at all was to end by cherishing them. They left you nothing else. They were all you had, all that you were. They became you, and made of you at last a kind of disfigured blind Narcissus, in love with your own ruination.

He had lasted, had forced himself on, as far as this; at Shiloh his legs gave out. From there to Memphis, a distance of one hundred miles, Ella led the team while he lay in the heaving wagon bed biting his lip to keep from groaning. Told that he had walked on those legs from northeast Tensessee, the doctor in Memphis snapped, “Well, sir, you may have walked your last step!” The infection was in the marrow of the bones, he told Ella. Asked if this meant a renewed threat of amputation, he said it could not be ruled out. Thomas Ordway went into the hospital demanding of the doctor, whom the question exasperated, how soon he could come out, and what was to become of his family while he was there, and what was to become of his team of oxen?