We used to arrive early, first among our own family and among the first of those car-borne, before work had begun, oftentimes before sunup, when Mabry was a sketch in grisaille upon the immense blank canvas of sky, at an hour when it was truly as if the dead, as so many of their monuments testified, lay asleep—still forms beneath patchwork quilts of leaves drawn up to the chins of their headstones. Wagons and buckboards stood in the road and in the schoolyard, their nodding teams hitched to the fence palings, the beds piled high with baskets of food, thermos jugs, cushions and old blankets, campstools, rakes, brooms. From scattered parts of the graveyard came the steady grate of files on hoe blades, and the long-drawn slash of a whetstone down the edge of a sickle or a scythe. The country folks—among them my grandparents, he in overalls and jumper and a collarless shirt, she in a mother hubbard, for protection against the briars, which allowed only her head and her hands to show, and a poke bonnet of flowered gingham, the ribbons tied underneath her chin—chatted in groups while awaiting their children and grandchildren from the towns.
I loved both my grandparents dearly, but of the two I loved my grandfather more, despite the fact, or possibly because of it, that he liked me least of all his grandchildren, whereas I was my grandmother’s favorite. This difference was always marked in their respective greetings. She gave me a big hug and kiss and made a great fuss over me, while my grandfather not only suffered with visible impatience the shy, fervent, and hopeless kiss which I implanted on his wrinkled cheek, just at the tip of his wiry mustache—he hardly bothered to conceal his disapproval of my grandmother’s affection for me. It was not merely that, being a man, he was less demonstrative. Towards others of his grandchildren he was affectionate enough. He just did not care for me.
“Silly boy! Whatever put that foolish notion into your head?” my mother cried when finally, unable to suffer in silence any longer, I spoke to her about it. “Why, of course your grandpa likes you! He loves you!”
“He loves me, all right,” I remember saying. “I’m his grandson and he has to love me. But he doesn’t like me. If only he did! Oh, if only he liked me as much as Grandma does, how happy I would be!”
To understand the reaction which this produced in my mother the reader must know that, along with the rest of their sons- and daughters-in-law, she was devoted to my grandfather, somewhat less than devoted to my grandmother. Ever ready to leap to my grandfather’s side in the rare and insignificant differences between his wife and him, she would attack my poor father, who sought to maintain a strict neutrality and who knew how unimportant his parents’ quarrels were, as if he had automatically taken his mother’s part. My mother’s cause was fraught with frustration because my grandfather would never stand up for himself. The soul of discretion, he retired from the field as soon as battle was joined. He would rather be wrong than wrangle; what was more, it did not bother him not to have the last word, even when he was in the right. This placidity of temper, which was precisely what she loved him for, used to provoke my mother to exasperation.
After giving an angry snort, shaking her head, jumping up from her seat, and pacing rapidly around the room, my mother sat down again and drummed her fingernails on the table, looking hard at me. I no longer recall her exact words, but this is the gist of the little family secret which she decided to let me in on that day. She did not say that my grandmother loved me less than she appeared to—this was merely implied in the way in which she said that my grandfather loved me a great deal more than he showed. It was my misfortune always to be the first of the grandchildren to arrive at any family gathering.
Knowing that his wife suspected him (quite unjustly) of a preference for her stepdaughters, and thus of her stepdaughters’ children, and also because he wished to counteract the flagrant partiality which she showed among her own children and her children’s children, my grandfather always determined beforehand to be unimpeachably equal in the warmth of his welcome to each and every one. In practice this worked out to mean equally cool to all. Quite possibly—for he was like that—he was particularly on guard against being driven by his wife to favor those whom she favored least—which would include my father, and therefore me. But being affectionate by nature, he was able to sustain this pose only through the first two or three arrivals, unbending all the while, until finally he dropped it altogether. As I came first, I felt the full brunt of his fairness; those of my cousins who came later not only got their proper share of his affection, they got my share as well. My grandmother, on the other hand, knowing how he disapproved of her favoritism, was always resolved for once to show none, with the result that she effused most over those for whom she cared the least. My grandmother had her fixed and permanent favorite (my Uncle Ewen, her first-born son); after him she valued her children in proportion to the distance by which they were separated from her and the worry they caused her. We lived closest by of all, and so, not having far to come, we gave her no particular concern, and were therefore less precious to her. The kiss I got from her, so unlike that unrequited one of mine on my grandfather’s cheek, had more light than warmth in it; those she bestowed on my cousins who had had to travel farther to get theirs were too heartfelt for outward show.
On graveyard working day, as at any family gathering, as one by one her children came home, my grandmother grew more and more fretful over those still missing. As the number narrowed, instead of taking comfort she merely transferred the anxiety released by the arrival of the latest one onto those still to be accounted for. Other families were already assembled and at work. Scythes hissed in the dry grass, the rhythmical chopping of hoes was heard on all sides and the scratching of rakes among the papery leaves. Already brush fires had begun to crackle and the air to thicken fragrantly with smoke.
While waiting for the rest to arrive, my grandfather would bring those of his children who lived outside the range of ripples from Mabry up to date on the chronicle of deaths since last graveyard working day. Fetching a sigh, he might declare, “What us folks hereabouts will do for fish now, I don’t know. We buried poor old Dora Exom in July.”
“How’s that? Is Aunt Dora Exom dead?”
“Dead and yonder in her grave. Yes, Dora is wetting her line now where the big ones bite every day.”
“I reckon you mean to say she’s in heaven. I don’t gainsay it. But I expect Aunt Dora wouldn’t have any trouble filling her stringer down in the other place.”
“I never seen anything like it,” my grandfather said. “Many a summer afternoon I’ve set on the creek bank alongside of that old woman, used the same bait, same size hook, set my bobber to the same depth as she set hers, and she would be hauling in fish like that boy yo-yoing there, and I would never get a nibble. Why, in clear water—now you all may not believe this, but in clear water I have seen fish steal her bait and sneak off to eat it, then just give up and turn around and come back and swallow the bare hook!”
“Wonder did she hand on her secret to anybody before she passed away?”
“If you ask me I don’t believe it was a thing she could have handed on to anybody else if she’d wanted to. She let on to have some secret formula, but I never believed it. I once heard her say that her mamma honed after fried fish all the while she was carrying her. Don’t you expect that might’ve had something to do with it?”
“Them Exoms sure et the fish! Pile of old fishbones out back of their house big as a haystack.”
“Wellsir,” said my grandfather, “she give away just as many as she fed her own family. You would hear a racket ’long about sundown and look out the window: there’d come Aunt Dora Exom stomping down the road in her gum boots and her old sunbonnet, wet gunnysack over her shoulder and about seventy-leven cats tagging along behind her mewing and meowing and yawning and licking their whiskers. ‘How’d you folks like a little fresh fish today?’ she’d say. And she would reach in her sack and feel around, picking out the very nicest ones for you. That good old soul must have give away a boxcarful of fine white perch in
her time. ‘Now you take and roll these in yellow cornmeal, honey,’ she’d say, and have your grease good and hot and fry them till they’re brown, and you just tell me if they ain’t good!’ Bless her old heart! ‘Now watch out for them little bones,’ she would always say. Ah well, Aunt Dora and old St. Peter ought to be able to swap some good lies. He was a fisherman too, so I’ve heard tell.”
My grandmother, meanwhile, if she heard any of this, what with fretting and fidgeting and glancing surreptitiously up the path every five seconds, sat thinking, “Oh, devil take old Dora Exom and her fish! How can he sit there and chatter away so unconcerned when right this minute his own child, our darling Ellis (or our Herschell, or our Florence) may be lying dead on the highway somewhere for all he knows to the contrary? Oh, my precious, my love, where are you? Why don’t you come? If it was his Winnie or his Bea we wouldn’t be hearing about Dora Exom and her old fish!”
Having so often been told that her fears were foolish, my grandmother enjoined upon herself a strict silence, which she was totally incapable of observing. “What do you suppose could have held them up like this?” she would ask when she could stand it no longer, which was very shortly, trying in vain to sound merely curious, or else pretending unconvincingly to be mildly annoyed with the tardy ones for keeping her waiting.
Those were the days when something was always going wrong with automobiles. Roads were bad, detours frequent, long, and rough. None of the children had been married long, all had young families, these youngsters had to be caught and dressed and herded into cars, along the route had to be stopped for every few miles and treated for car-sickness, taken behind the bushes, etc. In short, there were dozens of good reasons for any delay. My grandmother took them like pills, sucked the sugar coating off, and found them all bitter inside. “Oh, why don’t they come!” she would cry out then. The worst thing that could be done at this juncture was to remind her how often in the past she had gotten herself worked up like this, only to have the missing son or daughter turn up at the next moment, safe and sound and full of apologies. Yet someone, which is to say my grandfather, was sure to do it. Recognizing his tone, she shuddered in anticipation.
“Now, Hester,” he would say, “don’t be a fool. You’re getting yourself all worked up over nothing. There! What did I tell you? There come Florence and Cecil now. That leaves just Ewen.”
“Just Ewen!” my grandmother thought. “As though Ewen is any less precious to me than Florence. Just Ewen! Always my pet, as he very well knows. Is he throwing that up to me now, when the poor boy may be lying at death’s door, without even his mother at his side to ease his pain?”
“Now, please,” my grandfather continued, “try to remember that your children are not babies any more and don’t have to have you to hold their hand every time they take a step” (an observation, a truth, which gave my grandmother no comfort whatever—rather the reverse). “He‘ll be along directly. They’ve all always showed up before, haven’t they?”
This my grandmother was bound to admit, though just how it was any assurance that they would all show up this time, she never could understand. On the contrary. And even to mention it seemed to her to be tempting fate. She was convinced that she was destined to be bereft of one or more of her children, and the fact that she had gotten them all ten up to an average of thirty did nothing to allay her fears; it only brought ever nearer the day of reckoning, and made it all the harder to give them up. Whichever of her sons or daughters got home last, instead of being made to do penance for the anxiety he had caused her, was assured of being all day long the object of her special tenderness.
But, as my grandmother was forced to acknowledge, the laggard did turn up at last, was scolded for the apprehension he had caused their mother by everyone but her, and work could begin.
There was much to be done. For although, as I have said, it was thirty-five years since any Ordway was buried, ours was the biggest, that is, the most populous plot in the entire graveyard, containing as it did every Ordway who had ever died in the New World, most of whom never in their lives set eyes on Mabry. In addition to his own, his wife’s, his firstborn son’s, and his daughter’s, there were the graves of all his ancestors and kin whose bones and moldering remains old Thomas Ordway, my ghoulish great-grandfather, in fleeing Tennessee and vowing never to return, had disinterred and brought to Texas with him. Fondly spoken of in the family by nicknames conferred upon them by the various kegs in which that all-too-filial son had packed their relics for the journey, these reached as far back as old “Blackstrap” Dismas Ordway, my great-great-great-grandfather, and Amy his wife, known with affectionate irreverence as “Old Sourmash.” And Dismas beg at Aubrey, called “Old Tenpenny” on account of his ossuary, a nail keg, and Aubrey took to wife Genevieve, whose dust had come west in a cask which lent her the title “Granny Blackpowder.” These and many others, courtesy great-aunts and great-granduncles whose precise relation to one another and to me must needs be re-established each graveyard working day, lay awaiting their yearly maintenance like so many patients in a hospital ward the coming of the nurse to make their beds, and while so doing to reassure them that they had not been altogether forgotten in the world outside.
The gray stone faces of my ancestors—how clearly I see them still! Bearded with moss, freckled with fungus, bathed in tears when the rain fell, inclining this way and that as though in whispered conversation with one another. Each had, for me, taken on the aspect of its owner: here a high bald dome, pinched features formed by the cramped and scanty epitaph, here a crack like a scar across a cheek, a pair of small round old-fashioned spectacles formed by a double O in the text: my family album in stone. Barely legible by now, I suppose; even in my childhood some of the older ones could scarcely be made out, effaced by those prairie winds which, laden with grit, are like a sandblast—yet carved upon the tablets of my memory as with a chisel. My people, my dead, with each of whom, I was taught to believe, and in those days still did, I should one day sit down and converse. To them I owed my features, my voice, the strengths and weaknesses of my mind and body. Their migrations had determined that I was born where I was and not some other place. Before I could become myself, as according to the biological law, ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, I would first have to live through the lives of those who had produced me.
With each was associated some story, which, as his or her mound was raked, the weeds cleared away, the fallen stone set upright, was once again retold. Yearly repetition did not dull these tales; on the contrary, we looked forward to them as, seated in the concert hall with program in hand, one anticipates the opening notes of a favorite piece of music, and we would have been disappointed if, for instance, the tending of Great-uncle Hugh’s grave had not elicited from my grandfather the story, known to us all by heart, of Uncle Hugh and the lady’s corncobs. Honest, blunt, plainspoken Hugh Ordway, the enemy of all pretense and pose, whose epitaph stated not that he had “passed away” or “fallen asleep” but that he had died on a day in March 1858, had once been among the guests at a supper party, back in Tennessee. The menu included roasting ears, and to the problem of what to do with the unsightly cobs, the hostess had worked out this delicate solution: the white-gloved Negro butler (borrowed for the occasion) would go around the table with a big silver platter (likewise) and collect them from the guests between servings. From right to left he went, and as our Uncle Hugh happened to be seated on his hostess’s left, by the time it got to him the platter was piled high. As he had done with the dishes of food all evening, the butler stood with his platter at Uncle Hugh’s elbow. Noticing him at last, Uncle Hugh inspected his soggy offering, and in his broadest back-country accent said, “No, thank you just the same, don’t believe I’ll have any.”
Bachelor Great-granduncle Giles was extremely absent-minded. Once he bought himself a horse and buggy, the first he had ever owned, to go on a trip to Knoxville, a three days’ ride. His business there concluded, he took the train home. About a week later h
e remembered his horse and buggy, and went to the depot and bought a round-trip ticket to go and get them. Uncle Giles was never known to refuse a chew, yet he never became a slave to the weed. A heavy chewer once marveled at this. “I like tobacco,” Uncle Giles responded. “There’s nothing I like better, and I wish I could get the habit. But unless somebody reminds me I just can’t seem to remember it.” However, it was not really absent-mindedness: Uncle Giles had a lifelong preoccupation. When he was young he had overheard someone assert that the lifetime of man was not long enough for him to count to one million. “What!” he had snorted. “Well, we’ll just see about that!” and commenced counting. “Giles, how’s it coming? How far along are you now?” people would ask. “Three hundred and eighty-six thousand, four hundred and twelve—make that thirteen,” Uncle Giles would reply—until, latterly, he became secretive about his total. Just how far he did get no one ever knew. For though he was vouchsafed twelve years more than his allotted three score and ten, and did hardly anything else towards the last, his dying words were, “Tell them that fellow was right. It can’t be done. I only got up to—” And there Uncle Giles stopped counting.
Dismas, the Columbus of our line, was the youngest of three sons of a coal-and-timber merchant in Leeds, England. A born American in spirit, young Dismas, just turned fifteen, proudly refused when his eldest brother commanded him one day to black his boots. His brother beat him; still Dismas refused. He ran away from home. He walked to London. There he took passage on a boat to Savannah, Georgia, earning his fare as a cabin boy. From Georgia by stages he worked his way west to Tennessee, and there chose the tallest hill he could find, where the soil was of the meagerest, but where nobody could look down on him. His English accent, which he never lost, was a source of great entertainment to Amy, his wife, and to succeeding generations of his offspring. Once he went into a hardware store and asked the clerk for a hax andle. Another time he told his son Aubrey to go throw them ogs over the fence some hoats. “Amy,” he was forever saying, and among us there was no other way of saying it, “w’ere is me at?” To which the reply, after Amy, was, “At the moment, Mr. Hordway, you are standing in the all.” He once had an encounter with a man named Arrison. “Man named what, Mr. Ordway?” asked Amy. “Arrison,” said he. “An odd name, Mr. Ordway,” said she. “Odd? Nothing odd about Arrison,” said he. “How do you spell it?” said she. “Haitch hay harr harr hi hess ho hen. If that don’t spell Arrison then wot the ell does it spell?” said he. We employed that saying for all sorts of occasions. It was one of the very few not-quite-nice expressions which even the children in the family were permitted to use. When I solved the last problem of my homework at night and shut my book, “There! If that don’t spell Arrison,” I would say, “then wot the ell does it spell?”
The Ordways Page 2