“Now, son,” said my grandfather, “be a good boy and mind Mrs. Vinson.”
“Ned always minds me,” said Mrs. Vinson, accenting the “me,” as she handed him down from the wagon bed.
“That’s more than he does me,” said my grandfather.
If she heard the remark Hester did not let on. But sensing that she had gone too far, Mrs. Vinson said, “Ned minds me better than any of my own.” To which her Felix, peeping out from behind her skirt, grinned corroboratively.
“We’ll bring you back a play-pretty from town, Ned,” said Winnie. And with an uncertain glance up front, where her mother used to sit and where for a time she herself had sat as the little woman of the family, and where now her stepmother sat on the seat beside her father, “Won’t we, Pa?”
“We’ll see,” said he. And he again told Ned to behave himself.
My grandfather looked at his watch. It was just six. You had to get an early start if you were to get into Clarksville and attend to everything you had to do there and get back in time to milk again at evening. He asked Mrs. Vinson if there was not something they could bring back for her. Thank you just the same, Mrs. Vinson said, or rather shouted, for the baby, little Florence Ordway, had begun to cry again: she had cut her first tooth only the day before; thank you just the same, they would be going in themselves next week. In those days farm folks like the Ordways and the Vinsons went into town just once a month.
Then my grandfather flicked the reins and snicked to the team and the wagon lumbered off. The girls bounced along on the tailgate, waving back every now and again to their little brother. You could see a long way there on the edge of the prairie and it was a quarter of an hour before you went over the first hill. Ordinarily Mrs. Vinson turned back into the house after a short while, but that morning she stayed until the wagon was going over the rise and held Ned up to wave a last goodbye. The girls waved and he waved. And then at the last minute, just as the wagon was dipping down out of sight, Ned struggled out of Mrs. Vinson’s arms and started running after them. According to Winnie and Bea, at any rate. Seated backwards at the tailgate of the wagon, they were the last to see him, and as the legend grew in later years, so they always maintained in telling of that morning, the seventh of May 1898.
A breech delivery, the doctor had called it in explaining the failure; the words often echoed in Sam Ordway’s mind when looking at his motherless son. He had come hind-foremost into the world and he seemed framed, at three seemed almost resigned, determined to go through it that way. An awkward child, always underfoot, by turns stubborn and sniveling, with round reproachful eyes and a lower lip triggered permanently for a pout. He was a constant reminder of his mother’s death, of obligation to the neighbors, and now he was a source of tension, unspoken but unremitting, between his father and his stepmother. But whenever my grandfather found himself losing patience with him he had only to remember that if he had lost his wife through his coming, Ned had lost his mother, and that he had gotten himself a new wife.
The one he had gotten was a good one, though she had her faults of course, like everybody else. Sam Ordway felt lucky to have found any woman who would have him, a poor widower with three small children and no counter-attractions. To say, though, merely that he might have done worse was to do Hester an injustice, and certainly it came nowhere near expressing my grandfather’s appreciation of her. A better wife could not be found, nor, on this side of the angels, a better stepmother. She took excellent care of her predecessor’s children and she did it ungrudgingly. If only little Florence had been a boy! Then perhaps she would have been a little less resentful of Ned.
She was a jealous woman by nature, a discovery which at first had rather flattered him, yet for which he pitied her at the same time. It was a trait of which he himself was blessedly free, could scarcely comprehend, and he pitied anyone who suffered from it. Alas, though he did everything in his power to spare her, Hester’s situation was ready-made to exasperate a jealous woman, coming as she had into a house still redolent with the memory of a rival who was all the more formidable through having escaped beyond rivalry, beyond comparison.
He himself did not compare the two of them. One was one, the other the other, and they were as different as two women picked by the same man could be. Aggie, for instance, had been a placid and easygoing sort of person, seldom carried away and just as seldom downhearted, quiet and even-tempered in her affections as she was in all things. Hester on the other hand was as changeable as the weather, and required constant encouragement and reassurance. He could tell that his neighbors the Vinsons thought he was fonder of Hester than he had ever been of Aggie, and seemed to reproach him for it. He was not; he was fond of them in different ways and in their turns. And Aggie had not needed the open demonstrations of his affection that Hester had to have.
It had been hard on Hester, coming into a house already made. A woman liked to set up housekeeping with little things of her own choosing instead of ironing curtains made by the dead hand of the previous mistress of the house, finding on the backs of shelves months after taking possession scraps and tatters of things saved by the other, sleeping in another woman’s bed beneath quilts patched from another woman’s discarded garments, the very bed in which that woman had died giving birth to your husband’s child, above all raising the other one’s children. In the case of Ned she was not to be blamed for resenting a child of whom she had had everything but the joy. Without having conceived him, borne him, nursed him, named him, before her own marriage was yet consummated, stopping by on the way home from church, in the graveyard of which her husband’s first wife lay beneath a still grassless mound, she had put her bridal wreath under the wagon seat and taken him, just weaned, squawling, from Mrs. Vinson’s arms, home to the house waiting pre-equipped by her predecessor, whose dresses, waiting now to be made down for the children, still hung in the closet, still diffusive of her personal scent. The girls had ducked their heads and said hello, and climbed up on the tailgate, where they sat bouncing, clutching hands.
For Winnie it had been a demotion, going back to the tailgate of the wagon. She had sat, a diminutive replica of her mother, in her mother’s place on the spring seat alongside her father, until that day. Already an accomplished needlewoman, expert at the churn, she had been quick around the house as she was quick at school, following like a duckling at her mother’s heels, so that she knew without ever being taught how to mix biscuits, how to bake cornbread, how to pluck and singe and draw a chicken. At hog-killing time in the fall she stuffed sausages and rendered lard, helped make the harsh brown sudsless lye soap with which later, every Monday morning before she started school, standing on a bench over a tub alongside her mother sousing the heavy overalls and the bedsheets, she had scrubbed them up and down against the washboard until her knuckles were skinned and red, breaking off only to prevent her little sister, whose self-appointed guardian she was, from falling into the washpot where the clothes bubbled and boiled over a fire for which she herself had collected the kindling and toted the wood. Hardly big enough to lift a flatiron, she knew to lift one and lick her finger and touch the iron and listen with her ear cocked to the hiss of her spittle and judge the heat accurately before touching it to cloth. And so on the day following the funeral she had gotten up in the dark of the morning and dressed herself, and instead of going to school had started a fire in the range and mixed a pan of biscuits, set coffee to percolate, sliced bacon and put it on to fry in the skillet, and when the meat was done, standing on a chair above the stovelids, had dusted flour into the sputtering grease and added milk and stirred it into white gravy and had it all on the table and her little sister washed and combed and the beds made when her father came in from the barn. When the Vinsons rode over later to get the two girls and take them away she had met them at the door in her apron, her sleeves rolled above her knobby elbows and her hands and forearms clotted with dough, a smell of boiling greens and pork wafting out from the house behind her, and sent them ho
me again. “Pa needs somebody to look out for him,” she said. “Ma wouldn’t want me to leave him alone.” Thereafter she would get her little sister ready for school, to which she was admitted ahead of time out of consideration for Mr. Ordway’s difficulties, even more for Winnie’s, and walk her the two miles there because she was afraid of the Vinsons’ dog and walk back home and take her basket and go down to the garden and pick the vegetables that her mother had planted, would return and shell the peas and peel the potatoes and the onions, then go to the smokehouse and choose meat and make her father’s dinner and set it to cook and sweep the house and dust, and in the afternoon go fetch Bea, and in the evening help her with her lessons. “What about your own schooling, Winnie?” the teacher, Miss Duncan, asked her once when she came to meet her sister. “I’ll catch up, Miss Duncan,” she replied. “Soon as Pa has found us a stepmother.” In town in the store she would gravely advise her father what things she was low on, and would frown when the grocer grinned fatuously at her over the counter-top. But she would accept his gift of candy, and coming home seated beside her father in her mother’s place on the seat, holding on to her little sister, would studiously suck lemon drops as if she had but this short while to be a child in before getting home to her chores again. Then it was she and her father who did the week’s wash together, while she broke off now and again to shoo Bea away from that washpot, which exerted a fatal fascination upon the child, and it was she who instructed him, pursing her lips in repressed impatience for his clumsiness as they scrubbed side by side at the tubs or wrung out a sheet together, and he would sometimes catch in those wise, already worn, women’s eyes of hers a look of pity for him, a man reduced to woman’s work.
Fall came at last, freeing him, or rather forcing him to go in search of a wife.
Going courting again, spending all that time just getting into town and back, idling on the corners of the square inspecting the girls who passed in review there on Saturday afternoon, going to dances and cutting a figure, to graveyard workings and over the still-unflowered mound beneath which his wife lay, striking up a courtship with another woman, going to call on her under the watchful eyes of her father and her brothers, provided he was able to find one who encouraged him that far, and squiring her to church suppers and play-parties. Sam Ordway had thought he was done with all that, at thirty-three felt foolish even to think of himself in the role, had no heart for starting life all over again. He was used to one woman’s ways, she to his; now he would have to learn a new woman, train her to his ways. And he was afraid of making a mistake in his choice, especially as he had so little time in which to make it.
He would have preferred a young widow woman. Such a one, herself tried by loss, would better understand and appreciate his predicament, his frame of mind. The first bloom rubbed off her own passion, she would not be disappointed to find his gone from him. Trained already in being a wife, she would fit right off, broken in, comfortable, not pinch and cramp like a new pair of shoes. If she had a child, or better still two, of her own, that would be all right, that would be all the better. The risk that she would favor her own, he was willing to run, to try and cope with; he would feel less beholden to her for taking on the care of his three.
Hester Duncan was not a widow. In fact she was, at twenty-eight, an old maid. She was a plain woman, though no plainer than many a one who had found herself a husband. Sam Ordway was no beauty himself, and did not expect to find one, did not want one, who might think she was wasted out here in the country. Hester Duncan was country-born and -raised, and not afraid of dirtying her hands, though at the time he first met her they were employed in nicer work. And though she was an old maid, being a schoolteacher she understood and liked children. She had come to teach the Mabry school just that year. She had taught before, in Clarksville, but when her old mother was struck helpless she had given it up and come home to take care of her. Her father was long dead and the farm run down and triple-tied in mortgages, and when during the previous spring her mother died, she had sold what little equity remained to her in the old place and taken the vacant job at Mabry’s one-room six-grade schoolhouse.
That was Winnie’s first year in school. She liked it and she liked her teacher. She would set off in the morning with her books and the lard pail containing her lunch, which she as well as her teacher called her dinner, looking in her bonnet and ankle-length dress like a spry little old woman setting off down the road on a visit. Unlike other girls, she never ran or skipped but walked with a dignified matronly tread. On the papers that she brought home from school was written in a fine, careful hand, “Good.” She was quick and studious, and after Christmas, just before the mid-term vacation, Miss Duncan had come over one afternoon to visit Mrs. Ordway and compliment her on her clever child and to offer, if closer inspection of the family and its circumstances seemed to warrant, a suggestion about her future. In those days, at the first sign of intelligence in a little girl people began asking her if she meant to be a schoolteacher when she grew up. The age of eight was not thought any too young to begin preparing for such a career, as it was often entered upon at the age of fifteen or sixteen. Moreover, it was a solemn step, rather like pledging a daughter to take nun’s vows, for state law forbade teachers to marry. Most promising girls were taken out of school after just two or three years as little sisters and brothers began to multiply. Three years’ schooling was considered by many farm families quite enough. In many cases it was three years more than either parent had had. It was to judge if this was likely, and if possible to prevent it in the case of bright little Winifred Ordway, that her teacher came over that afternoon to praise her.
It was not the first time that Sam Ordway had ever seen Miss Duncan. She rented a room and took her board with the people who owned and ran the Mabry store. Saturday, unless something urgent came up, was the only day of the week when the Ordways ever went to Mabry, or past it on their way into Clarksville, and school was out then, so during the past months they had sometimes seen the new teacher cleaning out the schoolhouse, which was part of her duties, but which she looked the tidy, conscientious sort to have done whether it had been stipulated or not, or hanging out her skimpy virgin’s wash on the line (though never her undergarments; these she apparently hung inside the house to dry, out of sight of the farmers who on Saturday gathered to pitch washers alongside the store across the road. And every third Sunday they had seen her regularly at church, where once already she had passed them a compliment on their Winnie.
It was wintertime and my grandfather not in the field but at home, and after giving the women a while to talk between themselves, he had come in from the tool shed. It had been a pleasant visit. It was flattering to hear one’s child called clever, and he had vowed to see that Winnie went as far in school as she wished to go. The child who was to be Ned was already beginning to show on Aggie. My grandfather had pitied Miss Duncan for having to interest herself in other women’s children instead of having a child of her own. The next time he saw her Aggie was dead and in her grave.
It was in the churchyard that they met, or rather in the field below the churchyard, after services every third Sunday. Below the burial ground lay a hollow where wildflowers flourished in almost macabre profusion, phlox and swamp pinks, verbena, Indian blankets, which went largely unpicked, most survivors preferring to bring garden flowers from home to decorate the graves of their kin. This year for the first time around the Ordway house there were no flowerbeds, and so it was down to the hollow that my grandfather and the girls would go after church to pick a bouquet for Agatha’s grave. There they found Miss Duncan, who also had no flower garden of her own, picking a bouquet for the grave of her mother. She had been devoted to her mother and missed her terribly. The note of loneliness which sounded in her voice struck in Sam Ordway, like the second tine of a tuning fork, a sympathetic vibration.
This was during the summer and into the fall, before he had undertaken his quest for a wife, while he was still just thinking about i
t, or rather putting off thinking about it, dreading it.
It was the girls who brought them together. Winnie had been the teacher’s pet. “Are you picking flowers for your mother’s grave?” she asked. “So are we.” In an impulse of motherliness Miss Duncan had hugged the two orphans to her. At the appearance of their father she grew flustered. However, she quickly regained her composure.
Once started, Sam found it easy to talk to her. It was not like talking to a woman. She had resigned herself to life as an old maid schoolteacher and expected to pass unnoticed by men. Thus she was unguarded and without airs and coquetry and he could talk to her simply as to another person. Meeting there on a common errand of sorrow, they were unembarrassed by their encounters. Shortly Sam Ordway began to visit his wife’s grave also on Sundays when there were no services. Miss Duncan too came regularly. Once she was sick and did not appear. That day he picked an extra bouquet and put it on her mother’s grave. The following Sunday she found it there and met them at the gate and warmly thanked the girls for it. On a Sunday in September he did not appear in the hollow. Winnie and Bea were there and they told Miss Duncan that their father was busy putting up a tombstone on their mother’s grave. He had picked it up in town the day before and brought it home in the wagon. That morning he had come in overalls and with pick and shovel, and instead of going to services had planted the stone. When she and the girls came up from below he had it finished. The girls invited her to come and look. She said it was a beautiful stone. She was still standing over her mother’s grave when he gathered up his tools and left. Her loneliness struck him as never before, and it occurred to him to wonder who would put up a stone for her when her time came, and to wonder if she was thinking the same.
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