The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  “I thought you told me,” said Aggie, “that you would never stop searching till you had found him. This is not the end of the world, Mr. Ordway.”

  And so, though daunted, my grandfather vowed to search on. Thinking it over, he decided that he had not exhausted all the possibilities with that speech of his. He had been speaking only to the enfranchised. These were the classes of people left largely or altogether uncanvassed:

  1. Men without the $2.00 to pay the poll tax.

  2. Illiterates

  3. Ex-convicts

  4. Women

  5. Minors and children

  6. Negroes

  7. Republicans

  Minorities, to be sure (except the first, the fourth, and possibly the second category), but when all added together a big enough number of Texans to leave still some room for hope.

  And even in the loss of his money there was a measure of consolation, a certain sense of relief. It solved a problem. In future he would have no choice but to offer no reward beyond a father’s gratitude, and his appeal would perforce be pitched to the pure disinterested goodness in people. In that general goodness my grandfather still retained his belief. It had received a kick in the teeth, but on examination they proved, though somewhat loosened, to be still all there. That not everybody was good did not prove that folks for the most part were not. And the only sort from whom he might ever have expected any help were the pure in heart. Finally, not to be offering pay for information against Will Vinson (some share of which had been earned off Will’s crops) made him feel he was waging a purer fight—and thus one more promising of success—against him.

  Saturday afternoon and Saturday night in a Texas town always bring enough arrests so that on Sunday morning there are prisoners in the jailhouse to sweep the streets of the previous day’s peanut hulls and melon rinds, horse dung, banana peels, tamale shucks, Dixie cups, cigar and cigarette butts, and pale dry cuds of spent chewing tobacco. The bigger the mess the bigger the crowd that left it, and the bigger the crowd the more drinking and fistfights, thus the more arrests; so the streets are always fresh and clean for families crossing the square on their way to church and Sunday school.

  Prisoner’s garb is reserved for those committed on more serious infractions and in for a lengthier stay, and these, being liable to sudden desperate breaks for freedom, are exempted from service on the broom squad, regardless of race, color, or creed. The crew of sweepers are the disturbers of the peace, the vagrants, the drunk-and-disorderlies, et cetera, and they are mustered out in their civvies, their crumpled, slept-in, dusty, often blood- and vomit-stained Saturday-night finery, in loose-knotted neckties and unlaced shoes, sporting shiners and billy-club bumps, bruises and cuts around the cheekbones and jawlines, their own knuckles often skinned and raw, and fingers that wrap stiffly around a broom handle. They blink painfully at the sun and breathe the fresh air as though it stings; but an hour with a broom is good tonic for that morning-after head, that furry tongue.

  In some of the older counties the Sunday street-cleaning gang is composed exclusively of Negroes, but as you go west Negroes grow less plentiful, and in some towns they are not encouraged to linger long enough after nightfall to get themselves into any trouble. Such towns, though there are always rumblings about it, are obliged in the interest of public sanitation to integrate the broom squads. Under the watchful eye of the deputy with the sawed-off riot gun the races sweep in harmony, and in step. It is noticeable that the best sweepers are the whites. This arises not so much from superior aptitude, as from the fact that they are eager to get the job finished before they are seen at such work and in such company by other whites on their way to divine services. The ignominy of it is enough to keep even the most incorrigible, who are as a rule the ones most conscious of their racial superiority, out of trouble, or at least from getting caught, for sometimes as long as a fortnight.

  They were sweeping the streets of Paris that Sunday morning when my grandfather got back from Ben Franklin. By that hour ordinarily the job would have been finished, but the crowds in town the day before had been large and the streets were left a mess. With liquor flowing and politics in the air, however, the jail had been filled. By the time my grandfather had checked back into his hotel and had his breakfast and returned to the street, not a handbill, political or paternal, was to be seen littering the gutters.

  Orphans’ home?

  It was while eating his breakfast that those words, that question, popped into my grandfather’s mind. He was as busy thinking as a one-man band, playing three instruments at once. The lead, or harmonica part, of his thoughts was what has already been set down: the conclusion not to report his deception to the authorities, the determination not to give up and go home and endure the derision of his friends but to stick by his vow to Agatha and search on, extracting what consolation he could from his predicament. As an accompaniment, to this, the guitar of his mind was upbraiding Reverend Teague, saying, The amount, Mr. Ordway, is entirely up to you. Those poor homeless little waifs will be grateful for any amount, however small. Saying, “It’s not so much because it’s me, personally, that I resent it. It’s the principle of the thing. A poor distracted father in search of his little stolen son!” Meanwhile down in the rhythm section his thoughts were still contending with that Lieutenant Loftus. The beat was the same as before. That Will was not the criminal type. He and Mrs. Vinson were simply overfond of his boy. Had probably, not without some reason, almost come to think he was theirs. He had never received any ransom demands. Slim-witted as he was, even Will Vinson knew that he, Sam Ordway, was not the man to pick when you went kidnapping somebody’s child for anything more than love. And even if Will did send a note which he never got, and the deadline passed, he still wouldn’t harm the boy. Slow, yes, he might be slow, but never cruel. He might threaten to do something horrible, but when the time actually came … Not Will. Not good old Will Vinson, softhearted, gentle, sweet-natured old Will Vinson.

  This was the moment when his thoughts struck the chord:

  Orphans’ home?

  He imagined Will in Paris. Desperate, on the run, his bridges all burnt behind him, his ransom demands unmet, saddled with this boy. He saw a tree. Saw Will skulking about this tree day after day, long past the deadline he had set for the money to be left in the hollow between the roots. Then he saw him leading Ned by the hand through the streets of Paris. They entered an alleyway. There, slyly disengaging his hand, Will Vinson stole away, abandoning the child like an unwanted kitten. He saw Ned wandering lost, wailing, finally found by a pair of boys. Unable to locate his folks, they turned him over to a man who in time turned him over to the sheriff.

  “What’s your name, sonnyboy?” asked the sheriff.

  “Ned,” said Ned.

  That they might have checked in their files and found, or at least suspected, that this was Edward Ordway, stolen from home near Clarksville on May 7, this never entered my grandfather’s mind, so complete was his contempt for the law, or rather for the law’s interest in the affairs of a poor farmer like himself.

  “Well,” said the sheriff to his deputy, “I’m afraid there’s only one thing to do with him.”

  “Looks that way,” the deputy agreed.

  “If you’re thinking of adopting one of them,” said the man to whom my grandfather gave a ride in his wagon (for the Paris orphanage, non-denominational, was a few miles outside of town), “you want to pick a young one.” A farmer, he had the contract for the orphanage slops. Though Lord knew his hogs wasn’t getting very fat off of what them poor little devils left on their plates. “Be a longer investment ’fore you get him up to where he’s any help to you, or to your wife if what you’re after is a gal for her, but it pays off in the long run. Thing is to get them before the place ruins them, teaches them bad habits and dirty talk, makes them tough and shifty. Hamlin Underhill, he’s tried three. The first one run off with all the money in the house and they haven’t caught him yet. And what do you reckon the second
one done?”

  “What?”

  “Took him a ball peen hammer and smashed all the furniture to a flinders, then set fire to the outhouse!”

  “My goodness! What did the third one do?”

  But there they were. Behind tall cyclone fencing, a compound of barracks like an army outpost, with short intersecting streets, a church spire rising over it all. On the field which the wagon now drew alongside of, a band of the orphans were playing soccer.

  “Oh, but… they’re all girls!” said my grandfather.

  “Them ain’t girls,” said his passenger. “Them’s boys. They keep them in them smocks up to about ten years old, or twelve. Easier to make. And to launder.”

  “Oh, yes,” said my grandfather. They were nearer now. “Yes, I can see now that they’re boys.” And he shook his head. What he could see were their fuzzy close-cropped polls, like coconuts.

  “Them’s the girls,” said the farmer. They were passing a second soccer game, separated by a fence from the first.

  “Where?” asked my grandfather.

  “There. Them’s girls. They crop their heads same as the boys’. Have to, they say. Only way to keep down nits, ringworms. Well, this is the gate. I’ll get out here. What do I owe you for the ride? Much obliged to you. Hope you find one that takes your fancy. Remember what I told you about picking a young one. Younger the better. You won’t regret it.”

  “Mr. Ordway, I hope you won’t take exception,” said Mr. Marchbanks, the director of the home. “I know that to a father his child is like no other. But in a job like mine,” he said, tapping the photograph of Ned against his thumbnail, “where you see over six hundred every day …”

  “Six hundred!” my grandfather exclaimed. “I never knew there were that many orphans in the whole state of Texas!”

  “Oh, my dear sir! In addition to the district and county homes, like us, there are all the various denominational homes, there is the State Orphans’ Asylum down in Corsicana, the lodge and fraternal organization homes, Woodsmen, Masons, Oddfellows, et cetera, the privately endowed homes, the homes for the blind and the deaf-and-dumb and the insane and the colored and—”

  “Think of that!” said my grandfather. “That many poor little children that have lost their parents!”

  “Or never had any. Or never had any, Mr. Ordway. Much the commoner case, I assure you. Oh, no! Dont talk to me about your pure, unspotted Southern womanhood!”

  “Six hundred!” my grandfather repeated. And he was afraid that he smiled. He could not help it; among a number that large his chance of finding Ned was multiplied beyond his hopes. Anyhow, for him to pull a long face over it was not going to lessen the number of orphans in Texas.

  Mr. Marchbanks was saying meanwhile that although it had gotten so he could hardly tell one child from another (and small wonder, thought my grandfather, remembering those boy-girls and girl-boys, those uniforms like cotton-sacks), Mr. Ordway was welcome to tour the home, and if his boy was there, then of course he would be able to pick him out. My grandfather was not so sure of that, as he tried to picture Ned with his hair cropped. At this point Mr. Marchbanks returned the photograph, and, looking at it, my grandfather was shocked to find how little difference it would make in Ned’s case.

  They went first to the infirmary. “Now we will hope we don’t find him in here,” said Mr. Marchbanks. “But since it’s on our way we will just peek in.”

  Passing a door, my grandfather thought he heard the cry of an infant, a newborn baby. So he had. Of more than one. “Do you get them here that young?” he inquired.

  Mr. Marchbanks stopped. “Mr. Ordway,” he said, “we have found them not more than a few hours old lying at the gate when we went out to unlock it in the morning. We found one there one raw day in February that had its cord still attached. Its mamma had given him a doughnut. Can’t you just picture her? Probably all of about thirteen years old. The things I have seen, Mr. Ordway, the things that I have seen! One morning—this was not in my time but during the administration of my predecessor—they went out to open the gate, and there lying on the ground outside was a young woman just giving birth. The matron and the cook delivered her on the spot, with nothing more than a paring knife and a broken F string from a banjo, which luckily the cook happened to have in his pocket at the time. Now a lieutenant j.g. in the Marine Corps, that young fellow. I get a card from him every Christmas. Care to look in for a moment? Pleasantest ward in the whole place, the nursery. So long as you don’t let your mind dwell on what the future has got in store for them.”

  They went in. Every crib was occupied and the floor alive with babies on blankets. “So many!” my grandfather exclaimed.

  Mr. Marchbanks nodded. He nodded and nodded. Which manner of orphans these were, his expression left no doubt. He nodded eight or ten times more, and said yes, they were so overcrowded they had recently had to add another night watchman to the staff. Patrolling the fences to keep the ones inside from trying to break out, one man could not also guard the gate to keep the women from leaving more there. And not only women. Men too had been caught sneaking away after leaving babies at the gate, after the mothers had left them on their doorsteps. Yes, men. And though he named no names, some very highly placed and respectable men around the town among them. Caught sneaking away, leaving their little bundles of joy to be brought up at the expense of the county taxpayers. Forced to come back and pick them up and take them off. At the picture which this conjured up my grandfather could not help smiling. Mr. Marchbanks couldn’t either, though he quickly wiped his off (my grandfather followed suit) and said, peering down at the mass of babies squirming on the floor, “I leave it to you, sir, to judge the state of morals in northeast Texas.”

  Only this morning they had caught a young hussy making off after leaving hers at the gate. Big, strapping, rawboned country gal, perfectly capable of working to support it; but if she didn’t make another try tonight, he would be very much surprised. Well, he said with a comprehensive look around, they couldn’t catch them all.

  Mr. Marchbanks paused for a closer look at the occupant of one crib. “This young gentleman here,” he said, “I’ve got my eye on him.” He pursed his lips and shook his head. “Something tells me he is not going to be with us much longer.”

  “Oh, really!” said my grandfather. Peering in, he saw a fat, rosy-cheeked baby. “Gee, he sure looks healthy enough.”

  “It’s not his health I’m watching,” said Mr. Marchbanks, “it’s his complexion. I suspect that boy may have had a passing swipe of the old tarbrush. Too early to be sure; but he is definitely a shade darker than he was the last time I looked. If he keeps this up, why he will have to be sent down to the other place, of course.”

  “It must be awfully hard to be sure in some cases,” my grandfather observed. “I wouldn’t want your responsibility. Don’t you worry sometimes that you might have made a mistake?”

  “It is hard to be sure sometimes,” said Mr. Marchbanks. “I can recall babies that had the board of trustees in here hanging over the crib for as long as half an hour shaking their heads and trying to make up their minds. There have been cases where they never did. Whole board split right down the middle. There are eight of them. I’m the ninth—honorary—and in case of a tie I cast the deciding vote. It is, as you say, a responsibility, and I do worry sometimes that I may have made a mistake. For this reason, whenever there is the least shadow of a doubt I always cast the black bean. You can’t be too careful.”

  Mr. Marchbanks pointed out the large number of women attending the children. They had found, he said, and not only they but other orphanages as well, that up to the age of one year, without the attentions of a foster mother children just died. From plain lack of affection.

  Next they went into the sick ward, a long room with rows of beds along the walls and an aisle running between. The sick boys lying or sitting up in bed all turned towards the door when it was opened, but their faces did not light up as the face of a child expecting
its mother to come to the sickroom would have done. Down the aisle they went, then back up it again, while my grandfather inspected the patients. Boys of all ages they were, in identical nightshirts, beneath identical gray blankets, with bed tables on which stood identical water bottles and tumblers. None of them was Ned, though it was disconcerting how many of them reminded him of Ned. My grandfather found himself smiling a frozen fatuous smile at them, which they returned coolly. In their eyes all natural childish curiosity had been snuffed out; instead they looked out upon the world with a cynical indifference. Or was it, my grandfather asked himself, simply the lonely self-preoccupation of children with no one to think of but themselves and no one to think of them?

  The day being Sunday and the weather fair, the boys were all out of doors. All, that is, that were allowed out; some were confined to quarters for misbehavior. They toured the dormitories for a glimpse at these, and were glowered at like visitors to a zoo. My grandfather felt pleased and proud to find that Ned was not among these.

  From there they went out into the yard in front of the church. Services were just about to begin. The orphans stood in the yard waiting. Mr. Marchbanks pointed out some of the more interesting cases. He had said he could hardly tell one from another, but he did distinguish two types, the well-born and the troublesome. These two types were sometimes united in one inmate. “Take that boy there,” he said, indicating one who had already caught my grandfather’s eye, and whom he had taken to be a little girl suffering from her hideous haircut. “His daddy would have been mighty surprised to be told, as recently as just six months ago, that his son and heir would soon be in the orphans’ asylum and he himself in his grave with his own bullet in his head. Mr. Stanley Blankenship, he was, a big man in local affairs, chairman of the board of directors of one of the banks, officer in any number of county corporations, treasurer of his church funds. Got to dabbling in west Texas oil rights. Found himself short and mixed his accounts with his church’s. The auditors came in at just the worst possible moment. A familiar story. Put a pistol to his head one Tuesday morning. The shock of it carried off his wife, ruined any number of investors in his various enterprises. Now there’s his boy. An only child and spoiled rotten, as you might imagine, and don’t take to his new life here at all. I look for trouble from that boy.