“How is that? If you solved the problem, Grandpa, then why can’t you take the credit?”
“Because I wasn’t thinking what I was saying when I said it. I wasn’t thinking of anything. I was just sort of mumbling to myself as I walked around the problem, so to speak. When it came my turn, I said, ‘Well now, what is the situation? The situation is, we have got fifteen thousand pounds of very high dead elephant here where it’s not wanted. Now then, either we get this dead elephant away from this town, or…’
“‘Or what?’
“‘Or we get this town away from this elephant.’
“Well, I didn’t know I was going to say that, and the minute I heard myself, I wished I could find a hole with a top to crawl in and pull the lid down. I tried to laugh, to turn it into a joke, but it was no time for joking, and besides, I couldn’t laugh. The others all sat there looking at me with their mouths hanging open. Mr. Dickey looked like he was having a stroke. I remembered then that Jesus Christ says somewhere, it is by his idle words that a man will be judged. ‘By God!’ Mr. Dickey managed to say at last. I tried to find words to apologize. While I was still looking for them, Mr. Dickey said, ‘By God, sir! Now that is what I call circus!’ Then I really felt awful. There was no higher compliment in that man’s power to bestow, and I not only had not earned it, I hadn’t even been thinking what I was saying.
“Well, the town folks fairly jumped at my suggestion. All of them had been dying for a change for years. Topsy was welcome to the damned old townsite as far as they were concerned. As for us of the circus crew, dismantling Dickey Bros. daily meant that this was all in a day’s work for us. We found a spot about fifteen miles to the leeward of Topsy where the water didn’t taste nearly so much of rotten eggs, and there we relocated Zodiac. Afterwards, on Thursday, Mr. Dickey announced that he was going into winter quarters and asked if I wouldn’t like to go with them, come back on the road the following spring. From the look he gave me it was plain he meant to offer me a hideout. He still believed I was running from the law, as he had ever since I took the job as assistant bull handler. I thanked him but said I had other business to attend to. As a parting gift he gave me a bonus of fifty dollars for the suggestion I had made. I tried to decline it, knowing how little I deserved it, but he insisted. Old Topsy’s bones lay out there on the bald prairie until just a few years ago, when they were carted off to the Museum of Natural History in Dallas and there they may be seen today mounted on a stand and labeled ‘Prehistoric Mastodon.’”
Christmas 1898 fell on a Sunday. The Saturday before, Dallasites doing their last-minute shopping stopped in the streets to stare at a man wearing a sandwich board on which was painted:
HAVE YOU SEEN
MY LITTLE BOY
?
MY NEIGHBOR
STOLE HIM
AND WENT WEST
FOR
FURTHER
DETAILS
PLEASE STOP
AND ASK
THANK YOU
AND MERRY XMAS
Up Commerce Street from Houston all the way to Harwood, then down Main to Houston again, then up Elm all the way to Deep Elm (or Ellum, as everyone there calls it) and along the principal cross streets he went, passing several times in the course of the day his colleague, the shuffling, stoop-shouldered old stumblebum wearing boards advertising a loan shop, from whom he had adopted the idea, and attracting comment everywhere. Outside Sangers’ and A. Harris’ and the other big stores (there was no Neiman-Marcus in those days) the shoppers stopped to read his sign and discuss it among themselves, and some to ask for further details.
It worked. At five o’clock that afternoon on the corner of Elm and Akard streets a man from out in Grapevine, Texas, in Dallas for the day, approached my grandfather, asked to hear his story, examined the photograph of Ned, and told of a meeting with the Vinsons in his home town some months previous. And so the big city, where the trail looked most hopelessly lost, provided the lead which set him on Will’s track again. Staked him to continue his quest, as well. For by that hour of the day he had collected a total of $62.50, which the good people of Dallas, filled with Christmas spirit, had pressed on him; and this was after he had refused the first half dozen or more who had tried to give him something.
The man from Grapevine also set my grandfather off again on an inward path of self-discovery, by reminding him of the obligation he lay under, and which he was as yet so woefully inadequate to fulfill. My grandfather had hardly begun his story when the man exclaimed, “The what?” Then darting a glance to either side, satisfied that no one had overheard, drew my grandfather off Elm onto Akard Street and lowering his voice, he said, “Let me give you a word of advice, Mr. Hathaway. Just keep that part under your hat. Don’t let on to nobody that you have had the law working on this for you. I’ll overlook it myself ’cause you’re a stranger and don’t know no better. But hereabouts you get the law out after a feller, why folks that never even liked him before start pulling for him. Out here in Texas folks do look down on any man that goes to—”
“Well, I know that myself. I went to them before I realized that it was personal—if you know what I mea—”
“Why, hit was a johnny come out to our town from up north someplace and before he had time to catch on to our ways he had a falling out with one of our local citizens. Hit all started over a woman. Well, hit was the northern feller’s wife, in point of fact. She up and littered a pair of twins that didn’t look no more like their daddy than the man in the moon. Spitting image of this other feller, both of them. This led to hard feelings and things went from bad to worse and ’fore long they had a falling out, like I said—hit was over a Poland-China boar—and the northerner he up and went to law. Well! He’d been making out pretty good till then. He’d opened up a little grocery store and worked real hard and folks’d got so they didn’t hardly mind him being a foreigner—but oh me oh my, he sure come a whopper when he went to law over that hawg! His trade fell off to nothing, his kids didn’t hardly have no more’n a rag to cover their nekkidness, it got so people would cross over to the other side of the street to keep from wishing him good day. Well, to cut a long story short, somebody finally took pity on him and wised him up and he called the other party out and they shot one another up a right smart and shook hands and become the best of friends. After that his trade picked up and now he’s doing right well again. But let me tell you, that poor man like to of ruined hisself just through plain ign’rance. So believe me, if you ever want to see that boy of yours again, you’ll take my advice and not let on that you’ve brought the law in on it. Whereabouts did you say you was from?”
“I didn’t say, but… Arkansas.”
“Yes, I guessed you must come from some place like that. I believe that’s where this other feller come from too. Well, I’ll overlook it, as I say; but do as I tell you, hear? Don’t breathe a word of this to nobody else.”
And so my grandfather began schooling himself in the universal belief that getting back his boy was more or less incidental to settling his score with Will, and on the way he began rehearsing for that encounter.
So, Will Vinson, you dirty dog, I’ve got you at last! You’re mine! Yell all you like. Go ahead. Nobody will hear you here. No, I won’t make it quick. I’m in no hurry. I mean to enjoy this. First I’m going to work you over a bit, pay you back a little for the merry chase you’ve led me. Save your breath, you’ll need it to say your prayers. How’s that? Hah! What’s that to me? I wouldn’t care if you had a dozen. It’s the orphans’ home for them!
It used to be that he got no further than that, when, remembering with a shudder the orphans’ home which he himself had toured, he would relent. No more. Now he saw the thing through unflinching to the end. You didn’t know the man you had to deal with, Will. It’s us quiet ones that when the worm turns, he turns. I’m not easily riled. But when I am riled, then watch out! And you have riled me. There! Take that! That’s for being cheated out of my money. And there! Th
at’s for that little jaunt to Ben Franklin and what I had to take off of that fellow I thought was you. There! That’s for all those muddy miles of pushing that derned elephant which you never brought the kids to see. And there! And there! And there! And now, time to say your prayers, Will. Be quick! All right, that’s all. Now may the Lord have mercy on your soul!
Season of peace on earth, good will to men notwithstanding, by the time he reached Fort Worth my grandfather had killed Will Vinson seven, maybe eight times. He was killing him at least once a day, regularly after lunch, and sometimes before breakfast. He killed him in Grand Prairie and again the same day in Arlington. He last left him dead in a thicket just outside Fort Worth. Proceeding into town, he was promptly pointed out by the man who had been gathering pecans on the edge of that thicket, arrested, and clapped in jail.
The cell they put him in was the veritable Sistine Chapel of jail cells. On the ceiling and along the walls were depicted, in lead pencil, the scenes from the Old Testament which Michelangelo had hurried over, beginning with Adam and Eve playing Apple Core, Baltimore. Then was illustrated the Book of Begats, so many old patriarchs multiplying you couldn’t count them all. The bigamist Jacob was portrayed keeping the peace in his irregular ménage. A Saturday night in old Sodium (Sodom?) when it was a wide-open town on the plains was the subject of one panel, and in the adjoining one the daughters of Lot were shown doing their filial bit to keep the name of Lot alive. The impotent elders were represented peeping out from behind the bushes and slobbering over Susannah. Onan was pictured doing unto himself. One entire wall was devoted to the shenanigans of the degenerate David clan, with that sweet psalmist the king himself in state, or rather in a state, watching his neighbor’s wife taking her bath, then that business between his daughter and that one odd brother of hers, and finally the goatish antics of old Judge Solomon, that chip off the old block, with his harem and his libertine lyrics.
And of whom was all this the work but my grandfather’s old friend Reverend Teague! Yes, of course he remembered Mr. Ordway. Did he ever find that boy he was looking for? He even volunteered to pay back that little loan which Mr. Ordway had made him. However, he withdrew the offer when the other prisoner woke up, rubbed his eyes, saw my grandfather, and leapt from bed crying, “Lefty! So they caught you at last, you old horse thief you!”
“My name is not Lefty, and I never saw you before in my life,” said my grandfather.
“I thought you was dead!” the man continued. “How in hell did you ever get out of San Antone alive?” Turning to Reverend Teague, he said, “You know what this little son of a bitch done in San Antone? He—”
“I have never set foot in San Antone,” said my grandfather. “I don’t know you and you don’t know me. My name is Ordway. Samuel Ordway. I’m here looking for my little boy. Ask him” (indicating the Reverend). “What I am doing in this jail, I don’t—”
“Looking for your boy? Well, that’s a good story, Lefty. Stick to it, hear? What name did you say you was going by now? So I don’t forget it.”
“Look here,” said my grandfather. “I’m not even left-handed. Give me that pencil,” he said to Reverend Teague. He wrote on the wall, “Samuel Ordway.” Then he scratched it out, not wishing his name to be seen in such a place.
“Write some more,” said the prisoner, whose name was Rags. “Write, ‘Thirty days hath September.’”
“Remarkable!” said Reverend Teague. “I’ve seen men learn to talk Mexican or to play deaf and dumb and never once slip up, but this is the first time I ever saw one learn to write with his other hand.”
“What’s even more remarkable,” said Rags, “when I used to know him he couldn’t write with his left hand either.”
“Tell me, just what kind of racket was you trying to work with that story about a lost little boy?” asked the Reverend. “Oh, all right then. Keep it to yourself.”
Five weeks the Reverend Teague had been in jail, one for each book of the Pentateuch, and it began to look as if he would come to the Last Judgment before he ever came before an earthly judge. He was in for breach of promise.
“To think,” said Rags, “you could just marry your way out of here!”
“Her heart is set on vengeance now,” the Reverend sighed. “She would sooner have me rot away in this place.”
But his was nothing to the case of poor Rags. He had really had the book thrown at him. He had been given a year on charges of trespassing.
“A year for trespassing!” exclaimed my grandfather. (What he wondered, was he himself in for?)
Well, they had added on other charges, as they always did when they had it in for you. Vagrancy. Disorderly conduct. Profanity. Drunkenness. Violation of the sanitary code (he had spat where spitting was forbidden). Disturbing the peace. Resisting arrest. Insulting an officer. Contempt of …
“But those are minor offenses,” said my grandfather, “and even all put together not enough to keep a man in jail for more than a few nights.”
“And treason,” Rags said.
“Treason! Growing out of a trespassing charge?”
Well, he had been drinking at the time, it was true. And he was without fixed means of support. And he had spat in the officer’s face who arrested him, no getting around that. But when they tried to tack on all those other things, then he had told them just where to insert their lousy government and threatened to emigrate and renounce his citizenship, and that was how the treason charge got stuck on. Then they really got their backs up and started prying into his private life and booked him with trigamy—
“Bigamy,” said Reverend Teague. “Bigamy.”
“I can count,” said Rags. “And so can they.”
—fornication, adultery, desertion, gambling, corrupting minors, multiple balloting, consorting with persons of known criminal record (though how he was to avoid that he didn’t know, short of turning his poor old mother out into the street), receiving stolen goods (a Christmas present—shirt studs—from the same parent), cruelty to animals, indecent exposure, loitering, and when he got done serving time for all those things he faced a charge of attempted petit larceny. “Never go trespassing,” he concluded, “in a bank vault at three in the morning.”
There was more in the sequel to the Reverend’s story too. Having recalled that he already had a wife and five children, he had backed out of a hasty promise to marry a widow woman in the town. She objected less to that, however, than she did to the fact that when the time came to return all the little gifts they had exchanged, he was unable to recollect where he had mislaid the three thousand dollars she had entrusted him to invest in her name.
Punctually at half past five the jailer came bringing the supper tray. A surly-looking brute, he was a lesson in the deceptiveness of appearances. “Gentlemen,” he said with a hideous but well-meant smile. “How are you all this fine evening? Everything to your satisfaction? How is that nasty whitlow coming along, Mr. Brown?” (By which name he seemed to mean Reverend Teague.) “That poultice of my wife’s do it any good?”
They replied that they were very well, thank you, and that they had just one complaint to make at the moment. Would he be a pal and take away the bucket? He did so with a compliance which surprised my grandfather, for as he observed once the man was out of hearing, he had not expected such politeness towards prisoners on the part of jailers. Nor such excellent stew.
They said he ought to have been there before. Before last week, that was. The chili con came had meat in it now but formerly it was just plain old chili con carne. Up until last week the jailer had used to come banging on the bars and growling, “Here it is, you scum,” or words to that effect.
New jailer? my grandfather inquired.
Same jailer, but he was a changed man, and the whole regime had been reformed, owing to a riot they had staged.
To protest the food, asked my grandfather, or the abuse?
Neither, actually. Both admitted having eaten, as well as been called, worse, in as well as out o
f other jails. It had come about in the following manner: some while before, they had been given a new cellmate … The jailer returned at this point, with the bucket emptied, scoured, and sweetened with Lysol. Would that be all for now? he asked, and on being told that he might go, wished them each and all a hearty appetite. New cellmate, as they were saying. Fellow brought in on charges of having passed a lead half dollar, although he swore he was ignorant of the fact and that if it was counterfeit then he had been done out of a day’s wages; and it was true that he had no others like it, or for that matter unlike it, on him at the time of arrest. He had seemed at once not only a decent, but what was more, a particularly likable soul, a very sporting loser at three-handed stud (they played nightly, low man to do the chores around the cell next day, such as making the beds, mopping the floor, et cetera), quite content to take thirds on the bucket in the morning, and the longer you got to know him—and some three weeks went by with no sign of his case coming to trial—the better you liked him. To be useful to others was a pleasure to him, so that in time they gave up the nightly poker session and just left the housekeeping to old Bill. The man had a gift for finding things when they went on the street-sweeping detail on Sunday mornings, and always insisted on sharing with them. All the better-quality cigar butts that he picked up he passed on to them, saving only the two-fers for himself—said Havana leaf upset his digestion. Once he found a two-dollar bill, and what do you think he did with it? Sent out for a fried-chicken dinner for all, and swore when it came that the gizzard and the pope’s nose were his two favorite pieces and left the rest for them. Bill—Bill O’Shaughnessey—was a positive ray of sunshine. One of those easily-put-upon fellows that don’t know how to get mad. Would give you the shirt off his back. Would do anything for a friend and didn’t have an enemy in the world. One of those …
The Ordways Page 27