The Ordways

by William Humphrey

  * “Cooling time”: a line of legal defense, peculiar to Texas courts, in which it is held that if a man kills before he has had time “to cool” after receiving an injury or an insult he is not guilty of murder.

  PART FOUR

  Family Reunion

  MY UNCLE Ned Ordway was a little boy in a picture in a flowered pewter frame which stood next to the ivoryfaced marble clock with the spidery numerals on the mantelpiece in my grandfather’s room, a boy much younger than I already was, when I first became aware of him, and inherited his story. Once having heard it, I was not long in learning to dislike that picture, nor much longer then in persuading myself that it was not a good likeness. For just as the photographs of me accorded not at all with my own picture of myself, which is to say with my notions of the great deeds I was to do and the fine man I was to become, so that sad-looking, pinch-faced, whey-colored little boy with the tow hair parted in the middle and so thoroughly wetted down that he appeared to be bald, was not my Little Ned. Such a wretched boy was not worth stealing and running off with into the Wild West. Or maybe he had looked like that before he was stolen, but certainly not for long afterwards. For Ned had been taken to a land where surely even mothers grew sensible and no longer wetted down one’s hair, a land where it never rained and there were two Saturdays a week instead of Sunday, and there he must have blossomed like a desert flower, overnight acquired a big, lean, loose-jointed, muscular frame and a mustache as black and thick as a shoe brush, a rangy gait like a mountain lion on the prowl, skin the color of a new saddle, sharp steady eyes the color of a western sky which seemed to notice nothing while taking in everything, and a ready broad smile instead of the frightened pucker on that little boy’s face as he sat for the itinerant photographer that day long ago.

  He was my constant companion. Despite the photograph he was the elder of us, and on our expeditions was always the leader. This phase passed, and though I went on calling him Little Ned, he was no longer a boy in my mind, he was a grown man, only without all those depressing anti-children, or more particularly anti-boy attitudes which all other grownups seemed to have been born with. At about this time I began to go to the picture shows, and my image of my uncle took definite shape. That is to say, his costume and his character took shape; his face underwent regular weekly change. One week he would be a dead ringer for Johnny Mack Brown. The following week he looked more like Buck Jones. Or Hoot Gibson. Or Ken Maynard. Or Fred Thompson. Or Tim McCoy. Or Bob Steele. It all depended on who had starred in the preceding Saturday’s feature film. The image stuck with me pretty well through a week of long division and sentence diagramming, as I was always first in the line at the old Capitol, waiting for the ticket window to open at a quarter to ten, with my lunch in a paper bag, and in the front row of seats I stayed until my mother came and dragged me out at half past six that night, dazed, half blind, and still clutching the bag with my lunch, which I had forgotten to eat.

  I felt no disloyalty towards my father (Earl Ordway, third of the ten children of Samuel and Hester) for wishing sometimes that I had had another. The one I would have preferred was his own brother.

  Little Ned! How glamorous to me it was, that name! Not a name, not just something to answer to when roll was called or sign on checks, like Archie Ragsdale or Luther Haines, but a title, an appellation, like Wild Bill Hickok or Indian Jim Bridger or Lone Wolf Gonzales. The “little” would be, of course, in a country of tall men, a way of signaling his towering height. A hard man, Little Ned Ordway, but with a fondness for small boys, especially if related to him. He spoke little, and then in a quiet commanding drawl, like Randolph Scott’s, never raising his voice, not even when riled, especially not then, though the quietness then had a different ring, like the three mild little clicks which the hammer of a pistol makes on being cocked, or the initial premonitory rattle of a rattlesnake. He wore saddle-whitened blue jeans, a clay-colored Stetson sombrero, a fringed buckskin jacket, and a pair of hand-tooled Nocona boots. There clung to him the smell of horse sweat and leather and camp-fire smoke. When not riding herd or making a drive up to Dodge City or Abilene, he was in the saddle night and day rounding up the cattle, lassoing and branding dogies, broncbusting. Then there was vigilante duty and gangs of rustlers to have to catch, necktie parties to have to attend, towns to be cleaned up and establish law and order in. A wanderer, or as they said in the pictures, a drifter, constantly saddling up and moving on to avoid the gratitude of the lovely virgins whose fathers’ ranches he had saved from the designs of a villain in a black hat and a flowered waistcoat named, invariably, Kincaid. For me my western uncle was Kit Carson, Buffalo Bill, Pat Garrett, and Billy the Kid. He was, under a thick coat of moral whitewash, Cole Younger, Sam Bass. Sometimes on rainy days when I could not go out he was the young cowpuncher on the street in Laredo, all wrapped in white linen and dying that day.

  I have said that I was sure my father would not have minded had he known (supposing of course that I could have come and visited him and Mamma often) that I would really a little sooner have been his nephew, the son of his brother Ned. That is true, yet there was one thing which disappointed me in him—that was his impatience with me sometimes when I asked questions about Little Ned. Of course my father had never known Ned any more than I had, and could not give me any new information. But it was not this that made him impatient; besides it was not new information that I was after. I knew everything there was to know, and by then the addition of any new bit to the lore of Little Ned which I already possessed would probably have been upsetting to me. I just wanted to hear the same old things over and over again. How the family had gotten ready to go into Clarksville early that Saturday morning, the seventh of May 1898. How Aunt Flo (who must have been the grimmest-faced baby, with that one paralyzed eyelid stuck halfway up, poor thing, like a balky window shade) had cried all the way over to the Vinson’s. How they, the Vinsons, had behaved no different from any other day, and all the while they were plotting to steal our Ned and run off with him. How the family came back in the wagon late that afternoon and drew up at the Vinsons’ gate. How Grandpa had gone to the door and called “Hello!” and his voice came echoing back from the empty house. How he had gone west and searched and searched, and how …

  I simply did not know what to think, not only of my father but of his whole generation, the first time he indicated that all this, which after all he was much closer to than I, was not as endlessly fascinating to him as it was to me. And all my aunts and uncles were the same.

  By my time just about the only aspect of the tale of Little Ned that was kept alive by his brothers and sisters was the cautionary one. I, along with all his other nephews and nieces, was kept on a very short leash, and warned daily against accepting rides from or speaking to or even smiling at passing strangers. At the time of the Lindbergh kidnapping, long after the other mothers of Clarksville had returned to their senses and realized that their offspring did not present nearly the same temptation as the Lindbergh child, I was still hardly allowed out of the house. “Remember Little Ned,” I was told.

  Did Little Ned remember us, Grandpa and Grandma and Aunt Winnie and Aunt Bea—without, that is, knowing who and where we were? Or had old Will Vinson fooled him into believing that he was his own flesh and blood? Did he ever wonder who he really was (as I myself often did) and did he sometimes speculate, as he sat in the saddle out riding the range, on a lost father and mother, and maybe an unknown nephew, back east? Had they, I once wondered in one of the blackest moments of my young life, even changed his name, and was he not, to himself, Little Ned, our Little Ned, but something disgusting like Duane or Ferris or Troy, or some such Vinsonish given name?

  And how had Little Ned gotten along with his foster brothers and sister? Had one jealous one (that Felix Vinson, maybe) told him that he was a waif and a maverick and a stray, something found in the rain barrel, found in a pig track, something the cat drug in? Did they all gang up on him and tease him and pinch him and trip him whenever the
ir parents’ backs were turned?

  Sometimes as I lay in bed waiting for sleep at night, or on a summer day lay in my hideaway, a cave formed by rattan vines in the thicket down behind our house, then it was not Little Ned but I myself who was stolen by the Vinsons and carried off into a perilous wild country far from home. I saw myself waving goodbye to Grandma and Grandpa, who, younger, greatly resembled my own mother and father, and lying very still in Mrs. Vinson’s fat imprisoning arms, watched them out of sight in the wagon. I knew what they did not know, that we would never see each other again, and even greater than my own sorrow was my sadness for them. Then I pictured the feverish haste in the Vinson house, and I confess I rather basked in such admiration as could lead a family to pull up its roots and fly to unknown wastes for love of me. Then I saw us all jouncing along in the wagon, hurriedly thrown together, and I saw Will Vinson, a stout, red-faced, silent man, bloodshot of eye and needing a shave, whipping up the horses and cussing them for their slowness, and I saw the countryside transform. My imagined flight with the Vinsons took me through a flickering badlands in dim black-and-white and the fleeing Vinsons in my reverie moved with that frenzied jerkiness as of an overwound toy which characterized the motions of Tom Mix, Rex Bell, and Yakima Canutt. Behind us, in grim but vain pursuit, came Grandpa. I would wonder how Little Ned had felt on awaking that first morning after, and sensing his distress at not finding Grandma, I would begin whimpering for my mother. And when my mother came I would ask how she would feel, and whether she would have another boy to take my place, and if she did, whether she would ever think of me, if someone was to steal me from her and take me far away; and indulging myself in inconsolable self-pity, I would sob myself to sleep in her arms.

  For a long time I was shy with my grandfather, because I loved him so. Too, he was a silent man, always deep in thought, sad-seeming now that watery-eyed old age had come upon him, and so when I went to spend my first summer on the farm he was still a kind of beloved stranger to me. Nor did it seem at first that our acquaintance was likely to improve much that summer, even being in the same house together. With the constant craving of old folks for silence I had been thoroughly impressed before leaving home—more impressed than I believed I was given credit for, so that, to prove myself, I was practically mute. To the few remarks my grandfather addressed to me my replies were almost idiotically monosyllabic. I felt that he had only spoken to be nice, and I was conscious that I had nothing to say which would interest a man who had seen so much and who had such a lot on his mind. I watched him from afar going about his chores, and I would have liked to offer to help, but I hung back. The stoop in his shoulders as he brought in the milk pails or carried slop to the hogs excited my deepest sympathy. I saw him sitting unrocking in his rocking chair on the front porch, gazing over the fields, thinking his heavy thoughts, and I wished I could comfort him. At night I prayed, “Dear God, have pity on poor Grandpa, for he lost his son just like you. And, dear God, please let him take just a little notice of me.”

  The answerable half of my prayer soon was, and beyond my wildest dreams. One day at dinner, eating my glass of cornbread crumbled in sweetmilk, I felt someone watching me and at the same moment heard my grandfather say, “Bless my soul!” I looked up to find his eyes on me, and I realized that I had been scraping the dribble from my chin with my spoon after each mouthful, a fault my mother was always correcting me for at home. I burned red. Then Grandpa said to Grandma, “For a minute there I would have sworn it was Ned come back just as he was.”

  Now my grandfather had never seen Ned at anything near the age which I had reached. In all likelihood he was confusing both me and Ned with the childhood of one of his other sons. However that may be, I had reminded him of Ned, and on my side I did not feel I was being likened to that miserable boy in the picture, but to the cowpuncher of my fond imaginings. The resemblance to Ned which he fancied he saw in me was strengthened when my grandfather discovered the secret cult I had made of my missing uncle. The topic was no longer painful to him, and so, out of my grandmother’s hearing, for he supposed it was still painful to her, he began that summer to tell me his adventures in search of his son, and over them we drew close. As certain family traits will sometimes skip a generation, passing over the children to reappear in a grandchild, in my grandfather’s case and mine it was Little Ned and the West.

  Reading over what I have written, I see that I have made it seem as if I spent every hour of my boyhood mooning over my lost uncle. Needless to say, I did not. Nor did I suppose that my grandfather had nothing else to think about. He had twelve other children, for one thing, and I had often seen him in their midst on Christmas and Thanksgiving Day and on his birthday being quite thoughtless and gay. I had gotten over thinking it was unfeeling of him, after Ned’s abduction, to have had other children. But as Little Ned was never far from my thoughts in those days, I assumed that he was even less often absent from my grandfather’s. As a matter of fact it was I who had brought him back, after long and almost total absence. I, and the onset of old age.

  When I came along it was many years since 1898. Many years, many bales of cotton, many children. His wife was old and his children gone from home, the friends of his youth dying off. His work was done, and now as the restlessness of old age came upon him his mind turned to the great adventure of his life, flooding it in a blaze of remembered light. The palette of his memory was spread with pure prismatic colors and the pictures he painted were of a land of perpetual summer, of sweeping yellow plains on which herds of cattle moved in a slow red tide, of brown hillsides sprinkled with white sheep like mushrooms, green valleys lying below red hills where melons grew in winter, hot to the touch, like sunned rocks; crimson bursts of poinsettia, bright lemons, glowing, incandescent amid their dark leaves, huge aloes with curling arms like tentacles, like some great octopi of the desert, creature-like geological growths of red sandstone carved by the winds which seemed to whisper a language around them; a sound heard once and never forgotten, like wind rushing in a cavern, as a thousand sheep cropped the grass in a hidden and windless valley; lilac-blooming almond trees and purple bougainvillea, alligator-pear trees and banana palms with their tattered leaves like great feather dusters stood on end, and over it all a bright blue cloudless sky. I in the restless longing of childhood for my life to begin, he in the fretful climacteric of its close, beguiled ourselves with his remembrances of that hot, free, unrestricted land; and out of the landscape of our vision, shimmering like a mirage, rose the figure of our son and uncle, the personification of the place, of our dreams and our regrets, with eyes the color of that clear sky, skin the color of that burnt earth, a smile as radiant as that bright, bone-warming sun.

  I learned now why my aunts and uncles and my father were bored with the story of Little Ned, and although I never shared the feeling, I understood how it might be so with them. My grandfather had tried at first to keep alive the memory of their lost brother in Winnie and Bea, to instill a feeling for the brother they had never known in the ones born afterwards. They had not been bored then; they had listened, had listened with bated breath, they had cried hot tears. He thought they were crying for their poor little brother; he realized at last that each was crying for himself. He saw that their interest was the fascination of terror, and he saw that each felt obscurely ashamed of not having been kidnapped himself. He saw that each felt himself loved less than the child who had been stolen. They were only children, they were not to blame. He was. He had been a fool. He would be one no longer. And so he put Ned away in the attic of his mind as he had put away his clothes and his toys in the attic of the house.

  And then time took its effect. The other children outgrew their childish fears, their childish jealousy, and the two who had known him simply forgot Little Ned, and the rest who had not sometimes forgot that they hadn’t, and he became a story, and then became an old story.

  At first he had tried to tell his wife of his adventures. They would settle down before the fire afte
r supper at night. Selecting an opportune moment, my grandfather would clear his throat with a reminiscent chuckle. Never a penny was he offered for his thoughts. After a while he would try again, upping his volume a bit. She went on knitting bootees. Finally he would have to say, “Did I ever tell you about that time in Waxahachie when I—hah!—when I…”

  Now in relating any story about himself, my grandfather, after the immemorial fashion of country men, would always cast himself as the butt of the joke; only in this way could a story in first person singular be rendered unegotistical. My grandmother missed this point. So when he had wound up a long and intricate and lovingly embellished tale of what a rube he had been taken for in Waco, or what a fool he had made of himself in front of strangers on a streetcar one day in Dallas, or what he had been caught by his waiter doing with a certain unfamiliar dish in the dining room of his Fort Worth hotel, she would offer comfort in these words, “Well, never mind, dear. It’s all over now and you can just forget it. You’re home again where you belong and you needn’t ever go away again.”

  Her new child had turned out a boy, and my grandmother was a much more contented woman. Rather more contented than my grandfather felt she had any right to be, forgetful of Ned and her share in the loss of Ned. Relations between her and her stepdaughters had improved in his absence, partly through his absence, which had brought them closer together, and now even more through her greater contentment in having a son of her own. The girls were crazy about their little brother Ewen. You would think they had never had a brother—a brother of their own, my grandfather caught himself thinking. Oddly enough, the one he felt closest to at that period was little Florence. Not so very odd, really. She did not disappoint him as Bea and Winnie did; she was excused in his mind from the loyalty towards Ned which he felt they ought to show. And she appealed to him because of the neglect she now suffered, or that he thought she suffered, through her mother’s absorption in Ewen. Meanwhile it was not that Hester tried to force the baby on his notice; or if she did, naturally she never thought of it as forcing. But to my grandfather it seemed that she was campaigning to make him forget Ned. So towards little Ewen his original impulse of resentment began to harden into rejection. Too happy to notice this, my grandmother would say that the boy looked just like his father. To my grandfather what he looked just like was Ned. At night when it was his spell to walk him when the baby was colicky and cried, he would pray, “Oh, Lord, teach me to love this child of mine. He is a fine boy and I ought to thank you for him. He can’t help it that he’s a boy. It’s not his fault that his brother was stolen from me and not him. A man can have many sons and love them all. Only why did you have to make this one look so much like the other one, to remind me of him a thousand times a day? I know you sent me this boy, Lord, to console me, to take the other’s place. But I didn’t want to be consoled—at least not just yet. I didn’t want another boy. I just want my boy back.”