Ned said he had spoken to his two brothers—meaning Felix and Perry (one of whom lived in Laredo, the other in Corpus Christi)—about this. They themselves intended to go on using the name they had grown up with. For himself, of course, there was no problem. But as for his … as for Mr. Vinson, he was puzzled to know what he would prefer. And now there was someone else to consider.
“Who?” asked my grandfather.
“You,” said Ned.
“Oh, son,” said my grandfather, “I’m not jealous of my name, and if you think Will Vinson would want to lie under it, it’s his for the rest of time, insofar as it’s mine to give him. I was only born to it, he earned it the hard way. But if you think he would want his own back now, then for God’s sake and mine give it to him. It has been a burden on my mind for years. I never signed my signature without thinking that somewhere in the world was a man—never mind how he had wronged me—who bore my name like a brand.”
When we had been there a week there began to be talk of our returning home. Ned announced a barbecue. A truck-load of half-grown goats were brought in from the range and placed in a pen. A Mexican ranch hand would grab one of them, deceiving it with a soft murmur of Spanish the while, and holding it between his legs, would slit its throat, severing its terrified bleat in half, cursing it at the last moment so as to work up a righteous feeling in himself. They were hung, the hind legs spread by a stick, and skinned. The carcasses drained bloodlessly pale, almost white. Twenty of them, they hung like a day’s bag of game. I vowed I wouldn’t eat any of them.
Fires were kindled the following morning and over the coals were stretched grills of cyclone fence wire. The goats were thrown on the grills, basted with sauce. The smell spread on the air and we were all drawn nearer and nearer. Somehow the carcasses now looked as if they had been born that way, dressed to eat. The barbecue sauce was pure fire and to put it out much cerveza and gaseosa was needed.
When we had begun to recover from our dinner and to sit up and breathe once again, we felt the stirrings of another appetite which our family reunions always aroused. We children, when we saw the first of our fathers come alive, would be already aflame with excitement. We would have to contain ourselves yet a while, though. We understood, young as we were, that grown men, at childish moments, must be spared having to liken themselves to children.
One of the men would get to his feet, stretch, and as he flexed his arms and felt his biceps ripple, the cords of his neck bunch up, and looked about at the assembled men of his clan, he would feel swell within him a sense of his own singularity, a challenge to all his brothers, those who once had bullied him and those whom he had bullied in his turn (and who now thought perhaps that they were ready to shove him aside?), and that other crew, the ones to whom at all times he felt himself superior, his sisters’ husbands. He—whichever of them it happened to be—did not then say aloud, “I can run faster (outwrestle, jump higher, shoot straighter) than any one of you.” He quietly went and picked up a horseapple and heaved it. He watched it fall with seeming indifference—lest it be thought that he had put all of himself into that one—but drew a line in the dirt with his toe to mark the spot he had thrown from, just in case somebody else should feel called upon to throw a horseapple.
Now a horseapple is a heavy thing, and it takes a good arm to throw one. For the benefit of non-Texans, it looks like a rough overgrown green orange (in fact, the tree is called the Osage orange, though we call it the bois d’arc, pronounced “bore dark”) and to pick one up is to get your hands covered with a sticky white sap which quickly turns black and which nothing short of turpentine will take off. Nevertheless you cannot resist a horseapple; it lies there, a perfect handful, just waiting to be picked up and chunked.
But now, that one thrown gauntlet of a horseapple would lie where it fell, disregarded, and nobody went to pick up another from the pile beneath the bois d’arc tree. Only after about five minutes would a second man rise and hitch up his trousers and saunter over and look down at the toe mark and out at the thrown horseapple, and say, if he bothered to speak at all, “Nice throw.” Then he too would pick up one, or first pick out one, as critically as if he were choosing one to eat. And he would play with it, tossing it into the air like a boy skipping home after school with his lunch-box orange. Then, stepping quickly to the toe line, he would rear back and heave.
By then there would be a squad of juvenile umpires officiating down near that first horseapple, and the moment the second one came to earth up would go a yell—cheers and jeers—no getting it straight for a time which of the two was the better throw. When it was settled, “Best two out of three,” the loser would demand, and the winner would reply, “Many as you like. Go ahead. You’ve got a throw to beat already.” By then too a crowd had gathered, everyone cheering, taunting, the men egging one another on to challenge the winner. A chair was brought for my grandfather, who liked nothing better than watching this annual rite, delighting in the strength and skill of his sons as they engaged one another in trials. Soon word would reach the women in the kitchen (“What’re they doing out there?” “Oh, showing off, them fools”) and they would come flocking out, shaking their heads and pursing their lips in disapproval, but with their eyes kindling with excitement, hope, pride in their own men. All of them, like my own mother, country girls who, having left the farm and acquired townish notions, affected to find these old-fashioned amusements countrified and embarrassing. Actually what they were embarrassed by was their pleasure in them. For whether as participants or as spectators of the men’s events, once the going got good they quickly shed their superciliousness.
Yes, we had contests among the women too. Only among the children was competition discouraged that day. They were such spoilsports and graceless losers they were apt to ruin the fun. But we children did not mind. Footraces and such among ourselves were everyday; only once a year, or rarely twice, did we get the chance to see our parents cut up. And nothing tickled us like seeing our mothers kick off their shoes and shake down their hair, their faces aglow with girlish fun, poise themselves on the mark and run a footrace. And nothing thrilled us like seeing our fathers peel down to their hairy chests and wrestle with our uncles. We were excused, of course, from the impartiality which was expected of the grownups, and we shouted and groaned, and sometimes we wept hot hidden tears of filial chagrin, along the sidelines, and sometimes we got into fights among ourselves, disputing the outcome of one of our fathers’ matches. I never loved my mother so much as when, red-faced, panting, laughing, she fell on the grass and rolled with me in a hug and I felt the blood racing in her strong young body and she laughed at herself for being so childishly pleased at outrunning her sisters-in-law at the annual Ordway family reunion.
By now it was pretty well established in the family that certain ones excelled at certain things, and were expected to win. But it was a decathlon, with all expected to participate in each event. Besides, nothing was ever conceded. Time brought changes. Champions were made of flesh. And now a new contender had entered the lists—one of us, yet not one of us: Uncle Ned.
My grandfather, when it was a contest between two of his own children, always cheered the underdog. When it was between one of his own and a son- or daughter-in-law, he always cheered against his own. My grandmother was incapable of this detachment. At such times she preserved a kind of swollen silence, and when required to congratulate a victorious son-in-law, did so with what was called in the family her persimmon-eating smile. “You didn’t have to root so hard against Ross,” I had overheard her say to my grandfather when they were alone together later at night.
“What? What are you talking about? When did I root against Ross?”
“When he and Edna’s husband Ira were wrestling.”
“Oh. Well, he won, didn’t he?”
“Not with your help, he didn’t, poor boy.” This poor boy was six feet tall, weighed two hundred pounds, and was the father of four.
“To listen to you anyone would th
ink he’d lost.”
“No, he won, all right! But not with any help from his father, poor boy.”
To her children my grandmother’s predilection for them over their brothers- and sisters-in-law had long been a source of amusement, affection, and embarrassment. That she should not betray her bias that time the family games were played down on Ned’s ranch concerned them every one. They feared that, win or lose, Ned was sure to feel her displeasure, and this was sure to be felt by their father. All were relieved when Ned, conscious of being something of an outsider, as well as being the host and the eldest son with a dignity to maintain, placed himself hors concours and took a seat alongside the old folks to look on.
But Ned was never cut out to be an onlooker when any sort of games were being played. Dignity fitted him like a hand-me-down, and the diadem of seniority had sat for only a brief while on his unruly curls before it began to slip down over his eyes. He could not even be an aloof spectator, but must loudly take sides in every contest, his favor going sometimes inside, sometimes outside the fold, with himself in consequence seesawing in my grandmother’s favor. In between events he put on an exhibition of Western rope tricks that would have done a cowboy proud. Finally the running, the jumping, the weight-lifting and the rifle-shooting had been settled. Then, despite pleas from the women and a positive prohibition from my grandmother, they began to wrestle. Ned could sit on the sidelines no longer. He was matched against none other than my grandmother’s favorite, Uncle Ewen. No one could watch them for watching her. When the third straight fall was scored for Ned, my grandmother rose to the occasion by emitting a cheer. It was not the loudest cheer ever raised, but falling as it did upon a silence fraught with some uncertainty, her thin, cracked old woman’s voice carried and was heard. The two contestants, naked to the waist, bathed in sweat and streaked with dirt, got up to take their bows, saw that the applause was not meant for them, and joined in it. My grandmother received the acclaim with mixed feelings, smiling yet frowning to find her frailty so generally known, at having attention called to her unusual generosity. But as the clapping swelled she accepted it gracefully, and shared it with her husband. He sat glowing with pride in his strong bare-breasted sons. Loud and long was the applause that day for the man who had fathered them and the woman who had borne them and brought them up.
Early next morning (the men all stiff and sore) we left for home. On saying goodbye to him I gave Ned his French harp, and told him its history. The cars were lined up pointing east. There were promises to write and to come back soon and to visit together often. But it was a long way from Clarksville, no matter by what means you traveled, and as I waved back to my Uncle Ned and watched him grow small, I knew in my heart that it would be a long time—that I might even have to be my own man and could come out by myself—before I saw him and his part of the world again, and so I was.
Acknowledgments
For their efforts in recovering the manuscript of this book, left aboard the Rome–Milan Express on March 15, 1963, the author wishes to thank the Italian National Railways, and in particular Capostazione Michele Fortino of the Stazione Termini in Rome.
A Biography of William Humphrey
William Humphrey (1924–1997) was an American author and a finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction in 1959 for his classic book Home from the Hill, which told the story of a small-town family in rural Texas. Indeed, themes of family life, hardship, and rural struggle are the defining characteristics of his writing, appearing in all thirteen of his works.
Humphrey was born on June 18 in Clarksville, Texas, to Clarence and Nell Humphrey. Nestled in the heart of Red River County, Clarksville in the early 1920s resembled the Old South more than the Texan West. It is from this time and place that Humphrey drew inspiration for much of his writing career. Daily life in rural, isolated Clarksville was built around cotton farming and was emotionally and physically taxing. Neither of Humphrey’s parents attended school beyond the third grade, and the family moved frequently during his childhood: fifteen times in five years. His father, an alcoholic, hunted in the snake-infested swamplands of the Sulphur River to help feed his wife and son. Although Clarence was a difficult and quick-tempered man, Humphrey cared deeply for him, and his love for his father had a profound impact on his writing.
As the Great Depression progressed into the 1930s, so did the strain on the Humphreys’ already-precarious finances. Clarence worked as a shade-tree mechanic, yet was too poor to buy a car of his own. He would test-drive the cars he fixed as fast as they could go, taking them screaming down the back roads of Red River County.
In 1937 Clarence was killed in an auto accident. Humphrey was just thirteen at the time. Much later, in his memoir Farther Off From Heaven (1977), Humphrey commented on this period, which was to be the end of his childhood: “What my new life would be like I could only guess at, but I knew it would be totally different from the one that was ending, and that a totally different person from the one I had been would be needed to survive in it.” Soon after his father’s death, Humphrey and his mother moved to Dallas to live with relatives. He did not return to Clarksville for thirty-two years.
Humphrey exceled in school and was able to attend an art academy in Dallas on a scholarship. At the onset of the Second World War, Humphrey attempted to join the navy but was rejected for being color blind. Having seriously considered being an artist up to this point, Humphrey decided to focus on his writing instead. He attended the University of Texas and the Southern Methodist University for short spells during the early 1940s but did not graduate from either college. In 1944 he left SMU in his final semester and headed briefly to Chicago and then went on to live in New York City’s Greenwich Village.
In 1949 Humphrey published his first short story, “The Hardys,” in the Sewanee Review. He was so excited to receive the letter of acceptance that he tripped and fell as he was running up the steps to his house to share the news with his wife, the painter Dorothy Cantine, and broke his ankle. On the strength of that story, Humphrey was hired to teach creative writing and English literature at Bard College. Starting around this time, renowned writer Katherine Anne Porter, Humphrey’s contemporary and a fellow Texan, became a close friend and a firm supporter of his work, and remained so for many years.
The 1950s were a period of prosperity for Humphrey, who continued to publish stories in magazines like the New Yorker and Harper’s Bazaar. These works drew on Humphrey’s childhood in the Texan scrub, and many were collected in The Last Husband and Other Stories (1953). During this early stage of his career, Humphrey also formed a lifelong friendship with the poet Theodore Weiss and mentored playwright and author Sherman Yellen.
In 1957 Humphrey’s debut novel, Home from the Hill, rocketed him into modern conversation and defined him as an author. Previously regarded as a Western writer due to his Texan roots and their resonance in his work, Humphrey now became firmly grounded in the Southern literary tradition. Comparisons to Faulkner were constant throughout his life and long after his death.
Home from the Hill was an instant success and was made into a motion picture in 1960 starring Robert Mitchum. Variety reported that the film rights sold to MGM for $750,000, to which Humphrey humorously responded, “Unfortunately, they had one zero too many.” Still, it was enough money for Humphrey and his wife to travel extensively in Europe, moving to England in 1958 and later to Italy. Humphrey also used this time to focus on one of his greatest passions: fly-fishing.
In 1963 Humphrey returned to the United States and over the next few years partially returned to the world of academia, taking up short-term positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Princeton University, Smith College, and Washington and Lee University. But he continued to publish short stories and essays in major magazines such as Esquire, Sports Illustrated, and the Atlantic Monthly and in 1964 was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best Short Story for his work “The Ballad of Jesse Neighbors.” In 1965 Humphrey bought an apple farm in Hudson, New Yo
rk. Though he would travel extensively in the coming years, the apple farm was to be his home for the rest of his life.
During the same year, Humphrey published his second novel, The Ordways, which received extremely strong critical reviews and was compared to the writings of Mark Twain. A second collection of short stories, A Time and a Place, was published in 1968, and two essays, The Spawning Run and My Moby Dick, which first appeared in Esquire and Sports Illustrated, respectively, were eventually expanded and published as short books.
Over the next few years, Humphrey continued to publish with discipline, writing books that incorporated his signature microcosmically expressed theme of family values. These included Proud Flesh (1973), Hostages to Fortune (1984), The Collected Stories of William Humphrey (1985), and Open Season (1986). His last novel, No Resting Place (1989), was based on the forced removal of the Cherokee nation along the Trail of Tears and was heralded by the Los Angeles Times as “a novel every American should be required to read.”
Humphrey’s final collection of short stories, September Song (1992), conveyed his mounting sense of frustration at his declining health. By his seventieth birthday, Humphrey had undergone treatment for skin cancer and was hard of hearing. Diagnosed with cancer of the larynx, he died on August 20, 1997, at his home in Hudson. He was seventy-three years old.
William Humphrey in the 1960s, shortly after returning to the United States.
The author in Alsace, France. The image was taken in 1965, the year The Ordways was published. Two years prior, the manuscript almost disappeared when Humphrey accidentally left it aboard an express train from Rome to Milan. He added a prefatory note in the published edition thanking “Capostazione Michele Fortino of the Stazione Terminal in Rome” for his efforts in recovering the manuscript.
The Ordways Page 36