The Ordways (10 page)

During that time Ella Ordway and the children camped around the outskirts of Memphis, moving as the oxen ate down the grass and before they should become a burden upon the charity of any one neighborhood. Her husband, everyone said, was eligible for a pension; Memphis being in Federal hands, unfortunately, Confederate pensions were blocked. In the first flush of freedom the former slaves had quit the land, and Ella was able to earn a little money hoeing cotton. The children herded the oxen as they grazed, their helplessness serving as a guarantee against theft. From their campsite every evening after work she walked into the city to visit him. Having been warned of his suicidal tendencies, the hospital staff kept him under close surveillance. Up to a point, soon reached, his legs showed improvement. At the end of ten weeks he was discharged as incurable.

By then her pregnancy had begun to show. Coming up from the ferry landing on the Arkansas shore, she leading the team, he, his eyes shaded by a hat brim, sitting on the wagon seat stiff as an idol in a procession, their passage provoked a murmur of sympathetic disapproval from people at the sides of the road. In their general tackiness now, the family looked like the kind of white trash of which the man lazes while the woman does all the work, and the swarm of flies buzzing round his head, and his indifference to them, added to the impression of his shiftlessness. He appeared to think it only fitting that he should sit at his ease in the shade while his pregnant wife trudged along in the dust and heat. The inobservance which was owing to his blindness was taken for a sullen disdain. Remarks, meant as sympathy for her, were uttered against him. Fortunately these were vague; decorum forbade too direct a reference to her condition; and if he heard them, sunk in apathy, he envinced no curiosity. But she dreaded lest something more open be said.

At bedtime that first night in Arkansas their mother joined the children where they slept, separated from their parents by a partition formed of casks, in the forward section of the wagon. They made a place for her between them. Their father was restless, she said. The following night again she slept with them. Thereafter for the rest of the journey she shared their bed; their father slept alone.

She could not spare his feelings. Should he discover that she was expecting, he would insist that they stop wherever they were. Once stopped, they might never get going again. She had not come this far only to stop short of her goal. She was set on Texas, or rather on that place in her mind to which she gave that name, and which she envisaged as a vast, windswept blank, a place without landmarks, too wide for the plow, where this son she now carried would be born to something better than following behind a mule. Little was needed to estrange her husband, alerted as he was for just such a movement. He had watched in the darkness for any indication that she had withdrawn to her side of the narrow mattress they shared, had strained to catch any hesitation, any stiffening as she changed his bandages in the morning and the evening. The morning being the time when the queasiness was always upon her, he had not failed to detect such signs; then he had shriveled like a salted snail. Inside the darkness which enclosed him his feelers were out in constant agitation like the flutter of his fingertips as he felt his way around a room. Especially in bed he had watched with all his remaining senses for any sign that she came to him out of duty and against her inclination. In the beginning, back home, when she first got up off her pallet and returned to their bed, he had repulsed her, refusing this as he had refused food. He may even unwittingly have hoped to find that he disgusted her. The unstilled longings of his wrecked and repellent body filled him with shame, and with a sense of disloyalty towards the death he had tried to die. At the least suspicion that anyone had shrunk from him (and in his darkened mind these suspicions bred like germs) he would retreat into that death and the scarred features of his face set like incisions in stone.

Still she could not spare him. The rate of their progress had been slow and Texas was still far away. From what information she picked up about the distance, she figured she would just about make it; she only hoped they would be there before he discovered her condition. There would be time then to salve his wounded feelings. Meanwhile, under cover of his blindness, careful never to brush against him, in constant anxiety lest somebody say something to give her away, she drove them all on. The days were long, the weather dry. She got them up before daybreak, fed them a skimpy breakfast, yoked the team, and set off, her secret nausea forcing her to hang on to the yoke for dizziness.

They were in the cotton belt now, where slaves, more than ever they had seen in Tennessee, worked the broad fields. The bolls were opened full and the white fields shimmered in the glare of the sun. This white landscape with black people in it was like a photographic negative, or like that image which comes just before the loss of consciousness in a sunstroke, when everyone turns black, outlined by a glittering aureole of light. Ella Ordway's thin cotton dress, soaked with sweat, clung to her figure, accentuating her belly. The Ordways were stared at now fully as hard as they had been when he led the team.

It was during this time that the man seated on the porch of a country store where they stopped had taken it upon himself to interfere on her behalf. Their approach to the store had, as always, been studied from afar, and now this man watched the hot, dusty, pinched, and gravid little woman climb the creaky steps and cross the sagging, creaky porch in her thin shapeless dress, her worn and dusty shoes, waited until she was inside, spat out into the road, and said to his companions at large, “Now ain't that a sight to make you ashamed of being a man? Big lazy good-for-nothing taking his ease up there in the cool while that poor little woman has to walk along poking them oxen!” His tone was one almost of raillery. You might have thought he was baiting an old friend.

If Thomas Ordway heard this, and would have liked to hush the man for his own sake, it was already too late; there was nothing he could have said. In any case, he did not speak, and this must have seemed to the man on the porch like more of the same disregard which had been so provoking to begin with. “I'm talking to you,” he said.

As Thomas Ordway sought to locate the voice, his unseeing gaze passed without acknowledgment over his assailant.

“Here I am,” said he, stepping to edge of the porch and squinting against the glare. “It's me that's talking to you. I'm an old man but not too old to tell you—and to prove it on you, too—that any man who would sit on that wagon seat and let his wife, in her—”

At that point Ella returned. But before she could intervene the man gasped, uttered a strangled, horror-stricken sob, turned, and slunk along the porch and around the side of the store, a look in his eye as if he were bent on hanging himself. It was the closest call she had had. Thereafter, hot as it was, and though dizzy already with nausea, Ella Ordway wore her overcoat—which drew stares, too, but hid her condition.

In Little Rock they heard rumors of another threatened invasion like that of U. S. General Banks from New Orleans up the Red River shortly before. They would, they also learned there, have to cross that Red River. They were told of a ferry above Clarksville. Preferring redskins to Yankees, they decided to cut across the southeast corner of Indian Territory. Travelers who had been there assured them that the Indians of that section—Choctaws and Cherokees—differed only in color from folks everywhere: lived in houses, dressed in clothes, farmed small holdings, went to church. The savages were civilized, it was the white riffraff you had to fear in the Indian Territory. And even with them the Ordways' helplessness and their poverty seemed a guarantee of safe conduct.

From Little Rock they went to Arkadelphia, from Arkadelphia to De Queen, where they entered the Territory, arriving in Broken Bow on the second day of October. They had been on the road for not quite six months, and had come nine hundred miles from home. Their money was gone. Now Ella bartered with storekeepers for supplies, beginning with the things they had been given, then dipping into their own meager possessions. Piece by piece she spent her mother's silverware. Picture frames, china, the mantelpiece clock of imitation ormolu: all these were traded away. No longer could they rely on the hospitality of the countryside. The Arkansawyers had been poor, the Indians were even poorer. Their veneration of the blind was great, and when they came in their wagons to call, they solemnly extended their welcome through a translator, one of their children or grandchildren who had had government schooling. Still, they were more used to exacting petty tribute from travelers passing through their territory than helping them on their way. They took Ella's mirror, her cameo brooch, her sewing scissors, the brighter-colored articles of her clothing. One anxiety of hers she was able to lay aside. With the Indians her obvious secret was safe. They saw nothing remarkable, much less reprehensible, in the fact that the pregnant squaw should walk with the team while her man rode; nor would they, had he been in full possession of his faculties. Neither were the few white men here the kind to challenge a husband's mistreatment of his wife. As the temperature now hovered in the 90's, it was a relief to shed that overcoat.

The Ordways were asked if the war was over. They replied, not so far as they knew. Why? Well, they were the first folks to be seen coming through headed for Texas since shortly after the war began.

They turned south. Down into the red bottomlands, where out of stagnant sloughs cane-legged blue cranes rose creaking into the air and alligators sank from sight and mud turtles and fat water moccasins dropped off logs at their approach. Where in small stump-dotted patches Indian farmers snatched a crop of cotton between risings of the river which backed water inland for as deep as five miles, leaving in the forks of trees higher than a man's head tufts of matted trash like squirrels' nests. Then into the dark, cool, and fragrant pine forests: trees as thick as hair, with occasional clearings hacked out of them where loggers had operated, and in the clearing a mound of sawdust blackened at the base, growing yellow as cornmeal at the top. On into the brooding stillness, and then their first glimpse of the river. Impossibly red, silent, sluggish, it was as unlike water as anything could be. It looked simply like a crossroad to the one they were on. Thick, motionless, semi-solid, it might have been a fresh-poured concrete highway; you felt that just by waiting overnight you would find that it had set, and you could walk across to Texas.

And you found that you might have to do just that. The ferry had shut down. Had not run for nearly a year, the owner having gone off, beaching his boat over on the other side. This was told the Ordways by the half-breed farmer, market hunter, trapper, who lived in the last cabin. Where the next nearest ferry was he had no notion. He did not ask if the war was over; it was doubtful that he knew there was one going on.

Though hope of crossing there was gone, they were drawn irresistibly down to the ferry landing. There for the first time the Ordways beheld Texas. Dividing them from it were only a few hundred yards. After coming a thousand miles, to be balked by so little seemed intolerable.

Ella unhitched the oxen and led them, yoked, down to the water to drink. Dexter took her hand and padded along beside her in the deep red dust. Helen remained with her father, who leaned against the wagon looking towards the river. The oxen shied at the strange water, sniffed it, blew in it trying to clear it. While they drank Ella stood resting her hands on her stomach, gazing across to the opposite shore. A wall of black-green pines rose there with pointed tops as regular as the palings of a fence. At the base of this wall, between it and the red water, which lay as flat as though it had been smoothed with a trowel, stretched the thin gold stripe of a sandbar. The woods were parted by a fine line where the ferry road ran, until lost in the shadowy depths. Ella's eyes brimmed suddenly with tears. After this tantalizing glimpse to have to turn back, retrace their route to Broken Bow, and push on westward—who knew how far—through poor, inhospitable country until they learned of another ferry, that too perhaps shut down—the disappointment was too cruel. Frightened by his mother's tears, the boy commenced to whimper.

A crash in the woods at their back made the oxen toss their yoked heads. Out of the trees a deer broke, streaked across the bar, and plunged into the river. Instantly it sank from view, leaving only its head above water. Straight out it swam, cutting a wake in the slow surface. It reached the middle, and there the current must have run stronger than appeared, for the deer was swept steadily downstream. It disappeared from sight. Ella caught her breath. Had it gone under? Was it drowned? Anxiously she scanned the surface, the opposite shore. Nothing could she see. Over the sullen river a desolate stillness hung, and seized by a fit of despair she let out her breath in a sob. Then Dexter cried, “Yonder he is! Yonder!” Far downstream the deer rose slowly from the water, silhouetted against the golden strand. Head hanging wearily, it hauled itself out. Bit by bit it drew erect, dark with wet, distinct against the shining sand. Then it was gone, vanishing into the darkness of the woods.

That night over supper the Ordways considered their predicament. Their money was gone, most everything they had was gone. It was October; before much longer the weather would begin to turn cold. And Texas lay just across the water, not a quarter of a mile away!

Thomas believed the river could be crossed. Her misgivings angered him; he ascribed them to fear of his helplessness. She pondered whether to tell him of her condition. The consequences were vivid to her. This poor, half-savage country was not the birthplace she had dreamt of for her child. With winter coming on they could not travel far with a newborn baby. Though near destitute now, they would have still less to travel on next spring, after a winter spent keeping alive in this place. It was not a very big river: only a quarter of a mile wide, if that; and quiet, hardly rougher than a pond. Once across it, and they were there.…