The Ordways (25 page)

“I don't understand it,” said the printer. “What do you suppose would make a man do such a thing?”

“Search me,” said my grandfather.

“I've heard of men running off with their neighbors' wives, or with money that wasn't theirs, or both, and I knew of a fellow here in Paris once a few years back that run off with his neighbor's bird dog. A Gordon setter bitch, it was. But that's different, ain't it? I mean, you can understand a man coming to think that a certain dog or a certain horse, say, is absolutely the only one of its kind, and a horse or a dog is something you can't make for yourself. But this is the first case that's come my way of a man wanting somebody else's youngun.”

“Well,” said my grandfather, “I suppose if some little fellow just sort of got you … came to seem like ‘the only one of his kind.'…” He enclosed this in quotation marks because he wanted to dissociate himself from any such unmanly sentiments. And certainly he did not wish to suggest that his boy was “one of a kind.”

“I expect his wife put him up to it, don't you expect?”

“Well, Will was always very fond of children,” said my grandfather. Then he wondered why he should feel called upon to defend Will Vinson's title to master in his own house. “You think it would help any to say in the bill that he was sort of blink-eyed, and that when he swallowed his Adam's apple run up and down real fast? You see, what worries me about such a loose description is the possibility that some poor innocent devil might come under suspicion, maybe even get beat up and tossed in jail, just because he happens to be a stranger in a place and to have four little kids. However, I'm counting on that collie dog to help prevent anything like that from happening.”

“If he's got any sense,” said the printer, “he will have gotten shut of that dog by now.”

“Yes,” said my grandfather with a sigh, “I'm afraid even Will ought to be able to think of that. He was awful attached to that dog, though.”

“Well,” said the printer, “not everybody notices the same things about people. Maybe it's better not to go into too much detail. He's a white man, at least.”

“How do you mean?” said my grandfather.

“Well, we had a case out west of town here last year. Lady was raped. In broad daylight. Well, nearly raped. They got up a posse and went out and rounded up all the niggers they could find. Lady pointed out one—big strapping buck about two hundred pounds and black as my shoe. ‘'At's him,' she says. ‘'At's the one.' Wellsir, it wasn't a week later that she comes a-running into the house all out of breath and says to her husband, ‘I seen him!' ‘You seen who?' says he. ‘The boy that attacked me,' says she. ‘The hell you did!' says he. ‘Yes,' she says. ‘I must've been mistaken that first time.' Well, so him and a party of friends go looking for this second one, and they take along the lady to point him out.' ‘Ere he is,' she says. And what is it this time but a little bandy-legged runt that wouldn't have gone no more than a hundred and forty soaking wet, and sort of gravy-colored. ‘You're sure now?' asks her husband. ‘Yes,' she says, ‘I'm sure.' ‘All right,' says he. ‘Just don't come around a week from now telling me you've seen him again, 'cause this is the last damn nigger I'm a-going to lynch for you.' And do you know what she says to that? ‘I'm sorry, honey,' she says. ‘But you know they all look so much alike.' Now you need two thousand of these by tomorrow afternoon, you say. What time tomorrow afternoon?”

“I would like to have them a little before time for school to let out, if possible.”

“We've got a couple of jobs ahead of yours, but they will just have to step aside. Least we can do to help a man find his boy. It's been a pleasure to do business with you, Mr. Ordway, and I wish you the very best of luck.”

From the printshop my grandfather inquired the way to the grammar school. On the playground he found a gang of boys, and hired six of them at ten cents apiece to pass out circulars around town on Saturday morning, agreeing to meet them there with the circulars the following afternoon.

The circulars were ready as promised and his boys were waiting for him. My grandfather divided the circulars among them and paid them in advance. They were surprised when they read the text; he was surprised at what they had expected. It was nearing election time, and it appeared that these boys, some of whom had handed out campaign circulars for candidates in previous years, had supposed that he was running for public office. They were thrilled to be assisting in a manhunt instead.

“What'll you do with him if you find him, mister?” asked one open-eyed youngster.

Only later did my grandfather realize that by “him” the boy had meant Will Vinson. Which explained his look of disappointment at the answer:

“Why, take him home with me, of course.”

Overnight, lying keyed up and sleepless in his hotel bed, he had begun to have misgivings about this handbill campaign. Informers, tale-bearers, the sort anticipated by the printer: he could visualize the type, regretted doing a thing which would bring him into contact with such men. He had foreseen a slinky, shifty-eyed character sneaking up the back stairs of the hotel, slipping into his room, mumbling his sorry tale, holding out his hand—a man to whom Will Vinson had never done any harm; and he began to feel strangely beholden to Will, almost ashamed of leaguing himself with such a wretch against him. The morning light dispelled all such gloomy expectations, and now as he lathered his face my grandfather imagined quite a different sort of man who would come to his aid. He saw a fellow who, despite the printer's cynical predictions, rather resembled himself, reading his bill and saying to his wife, “Mae, you recall them strangers with that big collie dog that stopped at our place one day last spring and asked us to boil their baby's bottle? How many younguns did they have all told? Wasn't it four? Wasn't it three little boys and that little baby girl? And the man, you recollect him? What does it say here—thirty-five, medium build … Why, I do believe …”

“There's a reward,” the wife might say.

“Mae! I am ashamed of you! You can't take money for helping a man find his boy. How would you like it if somebody was to run off with Lester?”

At half past seven he went down and had his breakfast. Returning from the dining room, he stopped at the desk and told the clerk that if anybody asked for him to send them right up, no questions asked. At the foot of the stairs he had another thought and went back to say that should some second person ask for him while he was still with the first, to keep him waiting, then send him up after the first had left.

… That man who perhaps even now was reading his handbill and scratching his memory, and who in a few minutes might come knocking on the door which my grandfather sat watching—he would insist of course that he take money. All the more if the man was the sort to decline it. “I only wish it was more,” he would say. Naturally he would not give him the money here and now. But if on the basis of his information he found Ned, he would stop off in Paris on his way home, go call on the man, and say, “See, I have my boy back, and I owe it to you.” Then he would say, “You wouldn't claim the reward, but here: you can't refuse this.” And he would present the man with a bankbook in his son's name, showing a savings account with a $125 balance.

Musing on that journey home with Ned, my grandfather got out his photograph of him. He laid it face down on the table beside him while he returned his other papers to his pocket. When he went to pick it up he could not succeed in getting his fingernail under its edge. He would almost have it, then it would elude him. He tried sliding it to the edge of the table, but what a ham-handed thing he was! At last, by dog-earing a corner somewhat, he got it—only to turn it back over instantly and slap it down on the tabletop. For in that instant he had had a vision of Ned clinging convulsively to Will Vinson as he tried to pull him away, burying his face in Vinson's neck and crying, “I don't want to go with you! I won't! I won't! Don't let him take me away! Don't let him take me!”

A gasp of amazement at his own fatuity escaped him. He had been seeing himself all along as Ned's deliverer, had envisaged a touching scene of reunion. He had imagined his son pining for him. Had he forgotten the pleasure with which Ned always anticipated being left with the Vinsons for the day? He had imagined his son enduring an odyssey of hardships with the Vinsons on their flight. Fool! Weren't people who loved him as they did going to cushion him against every hardship? They would go hungry, would take food from the mouths of their own children, so that he might not want. They had sacrificed everything in order to have him; would they hesitate to beg or to steal in order to provide for him? Swaddled in such devotion, why should Ned ever want to leave them? If by now he remembered home at all, what were his memories? An indifferent stepmother and a father who had been willing to put him off regularly on the neighbors, a father who (for so a child of three would see it) had neglected for six months—a lifetime at that age—to come and reclaim him. If right this minute some man was to walk through that door bringing news of where he might find Will Vinson and his boy, what good would it do him?

My grandfather got up and went to the window. He gazed down the gray empty air shaft, and his mortification was transmuted into bitterness towards the man whom he imagined his son preferring to him. He would find him! He would find him if he had to search to the end of the world. And if that was what it took, he would tear Ned screaming from Will Vinson's arms. Blood is thicker than water. He was his boy, his, and he meant to have him back. And he would return him to a very different home from the one he had known before. Hester was changed. So was he. He would smother the boy with attentions, would let him want for nothing. There we would see whether in a short time he still pined for Will Vinson!

The knock which came upon the door felt as if it were upon his breast. He leapt across the room. But the door opened before he could reach it. It was the chambermaid, who said, “Do your room now?”

He swallowed his heart and said, all right. He vacated the room. Downstairs he told the clerk whereabouts in the lobby he would be sitting in case anyone asked for him. After half an hour he judged that the maid would be finished. “I'm going back up to my room now,” he informed the clerk.

“All right, Mr. Ordway,” said the clerk with a faint smile.

Nine o'clock struck. Nine thirty. At ten he braved the desk clerk's amusement and went down and inquired whether anyone had been in to ask for him.

“I'll send them right up if anybody does, Mr. Ordway,” said the clerk.

He remembered having heard of boys hired to pass out handbills throwing half the stack down a culvert or into a vacant lot. He could not believe that his boys would do a thing like that. He left the hotel. The streets of town, the side streets even, such as the one his hotel sat on, were littered with handbills (he remembered then that other name for them: throwaways) as with leaves on a windy autumn day. Surely everybody in Lamar County had seen one of them, had read it, then dropped it to the ground. For everybody in the county, everybody who lived along every road, including the one down which Will Vinson must have gone, was in Paris that day. In the square the streets were like cattle chutes, packed with a milling throng. Men stood along the curbs—no room to squat—spattering the gutter with tobacco juice. Farm women bucked the current, their small fry clinging to their skirts. By this time of day already the cobblestones were so layered with horse dung as almost to muffle the clop of hooves; the wagon beds as they went past rattled and popped. Around the corners of the streets leading off the square there hung upon the air the raw fumes of corn liquor. On one corner stood a big black-brown man, a Negro but with Mexican, maybe Indian blood in him, carrying a large tin-bound box hanging from a strap around his neck, crying “Mollyhot! Hot tamales!” All about him the sidewalk was strewn with the cornshucks his tamales came wrapped in. Whenever he lifted the lid of his box to make a sale he momentarily disappeared behind a cloud of pungent steam. Above the din that reverberated in the bowl of the buildings occasionally there rose the voice of the self-appointed evangelist threatening the crowd out in the plaza with hellfire and damnation.

My grandfather saw one of his boys passing out his circulars. Or trying to. Most men refused even to accept one. Those who did, did so only to get rid of the boy, then, without a glance, dropped the circular to the street. He was even approached by the boy himself. The hour was getting on, and finding himself with such a stack of them still to get rid of, the boy had rather a desperate look. My grandfather accepted the circular, and as soon as he had moved on, dropped it with a sigh. He looked sadly down at it where it lay in the spit and the dung, and saw that it read:

VOTE FOR ATKINS

The one lying beside it read:

VOTE FOR CRITTENDEN

A third which blew by at that moment read:

VOTE FOR WELLS

Also running, for one office or another, were Sayres, Porterfield, Slocum, and Knight, as he learned by turning over others, including several of his own, with his toe. He had chosen a day when circulars had fallen on the town like leaves after the year's first frost. There was to be a political rally in Paris that day, at which each candidate announced that he would speak. Even as he stood there my grandfather heard the distant sound of a brass band striking up, at which signal the square began to empty.

So named because underneath the mightiest of the oaks there the great Davy was alleged to have slept one night on his way to the Alamo and immortality, Crockett Circle lay on the eastern edge of Paris. You approached it through a grove in which now were hitched wagons and buggies and buckboards, the horses' heads drooping, their tails swishing automatically, from among them the lazy
flop flop flop
of dung spattering as it fell. At the edge of the grove, just inside the shade, on long trestle tables, the Ladies' Auxiliary of the Shiloh Cumberland Presbyterian Church were setting out their benefit food sale.