The Ordways (6 page)

Conscious of a long and vigorous lineage, the Southerner is assured of a long continuity to follow him. Meanwhile in his time he is the priest of the tribal scripture; to forget any part of it would be sacrilege. He treasures the sayings of his kin, and “As my grandaddy always used to say … As my poor father would say if he were here … As dear old Aunt Pris (God rest her soul) was fond of declaring …”—these expressions and others like them will preface his remarks to an extent hardly to be observed anywhere else. If he forgets them, he will be forgotten. If he remembers, he will be remembered, will take the place reserved and predestined for him in the company of his kin, in the realm of myth, outside of time.

The usual sort of selective genealogical pride, which seats certain relatives below the salt, others in the kitchen out of company's sight, has no resemblance to this clan feeling I am trying to define, which is all-embracing, all-forgiving, catholic, disowning none, welcoming alike the sinner and the saint, the pirate and the patrician, all who can claim the indissoluble tie of blood. Indeed, with his innate love of violence and his disrespect for the law (also Scotch, also exacerbated by a sense that the laws are not of his making but imposed upon him by conquerors), the Southerner will boast of ancestors whose memory another man would hide at the back of the highest shelf in his family skeleton closet. He will not only exhibit to view that particular limb of his family tree from which a horse thief dangles by the neck; he will cheerfully charge his ancestor with more horses than he was hanged for the theft of. The Southerner is like those ancient Hebrews who preserved and recounted and gloried in the stories of double-dealing and the bloodymindedness of their untrammeled forebears, and in his own rather frequent outbreaks he is emulating the exploits of his family heroes whom he has heard about all his life, who lived in freer and more manly times. When a Southerner sighs and says, “We are not the men our fathers were” (an expression often on his tongue), he means to say we are more civilized; he is lamenting the fact.

Undoubtedly the Southerner clings to certain outmoded social attitudes and resists changes, which for his own part he knows he could learn to live with, because they are unacceptable to Great-grandfather, whose voice, should he think one moderate thought, he hears accusing him of capitulation, of cowardice, of betrayal, of unworthiness of the name he bears in trust. To appeal to his reason does no good: he admires foolishness above all qualities—in the sense one intends when saying, a fool never changes his mind, a fool never knows when he's licked. “That's the kind of fool I am! A damn fool!” he will proudly assert. This is why telling him that the old cause, Great-grandfather's old cause, is doomed, already lost, is the surest way to harden his resistance: those are precisely the odds which appeal to his imagination, the odds which Great-grandfather fought against, which are calculated to win Great-grandfather's esteem. Tell him he is on the winning side, he loses interest and quits the field. This is not because he does not like to win, but because he does not like to have a side. He sees himself as the stubborn lone remnant, conquered but unsubdued, unreconstructed, he and Great-grandpa, ready to grapple with the very winds of change.

Great-grandpa, by a huge statistical probability, not only did not own any slaves, he hated the institution of slavery as only a poor man can hate the symbol of a leisure to which he will never attain. What is more, he believed not only that for his sins he was under the curse to eat his bread in the sweat of his face, but that it was sinful not to do so, and that those who lived off the sweat of others were storing up damnation for themselves. Certainly he did not go to war to defend slavery, no more than his opposite on the Union side went to war to end it. For love of country, then? What country? A confederation some few months old with a flag still new and stiff as a dime-store bandana, perverse in its origin, negative in purpose, comical in its maladministration, composed of states with nothing more in common than an indefensible and unpopular and even already demonstrably uneconomical institution, a union of disunion which had it survived would have had to fight at least eleven wars of secession of its own? The Southerner no more identified himself with the Confederacy than he did with the Union; both were abstractions. In the final analysis even Alabama, say, or Mississippi, was filled with too many people not his relatives for him to feel much sense of common purpose with them. He was as hypersensitive to his own state's encroachments upon his precious liberty as he was towards those of the federal government upon states' rights. He was still in the primitive tribal stage of social evolution. Clannishness was and is the key to his temperament, and he went off to war to protect not Alabama but only those thirty or forty acres of its sandy hillsides or stiff red clay which he broke his back tilling and which was as big a country as his mind could hold, whose sanctity to him came from the fact that in it were buried the bones of his own blood kin. He went because he had a taste for violence, because in it he found release and serenity, because it was the one orgiastic outlet sanctioned by his Calvinist creed and peace had raged for as long as he could stand it; because he resented any interference by outsiders, even in reforms which he was ready and even eager to make on his own, because it promised comradeship and adventure, a holiday from cotton chopping and a chance to shine, because he believed he would come through it unhurt, and most of all because his family ghosts all urged him to it. As for ideology, good or bad, he went with about as much of that in his kit bag, or awareness of any on his enemy's side, as most soldiers go off to fight most wars. He fought not out of conviction but out of pride, and wounded pride was what he nursed in his defeat. While the G.A.R. member convinced himself that he had fought for a cause, and that his cause was just, the Confederate veteran told himself, and his sons, that it was all the finer to have fought without a cause, and all the harder then to have lost.

“Oh, for heaven's sake, Tom! That was all a century ago,” my Northern friends exclaim when they hear me in this strain. Alas, no (though it wouldn't matter if that were true), it is still only about twenty years ago. It is not much more than that since Southerners sat on their grandfather's knee and listened to him tell again of Great-grandfather's wasted courage and his wounds, the desolation of the land and the loss of the farm, the hunger, the humiliation. But, as I always tell my friends, have patience, there is hope. Not even a Southerner's memory lasts forever. I reckon the active life of a Southerner to extend three generations past his death. He lives on in full vigor in the minds of those who as children heard about him from those who knew him in the flesh. As mine is the last generation to whom the Civil War is a told story remembered in the accents of familiar and kindred voices, I calculate that it will come to an end when the last of us is gone.

As it exists in my mind today the story of Thomas and Ella Ordway is a series of stereoscope views, like that trayful of them in my grandfather's house with which I whiled away many evenings of my childhood. In black and white (my memories belong to the pre-Kodachrome era), speckled, yellowed, the subjects staring self-consciously at the photographer, above them a filterless, bald, overcast gray sky. Our viewer likewise was pre-battery-lit, pre-pushbutton-plastic: an antiquated and clumsy apparatus with a hood for the eyes and a cutout for the nose, a large wooden handle, and a track along which the card holder slid. You put one of the cards into the rack and moved it back and forth until it swam into focus, and you beheld twin ladies seated on twin cliff edges. Then you waited, and after a time (it was a little like sobering from drink) this slightly sickening double image began to merge, the two pictures became one. Simultaneously the picture space opened inward, the flat vista behind the now single young lady plunged into perspective and the perilous chasm gaped beneath her feet. So it is now with my collection of mental views—older by some thirty years, faded, spotted, curled with age; yet if I wait the scene will come into focus, and those old pictures first printed on my mind by my grandfather as we lingered over dinner on the ground on Mabry graveyard working day sharpen, open inward, and as it was then with the stereoscope, it is as if I have been drawn bodily through the lenses.…

Eight days afterwards the battlefield at Shiloh was still strewn with corpses and with the carcasses of horses with bloated bellies, their stiffened legs sticking out like toppled equestrian statues. White-clad stretcher bearers wearing white face masks carried corpses to wagons which, when loaded, lumbered away drawn by teams of six mules in tandem, to be replaced by others returning empty for more. Meanwhile, in the area not yet cleared, black-clad women wearing bandanas over their mouths and noses revolved among the bodies, bent as though gathering firewood or picking cotton, and, like cotton pickers, crooning a steady low lament, broken occasionally, as a body was turned face up, by a wail of recognition. Flies were thick and buzzards hung overhead in the soft spring sky like kites on strings. Ella Ordway also remembered and later told her son, and when she herself was a memory he told her great-grandchildren of a man seen hanging by the neck from a limb of a tree and slowly spinning, with, pinned on his chest, a sign which read, “He was caught robbing the dead.” She was told that a number of bodies had been discovered with the ring fingers missing. The women searchers formed a posse. They had surprised him the day before Ella's arrival in the act of extracting a gold tooth from a corpse's mouth, and had lynched him on the spot.

And even on the eighth day afterwards the line of wagons waiting outside the commandeered cotton shed where Ella Ordway was told to go was like the line outside the compress at the height of ginning season. Some, like hers, with one mule where there ought to have been two harnessed to the tongue, and equally wobbly; others sound, tight, painted, drawn by well-fed teams, all driven by those who had been left at home, fathers too old to fight, wives and mothers, some with infants at the breast. Nor was she the only one to have thought to provide herself, figuring they would be in short supply, with a coffin.

The relatives were not allowed inside the shed. Soldiers, two by two, took the coffins inside—those who had not brought their own were given one—six returned with it on their shoulders and slid it onto the wagon bed. There the parents or the wife was allowed to view the body; when they nodded the carpenter nailed the lid down. As her turn neared and her wagon drew closer to the door, Ella could see inside as the soldiers went in and came out. The bodies lay in rows on the floor, covered with blankets, except for those which had been sewn into cottonsacks coated with paraffin wax. Of these bundles some bore only a semblance of human shape; some among them were only half length. The old man ahead of Ella Ordway had apparently seen that he was being given one of these cottonsacks. When his coffin was brought out it was already nailed shut. Ella Ordway overheard him say to the soldiers, “Men, are you sure? I don't ask to be shown, but are you sure it's my boy in there?” So when her turn came and her coffin was taken inside and she heard hammering on the lid and it was brought out, she signed the receipt without a word. She was sent to another barn, where she was given his effects, his watch and her last letter to him, all that was found on him. The officer in charge there insisted on having her wagon filled with hay for her mule. A native of Nashville, he recognized the address on the envelope and knew the length of the trip home which lay ahead of her. He also insisted that she take a loaded horsepistol, almost as big as she was, to defend herself with.

In planning his death Thomas Ordway had overlooked two things, or rather three. First, that he belonged to an army drawn from a race of idolaters of the dead like himself, that never since the early Greeks had any body of fighting men lost more opportunities to pursue and harry a retreating enemy in order to gather and identify and notify the next-of-kin of, and render obsequies to, their fallen comrades; and that even had his wife appeared another week later they would promptly have detailed a squad to go and dig him up for her, to be taken home to lie among his kin. Only it was not necessary. He had not been buried yet. There were too many of them, and as he had been among the first casualties, and his telegram had gone out in the first batch, and as she lived within the state, she was expected. Second, his wife—that the very devotion which he sought to escape a lifetime of indebtedness to, would surely bring her, by day and by night, and even if it killed one mule, a mere three hundred and fifty miles to fetch him home, knowing he would never rest peaceful until he was laid beneath the dove-haunted cedars on that knoll down back of the house where every other known and remembered Ordway lay. Even so, he might have gotten away with it but for the watch, and an impostor be lying in that grave in Tennessee, and his descendants would never have sat above his bones in Mabry graveyard listening to the tale of how they came to be there. And even so, he almost did get away with it, because Ella Ordway was halfway home again before she looked at the watch, having instantly conceived the notion that it had stopped running when he died, that if she should open it (it was one of those with a closed face, a hinged cover released by pressing the stem) she would see the hands pointing to the exact moment of his death. So instead she waited until sometime during the third night, when lying in the hay alongside the coffin she awoke with no sense of the hour and in the dark opened the watch and moved the hands and wound the stem and set it going. And even after seeing that it was not her husband's watch—which was the following morning when she stopped a man on the road and asked him the time—Ella Ordway still drove on towards home, saying to herself, they must have made a mistake back there in that office. Putting herself in that officer's place and thinking, with so many to sort out and label and keep track of he must have gotten two watches mixed. Wondering how she was going to get it back to him. Telling herself then that maybe since leaving home her husband had swapped watches with some man. Not daring to admit the thought already pounding on the door of her mind, she urged the mule on still harder, the coffin jouncing on the bedboards. He had my letter on him, she said. She felt for it in her pocket. It was there. Then saying to herself finally, if I don't look I'll never know the difference. If I just go on home and dig the grave and bury it then it will be too late to do anything about it, too late to worry about it. If I find it's not him I'll have to take it back, and then I'll have nothing. Then I will never know where mine lies buried, or even if he does. But if I go on home and bury this coffin then I can always believe I have him. If it's not him I'll never know. And what I don't know won't hurt me. Believing it's him in time will make it so.