The Ordways Read Online Free PDF Page A

man named Arrison. “Man named what, Mr. Ordway?” asked Amy. “Arrison,” said he. “An odd name, Mr. Ordway,” said she. “Odd? Nothing odd about Arrison,” said he. “How do you spell it?” said she. “Haitch hay harr harr hi hess ho hen. If that don’t spell Arrison then wot the ell does it spell?” said he. We employed that saying for all sorts of occasions. It was one of the very few not-quite-nice expressions which even the children in the family were permitted to use. When I solved the last problem of my homework at night and shut my book, “There! If that don’t spell Arrison,” I would say, “then wot the ell does it spell?”
    There was my Great-granduncle Wesley and his wife Caroline. She outlived him by forty years, never ceasing in all that while to lament him in these words, “Such a good man! Such a good husband and father! Never drank, never smoked nor chewed, never dipped, never diced nor gambled, and never used language.” So that in our family it became a byword, and we could never hear the catalogue of virtues of some pattern of them all without appending to it, “And she never used language.”
    Not all the stories were amusing.
    There was Inez Ordway, my grandfather’s second cousin. One of her babies was eaten alive by a sow. For days the poor distraught mother refused to accept the fact and went about searching for her child in unlikely places and calling its name, asking the neighbors and even passing strangers if they had seen it. Then her mind cracked and gave way. She was hopelessly insane for months, never fully recovered. She would hum tunelessly without stop, even in church. Another baby was universally prescribed for her, but after the calamity she could never have another. In her later years she came to fancy that she herself was her own child, her own mother.
    Then there was Dorcas Ordway. Listening to my grandfather recount her pathetic history, I used to thrill with indignation. The man she had been about to marry was shot dead on the very church steps by the suitor whom Dorcas had rejected for him. Within a week the killer was shot down by a kinsman of the slain man. Instead of being pitied, Dorcas Ordway was blamed by the community, led on by the women who had always envied her beauty, for these acts of madness which had cost the lives of two of its young men. She was accused of having cast a spell over them. Bitterest of all were the mother and sisters of her bridegroom. Cursed and shunned when she went out, she kept to the house. It became the rule, whenever a cow went prematurely dry or a person fell mysteriously ill, to expect signs painted on their door, rocks thrown through the windows. Her old father braved these attacks as well as he could, and her brothers fought many fights in her defense. Dorcas Ordway wasted away and died of unhappiness at the age of twenty-eight. A revulsion of feeling thereupon swept the community, all of whom came penitent and ashamed to her funeral. “You have hounded her into the grave with your unkindness,” said her father as the dirt was being shoveled in upon her. “May God forgive you. I never will, and I hope and pray that your consciences, if you have got any, will never stop tormenting you until you are all where my poor dear girl is now.”
    In the entire history of the Ordways only Willis, my great-grandfather’s eldest brother, was ever musical. Though no one had told him, he knew the name for a fiddle the first time he ever saw one, and how it was to be held and bowed. He could play any instrument, sang like a bird. Hearing him, they would ask what was that lovely tune, they could not remember ever hearing it before, and Willis would blush and admit that it was something he himself had just made up. Willis Ordway, born frail, died at twenty-three of galloping consumption. Only then did they realize that they had had another Stephen