The Ordways Read Online Free PDF

Foster in their midst. They tried to recall, to preserve his songs. In vain. They were too unmusical to reproduce them, and all were lost to the world forever.
    But these were distant kin, and all that was long ago and far away, and nothing lasts forever, not even unexpiated wrong. Time redresses many grievances, the rest it wears out in sheer weariness, and even the most vexed and ill-used wraith lies down at last with a sigh—especially if removed to a second grave far to the west of the scenes of its unhappiness. Ours, like the lettering on their tombstones (also transported from Tennessee by my great-grandfather), grew dimmer with each passing year. Their characters flattened by time like flowers pressed between the pages of a book, they had become types, useful to point a moral, but powerless to scare. Progress and enlightenment, by rendering so needless their fates, so old-fashioned their attitudes and stances, had made them all quaint, slightly unreal, even faintly comical. Disappointed lovers nowadays seldom shot their rivals, certainly not with such a melodramatic flair for the setting. Today’s tough-minded young women seldom perished of community opinion, nor did their fathers make brave speeches at their biers. The eating of an infant by a hog was horrifying, but it was too grotesquely rural to affright the modern mind, even the modern child’s mind. These old ghosts had accepted the changes in the world, and no longer harrowed their kin.
    The custom was for friends to assist one another at these family seances, in session throughout the graveyard that day. One rested from his labors by dropping in on others’ plots, lending a few minutes’ help with the weeding, and leaving behind a little wreath of remembrances of their dead. Something amusing, in a respectful way, by preference, or else sweetly sad—some saying or doing which revealed an endearing bias of character, or, overlooking all faults, which trained a light on the good side of his or her nature, something to bring a smile to the lips, followed by a meditative sigh. This my grandmother did—spent the entire morning doing, in fact, dispensing consolation wherever she went. My grandmother had few living enemies, no dead ones. She buried her enmity with the person who had earned it, and never afterwards could be brought to speak an unkind word of him. For her the good which men did lived after them, the evil lay interred with their bones. To one family on her round of visits she would recall some small characteristic act of kindness which she had once received at their mother’s hands, sinking all mention of a long-standing feud between them, and would say, if any of us remonstrated with her afterwards for her hypocrisy, “Mavis Mahaffey and I may have had our little differences. But I was no doubt as much in the wrong as she was” (a concession which you needed to be dead in order to win from my grandmother). “In any case, I no longer even remember what the quarrel was about. She was a good wife and mother and an excellent housekeeper, and for my part, if the Lord forgives Mavis then I certainly do.” Cowardly herself—or so, despite having borne ten children in a farmhouse bedroom attended by a doctor whose preparedness for emergency consisted of eighteen months’ training at a frontier medical academy fifty years before, she believed—she admired silent endurance of pain, and on graveyard working day liked to recall to survivors the patience and the fortitude with which their departed had sustained the illnesses which claimed them at the last. She would gladden a lonely widower (a class towards which she felt especially drawn) with praise of his dead wife, and stooping unseen, would pluck from her grave the one weed which he had overlooked, as during a sick call she might have plucked a loose thread from her invalid friend’s skirt.
    Repaying us these courtesy calls was not so easy for the