The Ordways Read Online Free PDF Page B

friends of our family. None of course had known any of those old long-dead Tennessee Ordways, nor the tenant of our smallest grave (who would have made such a suitable text for the sort of homilies that were wanted that day), little Dexter Ordway, my grandfather’s brother, who on the ninth of October 1863 had been recalled to heaven at the age of five. Agatha the Unwept was still remembered by many, but hers was a ghost deemed best left to lie. Some few professed to be able to recall my grandfather’s sister Helen; but as she had died at twenty-six, and had been so self-effacing as hardly to have any character of her own, they could only nod over her grave, remember her devotion to her poor father and her usefulness to her mother, and sigh over the brevity of her life. That left my great-grandparents. There were still a good many old-timers who remembered them, but it was not possible to recount any amusing anecdotes of either of them, nor anything even tolerably melancholy. Only one thing kept the remembrance of Ella Ordway from being unbearably depressing, and that, an ambiguous sort of mitigation, was her own unconsciousness of anything especially hard about her wretched life. One might have admired her enormously, even have marveled at her adventures (I did), but those who had known her, and seen her wonder at their admiration, had ended by accepting her intrepidity, her endurance and self-sacrifice at her own low estimation. Her patient and obliging spirit would come when summoned on graveyard working day, as she herself had always come when called, and unlike his , would go away when sent; but it seemed to say that the afterlife was just as cheerless and exacting as this one. There were few solacing reflections to be drawn from her story, none whatever from my great-grandfather’s.
    From the time he settled in Mabry until his death twenty-five years later, Thomas Ordway was an all-too-familiar figure in and around Clarksville. He was a specter haunting the town, a reminder of events which everyone wished to forget, the symbol of their common defeat, an object of universal pity and of unconquerable aversion. Watching him, his boy leading him by the hand, drag himself along the sidewalk like a half-crushed insect, each slow deliberate step seeming to require a separate resolution and the remarshaling of all his shattered faculties, hearing the tap-tap-tap of his cane on the pavement and smelling that odor arising, despite the twice-daily changing of the wrappings, from his suppurating legs, men shuddered and turned their heads. Time passed more slowly in those days, brought fewer changes, hardly seemed to pass at all, and forty years later, standing over his grave, they shuddered afresh as that old lazarus of their youth rose up before their mind’s eye. My grandfather, down on his knees tending his father’s grave as in life he had tended the helpless man, was only repeating what as a boy he had overheard from them, when he said, “Better if he had never been born.” Even for me, who never knew him, who came long after, my great-grandfather cast a shadow (I am speaking literally) on my town, and I could not cross the square, as I did every morning on my way to school, without seeing it.
    We lived across town from the grammar school. It was a long walk and I was usually behind time, often late. I was too young to own a watch and the bells of the courthouse clock were not much use to me; they measured time in gross quarter hours whereas I was either late or on time for class by minutes, and a minute was as good as an hour for earning a demerit from Miss Addie Dinwiddie. But I had my own way of telling time, at least on clear days. The square was my sundial, its needle the monument rising from the plaza in the center. My way lay diagonally across from the northeast to the southwest corner, and the moment I entered the square I always knew by where the shadow of the statue fell in relation to the