The Ordways Read Free Page A

buckboards stood in the road and in the schoolyard, their nodding teams hitched to the fence palings, the beds piled high with baskets of food, thermos jugs, cushions and old blankets, campstools, rakes, brooms. From scattered parts of the graveyard came the steady grate of files on hoe blades, and the long-drawn slash of a whetstone down the edge of a sickle or a scythe. The country folks—among them my grandparents, he in overalls and jumper and a collarless shirt, she in a mother hubbard, for protection against the briars, which allowed only her head and her hands to show, and a poke bonnet of flowered gingham, the ribbons tied underneath her chin—chatted in groups while awaiting their children and grandchildren from the towns.
    I loved both my grandparents dearly, but of the two I loved my grandfather more, despite the fact, or possibly because of it, that he liked me least of all his grandchildren, whereas I was my grandmother’s favorite. This difference was always marked in their respective greetings. She gave me a big hug and kiss and made a great fuss over me, while my grandfather not only suffered with visible impatience the shy, fervent, and hopeless kiss which I implanted on his wrinkled cheek, just at the tip of his wiry mustache—he hardly bothered to conceal his disapproval of my grandmother’s affection for me. It was not merely that, being a man, he was less demonstrative. Towards others of his grandchildren he was affectionate enough. He just did not care for me.
    â€œSilly boy! Whatever put that foolish notion into your head?” my mother cried when finally, unable to suffer in silence any longer, I spoke to her about it. “Why, of course your grandpa likes you! He loves you!”
    â€œHe loves me, all right,” I remember saying. “I’m his grandson and he has to love me. But he doesn’t like me. If only he did! Oh, if only he liked me as much as Grandma does, how happy I would be!”
    To understand the reaction which this produced in my mother the reader must know that, along with the rest of their sons- and daughters-in-law, she was devoted to my grandfather, somewhat less than devoted to my grandmother. Ever ready to leap to my grandfather’s side in the rare and insignificant differences between his wife and him, she would attack my poor father, who sought to maintain a strict neutrality and who knew how unimportant his parents’ quarrels were, as if he had automatically taken his mother’s part. My mother’s cause was fraught with frustration because my grandfather would never stand up for himself. The soul of discretion, he retired from the field as soon as battle was joined. He would rather be wrong than wrangle; what was more, it did not bother him not to have the last word, even when he was in the right. This placidity of temper, which was precisely what she loved him for, used to provoke my mother to exasperation.
    After giving an angry snort, shaking her head, jumping up from her seat, and pacing rapidly around the room, my mother sat down again and drummed her fingernails on the table, looking hard at me. I no longer recall her exact words, but this is the gist of the little family secret which she decided to let me in on that day. She did not say that my grandmother loved me less than she appeared to—this was merely implied in the way in which she said that my grandfather loved me a great deal more than he showed. It was my misfortune always to be the first of the grandchildren to arrive at any family gathering.
    Knowing that his wife suspected him (quite unjustly) of a preference for her stepdaughters, and thus of her stepdaughters’ children, and also because he wished to counteract the flagrant partiality which she showed among her own children and her children’s children, my grandfather always determined beforehand to be unimpeachably equal in the warmth of his welcome to each and every one. In practice this