Free The Ordways by William Humphrey

the first time in months at her accomplishment. The bandages were removed from his head. His legs improved to the point that he could get about a bit. And so it vexed her especially that just as his appetite was improving the food should begin to give out. Then she awoke to realize that in her concentration on him the children had been neglected, had grown thin as two shadows. She felt their round hungry eyes following her as she carried the tray into their father’s bedroom. And as the food worsened he developed a convalescent’s finickiness. Visitors, hearing that he was up, came to call. He dreaded being seen. They tried not to notice the smell. The war had come closer and they could not keep it out of their conversations. If they tried to avoid it he noticed the effort. It was going slowly. At the mention of each reversal he seemed to shrink, as if he felt personally responsible, as if he knew that the sight of him must be dispiriting, a portent of defeat, something which might happen to their sons and husbands. As his strength returned he grew restless. His capacity to do himself mischief increased. It was more and more difficult to keep him under surveillance.
    Unleavened bread, yes; they were unused to any other kind. But it was not the paschal lamb that the Ordways slaughtered before the flight from Tennessee, it was the family mule.
    The milch cow had already been eaten. That was early in the fall, when Thomas Ordway had still to be watched over constantly, could not be trusted alone with himself, the ten-year-old girl relieving her mother at the post in full awareness of what she was on guard against, freeing Ella to go out to the barn to milk, out to the shed to split wood for the cookstove. Then the scrawny cow went dry and no bull was left in all the countryside to breed her to. So Ella Ordway sent down and got a neighbor who in exchange for the hide and one forequarter came up and killed and butchered her.
    But in the spring she was ashamed to ask the man to come up again, or even send down and beg the loan of his block and tackle. For he knew there was only one animal left on the place. She was further ashamed, ashamed for her neighbor this time, foreseeing that he might offer to do the job for her on the same terms as before.
    The crows had settled thick and bold upon the meager stand of corn. They perched upon the scarecrow’s head and laughed. The boy was put to frighten them off, came home crying with humiliation for the contempt they showed for his size. What the crows did not get went for cornmeal for the table, the poor mule got none. By February its ribs were showing like a washboard and it had begun to gnaw the wooden railings of its stall.
    Nobody loves a mule, and a farmwoman loves no animal, except perhaps her cow. But she knows that upon the family mule depend their crops and their transportation. But now the Ordways faced starvation. Ella’s pantry, her root cellar, her smokehouse were bare, no longer even smelled of food. One night after serving a supper which wrung her heart with shame, Ella Ordway made up her mind. Terrified of that long horsepistol which that brevet major had given her, she spent the following morning at the grindstone sharpening a new point on the kitchen knife which she had deliberately broken off. That night after a still more wretched supper, and after the house was asleep, she got up and slipped outdoors. She took from underneath the washstand outside the back door the things she had secreted there earlier: the knife, two raw turnips, and one wrinkled apple. She went out to the barn. She fed the mule the turnips and the apple and listened to him munching in the dark. She waited until he had finished, then as he nuzzled her begging for more, she felt along the bony ribs until she discovered the beat of the heart. She placed the knife between two ribs and shoved with both hands, then fled from the barn and ran to the house, where for the rest of the night she