Free The Ordways by William Humphrey Page A

lay shivering on her pallet on the floor. Next morning she found herself spattered with blood.
    The children bowed their heads over their plates and closed their eyes, relishing the odor of hot meat, not only for itself but because it relieved that other odor which they spent their lives trying not to notice, not to flinch from, because already his hearing told him whenever anyone averted his head in speaking to him, that odor which was the War and her childhood to Helen Ordway. No grace was said. It was years later, in Texas, before Thomas Ordway thanked God for another meal. They had looked up after a time, and my grandfather could recall his sister telling how the tears ran down from her father’s sightless eyes, and years later, and a thousand miles distant, remembering that sliced mule meat on her dinner plate and her father’s dead eyes swimming in tears, she still wept. Retelling it to us on graveyard working day would bring tears glistening to my grandfather’s eyes.
    â€œI won’t live in a country where things have come to such a pass the folks have to eat their mules,” Thomas Ordway said.
    It was the first indication he had given that he meant to live in any country. So when he pushed away his plate and pushed back his chair and got up from the table and felt his way to the door and out of the house, and Helen rose automatically to follow, to trail him, her mother motioned her back into her chair. “Eat, children,” she said. And they did.
    â€œWhat, Grandpa? Eat mule ! Phew!” we would exclaim, sitting over the remains of our feast.
    And my grandfather would say, “Ah, you-all have never known what it is to go hungry. May you never know! Your Great-aunt Helen, poor soul, there she lies, used to say she never in her life ate anything that tasted half as good to her again as that old mule.”
    When a man decides to pull up his roots and set off in search of a new life, he instinctively heads west. No other point of the compass exerts that powerful pull. The West is the true magnetic pole. Ever since his expulsion from the garden to a place east of Eden, man has yearned westward as towards a state of remembered innocence, and human history is one long westward migration—or was until just the other day, when with no more West to go to, we began to look towards the moon. What housebound Northerner peering through his frosted windowpanes at the slushy street with its pack of shuffling, shivering humanity has not felt his thoughts turn, following the sun, westward? Has not longed to get away from self-searching and soul-twisting, away from factions and parties and monthly installments and jury duty and female equality and starched collars and business suits and steam heat and sinusitis and the subway rush hour and the dog’s nightly walk around the block, to go West and get out of doors, doing a man’s work among men? What Southerner, be he a South Carolinian or a southern Italian—for the South is the same the world over—has not yearned to escape his oppressive long hot summer and his long oppressive history and go where the wind blows free across the high plains and where a man is his own man? To escape the rigidity of his life, the sense that all his efforts are foredoomed, his place marked out for him unalterably. Away from that oppressive hospitality, that chronically inflamed sensitivity to slight and affront, that vendetta mentality, that all too well grounded political cynicism, that paternalism, that orgiastic religiosity, that hedonistic puritanism, away from those morose, mistrustful faces with their eyes slitted from squinting at the merciless sun. And which way does he turn? What Easterner has not longed to follow where the young and the adventurous have already gone, to be free to employ that exhilarating and patronizing phrase “back East”? Where everybody does not know everybody else’s business and the sins of the fathers are