The Ordways by William Humphrey

Author:William Humphrey
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781504006279
Publisher: Open Road Media

PART FOUR

Family Reunion

MY UNCLE Ned Ordway was a little boy in a picture in a flowered pewter frame which stood next to the ivoryfaced marble clock with the spidery numerals on the mantelpiece in my grandfather’s room, a boy much younger than I already was, when I first became aware of him, and inherited his story. Once having heard it, I was not long in learning to dislike that picture, nor much longer then in persuading myself that it was not a good likeness. For just as the photographs of me accorded not at all with my own picture of myself, which is to say with my notions of the great deeds I was to do and the fine man I was to become, so that sad-looking, pinch-faced, whey-colored little boy with the tow hair parted in the middle and so thoroughly wetted down that he appeared to be bald, was not my Little Ned. Such a wretched boy was not worth stealing and running off with into the Wild West. Or maybe he had looked like that before he was stolen, but certainly not for long afterwards. For Ned had been taken to a land where surely even mothers grew sensible and no longer wetted down one’s hair, a land where it never rained and there were two Saturdays a week instead of Sunday, and there he must have blossomed like a desert flower, overnight acquired a big, lean, loose-jointed, muscular frame and a mustache as black and thick as a shoe brush, a rangy gait like a mountain lion on the prowl, skin the color of a new saddle, sharp steady eyes the color of a western sky which seemed to notice nothing while taking in everything, and a ready broad smile instead of the frightened pucker on that little boy’s face as he sat for the itinerant photographer that day long ago.

He was my constant companion. Despite the photograph he was the elder of us, and on our expeditions was always the leader. This phase passed, and though I went on calling him Little Ned, he was no longer a boy in my mind, he was a grown man, only without all those depressing anti-children, or more particularly anti-boy attitudes which all other grownups seemed to have been born with. At about this time I began to go to the picture shows, and my image of my uncle took definite shape. That is to say, his costume and his character took shape; his face underwent regular weekly change. One week he would be a dead ringer for Johnny Mack Brown. The following week he looked more like Buck Jones. Or Hoot Gibson. Or Ken Maynard. Or Fred Thompson. Or Tim McCoy. Or Bob Steele. It all depended on who had starred in the preceding Saturday’s feature film. The image stuck with me pretty well through a week of long division and sentence diagramming, as I was always first in the line at the old Capitol, waiting for

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.