The Ordways by William Humphrey

of his shiftlessness. He appeared to think it only fitting that he should sit at his ease in the shade while his pregnant wife trudged along in the dust and heat. The inobservance which was owing to his blindness was taken for a sullen disdain. Remarks, meant as sympathy for her, were uttered against him. Fortunately these were vague; decorum forbade too direct a reference to her condition; and if he heard them, sunk in apathy, he envinced no curiosity. But she dreaded lest something more open be said.
    At bedtime that first night in Arkansas their mother joined the children where they slept, separated from their parents by a partition formed of casks, in the forward section of the wagon. They made a place for her between them. Their father was restless, she said. The following night again she slept with them. Thereafter for the rest of the journey she shared their bed; their father slept alone.
    She could not spare his feelings. Should he discover that she was expecting, he would insist that they stop wherever they were. Once stopped, they might never get going again. She had not come this far only to stop short of her goal. She was set on Texas, or rather on that place in her mind to which she gave that name, and which she envisaged as a vast, windswept blank, a place without landmarks, too wide for the plow, where this son she now carried would be born to something better than following behind a mule. Little was needed to estrange her husband, alerted as he was for just such a movement. He had watched in the darkness for any indication that she had withdrawn to her side of the narrow mattress they shared, had strained to catch any hesitation, any stiffening as she changed his bandages in the morning and the evening. The morning being the time when the queasiness was always upon her, he had not failed to detect such signs; then he had shriveled like a salted snail. Inside the darkness which enclosed him his feelers were out in constant agitation like the flutter of his fingertips as he felt his way around a room. Especially in bed he had watched with all his remaining senses for any sign that she came to him out of duty and against her inclination. In the beginning, back home, when she first got up off her pallet and returned to their bed, he had repulsed her, refusing this as he had refused food. He may even unwittingly have hoped to find that he disgusted her. The unstilled longings of his wrecked and repellent body filled him with shame, and with a sense of disloyalty towards the death he had tried to die. At the least suspicion that anyone had shrunk from him (and in his darkened mind these suspicions bred like germs) he would retreat into that death and the scarred features of his face set like incisions in stone.
    Still she could not spare him. The rate of their progress had been slow and Texas was still far away. From what information she picked up about the distance, she figured she would just about make it; she only hoped they would be there before he discovered her condition. There would be time then to salve his wounded feelings. Meanwhile, under cover of his blindness, careful never to brush against him, in constant anxiety lest somebody say something to give her away, she drove them all on. The days were long, the weather dry. She got them up before daybreak, fed them a skimpy breakfast, yoked the team, and set off, her secret nausea forcing her to hang on to the yoke for dizziness.
    They were in the cotton belt now, where slaves, more than ever they had seen in Tennessee, worked the broad fields. The bolls were opened full and the white fields shimmered in the glare of the sun. This white landscape with black people in it was like a photographic negative, or like that image which comes just before the loss of consciousness in a sunstroke, when everyone turns black, outlined by a glittering aureole of light. Ella Ordway’s thin cotton dress, soaked with sweat, clung to her figure, accentuating her belly. The