Graveyard Bustling with Life

THE ORDWAYS by William Humphrey. 362 pages. Knopf. $5.95.

Good writing is rare enough. Storytelling is an even rarer skill. A genuinely comic vision is beyond price. The Ordways has all three. Seven years after his doom-laden first novel, Home from the Hill, William Humphrey has made a surprising switch from tragedy to mock epic. The result is the most delightful novel so far this winter.

Humphrey's darkly memorable earlier book unraveled the archetypal family quadrangle. The Ordways also is a family saga; it, too, is set in an East Texas small town and begins in a graveyard. But there the resemblance ends. This graveyard is bustling with life, for no Ordway has died in 35 years; it is annual Graveyard Working Day, and the whole enormous clan has come to gether for piety and picnicking.

Count to a Million. As graves are weeded and headstones set straight under the fond patriarchal eye of Grandfather Sam Ordway, the dead begin to seem nearly as quick as the living, and reminiscences have the soft, nostalgic sheen of loved stories often told. Author Humphrey deftly weaves them into a leisurely ramble through Southern history and Texas geography, with stops along the way for circuses and barbecues, political rallies and small-town jails, courting scenes and courtroom dramas, jokes, pranks and tall tales.

There is the one about absent-minded Bachelor Great-Granduncle

Giles Ordway, who was preoccupied all his life with trying to count to a million: "Just how far he did get no one ever knew. For though he was vouchsafed twelve years more than his allotted three score and ten, and did hardly anything else towards the last, his dying words were, Tell them that fellow was right. It can't be done. I only got up to--' And there Uncle Giles stopped counting." There is a deadpan investigation into the real origin of those statues of Confederate foot soldiers that decorate the central squares of all Southern small towns, and why they so much resemble the statues of Garibaldi in all small Italian towns: seems there was this enterprising Italian sculpture salesman with fancy clothes and an engraved calling card . . .

Floating Ancestors. One grisly-funny story tells of Great-Grandfather Thomas Ordway, blinded at Shiloh, who dug up all the Ordway graves in Tennessee and loaded headstones, kegs of bones, and the living members of his family together in an ox-drawn wagon to come to Texas--and of how the wagon was flooded crossing the Red River, sending the tombstones to the bottom while the kegs floated off downstream. Most remarkable of all is the story of Sam Ordway himself and his half-year search throughout Texas for his little son Ned who was stolen away by a neighbor. Ned is not found until years later, but on the way every conceivable stereotype of the Old South and the Wild West is slyly overturned or brazenly outfaced.

Author Humphrey is a man of supple mind and ingenious fancy; he is also the unobtrusive master of a wide-eyed, self-deprecatory style that again and again sweet-talks the reader, step by reasonable step, right to the brink of the preposterous^and then tumbles him into laughter. He does it with a loving touch that leaves no bitter aftertaste: the Ordways come up smiling too.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.