The Keepers of the House (11 page)

She remembered. And everything seemed to be in its right place. Only she was different. No, that wasn’t even so; she was just as she had been all along, she just hadn’t known.

Margaret sat and looked at the rough splintery bow of the skiff. He had never intended to come back, her father. Of course not. Her mother was a fool. And that was why her family had always treated her with a shrug and a turn of the head, and a little gesture that meant moonstruck and sun-dry. …

There was Cousin Francine now, married ten years when her husband left to take work on the docks at New Orleans. He’d been gone a year, and no word from him, when she gave him up, and married another man. (That was three years past, and he still hadn’t come.) He might have been dead, and nobody thought to tell her. Or he might have found himself another wife in New Orleans, one he liked better, younger and without those four children.

It was the way things went, like it or not. Her mother ought to have taken another man and forgot the whole thing. After all, she had nothing to stop her. No other blood in her veins.

Margaret looked down at her own hand, at the black skin with the white blood under it.

Not like me, she thought. Not like me. She was all one piece. … Not like me.

A water turkey settled in a tree almost overhead. Margaret automatically noted its brown neck: a female. Skinks skittered up and down and over the trunks of fallen trees. … Margaret thought: If I’d brought a line I could take back a few bream.

The angle of the sun was different now. It was shining directly into her eyes. A couple of hours must have passed. She’d have to be getting back. Her great-grandmother was finished with the tomato plants. She was resting in the shady part of the porch, her lip puffed out with a fresh wad of snuff. Little Matthew, who was about four, was watering the garden with a small bucket and a gourd dipper. He went down the rows, from plant to plant, ladling out the water carefully, singing a wordless song. When his two buckets were empty, he trotted off to get the yoke. He settled it across his shoulders, fitted the buckets in place, and started down to the riverbank.

The youngest child always did the watering under the old woman’s gleaming black eye from the shade of the porch. Spring was very dry and shallow-rooted plants shriveled quickly. But there were always plenty of children around Abner Carmichael’s house, plenty to do the watering.

Margaret remembered when she had done that, remembered the feel of the smooth greasy yoke over her own shoulders. The yoke was old, old as Abner himself; he had made it when he was a small boy, made it well, and it lasted, darkening with sweat and the greasy hands that lifted and pulled at it.

Margaret waited until little Matthew came out of the willows and the water locusts that lined the river. He moved much slower now, full pails swinging on each side, his thin black legs pushing him up the gentle slope. He stopped at the edge of the garden, bent his knees and swung under the yoke, leaving the buckets safely on the ground. He lifted them one at a time and carried them down the rows to continue his watering.

He was sweating. Margaret saw the glisten of his black skin. She went toward him, stepping carefully between the triple poles of the bean hills. “Matt.”

He stuck out his tongue.

“That pink looks plain silly in a black face,” she said curtly. “You got no hat. Take mine.”

She plopped it down on his head. He was too surprised to object.

She walked back and up the two steps to the porch. The old woman, her great-grandmother, said: “You give him you hat.”

Margaret looked at the black old face in the dark cobwebbed corner of the porch. “I can’t hardly see you back in there.”

Her great-grandmother wobbled her head. The band of Indian beadwork shone briefly in the light. “Why you give it to him?”

“He’s working,” Margaret said, “I ain’t.”

“You never done it before.”

“That so,” Margaret agreed.

The old woman bent her head to cough, holding one hand tight across her mouth so the lipful of snuff wouldn’t get away. The headband gleamed again, white and purple.

“Where that come from?” Margaret said. “The band.”

The old woman straightened up and carefully arranged her thin figure in the chair again. You could see her stretching and placing every one of her vertebrae. Finally she settled her spine against the straight wood back and gave a little sigh of relief. Her bare yellow-soled feet had shaken apart during the paroxysm of coughing. Now she brought them together again and placed them properly, heels together, toes with their nails like yellow horns pointing slightly out.

Margaret waited.

“Made it,” the old woman said.

One autumn when she was a little girl they had gotten the clams and the mussels from Dead Man Shoals, a long way to the north. During the following winter they had ground down and polished the shells into beads.

“Nobody do that any more,” she said aloud.

They’d forgotten most of the Indian things that had come to them with their blood. Nobody made beads, not even the old people any more. They kept what they had, wore them, but that was all. They probably didn’t remember how to make them any more. And nobody else had learned, none of the younger people at all. The old woman sighed. Even the shoals were gone. Dead Man Shoals, where the river swirled and broadened and the pines were thick on both sides, so thick that it was always dim under the interlocking branches, so thick that nothing could grow in the heavy mat of needles, not even a single blade of grass. At night it was like an enormous bed, without end, one that was soft and sweet-smelling and warm on a gusty fall night.

“You never been up them hills,” the old woman said. “Never once.”

“No.”

The air was cool and light in the summer. Nothing like the steamy denseness of the bottomlands. Even the trees were different. The pines had heavier trunks and longer needles. The sassafras was thicker and better; they always dug the roots there and brought them back for tea and medicine. The hickories were bigger and taller; even the mockernuts promised more. Just before they left for the south, they always gathered hickories and walnuts and beechnuts—cleaned out the woods—after the first hard frost had set their bones to shivering.

Nobody did that any more. And even the shoals were gone. There was a dam below them now; all that region was flooded and the little sand beach was gone twenty feet or more under the water.

She sighed, the windy dry sigh of an old old woman. “You give Matt your hat.”

“I’m going inside,” Margaret said. “I’m going back to bed.”

The old eyes flickered their answer, old black eyes, hooded like a bird’s.

“I’ll gig me some frogs tonight,” Margaret said. “I reckon you like ’em enough to eat a leg or two.”

The hoods dropped and opened.

“Old woman,” Margaret began. But she forgot the rest and lost interest and instead of standing and trying to remember what it was she had been thinking to say, she turned and went inside. She didn’t unroll her pallet from where it lay neatly placed by the wall; she climbed into the iron bed that stood with three others, filling the room, and fell asleep almost at once.

She never again slept on a pallet on the floor like the other children. She never had to because she no longer slept at night. She never again woke to see the lumpy quilt-wrapped shapes huddled on the floor among the round iron posts of the three real beds. She slept her days in the comfort of the bed, and spent her nights outside. Nobody bothered her; nobody noticed.

Only during the coldest nights of the winter she stayed home, when it was way below freezing outside and rain was falling. Then she sat up by the kitchen stove, feeding it little bits of wood, staring into the black iron surface and the red-tinged cracks. Those cold winter nights, all the others got into one bed, all who could get in, body piled on top of body, skinny limb to fat, sucking warmth. The underside of the mattress was lined with newspapers, and between the covers were more newspapers, and every time a child turned or stirred the whole quiet night was full of the sound of moving papers, crackling like a fire.

There was also the sound of breathing, the sound of moving air, in and out. Quick and rustly like squirrels on a roof. Heavy and slow like a giant dying. Creaky and thin like the turning of a wheel.

It seemed to Margaret that the room rocked and echoed and shook with the noise. How did I sleep before, she thought, and I couldn’t now. …

She remembered that winter beds were lumpy things, with always an elbow or an arm, strange bodies pressing together for warmth.

All through the winter nights she sat at the stove, while hoarfrost crusted like mold on the ground, and the puddle-filled ruts of the road froze solid, just the way the last passing had shaped them. When the sun came up, Margaret left the house quietly. She had found a hollow tree trunk, up the slope about a mile away. Its hollow, which faced toward the south, was partially covered by another fallen tree. In this shelter she built a small fire and kept it going with bits of moss and twigs until the sun had swung up high enough to give some warmth.

She liked the hours she spent crouched inside the trunk. It was warm, it was alone, and she could listen to the shrunken winter sounds of the woods. She always waited until the steady dripping of the night ice ended, then she stopped feeding her fire and watched it go out. She never once stomped the coals—somewhere in the back of her memory was a warning never to kill a fire on your hearth. Way back, from a story long ago—she did not think about it, did not question or wonder, she merely obeyed. The same way she never put a hat on a bed, nor entered and left a house by anything but the same identical door.

When her fire was gone, died of itself, she would get up, feeling her knees prick and shiver with their long cramping. She would shake herself and smooth down her hair. And she would go back to Abner Carmichael’s house for something to eat. Most times there was cornbread and drippings and sorghum syrup, thin and stale. Sometimes there would be fatback or cold bacon. And sometimes there wouldn’t be anything. Specially towards the first of spring, when the pantry shelves were stripped bare, and the bottom of the meal sack squirmed with weevils. Margaret did not mind—she was not hungry—and only children fretted when they found nothing to eat until dinner. Margaret did not really care about food. What she wanted most, she now had. Those mornings, the bed and the room were hers. The empty bed, its lumpy moss-filled mattress resting on old-fashioned rope slings, its heap of quilts faded muted splotches of bumpy color. There were no pillows, and the bed smelled faintly of kerosene, with which it was sprinkled every month, against vermin. It smelled of the many bodies that had lain on its bare striped ticking, the stale sweet smell of old sweat and sex. Margaret curled into it, sleeping hard and without the annoyance of dreams.

A
LONG
toward the end of that first winter, her great-grandmother was taken sick, struck down in her chair on the porch—in the thin pale sun this time—so that her head dropped to her chest and her wad of snuff fell out of her lips with a little wet plop on the bare boards of the floor. They moved her inside, her daughters and granddaughters, and sent children running in all directions to tell the men at their work about it. They brought her into the bedroom, an old woman, shriveled red-brown body, small and dry like a husk, dying by inches. Her eyes were open but they weren’t seeing; even when it got dark and they lit a lamp close by her head she didn’t turn toward it, or even blink at its yellow shine. Her shriveled flat old chest rose and fell, shuddering each time in a deep rasping snore.

Margaret was asleep when they carried her great-grandmother in and laid her down in the narrow bed she had occupied all her old life. Margaret woke to the sound of rattling breathing and hushed whispering and quiet feet scurrying over the boards. She rolled out hastily and went into the kitchen. She stayed there, slumped sleepily in a corner, watching, while the evening dark deepened, and the stars finally began to come out, clear and frosty.

The first of the old woman’s children and grandchildren and relatives began arriving: they crowded the porch until the beams sagged. When it was too chill to stay out there, they jammed themselves into the kitchen, talking in whispers, passing a gallon jug of corn likker from mouth to mouth. The house shook and groaned under their weight.

In a bit, the preacher drove up, a short heavy man, whose name was Robert Stokes. They all hushed and listened to the short mutterings of prayer in the bedroom, giving responses themselves now and then. When Robert Stokes came out and took his place at the table, the muffled conversations began again. Since he was the preacher, they gave him his whiskey mixed with water in one of the few glasses they had. He waited with them, death-watching with them, talking crops and markets and animals with the men. His round black head nodded, solemnly sleepy. He was as tired as any of them, he farmed like them, and preached and watched in his spare time. He wasn’t young, everybody remembered him always being there, preaching on Sunday mornings, and visiting the sick and the dying every hour of the night. It had been forty years past that he and his bride built their first house. Not that it was a house really, it was just a lean-to against some big pines, but it was warm and dry and enough for them, and it would do until they got around to building something more. They had the spot picked already, stones marking the ground where the foundations would be. It was a nice spot, on a little rise with two big pecan trees and a spreading dogwood that turned sparkling every March, like moonlight. It was four years before they got to do anything, and then they used the old-fashioned mud-and-moss between lathes. Their grandfathers built houses like that; they brought the method with them when they spread north from the Gulf coast, slaves on the run maybe, or hungry freemen. There had even once been a special name for the way it was done, but that word was long forgotten.

Robert Stokes built his house that way, room after room, year after year.