The Keepers of the House (12 page)

He’d been lucky in his wife too. He’d taken a young skinny girl, an orphan living in her cousin’s house and not welcome there. Kettle cousins, people called them. They got to do most of the work and to lick the kettle when everybody else was done. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen when they married; he himself was only fifteen, but he had reached his full height: he had the same square dumpy figure. His skinny small girl grew after her marriage, until she stood almost six feet tall. She had only sons and she bore them—all of them—alone. It did not occur to her to have a woman stay with her as her time approached. Maybe she thought there was no one to ask. The first time she was weeding her garden, seeing that the bugs did not eat up the tomatoes and fastening down the stakes of the beans, when the ammonia-smelling water spurted down her legs and stained the ground by her bare feet. With the first quiver of her belly muscles straining, she went back to the lean-to, stood her hoe carefully against the wall. Inside she spread a quilt on the floor and squatted, shaking with the spasms and panting with relief in between. When her husband came home that evening, late because he worked as long as there was light in the sky, the baby was sucking, the bloody quilt was folded away in the corner.

Even at her present age, she still worked the fields with her husband and her five living sons. Robert Stokes was a lucky man, the Lord had been good to him. He was saying so as he sat at the kitchen table with the family of a dying old woman. He had a deep voice, best voice in the county, and the words of praise for his lot and for the soul of the old woman struggling to leave her body blended together.

“And you hear that now,” he said abruptly. They all went silent, listening. Margaret heard nothing but the wind and the stamping and rattling of the tethered mules on the frozen ground. He pointed up to the roof. “Jesus and his angels waiting to carry off the soul of our sister.” Everybody looked up, at the soot-stained and water-streaked ceiling. Margaret glanced out the window into the dark cold winter sky. “You hear their wings, children,” the preacher said. “Yes, Lord,” somebody answered, and they all fell silent, listening again. This time there were two great strangled snores from the dying woman. They dropped their eyes, cleared their throats, and moved about. Some went on the porch, some fetched the likker jug.

As the crowd shifted and parted, the preacher saw Margaret standing by the corner window, where she had been staring into the sky, looking for the brushing wings. “I don’t know you, child,” he said kindly. “I ain’t never seen you before for all that you look familiar to my eyes.”

Somebody bent down and whispered into his ear: “It’s nothing but Sara’s baby, the only one she had.”

“Jesus save us,” he said, and looked at her again. This time with curiosity. Margaret stood perfectly still, knowing that he was searching her face and body for some sign of white blood. She stared her great brown eyes directly into his small black ones, shrewd and bright in the folds of his fat face. She stared, daring him to ask her more, daring him to say anything. … She held her breath.

He looked away. Other bodies slipped between them, people moved about, and he disappeared.

Margaret began to breathe again. But now the air in the room had gotten too hot for her, it was too full of the smell of whiskey-laden breaths. She had to go outside. She pushed her way through the room, using her elbows.

The night was very cold. The ground glistened with frost. It was marked like snow, with footprints going off in one direction to the privy, in the other around the yard to the small barn where the visitors’ mules were sheltered. Margaret stared at the two trails, visible in the dim kerosene light from the window, and wondered where she could go. It was too cold for her hollow tree; even with a fire she was sure to have frostbite by morning. Even the porch was too cold. The snuffling snort of a mule decided her. She went to the barn. It was jammed with animals, but she found an empty feeding trough and climbed in. Here, the steamy reeking air was passably warm—in spite of the cracks and holes in the walls—and Margaret settled down to study the watery dark eyes and the slope of the varicolored flanks that surrounded her. The sharp heavy odor was a kind of anesthetic, and she slept with her eyes open, staring at the pattern of light and dark, lulled by the animals’ breathing and their occasional shuffling.

She was aware that time was passing, but she could not see out to gauge the movement of the stars. She heard nothing and noticed nothing until the first shriek from the house.

The animals stirred slightly and backed, their rope halters creaking. There was a second cry, the long descending wail of mourning. The old woman was dead.

Margaret settled back. No need to go in, just an old woman who had died, worn out with the revolving years. No need at all. … Then all of a sudden in the dark empty space over the back of the big grey mule that belonged to her cousin Zelda, Margaret saw her great-grandmother. Saw her clearly, just as she used to sit on the porch—shawl around her shoulders, band around her head. Her blackbird eyes under the folds of brown skin glared out, angry as always. She lifted her hand, the one that had the jagged scar of a ceremonial magic cut across the back, and she beckoned.

Margaret stared at the hand, at the design of the scar, at the veins raised like vines on a wall, at the long fingernails, thick and yellow as horn.

“Come into the house,” she told Margaret.

Her voice was strong and loud just the way it had been before. But that, Margaret thought, would be because she wasn’t more than a minute or so dead, and her soul hadn’t had time to fade off, to go wherever it was that dead souls went, off somewhere in the pine hills to the north, where people said they saw them sometimes on warm summer nights, walking around, taking the breeze as if they were alive.

“Plenty people in the house,” Margaret told her, “you see that kitchen, there isn’t a foot of open space. And your brother’s family from over Tchefuncta Creek that still got to get here.”

The ghost turned her head, looking over her shoulder, back at the house. The purple and white beads of her headband winked.

“You see,” Margaret said. “I been telling you.”

The head swung back, and the eyes fastened on her again. “Come to the house,” it said, “child of my daughter’s daughter. My flesh and blood.”

She slipped lower then and faded into the grey of the mule’s flank.

Margaret stared at the place where she had been, feeling the tug of the blood in her veins, feeling it pull her out of the stable into the house. The old woman’s blood bringing her back into the family group in the kitchen.

Grudgingly Margaret crossed the empty yard, swept clean by a twig broom each week, and frozen now so that it crackled beneath her feet. “Only half my blood,” she said aloud into the night.

“Be with my blood,” her great-grandmother’s voice said emphatically though fainter this time. “Go.”

Margaret looked up, into the clear, star-freckled night. “Is that where you are,” she asked, “up there?”

She stood and squinted into the depths trying to make out the figure of her great-grandmother drawing farther and farther off, dodging her way among the stars.

Margaret sighed and nodded after her and did her bidding. She went into the house.

The bedroom was noisy and bustling now—Margaret glanced through the door. All the oldest women had crowded themselves into the narrow spaces between the beds to begin the waking. They had brought straight wood chairs with them, lined them up close as possible there. Now they were sitting straight-backed in those close-packed rows, hands folded across their chests, rocking their bodies back and forth from the waist, mourning. It was a descending long nasal wail, repeated over and over again, each one exactly like the one before. It was not a hymn. It had no tune; it did not even have any rhythm. No two voices were together. It was only a raggedy picket line of sound to keep the evil spirits away from the dead.

Three younger women were bent over the bed, washing and preparing the body, putting half-dollars on the eyes. They were singing a familiar hymn: “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown.” They were singing more softly and they kept losing the melody in the noise of the mourners, but they just picked it up again and went on.

Margaret turned back to the kitchen. A few people were leaving—to carry the news—so the room was no longer unbearably full. Robert Stokes still sat at the table, alone now. All the other wooden chairs had been taken into the bedroom for the mourners, and only the preacher was left his. The men squatted on the floor, some hunkered down in the middle, others resting their backs against the walls, talking quietly or just staring out into the center of the room. The children were propped in the corners, sound asleep; now and then one cried or whimpered. The women—all those who weren’t actually waking in the bedroom—were jammed into the far corner around the wood range. Pots clattered on the iron top and the sweet odor of squirrel stew mushroomed up with the steam.

All during the following day they came, from twenty-five miles around, the old woman’s descendants, jolting along behind the patient rumps of their mules. The house floors sagged and groaned under their weight. The hams and the cold joints and the fowls they brought with them crowded the shady north corner of the porch, hung there out of the way of raiding varmints. The old woman had been washed and laid out in her plain pinewood coffin. Candles stuck in blue bottles were burning in a triangle at her head.

It was so noisy, Margaret thought as she huddled in the farthest corner of the kitchen, it was so very very noisy.

She slept in the barn that night, patiently waiting for the end. In the morning, she stood on the porch in the little pool of cold winter sunlight and waited while they nailed closed the coffin, and carried it outside to the wagon for the five-mile trip to the cemetery.

There was a band now, a five-piece band. They looked pretty tired because they had been playing at a dance over in Mill River, but they took a few quick drinks and swung into place behind the wagon. Their feet crunched on the frozen mud and the mules snorted and grumbled, but they played their saddest marches: “Garlands of Flowers” and “Westlawn Dirge.” The trombone and the trumpets lifted clear and sad in the cold morning air, the drums gave a slow dull beat. Everybody walked the whole way along the rutted road. The men had gone out the day before and cut pine branches and spread them across the muddiest parts so the wagon with the coffin and the band and the first of the line of marchers got across dry-shod. But the branches sank farther and farther into the mud, and by the time the end of the procession came, the puddles were as deep as before, only now they had bits of twig and broken stalks of pine sticking up in them. Those in the last of the line had to make their own way, had to jump across or clamber up the low slopes on each side, slipping and sliding on the icy rocks.

Margaret was among the last, with the smallest of the children who could walk on their own. She hitched up her skirts and jumped. The children chattered and clambered around. And all this time the drum kept a steady funeral beat.

The graveyard was only partially fenced by a single strand of barbed wire, but no animals ever wandered in. Under the tall thick pines, no bushes and practically no grass grew. The sandy stretch stayed clean and open with only the gentle drift of pine needles across it. There had been no burials for quite a while; the graves had all sunk into gentle rises, smoothed by the rain. Most had no headstones; a few still had their wooden ones, cut into the rough outline of an hourglass—they would soon fall away. Two or three had been covered with cement poured into wood molds. In the cement, under a pane of glass, was a colored picture of the dead. Margaret remembered one: a young man standing stiffly, hand in coat. A wedding picture for a grave. …

It would be over there, the east corner, Margaret thought. I don’t have to see, I know it’s there, with the name and date scratched under it. … But nobody does that any more.

All they did now was outline the grave with white stones, set that wood hourglass marker at the head, and put the dead gifts on the top. …

Every grave had them. Cups, and glasses turned purple by the sun, and china animals—dogs and cats, and a broody hen or two. And plates. Lots of plates. Most of these stood on two-inch-high spires of sandy mud, jutting out like mushrooms from the grave. The rain had given them that form, and the plates that sat on that thin rain-carved stem were called Death’s Cups. If you touched one, old Death himself would come riding after you on his white horse with a long tail that rattled in the wind because it was made of little finger bones. …

There was a black smear around the open grave. To lighten their work, to thaw the first inches of ground, the diggers had built fires there. They had not watched too carefully because the flames had left their bounds, spread through the strand of barbed wire, and run up a young pine tree. Soot and ash lifted and hung in the air as the tramping feet passed through.

The band became silent, only the drum thudded slowly. Margaret felt her skin quiver across the back of her neck. There were the grunts of men bearing the coffin and the squeak of ropes. Abruptly the drum stopped.

For a moment there wasn’t even a wind. Then there was a scuffle at the grave and the wailing began again—a dozen or more voices this time, high-pitched, echoing off the tallest of the pines, shaking the buck vines that twisted high overhead. Somebody had jumped into the grave and they were pulling them out. Even women who did not know how to wail the way the old ones did were screaming softly now, with a slow breath-like rhythm. The preacher began a proper hymn as he picked up a handful of mud. He dropped it into the grave, letting the sandy grains trickle between his fingers like sugar, savoring the feel of the earth. He moved aside, gesturing with a swing of his arm. Then there was shuffling as everyone pressed in to drop other handfuls on the pine boards. “Jesus save, Jesus save,” the preacher sang at the top of his fine voice. Margaret noticed a couple of black crows circling high up in the clear sky, watching. What do they think? she wondered. Whatever do they think?