The Keepers of the House (14 page)

And what was she doing now? … And where was she? …

Margaret made herself stop thinking of that. Finally, she forced herself to study the pine cones she held in her hands, the tapered cones of the longleaf pine.

She was grown now herself. She was seventeen. Most girls that age were married. Lots of them had a child or two. They wouldn’t be crying over a mama.

Margaret looked out across the misty pasture where a single black-and-white cow grazed.

I been coming here ever since I was born, she thought. This spot or another like it. Every year since I been born. But this one here, this is the last. …

She stopped, startled. She looked around, half expecting to have discovered somebody else had spoken those words aloud. Now that they were said—or thought, which was the same thing—they seemed true enough. But she was afraid of prophecy, and its connections with the devil; her heart beat much faster and irregularly, and she shivered. But she believed: this would be the last year.

Knowing that, she looked at everything more carefully. The first sweet-smelling tall flowers of the greenfly plant. The pipewort, the moss verbena. The blue flowers of the pickerelweed in moist overgrown beds of ponds. The reddish curled lips of the skunk cabbage. And milkweeds, tall and purple. Jacob’s-ladder, poking its way between pine needles. The ginseng with its tiny purple flower, whose root, people said, was good for making love. Yarrow, lacy-leaved and fragrant. The poisonous Indian weed. And the sweet-tasting honeysuckle. Four-o’clocks to string on a child’s necklace. And whole fields full of wild pinks, brilliant and glowing in the sun.

And the little animals that rustled among them. The snapping turtle catching flies by the rubbly edge of a pond, splashing into the water at the slightest noise. The box turtle lumbering into its burrow. And the snakes. Kick aside a fallen pine and you were sure to find a bull snake, blotchy grey, and hissing at you. Rattlers too, all kinds and sizes; when you found one, you called the children together and stoned it. And all the others, the milk snakes and the the black runners and the green snakes and the corn snakes and the rat snakes. There were so many, when you thought about it, so very many.

Margaret wondered: There a lot of things I don’t have no names for. Plants and varmints both, that I can’t call by name.

She was alone the whole day, watching, looking, going wherever she wanted and as far as she could walk.

The stand of pines the family was sheltering in now, it was a kind of narrow strip running up the side of the rising sandy hills. If she went very far in either direction the land changed rapidly. Hickories began to appear, and scrub oak, and soon she was in a dense wood of holly and beech and sweet gum and water oak and dogwood and sweet bay, buck vines lacing them all tight together overhead. Now and then she passed a persimmon and a pecan, and she noticed their location carefully, in case she should come this way in the fall after a hard frost when their fruits would be ripe.

She found streams, too, ones that the flood season hadn’t seemed to touch. Most were very small, a trickle over a sand bottom. She drank their leafy-tasting water and ate the wild watercress from their banks. She found a large one, down in a gully, almost out of sight in a clump of sweet bay trees and wild azaleas. This one was older; it had cut its way through the sand and had even channeled its way deep into the rock. She stood looking down into the opaque smooth-flowing water. By the far bank, no more than five feet across, she saw the quick flick of a sunfish.

He would be good fried, she thought automatically. And then: Why am I always eating, always thinking of that? Why does it take so much trouble to keep your stomach full and quiet?

A leaf sailed by, and a long-legged fly walked the quiet water in the lee of a fallen rock. Water bugs twitched their way about the surface. She knelt and looked at her reflection in the water that flowed half an inch below the rock shelving. She studied her face, heavy-lidded large eyes, full mouth, ears that were too long. She spat and the white froth sailed by her cheek. Another water-walker, caught in the flow, spun past, long legs skating feverishly. Margaret cupped some of the water in her hands; it was perfectly clear. She drank, and it was much colder than the other streams. She dipped in her arm, groping for the bottom, found none. She stood up, dragged over the fallen branch of a magnolia and thrust it down, pushing against the little current. It did not touch. Margaret pulled it out, tossed it aside. The creek must not have had a bottom.

She walked on. There were a few very early blackberries, small and sour before their season. She stopped and ate them anyway, face crinkling at their flavor.

And it be right strange, she told herself silently, the way things come in their seasons. The way they appear and go each year at the same time, without never a mistake. … And the way people come. And me, I am here now, but I won’t be next year. And where will I be? I don’t know the answer to that any more than I know why berries have their seasons and the persimmons only ripen after a frost and a rattler is poison and a king snake isn’t. And why a milk snake sucks the cows dry and a hoop snake puts its tail in its mouth and rolls down the road when the moon is small. … And there be reasons for all of those and causes too, only I don’t know them. I don’t know anything. … I don’t know what Mobile looks like, only what Grover Kent tells about the docks and the bananas. And I don’t know what New Orleans looks like, only the stories people bring. And I never seen the ocean. … All I seen is the cotton fields and the rivers, flood and dry, and the way pines move in the wind, moaning.

She began to walk back to the place where her family was stopping. Thinking: I won’t pass here again. Maybe for a long time. Maybe not ever.

Watching carefully, looking carefully. To remember.

She entered the stretch of pine, and passed her way among them, weaving silently, playing that she was a ray of light or a wind. Shapeless, formless, smooth, passing. …

She slipped into the shelter she had built for herself, a bit away from all the others, and, tired by her long walk, stretched out under it. And listened to the sounds. The bells of the cows. The games of the children, their reedy voices raised in the singsong chant: “Here come Johnny Cuckoo. …”

Whatever did that mean? Margaret thought. … Nothing seemed t
o mean anything clear this morning. … Not even words which were supposed to.

The children went on chanting in a raggedy chorus: “I come from being a soljer, a soljer, a soljer, I come from being a soljer on a dark and stormy night.”

It was a silly song, Margaret said to herself. As silly as the moaning sounds Katy was making. …

Margaret opened her eyes and glanced across the clearing. Katy was walking slowly up and down, arms across the shoulders of two women. She seemed to be laboring in earnest now, Margaret thought. …

Margaret closed her eyes again. Katy always labored hard. Her babies were always born with long mashed heads that they kept for the first months of their lives. … She was taking on now. Her moans were interrupted by screams. So that was why, Margaret thought, the men had disappeared. It was supposed to be bad luck for a man to be too near a birthing.

I’ve got to remember this too, Margaret thought. And the way the sounds go right straight up into the open sky.

Then, because she was tired, she fell asleep.

When the ground finally dried a bit, they began moving back to the bottomlands. The men went first, to start the plowing. They were ready to plant by the time Margaret and the other women arrived. They also had replaced the rock foundations and levered the house back on them. The women had the inside to clean, the mud to scrape and slosh away with buckets of water. When they were done, they brought the beds and the bedding from the wagons. The old men built the mud-and-moss chimney. The children swept the yard, and took the dead animals (possums and rats and squirrels) and carried the bloated bodies down to the river and tossed them in.

The stove went back into the kitchen while they were hammering the lower boards on the barn. They were ready for another year.

Spring passed into summer, shimmering with heat. Endless, work-filled unmarked days, one very like the other. Finally, a rest in the hot days when the cotton was making, when there was nothing more to do until the bolls swelled open and full. Then it was time to start dragging the long sacks up and down the rows in the crouching, sweating weeks of picking. Imperceptively the nights cooled, and the mornings. Margaret noticed the change as she carried the washing over to the baptistry behind the old church—a long walk but the water was clearer than the river. Margaret had never liked the smell of river-washed clothes, and they always took on the muddy color so soon.

It was on one of those cool early mornings—she had left the house long before it was light—washing her clothes in the clear creek water, that she met William Howland.

At first she did not think he was flesh and blood. She had not heard him come, had not heard the crinkle and crunch of the ground under his feet. He just appeared, not far from her.

She often saw things in the woods. Faces and figures. Sometimes they talked to her and sometimes they only stood back and looked. Sometimes they were friendly and sometimes they scowled and warned her away from places they were guarding. Sometimes she recognized them and sometimes they were people she had never seen before. Sometimes, they weren’t even people. They were just shapes without a name, like a breeze if you could see it. Or they were animals. There was a chicken, a big red rooster, that she saw everywhere. It seemed to follow her for days at a time.

So when she saw a tall heavy blue-eyed bald man in the morning fog, she was not surprised. He was one of many. …

For the first minutes she talked to him, she was sure that if she put out her hand, she could reach right through him. Then she began to realize that he was solid, and she felt disappointed. He was real. …

She sat down abruptly. Almost crying.

“You sick?” he asked.

She shook her head, still having trouble with tears.

“What ails you?”

She shook her head again, and he sat beside her, and talked for a while. She heard his words but she did not bother to listen to them. Not for a long time, until she had gotten herself used to this new situation, then she sharpened and focused her ears again.

“So there’s one thing sure,” he was saying. “I got to get myself a housekeeper.”

She looked down at her hands folded in her lap, big hands.

“And I reckon it’s got to be somebody young, account of it’s no easy job. The house needs lots of work, you can see that from what I been telling you.”

I weren’t paying any mind, she protested silently.

He was waiting for her to say something.

“Why you tell me?”

“You might want the job, seeing it’s open.”

She lifted her hands and held them out in front of her, fingers stretched. “I figured to be going away,” she said. “I been figuring on that.”

Last spring. Spring past. That day she found the persimmon trees and saw the sunfish in the creek that didn’t have a bottom. …

“I been knowing I would.”

“What your family say?”

“Got none.”

“Not a mama?” He frowned, unbelieving.

“She been gone.”

“A while back?”

“She never come back from looking for my papa.”

He chuckled. “I heard tell of things like that.”

“My papa was white.”

William Howland hesitated. Finally because he had to say something, “I don’t mind,” he said.

“I got nobody to ask. My grandpappy, he be glad of the room in the house.”

William rubbed his face, feeling very tired, hearing the stubble of his beard grate in the quiet morning. “If this here is New Church, I got maybe a twenty-mile walk.”

He stood up, and she seemed much smaller, fragile almost. She did not raise her head to look at him, the way a white woman might. She didn’t act at all like a white woman. As for her having a white father, he didn’t believe it, not with the color of that skin. But lots of gals said so, and you had to let them have the comfort of it, if there was any.

“Look now,” he said, “you go back and talk to your people and tell ’em where you going, and then you come over to my place, if you still want to.” How could anybody that tall, he wondered, look so delicate just because she was sitting down? Then he saw that she wasn’t sitting, she had folded herself into the earth. Her weight and size had passed into it. She perched, suspended on the very crust.

“That’s the way to do it,” he said, more to hear the sound of his voice and stop another deep feeling that was beginning to bother him, a tensing of muscles he had forgotten about. “It plain wouldn’t be right to expect you to go rushing off when it can’t help but be a surprise to you.”

“No,” she said.

“You ain’t used to people walking out the woods and offering you a job.”

“It don’t surprise me,” she said quietly, in the light even voice that was so hard to remember. “Nothing that happens surprises me, ’cause I know it ahead of time.”

He gave a quick laugh, and reaching down, touched the top of her head, briefly. She still did not look up.

He walked away, feeling her eyes follow him the whole way up the stream, where he picked up his shotgun and coat, all the way until he disappeared into the woods.

Margaret sat and stared at the wasps crawling over the damp surfaces of her laundry. “I knowed you was coming,” she said after him.

Only I didn’t know what shape you’d have. And maybe that’s what the chicken meant, and the shape I saw yesterday in the branches of a hickory tree, the one that was bluish white and made a sound like an old-fashioned harp. They were telling me that something was about to happen. They were telling me and I wasn’t understanding what, beyond that there was something coming. …

She glanced up at the sun through the pine trees. It had hardly moved. No more than half an hour had passed.

Unless the sun was standing still. … No, she thought, it wouldn’t do that for me. It would do it for kings, but not for me. … It was real time. And it hadn’t been very long.