The Keepers of the House (16 page)

When the garden was finished—ripped naked, forced back to its proper bounds—and there was no more, Margaret went hunting for fruit to preserve. She did not know these woods and fields, but she learned quickly. She was used to finding and taking whatever the country had to offer. At New Church foraging was something that older children taught younger. So now, Margaret came home with her sacks full of quinces and persimmons and apples and pears. And lines of glasses cooled on the window sills. One afternoon she rooted in the tangle of the vegetable garden, and she brought out pumpkins and acorn squashes, sturdy things that had survived their neglect.

William saw them heaped on the back porch, glistening yellow even in the shade, and he wondered why he had not thought about them for all these years, them growing out there under the tangle of grass and creepers, year after year, season after season, with only deer to nibble them.

They looked right pretty piled there, he thought, pumpkins and squash and the bumpy ornamental gourds that somebody had planted—somebody forgotten now.

Toward the end of the first week, he came across her, sitting at the kitchen table, under the hanging green-shaded lamp.

He’d worked late that day. First at the spring house: the new pump (the one his sister had ordered in time for the wedding) was giving trouble. He’d still been tinkering with it at suppertime, so he sent for Ramona to bring him down his food. When he finished with the pump, he still wasn’t through. There was one more thing to do: he had to go to the mill. All that day there had been small tornadoes about, sudden funnels dropping from the low puffy black sky—he’d been watching them. One, he thought, had passed close to the mill. He’d have to see. He’d have to be sure that the winds had not damaged the building or the stones—they were both old and brittle. And so he went, hunched over his horse’s back against the blowing rain. He checked the building carefully and thoroughly by the yellow light of his kerosene lantern (only the main house had electricity). The mill was secure. The winds of the afternoon had cracked a window, no more.

William stood for a quiet while looking at the great stones that were getting harder and harder to find these days, when almost nobody ground their own meal any more. He listened to the dropping wind outside, and to the scurry of the mice and the small animals who always lived in any mill. He sat on the floor, tired and thoughtless, resting in the shelter of the roof, waiting for the sky to clear.

So it was near ten o’clock when he finally unsaddled his horse and climbed the slope to his house. He saw the light in the kitchen. It could not be Ramona. She would have left long ago for the house she shared with her husband and her old-maid daughter a quarter of a mile down the road.

William Howland walked across the yard, noticing through a gap in the eastern clouds the outline of the Bear. He saw the bright starry shape clearly. Head down, tail up, it had always looked more like a skunk to him.

So few people watched the stars any more, he thought. His uncle now had been able to tell the names of every constellation as it lifted itself over the shelter of the trees.

He stepped quietly to the back porch, and glanced in the window. It was Margaret (always in his mind he called her Alberta and corrected himself now). She had greased her hair and pulled it straight back, pinning it flat to her head. He saw the twin tendons of her bent neck, the same delicate arch that he had noticed when he stood up to leave her by the creek in New Church.

It was strange, he thought, standing on his porch in the chilly night, how she changed. Sitting she was a child, delicate, uncertain. When she walked, she moved with the stride of a country woman, long steps, arms hanging motionless at her sides. A primitive walk, effortless, unassuming, unconscious, old as the earth under her feet.

She was sewing, William noticed, but not very well. He had seen his sister whip the needle back and forth through the material, quick, deft, sure. Margaret sewed slowly, pulling the thread out to its full length after each stitch.

She did not know how, he thought. But she would never have had the time or the chance to learn over at New Church. …

The bend of the neck, the slow clumsy stitching—he caught his breath, aching, as the sight of poverty always hurt him.

If she wants to learn, he told himself, I’ll get somebody to teach her. If she wants to learn. …

He went inside. She turned her head slowly at the sound of the door.

“Just me,” he said. “Go ahead.”

She folded her hands over the material. He glanced at it. He had seen that flowered cloth somewhere. … Yes. His sister had bought it to make curtains for the hall upstairs. This must be the remnant.

She did not say anything, so he asked: “You’re making curtains?”

“No,” she said. “No.”

“If you want to learn,” he said, “I can find somebody to teach you.

“My grandmama showed me,” she said softly, and her voice was wispy and dry. “I be all right if I can remember me what she say.”

Her voice always vanished like smoke on the air. He felt uncomfortable. “Whatever you want.”

He went to bed. And only the aching tiredness of his muscles pushed him to sleep. He kept wanting to stay awake and listen. To be sure she had finished in the kitchen and come safely upstairs to bed.

It was Sunday—its bright warmth carried an edge of winter in the yellow sun and the hard blue of the sky. The fields were deserted and so was the dirt road. Ramona came plodding along early in the morning and fixed dinner and left it on the back of the range. She was the last person to pass by. Sundays were like that, empty. No one moved about. Some of them—the good people—had been to church and were now home resting after their heavy Sunday dinners. They sat on their sunny porches in big cane rockers, bobbing gently to ease the distention of their bellies, on the porch boards beside them were sweating highball glasses with their slivers of ice.

And the other people, well, some of them would still be out on Saturday-night hunts, shacked up back in the woods, beside a fire, drinking corn likker straight from the jug. And some others would be fishing, dozing over their poles among the willows.

William Howland sat alone on his front porch and mended traces, a glass of bourbon and water by his side. When he had finished with them, he got out his guns and his cleaning rags and brushes and went over them carefully. He even took down the old long rifle from the kitchen wall, the one that had belonged to his great-great-grandfather who’d drifted down from the Tennessee hills with it over his shoulder. William Howland always kept it clear and clean and oiled. He didn’t dare fire it. He didn’t have the ball and he wasn’t sure of the charge and he didn’t believe the old barrel would hold together anyway. But he kept it clean just the same.

When he finished that—and it was just like any other Sunday—it was time to go down for the milking. Oliver Brandon was alone at the barn—nobody else around on a Sunday. William helped whenever he wasn’t going out to supper. He enjoyed it, even the three-times-a-day milking schedule of full summer. He liked the smell of the cow’s flanks pressing against his cheek. He liked the way the teats felt under his hand, the way the milk pulsed under his fingers, he liked the feeling that his hands had a life apart from his body. When he was through in the barn, he got himself supper in the kitchen, walking up and down, prowling around among the cupboards.

This particular Sunday he found a mouse’s nest in the large china tureen at the top of the deepest closet. (He remembered the tureen, though it hadn’t been on a table since his mother was alive and only rarely then. It belonged to the Lowestoft service his Creole grandmother brought with her as a bride.) He clapped the cover on and carried nest and mice to the back yard and flung them out. As he came back inside, he heard the wooshing swoop of an owl’s wings, and he nodded to himself, satisfied. He hated animals and vermin in the house. He would have to talk to Ramona, he thought. She was getting unusually careless.

He went into the living room, and under the light of the gooseneck lamp he began the newspapers and the magazines he had been too tired to read during the week. He still kept glass and bottle close at hand, and as usual at Sunday bedtime, he was quite drunk. He had been drinking steadily most of the day.

He put down the last magazine, snapped off the lamp, picked up the liquor, and began his trip upstairs in the dark. He did not need a light. He knew the rooms so well. No piece of furniture had been shifted in all the years he had been living here alone. And almost none had been shifted since the time his parents were alive. …

His parents. He stopped for a minute and thought about them, the way he hadn’t for years.

He stood in the dark hall and looked across the living room to the bright squares of moonlit windows. It seemed he could see them sitting in the humps of maple rocking chairs by the big fireplace.

They always had sat there. … His mother. Crocheting by the hour, filling all the tables with centerpieces, all the beds with spreads. There were even crocheted curtains at the bathroom window. His mother had stopped everything else and done them especially for that room, when they first got inside plumbing. She crocheted capes and gowns for all the babies in the county, white and black—and William smiled to himself in the dark—the same pattern over and over, only the ones for black babies did not have the three tiny ribbon bows stitched on top. … William took another swallow from his glass. Poor old lady, he thought, with everything hanging on those three bows of ribbon. You had them. … You did not. … And that was your whole place in life.

William was not the first to notice the significance of the ribbons. His father pointed it out to him one day, shortly before he went off to Atlanta to read for the law. “Damn silly thing, but just plain like her. … And you was to tell her, she’d throw a fit right at you.” His father chuckled, contentedly. “Should have your women spoiled,” he told his son. “Leastways Howland women is always spoiled.” It had been his mark of manhood, his wife’s soprano giggles, her great penchant for collecting cut-glass and rose-flowered Haviland china. …

William turned away from the dark parlor. But across the hall, on the other side, the door to the dining room was open, and he saw his parents again, in there. Saw them sitting in the little bay window, where plants used to be kept but which was bare and empty and dusty now. They were sitting right where they had been the day of his wife’s death, that afternoon when he had come and told them he would need to have the tomb. The laughter was gone; they were two old people, shivering, paralyzed with fear.

And it ends like that, William thought. The gaiety and the pride in fear and death.

William closed the dining-room door, shutting them in there. He would work again tomorrow and be too tired for such thoughts.

He began his slow drunken climb up the steps. He dragged his hand heavily along the rail, and his fingers passed over the charred spot that dated from his great-grandfather’s time. One evening bandits came upon the house (there were a lot of them on the trace at that time). They caught and killed the youngest daughter—found her asleep in bed, in the room that was now the kitchen—kicked her to death on the brick floor. They lit a bonfire in the center of the big main hall, and were cooking their supper when that William Howland and his four grown sons and their slaves came back. The old man stayed behind to put out the fire and tend the broken body of his youngest. The rest of them drove the robbers into the cane-brake in the dark and killed them there, one by one as they wallowed hip deep in the swamp. … The railing had been one of the things that the fire had charred. They kept it to remember by. Generation after generation. When they enlarged the house, they added the old railing to the new stairway. … To remember by. …

Killing and death, William thought as he rubbed his fingers across the charred rail, those were the things you set yourself up to remember. And the others went to their graves unmarked.

He’d told Abigail the stories, all the stories he knew. She’d listened of course, but how much would she remember? Women never took those things too seriously. His sister Annie now, she hadn’t remembered, hadn’t even tried. She’d simply forgotten everything before the time she married and moved to Atlanta. Even the long days of their childhood. How they’d hunted tupelo honey and found the bobcat’s young in an old eagle’s nest. …

His lips were numb. He must have had more to drink than he thought. He put his knees firmly into the business of lifting him upstairs.

Sometimes he felt the age of the house, felt the people who had lived in it peer over his shoulder, wondering and watching what he was doing. He felt them now, like mice in the walls, voiceless and rustling. It seemed to him too—tonight especially—that he could hear their breathing, all of them, dozens of them, breathing together, deep and steady, the way they had when they were alive. …

He dropped down on the bed, not bothering to take off his clothes. And he chuckled to himself. He had been listening to his own rasping breath. No more.

He rested a few minutes, before he crooked one leg and pulled off the heavy boot and tossed it into the far corner of the room. It made so much noise that he stopped and listened, startled.

He was thinking about the other boot when Margaret came in.

He’d left his door open. By the moon which slanted bright and low through his east windows, he noticed her standing just inside the room. She was wearing a nightgown of a familiar flowered material, high neck and long sleeves, a bit like a choir gown, he thought.

“I scare you with that noise?” He was surprised at the huskiness of his voice.

“I can take the other one off,” she said. And she did, standing it carefully by the side of the bed.

“If you wasn’t so young,” he said, “I’d offer you a drink.”

“What you read down in the parlor?”

“Huh?” he said. “The papers.”

She sat on the side of the bed and the moonlight picked out the pattern of her nightgown. He recognized it. “That’s what you were sewing on, the other day in the kitchen.”