The Keepers of the House (17 page)

“I found it,” she said.

“It was right clever of you,” he said. “Reach me my drink, child.”

She handed him the glass. He shook his head, and reached across her to get the bottle. His unsteady hand brushed her breast. It wasn’t until the hand had come back with the bottle in it that he realized her nipple was hard and erect.

He put the bottle down on the floor beside the bed carefully, in case he should want it later.

He wondered if she’d been waiting all these nights to come because she hadn’t had a nightgown. He started to ask her. But there was something—she had her hair pinned back and she was studying her own hands—that changed his mind. She seemed small and fragile again, and for the first time in his life he wanted to hit a woman. It was the bend of the neck that did it. It was so exposed and patient.

She bore him five children, all told. Three of them lived, two girls and a boy.

I
CAME TEN YEARS
later, my mother and I. The two Abigails. Mrs. Abigail Howland Mason and Miss Abigail Howland Mason. Coming back home.

We came on the overnight train from Lexington, Virginia, to Atlanta, and we had to wait around a couple of hours there. For some reason or other—I suppose she just felt too awful—my mother hadn’t told her Aunt Annie, so there was nobody to meet us. It was just us two waiting in the station, which was stifling in the summer heat, just two of us sitting on the hard benches not far from the stand where a man sold oranges and newspapers.

Like I said, we had to wait around for a couple or three hours for the local—Number 8—to Madison City. You could see that waiting was hard on my mother. You could see her getting tireder and tireder. I guess she hadn’t slept very much on the Pullman the night before, and it even looked like she wouldn’t make it down the long flight of steps to the tracks. But once we got on and settled in our seats—in the dirty coaches that still carried spittoons in the far corners of them, where luggage was always falling out of the sagging racks high over your head—she took off her hat and put her head back and dozed a bit.

I hung out the open windows and chattered to myself. First I talked about getting my head cut off by passing poles and an occasional boxcar on a siding. Then I tried to see how much I could remember from the last time I came this way. (We had visited my grandfather every Christmas since I was old enough to travel.)

“I came here when I was three months old,” I told a cotton field full of pinkish blooms.

I have been here all along, the field told me back.

“But I remember more.” And to prove it I chanted out the names of towns along the way.

Actually, I didn’t remember much more than the string of names. Because a year is a long time at eight and from one to the next was an immense distance. I couldn’t even have told you what my grandfather looked like.

I suppose my talking bothered her, because my mother opened her eyes and patted the bun of hair at the nape of her neck back into place and looked at her watch and looked out the window and sent me down the car to ask the conductor exactly where we were. We were then three and a half hours late and we got steadily later. It annoyed my mother, though she should have known better. That train was always late. There was some trouble with a switch just out of Opelika, and then we waited for a fast freight. There was trouble with a hot box that took an hour to fix. And the signals were wrong for the bridge crossing over the Red River.

All she said to me finally was: “Please, child … you’ll have to be good if I’m to travel with you alone.”

I fell silent after that, remembering all the things I had been told. That my mother wasn’t well, that I must not disturb her. That my father was gone, for years anyhow, and I must help her just as he had.

When we got near our stop, the conductor woke my mother. “Thank you, Mr. Edwards,” she said. He took our baggage and piled it ready on the platform. When we felt the grating as the brakes began to take hold, he shook hands with my mother. “I am right proud to have Will Howland’s daughter home again.”

She smiled at him. She wasn’t a pretty woman, but she always looked radiant when she smiled. “I’ve been gone too long, Mr. Edwards,” she said, “but I’ll be staying now.”

Then the train stopped and I found I did recognize my grandfather, after all.

Right then and there the first part of my life ended. And the second began. Sometimes as the years passed, the hot dusty country years, I found myself thinking back to the first part, to the smooth green college town. And wondering if it had happened at all. I remembered so little. The clean light mountain air, evenings when your nose would just shiver with the sparkle in it. The smooth roll of the campus and the columned buildings. My father walking off to teach his class in the mornings, leaving a thin line of pipe smoke behind. The way leaves fell in the fall until there were great bright heaps on the ground (they don’t do that this far south). I remember a small town, all brick and narrow streets, shabby-looking. It had been burned in ’63 when the whole Valley was fired. There was only one house left standing, way on top of the highest hill in town. Not a pretty house—it was too squat for its row of white columns—but a real old one. It had been used as headquarters during the war because of its great view. They were supposed to burn it when they left, but they must have forgotten. … There was also a river, down between sharp banks, a trash-littered river. I saw them pull a body from it one day, when I had gone to fetch something from the grocery. A couple of fishermen dragged it out, one by an arm, one by a leg. I remember it was a Negro, I saw the dark skin clearly, and it was naked.

I remember too that my parents weren’t getting along. You could feel how stiff they were to each other sometimes. Often as I lay in bed, I’d hear their angry voices through the closed doors. And her eyes were red for days on end.

Maybe that was the reason my father was so anxious to go back to England when the war started in 1939. I remember him going around quoting Rupert Brooke over and over to my mother, until she dabbed at her eyes openly. It was about going to meet Armageddon.

He went of course. The week before he left there was a great deal of partying—for him, I guess. I had never known them to go out so much. Then he was gone, and my mother, silent and red-eyed again, went about the business of moving home to her father.

Once I was back in Madison City, it seemed I’d never been away—the flat cotton fields, the tangled pine uplands, the stretching swamps were home. I had no personal memory of the place—not very much anyway, but everybody assumed that I would have an atavistic one. And maybe I did. Within a single day I felt that I had always lived there. My father was gone; I never even had a letter from him. (My mother did, but she didn’t talk about them or show them to me.) He just disappeared from my life, and that was all. People always called me the Howland girl, and it was hard to remember sometimes that my real name was Mason. Whenever I’d go calling with my mother, making a little procession up somebody’s front walk—my mother first, then me—all the ladies greeted us the same way: “Why, my dear, it’s the two Howland girls!”

We were Howlands and we were living where the Howlands always lived. I forgot my father, there were so many other things. He hadn’t forgotten, though; he tried to see me once after the war, he came back to the country just for that, I guess—but by then it was too late. And now, today, I don’t even know where he is. I don’t have any address. I don’t even know what country. He is gone as completely as if he never existed.

Sometimes I feel that my grandfather was my father. And that Margaret, black Margaret, was my mother. Living in a house like this you got your feelings all mixed up.

She was his wife, only she wasn’t. She kept house for him and the law said they couldn’t marry, couldn’t ever. Their children took their mother’s last name, so though they were Howlands they all had the last name Carmichael.

The oldest was Robert. He was a year older than I, tall for his age, very tall (he’d gotten his mother’s height). He had red hair, and his freckled skin was fair. At first glance you would not have thought he had any Negro blood. But if you looked sharper—and if you were used to looking—you could see the signs. It was the planes of the face mostly, the way the skin sloped from cheekbone to jaw. It was also the way the eyelids fell. You had to look close, yes. But southern women do. It was a thing they prided themselves on, this ability to tell Negro blood. And to detect pregnancies before a formal announcement, and to guess the exact length of gestation. Blood and birth—these were their two concerns.

In the South, most people could tell that Robert was a Negro. In the North, he would have been white.

After Robert there was Nina, a couple of months younger than I, so she would have been almost eight that summer we came back to Madison City. Then there was a gap of three years: that child had died. Then there was Crissy, Christine. Both girls were fair, with red hair like their brother’s. Their other blood showed in the shape and color of their eyes, in the waxy pallor of their skins, in the color of their fingernails.

And how did I know? Because I’ve spent my time sitting on porches on a sunny dusty afternoon, listening to the ladies talk, learning to see what they saw. …

They taught me my Bible lessons the exact same way. And to this day I am very good at spotting signs of Negro blood and at reciting the endless lists of genealogies in the Bible. It’s a southern talent, you might say.

Funny how memory is. There are places—months and years even—when I cannot recall a thing. There are simply blank spots with nothing to fill them.

And I have tried. Because somehow or other I convinced myself that if I could just remember—could have all the parts—I would understand. And even so I can’t. I’ve lost it somewhere.

I can remember coming to my grandfather’s house. I can remember that one particular train ride, out of all the others. But I can’t remember what I thought of the house. And of that first night there. I can’t remember what I thought of Margaret and her children. Maybe I didn’t think of them at all.

I don’t remember when I figured out that Margaret’s children were also my grandfather’s children. Not even that. I suppose it just came to me slowly, the way things seem to do. I never have any great revelation—I’m too dull for that. But bit by bit, fraction by fraction, a thing impinges on me, inches its way into my mind, until by the time it is full-grown I am quite used to it. I suppose that was the way with the children my grandfather and Margaret had together. By the time I knew, by the time I understood, it was as if I always had.

No one told me. I’m sure of that. I don’t know what my mother thought, but she never said a word. She always pretended to believe that Margaret’s children had just come.

Maybe that was what she had in mind when she told me all the old Negro stories about Alberta. Her children, now, had just come to her, without a father. They had just come sneaking into her body when she was asleep in the soon of a foggy morning, come sneaking as gently as the dew that dripped off the tips of the pine needles. Her children had no father, and they were born alone too, in the tops of the highest ridges where there was nobody but some noisy jaybirds to hear her panting in labor.

There were no more children for Margaret. The last had been born—and died—two years before we came, so it wasn’t until much later, when I was a grown woman, that I found out Margaret, unlike Alberta, didn’t go away up on the ridges to bear alone. She got on the train and went to Cleveland and bore them in a hospital there. That way their birth certificates didn’t have the word “Negro” on them.

The first time I ever heard any talk about Margaret’s children, it was a little girl in my class at school—third grade or so—a blue-eyed girl with frizzy blond hair that her mother put up in papers every afternoon. It was a sniggering remark, and all I could think of was: Sure, I know. But I couldn’t let her get away with it, it wouldn’t have done my standing as a Howland any good. A couple of days later, I poured a half bottle of India ink into that fuzzy scalp. And a week later I managed to work a large blob of nail polish into it too. It had dried before she noticed. You could see it shining through the thin hair.

I wasn’t startled, I wasn’t hurt. Somebody had just put into words what I had known for a long while.

Margaret’s children didn’t go to school with us, of course. They went to the Negro school four of five blocks away. We didn’t even go in together. Some mornings my grandfather drove me—if he had business in town—and sometimes Oliver Brandon did. Oliver had worked for my grandfather from the time he was twelve, at one job or another. He was in his forties now, and he could do just about anything, from doctoring sick animals to tinkering with the cars, and in those days cars needed a lot of tinkering. It wasn’t too unusual for them to break an axle on the ruts in the road.

Cars weren’t common in our part of the country. Not with the depression thick and heavy still. I suppose there were a dozen of them in town, no more. The horses were still scared of them.

But every morning I drove into town to school—barely two miles by the direct road, but nearly five the way a car had to go, keeping to the best of the graded roads. It took me almost as long as it did Margaret and her children. They went by wagon, a new one that handled easily and wouldn’t tire the mule. Margaret drove them every day, along with any of the other Negro children who wanted to go. In bad weather she’d be bundled up in an old waterproof of my grandfather’s and the children would be crouched down in the bed of the wagon under their tarpaulins. In fine weather they’d ride up on the seat beside her. But they went. Every day. She was strict about that. I could fake colds and sore throats and general aches, and spend long lazy days in bed, playing tent with the quilt. My mother didn’t object. But if Margaret’s kids complained, she paid no attention. Robert whined for days about being sick, before he broke out in flat blotches of chicken pox. Margaret let him stay in bed then, but she’d pushed him too hard, because he caught pneumonia and almost died. You could hear his strangled wheezy breathing through half the house. You could even hear it over the noisy gusty spring storm that was roaring outside.