The Keepers of the House (19 page)

So it was just three little girls. In all those acres. By this time the place was very large. My great-great-grandmother, the one from New Orleans, had gone land-crazy during the Reconstruction … because she was city-born, the stories went, she wanted more and more room in the country. It was she who looked up the old letters and found that the Howland farm had once been called Shirley. She tried to bring back the name; all her papers and diaries referred to it that way. But it hadn’t worked, and after her death it went right back to being called the Howland Place the way it had always been. She hadn’t changed its name but she had changed its shape and its size. And she had also bought most of the timber lands that were going to be so valuable.

When I was a child they were beginning to look to those stretches, and my grandfather was just beginning to realize what he owned. He was in no hurry. When he went into lumbering he would go in right, not just with one silly little coffeepot mill sawing away. … He told us that, us three little girls, when he took us with him on those rides up to the timber lands.

Once we found a still, smelled it cooking quite a ways off. He only laughed and said: “I plain ought to charge them rent,” and he wrote that message on a piece of paper and left it there. A couple of nights later there was a bottle of white lightning standing on the kitchen table. He said it was awful stuff, that they hadn’t any idea how to make likker, and he gave it to Oliver.

Crissy and Nina and me. … That was all. My grandfather didn’t like visitors. My mother preferred—more and more—to stay quietly at home and read or rest, she wasn’t very strong. And we were too far from town to walk in. Of course there were plenty of other children living on the place, Negro children from the tenant and the cropper cabins scattered around the farm. We didn’t seem to play with them. I don’t know why. Most times we didn’t even see them; now and then we found them in the middle of a game, but they simply moved off. They wouldn’t play—no matter we wanted to—they pulled away from us. They wouldn’t have us, and after a while we stopped trying and forgot that they had ever been there. I never quite knew why. In town they played with white children. Maybe it was Margaret’s children, the half-bloods, that they didn’t want. They understood about me, even if they didn’t like me, but they didn’t know about them.

Almost the only time I went out was with some distant cousins from town. (I went alone. Crissy and Nina stayed home.) Once or twice a month my mother sent me in the car with Oliver to pick them up. I never much liked the outing, nor those children. They were younger than I, the last was just a baby still in diapers, and their names were Clara, Reggie, and Maxim Bannister. They would come out with their nurse, a great fat black woman who kept a bottle of gin hidden in the front of her dress, and we would go for a ride. We always went the same way and to the same place—I suppose Oliver took the best road. We drove up the paved state highway for half an hour, the engine sputtering on the slopes but making it anyhow. At the top of Norton’s Hill we stopped at the old cemetery, the one that wasn’t used any more, right by the spring-fed lake where lots of people came to fish. We got out there and I did what my mother told me to do—breathe the air. There was supposed to be something especially good about it at that spot. As my mother explained it, it had something to do with ozone, but I forget just how it went. So I breathed in and out, played tag around the old graves, looked for skulls and bits of bones, and drank the Thermos jug of lemonade that we always brought along. Oliver, who was pretty much bored with the whole thing, sat on the running board of the car and whittled peach stones into fantastic figures. He never worked with wood, only the peach pits. And he did the same thing over and over again, a funny little animal that might have been a monkey. Sometimes when he’d gotten an unusually large pit, he’d cut two animals facing each other.

“What’s that?” I asked him practically every time we went out.

“Lay-overs to catch meddlers, missy,” he’d tell me quietly and that was that.

I never did find out what they were, or what they were for, or what he did with them. I never saw any of them around, so I guess he didn’t give them away; but if he didn’t then he must have had roomfuls of them in the house he shared with his old-maid sister down by the big spring that was called the Sobbing Woman.

It was a good, cleaned-out spring. Somebody, my grandfather or his father, had taken a great pipe four feet across and sunk it there, so that when you knelt to draw your water you knelt on clean solid terra cotta. Beyond that rim somebody had laid other stones, so carefully that they were almost smooth and even as a sidewalk or a street. It was a big spring; the water flowed out of its gap at a great rate and down across the stones into the run. As it went over those stones it gave the peculiar sound that had got it its name, the Sobbing Woman. I always went and looked straight down, the bottom of any spring seemed wonderful and mysterious to me, though I was never sure what I expected to find. This one particular time, as I was staring down into it, I saw two rats. They were near the bottom, they were a little off it because they seemed to be bobbing slightly, which meant that they had been there awhile and were beginning to rise. I never told Oliver or his sister, but I suppose they scooped them out when they came to the surface, and anyway the water from there didn’t seem to hurt them.

I thought about it afterwards and I began to wonder if maybe there wasn’t always a rat in the spring and if that wasn’t the carving Oliver made.

“That a rat?” I asked him the next time we went for a drive.

He studied the little piece of dried pit between his fingers. “Look like a rat?”

“No,” I said. “Not any I ever saw.”

“Then,” he said, “I don’t reckon it is a rat.”

“Looks like a monkey.”

He looked again, turning it around and around in his black fingers. “You seen a monkey like that?”

I had to admit: “No.”

“Then I reckon it ain’t a monkey.” That was all he’d say besides telling me to go away and play because it was almost time for us to be starting back or my mama’d worry.

On the way back, somebody would be sure to have to go real bad, so bad they couldn’t wait. Since Oliver was in a hurry to get home, and the nurse was too, they didn’t stop. I suppose with four kids they’d have spent most of the trip back stopping. But they didn’t have to. The nurse pushed aside the piece of old carpeting in the back, and she lifted the thin flat piece of tin that covered a hole in the floor. Then, propping both carpet and cover back with her foot, she motioned us to come on. If it was the baby, she’d pull down his diaper herself and hold him over the raggedy hole. If it was any of us, we could do it ourselves. It was kind of fun to squint out the hole, when you got finished, and watch the uneven tar-lined concrete whiz by underneath you. But the nurse never let us do that very long. She got tired holding up the rug and the piece of tin.

I remember things like that.

About that time too, the drifters arrived.

They came to our kitchen door, the two of them, one Sunday afternoon. They walked up the path from the woods by the river, the girl leading the way, the boy following, but not too closely. They seemed about six and seven, ordinary-looking Negro children, more raggedy than most. They moved slowly—not hurrying, but not uncertain either—right up to the door. They turned around and sat down on the steps there, silently. And tucked their heads in their laps, like ducks, dozing.

My mother lifted her eyebrows. “Drifters?”

My grandfather nodded. “Looks like we be having these two for awhile.”

We did. They stayed for almost a month. Everyone was very kind to them because there was a saying that if you chased off a drifter you yourself would be hungry before the year was out.

In those depression times there was a lot of moving about. My grandfather said that there were streams of people on the main roads, in little trucks with all their furniture and bedding piled around them, traveling. They were moving into towns, looking for work, they were moving out of towns looking for places to settle. And with all that going on, some children lost their families. Maybe they died (there was a bad winter in ’36 when a lot of people died, whole housefuls); and maybe they just moved on and forgot to take all the children. And sometimes they didn’t forget, they intended to lose them. It was that sort of time.

Those left-over children became the drifters. They went about in little bands, like stray dogs, two and three and four. Sometimes they were brother and sister and sometimes they had just found each other out on the roads. They traveled amazingly far, when you think how small some of them were. They didn’t know who they were—most times they had only first names—and they didn’t have any place to go. They lived out in the fields and the deep woods, and sometimes they found a cave and stayed there awhile. The older children could slip about like shadows at night, stealing what they needed. Winters they came into the barns for shelter, sleeping with the same cattle they had been milking on the sly all summer.

And sometimes they would come straight up to a house and wait for food, as those two did. At suppertime Margaret filled two pie plates and brought them to the porch. They ate, without forks or spoons, steadily and daintily, like cats. When they were finished, they disappeared. They came back once or twice a day, as if they couldn’t remember when it was that we ate.

“You’ve got to do something about them, Papa,” my mother insisted.

“I’m feeding ’em.”

“You know what I mean.”

He shook his head. “You want me to put ’em in a cage?”

“Really, now.”

“World’s got a lot of troubles,” he said slowly, “and you can’t worry over them all. … Those little ones won’t stay. Even food won’t keep ’em.”

He was right, of course. One day they were gone. They hadn’t said a single word to anybody all that month, and they didn’t give any sign that they were leaving. Just one day they didn’t come any more. …

We didn’t know who they were, nor where they’d come from. Drifters were like that.

And I remember when the war began. We hadn’t turned on the radio that Sunday, because we’d worked straight through the day. It was hog-sticking time. Lots of the girls at school said they couldn’t bear to watch, but it never bothered me, and anyway my grandfather expected me to learn. Work really started the day before when the knives, the two-sided slaughtering knives, were honed on the back porch. By then the hogs had been brought to the slaughter pen; they hadn’t eaten for two days, but they kept Oliver and a couple of boys busy filling the water troughs. Early, before dawn on sticking day, those boys began putting shovelfuls of hardwood ash into barrels of boiling water—to scald the hair away. The butchers came, three men hired specially from town. They’d test the knives and stick their fingers into the water (if it was too hot the hair got stiff and difficult to scrape). And then, just as it was getting light, they’d start to work. They tried not to excite the hogs, tried to move them out of the pen one or two at a time; but somehow it didn’t ever work. The last ones got wild, and had to be knocked on the head or shot with a rifle. Oliver did the shooting; he stood on the edge of the pen, pumping his shots into the grunting squealing heads below him. My grandfather always hated to tell him to start. “Pity to do that, child,” he’d tell me, “the meat ain’t going to taste right done that way. Their hearts bound to stop before we can get to them.”

The proper way was to stick them, to jab the knife over the heart and cut all those veins and arteries and let the heart pump out its own blood. …

Soon as Oliver finished his shooting, the pen was full of men dragging at the hogs, to wash and scrape them, to slit them open and hang them. All the time my grandfather bustled around saying something like “Cool it fast. Prop ’em open. …” It was late evening before the meat was finally cut and salted in barrels waiting for the smoking. By then my grandfather was staggering tired, and I had a couple of new bladders to make balls with.

We went straight to bed, while my mother clucked and fussed over us. “Papa, you’ll wear that child out.”

My grandfather was so stooped with weariness that he seemed short. “She’s got to know the way of the place.”

Since my mother hadn’t listened to the radio (she never did turn it on; she preferred to read), she knew nothing about Pearl Harbor. I found out the next day at school.

We all left our classrooms in the middle of the morning and crowded into the downstairs hall to listen to the President asking for a declaration of war. The school had only one small radio, and they turned it on top volume so that everybody could hear. The words were blurry and not at all clear, and I remember wondering what everybody was so excited about. I didn’t understand. For me the war had started when my father went off to fight, and that was over two years before.

There was one immediate difference—planes. Before, you almost never saw any—we weren’t on any of the regular air runs. Now there were lots of them, zooming up and down and buzzing houses and scaring the cattle worse than ox-warble flies.

There were accidents too. You’d hear about them occasionally. My third cousin Hester, who lived on her father’s place a little to the north of town, woke up one night thinking the house was falling down. A trainer shot by overhead, trying to land in a cotton field. It missed in the dark, tore through the field into the wood lot, exploding as it went. It started a brushfire that ate its way up the back ridges, running fast before a rising wind. Troops worked for two days, hundreds of them, before they got it in the right place and could dynamite it. My cousin Hester kept a piece of the plane’s glass. It was broken into a sort of heart shape, and polished by the fire. Her father drilled a tiny hole in it for her, and she wore it around her neck on the same little chain that held her gold cross.

That piece of broken melted glass was just about all the war we had. There were a few uniforms around and a navy poster in front of the post office. And the town looked empty. The young men had been drafted. The older men and the young women had gone down to Mobile and Pascagoula and New Orleans for jobs in the shipyards there. That left nobody except women with small children, and those who wouldn’t leave their homes to go job hunting with their husbands.