The Keepers of the House (2 page)

That William Howland was murdered by five raiding Indians one April while he was clearing his fields. They took his ax and his rifle and his powder horn and the shot pouch of groundhog hide, but they didn’t bother the house up on the hill. They were drunk and careless and maybe they just didn’t notice. The Howland boys went racing off to their nearest neighbors—there were six or seven families in the area by then. In little more than a day nine men set out, and William Howland’s oldest son, who was fourteen, went with them. They trailed the Indians to the Black Warrior River, and they killed them—all but one—on the banks there. They took that single survivor back, along with the half-dry scalp. They called the Howland family out to watch while they hanged the Indian to a white oak in front of the house. They buried William Howland’s scalp decently at the edge of his grave.

That was how the first William Howland died, a youngish man still, but not before he had left a wife and six children to fill his house.

All in all the Howlands thrived. They farmed and hunted; they made whiskey and rum and took it to market down the Providence River to Mobile. Pretty soon they bought a couple of slaves, and then a couple more. By the middle of the century they had twenty-five, so it wasn’t a big plantation; it wasn’t ever anything more than a prosperous farm, run pretty much along the lines of the Carolina farms the first William Howland had seen. There was cotton, blooming its pinkish flower and lifting its heavy white boll under the summer sun; there was corn, soft-tasseled and then rusty as the winter cattle grazed over it; there was sorghum to give its thin sweet taste to the watery syrup; there were hogs whose blood steamed on the frozen ground in November; there were little patches of tobacco, moved each two years to fresh clean virgin ground. The house grew larger; there was a barn and a stable, and four smokehouses, and a curing shed for the tobacco. There was a grist mill with a cypress wheel and granite stones. In the prosperous days before the Civil War even the interior began to have touches of elegance—harmoniums, and inlaid tables and shelves full of china figures. By then the county had a proper name—Wade—and the little boat landing that the first William Howland cleared had turned into Madison City, a tight neat town with a brick courthouse and a square and a single street lined with stores and houses.

And every generation had a William Howland. Sometimes he had his mother’s maiden name for a middle initial and sometimes he didn’t. There was William Marshall Howland, who’d come first from Tennessee. His son was just plain William Howland, his mother having come from ordinary people with no feeling for their name. His son was William Carter Howland. He was killed in the Civil War, maimed and burned to death in the thickets of the Wilderness—a young man without a wife or even a bastard son to carry his name. Within three years, his brother’s son was named William Legendre Howland, and the name was back. That particular Mrs. Howland, whose name had been Aimée Legendre, caused quite a commotion in the county. First of all she was a Catholic from New Orleans, had married before a priest, and never once set foot in either the Baptist or the Methodist church of the town where she lived her entire married life. That was one thing. And then there was her father. Mr. Legendre dealt in cotton; and during the last days of the Civil War, cotton sold at fabulous prices both to the mills of the North and those of England. A man who wasn’t troubled by Confederate loyalty could make a fortune in no time at all. Mr. Legendre did, and he continued to prosper all through the Reconstruction. He was a very wealthy man when he dropped dead on the steps of the St. Louis Cathedral, as he left mass on a rainy Sunday morning. His money went to his daughter, and with it the Howland place prospered and grew. Aimée Legendre Howland had a craving for land, perhaps because she was city-bred herself, and as other farms were sold (in the poverty-ridden ’70’s and ’80’s) she began buying. All sorts of land. Bottoms, for cotton. Sandy pine ridges that weren’t used for anything in those days except woodlots.

After her son, there was one more William Howland. He was my grandfather.

When I knew my grandfather he was an old man, a big heavy man, with faded blue eyes, and a shiny bald head fringed by dark hair. His beard had gone so white that there was no longer any shadow on his cheeks and they shone bright pink at you like a child’s. That was the man I knew. But there was another, an earlier one—I had seen him in pictures and I knew him from stories.

Everyone tells stories around here. Every place, every person has a ring of stories around them, like a halo almost. People have told me tales ever since I was a tiny girl squatting in the front dooryard, in mud-caked overalls, digging for doodlebugs. They have talked to me, and talked to me. Some I’ve forgotten, but most I remember. And so my memory goes back before my birth.

When I want to, I can see my grandfather William Howland as a young man, tall and heavy already, but with fair hair and a fair mustache that curled over his lips. A handsome, gentle man. He went to Atlanta to study law in his cousin Michael Campbell’s office. He was there for two years, not working very hard, not even interested in the law. He stayed that long only because his father wanted it—he never liked cities and this one was still bleak and new; it hadn’t quite lost the burned, gutted look.

He was bored but he wasn’t really miserable. His studies did not interest him, but his holidays did; he was very much in demand among his cousin’s younger friends. The women thought him handsome in a rugged, unfashionable way. They took him on long drives to visit the burned-out hulls of buildings and plantation houses fired during the war. There was a perfect craze for moonlight picnics among ruined houses, on battlefields. They told him long stories of raiding and valor and courage; he nodded solemnly, sadly, though he didn’t believe a word, because he had come from a part of the country that had been burned out too, and he knew how stories grew. Still, he had to admit ruins made a nice spot for a picnic. Enough time had passed so that the brick and rubble were mostly covered by smilax and creepers, softening their outlines. On a gentle summer night, you could forget the fire and the killing and see only the soft forms of the young women, vague and floating and romantic in the diffused light.

He liked hunting with their brothers and their fathers, and every house party invariably included a hunt. Coonshine, they sometimes called it.

No women ever went with them. It was a man’s hunt. On foot, back-country style. (Now and then the women talked about the mounted English hunts and wondered how becoming a formal black habit would be. But none of them could ride well enough, and the country was too broken anyway.)

The hunt began about midnight. First the Negro handlers arrived with the dogs in a wagon; a squirming yelping pack. Then the hunters and their servants crowded into other wagons and bumped their way to a likely spot. The handlers released the pack; they scattered and circled, yelping, looking for a trail. The hunters lounged around the wagons, talking, laughing, listening to the hounds work, waiting for them to pick up a scent. When they did, the men trotted after them. They went for miles sometimes following the hounds, crashing through underbrush, resting on fallen logs. If they found they had treed a bobcat (a painter some people called them) the Negroes shook it down from the tree, and let the pack finish it. When that happened, William walked quickly away from the brief scrawling tussle; afterwards he avoided passing that particular spot of torn ground and scattered bits of fur. (He could stick a hog and he often worked in the slaughter pens in the early-winter killing, but he did not like to kill wild things. He never had since the day he went dove shooting with his father in the pasture lots at home, and the matted bloody feathers made him vomit.)

Most times they did not even see any game, and anyway white men almost never killed on a hunt. They had bearers for their guns, and these usually dropped behind early in the chase—so the hunters could not have fired, had they wanted to. (Sometimes William wondered why they bothered bringing guns along at all.) The Negroes clubbed the game to death … coon or possum for the pot, the fox’s tail to decorate the side of a cabin. After all, no white man ate possum or coon, unless he counted himself trash. Once a possum was cooked in the house, people said, twenty years later you could smell it….

After a couple of hours the hunters tired. They built a fire and waited for their gun bearers to catch up with them. With the bearers came several boys carrying jugs of whiskey, panting under the awkward load, staggering over the broken ground.

William Howland, back against a pine, legs aching with the unaccustomed exercise, lungs aching with the effort of scrambling up and down the razorback ridges, drank the warm whiskey and stared into the blazing fire, listening to the pack work in circles around him. And even before the whiskey, he felt drunk. It was the race through the night, with the bright moon whirling around your head as you went, and the dogs on after something, calling to you. It was the smell of the night, of leaf mold, of bark. It was the feel of the night earth, of the sleeping ground.

He was in Atlanta two years; he left when he married. Her name was Lorena Hale Adams.

(There are no pictures of her. No pictures at all. He burned them one summer afternoon.)

He was not supposed to have married her. He was not even supposed to have met her. She was not at any of the house parties and dances. She was not at the concerts or the assemblies or the memorials. She was not at the teas, or the receptions, or the Sunday dinners. That he met her at all was an accident.

Soon after he came to Atlanta he acquired a mistress, Selma Morrisey, the widow of a contractor. She was Irish-born—she kept a faint touch of the brogue—nearly forty, with two children in their teens. She rented rooms, and William Howland saw her pleasant pecan-shaded yard and wide, gingerbread-fretted porch, and moved in. In a couple of weeks he had left his small upstairs room for the larger and far more comfortable one downstairs, the one that held the enormous double bed her mother had brought from Ireland.

Selma Morrisey was a pleasant comfortable woman, and they were very happy. Now, William never came back to her house at noon. Each day he had dinner with his cousin Michael Campbell and his wife, a long slow heavy meal, in their huge dark dining room. Afterwards the two men went back to the office. This particular day, Michael Campbell had been trying a case, and William as his clerk scurried back and forth, carrying notes, running errands. It was May and very hot. Heavy morning rains gouged ruts in the streets and turned to steam in the heavy air. William’s face was red and streaked with dirt, his mustache was ruffled and wispy. His linen coat showed huge blotches of sweat across the back. The starch in his shirt stuck to his body in dabs and gave out a strange sweet smell in the heat. At the noon recess, Michael Campbell sent him off to change his clothes.

For the first time in two years William went home, walking the few blocks rapidly so that he could feel the currents of air moving about his body. He swung through the front gate, bounced up the steps, and burst into the parlor, whistling loudly. He had expected Selma. Or no one. But there were two women sitting over their teacups at the dining-room table. He bowed politely, apologizing.

“This is my cousin,” Selma Morrisey said, “Miss Lorena Hale Adams.”

He bowed again, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the soft gloom of the drawn shutters. He looked, and then looked again.

She stood up, politely, still having the manners of a child. She was very young; her cheeks were smooth and round and bright pink. Her nose and mouth were very small and her eyes were very large, and a luminous grey. She was also extremely tall for a woman, the face that looked across at him was almost at his own level.

“We’ll go into the parlor,” Selma Morrisey said. “William, would you like some tea?”

“I have to go back,” he said.

But he went into the parlor. They sat on the linen covers of the horsehair furniture, and he studied Lorena Adams carefully. Her face was round, her skin very white. Her hair, which she had pulled back over her ears into a crisp bun at her neck, was straight and heavy and black. William thought he could see her glowing, and all the verses of Poe, of which he was so fond, began running through his head.

In half an hour or so, he left, because he had to, and changed and went back to work. All the rest of the long hot day he was conscious of a silly smile quivering the ends of his mustache. They lost the case, and he did not care. As he was pushing his way through the crowded corridors, an old man hawked and spat, and the slimy white wad hit William’s shoe. He wiped it clean with a clump of rain-washed grass. And that was when he decided that he could never manage the law. That he was a farmer and nothing more.

Much later that evening—when it had gotten cooler, with a little breeze blowing down off the hills to the north—he lay in bed and waited for Selma. The room was dim. They had only one very small lamp burning, because of the heat. Nothing so stifling as the smell of kerosene, Selma said.

She had been making her nightly round of the house, opening the shutters on the west side, closing them on the east against the rising sun. William could hear her moving about, and he folded his arms under his head and stretched contentedly. She came finally, closing the door behind her, stopping at the dresser to take the last of the pins from her hair, and do its regular brushing. William, for the first time, noticed the nightgown she wore—the long plain gown of lawn, drawn tight to the neck with a drawstring, falling loosely to the wrists, falling straight to the floor. A shapeless proper night gown … a wifely motherly gown … he would have supposed that a mistress would have something more fancy, more seductive … He chuckled; it had never been like that for them.

“You are laughing,” she told him through the mirror.

“I’ve never noticed your gown before.”

“They are all alike,” she said.

He chuckled again, and she smiled back at him.