The Keepers of the House (20 page)

Most all of the hands were gone. Kids chopped cotton, and brought it in too, and the way they picked made my grandfather sick at heart. But the prices were so high he could afford to waste, and anyway he wasn’t nearly as bad off as some of his neighbors. He didn’t have much in cotton any more. Cattle and hogs didn’t take nearly the manpower. He was also doing a lot more lumbering than he ever had before. Way on the other side of the ridge there was a big new sawmill that went day and night, and a new railroad spur leading to it.

My grandfather and my mother listened to the radio every night and every morning, and he kept marking the war map he’d pinned up on the dining-room wall. But that was all. Or it was all I noticed. I was busy trying to catch a hoop snake.

Nina and I were doing that. It was Margaret who’d first told us the story of the hoop snake, the long black snake that has a smile on his face, and a taste for fun and games. When the moon was new, he’d crawl out on dirt roads and roll himself into a hoop, holding his tail in his mouth. It was lots of fun for him, so he’d sing a song as he went along. And the song was so jolly that all the animals would come out and listen, the coons and possums, and the other snakes, and the deer, and the bobcats. The mice and the rabbits came to the edge of their burrows. And even the birds woke up and listened.

Nina and I, soon as the moon was new, we’d sneak out of bed and meet behind the chicken yard. We looked and looked, for miles in all directions, and stayed up most of the nights that way. (I used to fall asleep over my desk at school every single afternoon. Though the teacher must have noticed, she didn’t say anything. She was an old lady and happy to have one child really quiet.) For all our work we never found a single hoop snake, not one. Though we did see lots of tracks.

And while we hunted the road, we were on the lookout for Johnny Cuckoo too. He was the crippled soldier who marched up and down the empty roads, and all the little kids sang about him. We didn’t really expect to find him, because he mostly came out and walked on dark and stormy nights, when it was raining hard and blowing and he was sure to be covered with mud. But we kept an eye out for him anyway. There was no telling.

In those days I was far more at home outside the house than in it. The house was shivery and strange and there were things going on that I didn’t understand. Nobody told me—you just learn to find out things—but I knew that my mother was dying. I’d heard the word “tuberculosis” whispered about, but a fair number of people around our way had it, and it didn’t seem to do them too much harm, and it certainly didn’t kill them, so I didn’t know what to think.

One day Margaret packed my clothes and pushed me in the car and Oliver drove me into town to stay with my cousins, the Bannisters. On the way over he told us that Margaret’s children were going to stay with him. I don’t think he was very happy about that, he and his old-maid sister, with children in the house for the first time—but there wasn’t anybody else.

Margaret and my grandfather took my mother to a sanitarium near Santa Fe. They were there the best part of a year. And only my grandfather and Margaret came back, my mother was buried out there.

But all this was still in the future that cloudy gusty day in June when Oliver drove me to my cousins’ house and carried my suitcases inside. Clara and Reggie and Maxie were lined up on the porch waiting for me. Maxie was chewing the top of the porch railing.

“You’ll get lead poisoning,” I told him, and he stopped. “Don’t you take care of him?” I asked Clara. “Don’t you know anything?”

I wasn’t particularly happy to stay with them, and I really didn’t like being in town where you never could get away from people’s eyes. They knew when you walked down the street, whether you went to the drugstore or the dentist, whether you had a cherry Coke or a root beer. The only secrets you had were the ones inside your head. …

These particular grown-up cousins (they were Peter and Betsy Bannister; he ran the Pyrofax office in town) were just about the only ones my family was on good terms with. There were others I liked a lot more (I had dozens of them all around), but these were the only ones my family approved of.

It went back beyond the turn of the century, to the time of the Catholic Mrs. Howland from New Orleans. What with her religion and the way her father made his money, the Howland family had not treated her very well; they split into those who would accept her and those who wouldn’t. Now she was long dead, but the different cousins went on being cool to each other. I once asked my grandfather why we didn’t see some cousins who lived only a little way out of town and who had four sons and the oldest was the star basketball player on the high school team. He shrugged. “Damn-fool thing, child, but they were right mean to my grandmother.” He didn’t try to change it though, maybe because he didn’t want to have to deal with more family than he already had.

And that was why I found myself staying with the Bannisters. Cousin Peter traveled a great deal—I forget why—and he was supposed to have a mistress in Birmingham. He was a diabetic, so he didn’t smoke or drink and he carried cans of special diet food with him. He always seemed to be eating fruit of some kind, and when he did sit down at the table with us, his plate was never like ours. Years later, on one of those trips to Birmingham, he happened to go to a revival meeting, and he was converted. Now, this preacher was a healer who told him that he didn’t need insulin if he believed in God’s Grace and Healing Power. He sent Cousin Peter home with God’s Holy Words rolled up in a little wad and tied around his neck with thread. Cousin Peter did believe, so he threw out his syringes and he sat on the porch (it was a hot day) praying for a miracle, until he passed into a coma. Cousin Betsy hesitated to call a doctor because she didn’t think Peter would like it if she interrupted a miracle or anything like that; and by the time she got him to the hospital it was too late and he died.

But the time when I lived in his house was long before he got religion and killed himself. In those days he was just a kind pleasant man, who didn’t seem to be around very much.

Cousin Betsy was a short stout woman, quiet and easygoing. She had two or three servants but the house was always dirty. “All this town dust,” she would cluck, “it just comes in all the cracks.” It also came in all the windows, because nobody ever bothered to shut them, even if it was raining or blowing. They closed them for warmth in the winter, but not before. And the heavy greasy cooking that you could smell from the minute you began climbing the front steps came from a black wood range (Aunt Betsy had never gotten around to changing and the cook liked this one) that had grease and soot a quarter inch thick all over it.

Like the windows, the doors were always open and the screens sagged partially ajar, and animals wandered through. A cat dropped her litter in the hall closet—it was a stray cat and I don’t know why she picked that spot—but Cousin Betsy fed her until she decided to leave. And of course birds flew in and out of the upstairs windows. It was an old house and they had never got around to screening the second story. We all slept in tester beds hung with mosquito netting. (And that probably wasn’t such a bad idea because in those days there was considerable malaria in this part of the country.) Once wasps built a great nest in the upstairs hall, right over the picture of Cousin Betsy’s father, the one who’d been Senator from South Carolina. She didn’t seem to notice, though the rest of us used to dash along that part of the hall for fear of them. They finally bit Jeff, the cook’s husband, while he was changing the bulb in the overhead light. He almost fell off the ladder and he did drop the glass cover with a great crash. He and his wife went after the wasps then, wrapping themselves up in layers of mosquito netting, and got rid of them. Afterwards the upstairs hall was lighted by a bare bulb because the glass shade was broken, and things like that didn’t bother Cousin Betsy.

There was only one thing that did, as far as I remember. That was underwear. Everybody in that house always had new or almost-new and very fancy underwear. She kept careful check. “Now, honey,” she explained to me, “if you were walking downtown and you were run over by a truck and they took you to the hospital and they saw that your panties were all torn and ragged and your slip was pinned at the shoulder by a safety, you’d be so ashamed you’d have to die.”

“And just think how people would talk after,” I tried to joke with her.

She didn’t see it. “And think of that,” she said seriously. “Yes, indeed.”

But it really wasn’t bad living with them, not bad at all. Aunt Annie, my grandfather’s sister, came down to see me every month or so, I suppose it was her way of checking up on the Bannisters. (She was such a neat woman that house must have made her sick.) The rest of my life was almost the same. I went to school, the same one, only I could walk, and it was rather nice not having to make that long drive every day. Once you got used to it, there were lots of things to do in town. There were even lots of things to do in the house, though it never seemed to occur to Clara, Reggie, and Maxie to do any of them. I had to show them. Maybe it was because they lived there, and just didn’t see any more.

Take their house itself. It was one of the funny old town houses built and rebuilt so many times that nobody was sure exactly where anything was. It had a narrow front, but it was very long, extending almost the length of the entire lot. There were halls and wings and different levels. Lots of people had added to the house but they hadn’t bothered to attach their different wings very carefully. I once broke my arm because I forgot and sprawled down the step that went from the breakfast room to the kitchen behind it.

The farthest back rooms of the house, the ones behind even the second kitchen, were used for nothing but storage. They were full of wrapped and lumpy things, an occasional dead bird, rat poison, old trunks, and hat racks. Clara, Reggie, Maxie, and I would open the trunks sometimes, the ones that weren’t locked. It was a way to spend a rainy day. A lot of the trunks were full of dresses, of wedding dresses mostly. In some the cloth was so delicate that it tore when you picked up the bead ornaments. The egret feathers fluttered into dust when we lifted them out. There were musky furs too; we had to tear open the cloth bags they were stitched into. There were diaries and journals and letters. And one of the trunks had half a dozen old pistols, two cavalry sabers, and four dress swords. We played soldiers with them all one long afternoon.

I suppose we destroyed quite a bit of the stuff we handled. But I didn’t think of it then, and I don’t feel badly about it now, because it was just lying there, in storage, and the moths and the roaches were doing more slowly what we did rapidly.

They were lovely rooms, stuffy and hot; dust hung in the air like smoke, and the motes drifted back and forth in the panels of light from the dirty windows.

As you went through the line of storage rooms, you noticed that they got smaller and smaller toward the rear. Those must once have been slaves’ or servants’ quarters. The very end of the house wasn’t even a room really, but a kind of last-minute addition. It was painted the same color as the house, and at first glance looked the same, but it hadn’t been built for an all-weather room at all. It was more of a tool shed. There were no inside walls—just the studs and the outside boards—and the floor had been laid any old way, with great gaping cracks in it. There was a door leading to the outside yard, but it had been nailed shut years before, probably to keep out burglars. The nails were bleeding streaks of rust down the wood.

The room itself was completely empty. There was just the dusty uneven floor and the dirty unfinished walls, and that was all. The walls weren’t even very solid. Unlike the rest of the house, which was clapboard, the boards of these walls ran straight up and down; there were cracks between all of them and large knotholes in some of them.

It wasn’t the room. It was what you could see from there. We found out by accident, but once we knew we kept coming back. Just to see.

The room wasn’t more than three feet from the board fence that marked the property line. Now this fence had been built seven boards high, but it sagged a great deal until part of it was actually leaning against the house. If you stood in the Bannister yard, it looked like a good solid fence and it really was way over your head. But when you were inside you stood on the foundations of the house—and because it was an old house, its foundations were very high. (They thought it gave them good circulation in the old days and kept down the fevers.)

The other house, the house on the next street, also extended almost to the property line. Though it was an old house too (there were few new ones in town at that time), the additions had been done recently. They had been done very cheaply too, and so they sat almost right on the ground. Because they were so low and the board fence was so high, people over there seemed to think they couldn’t be seen. They never bothered pulling the shades. Through the corner crack of that tool room—if we stood on a crate to give a little more height—we could see right in.

We saw a dresser, of some dark wood, mahogany or walnut. It had a lace scarf hanging across the front in scallops and down the sides in long fringes. There was a line of china ornaments too, but we couldn’t make out exactly what they were. I thought elephants, but Clara said no, they were china dolls. There was a bed with a pink spread and a couple of bright blue pillows. There was also a brown-haired lady whom we caught sight of now and then. She always seemed to be wearing a pink ruffly robe. The material seemed a bit stiff and shiny, so maybe it was taffeta. We never did see her face, because the head of the bed was out of sight around the corner of the window. And she didn’t seem to be home very much unless she was expecting a caller.

All that long vacation the first thing we did every morning was to take a peep through the crack into the room. If it was empty we went outside to play in the yard. Usually we stayed near the back fence, so when we heard feet on the cinder walk, and a knock on the door that led into that back addition, we could go tearing into our tool house and start squabbling over who would get to stand on the box.