The Keepers of the House (21 page)

She took the pink spread off the bed first, so it wouldn’t get spoiled. She always did it quickly, right after they’d first come in. With her long brown hair swinging around the sides of her face, she’d turn the spread back and hang it over the foot of the bed. Then she’d step to the other side of the room, out of our sight. There seemed to be something else over there, chairs maybe and a table, I don’t know. The two of them stayed over there quite a while sometimes, and we’d get pretty tired waiting. Once Reggie didn’t believe that nothing was happening for so long and he yanked the box out from under me, and I tore my leg on the head of a nail as I fell.

Sooner or later they’d get to the bed. Their heads were completely out of sight under the window ledge. All we ever saw was the tangle of moving bodies. Sometimes they were dressed and sometimes they were naked—it was pretty much the same heaving lump, wrapping and unwrapping, pumping and jerking.

We watched all through that one summer. Even when we had to go to school we kept it up—until the late afternoons got too cold to be standing by a crack in a tool shed. And by the time winter was over, we’d almost forgotten. It wasn’t the thing to do any longer.

We didn’t care who she was. It wasn’t who that interested us. It was what. Years later, when I thought of it again, I remembered that Dr. Harry Armstrong, who was my grandfather’s cousin, lived there, and his daughter Linda had brown hair. Her mother was dead and her father was pretty poor, so they only had one servant, who fixed them dinner in the middle of the day and left them a cold supper on the stove. I don’t remember Linda Armstrong very clearly. She was much older and she went to Chicago to find a job, after a while. She married there and moved to Des Moines, and never came back. When her father got very old and had a stroke and was kind of silly and half crippled too, he sold the house and moved out with her.

I suppose we left the boxes in place under the crack of that tool house, and eventually somebody found them, and figured out what had been going on. Because, that following spring when I proposed that we go back there, my cousins got a funny expression and said no, they weren’t allowed in that room any more. Their little pudgy pasty faces looked scared, but I didn’t think anything of their mother—I figured she wouldn’t dare do anything to me. I went swaggering back to the shed, but both doors had new hasps and padlocks. …

In May my mother died at the hospital in New Mexico. She was buried there.

When they heard, the whole family was terribly upset. They thought she should have been brought home, all the Howlands had been buried in Wade County since the first one had wandered in here. They’d even brought home the bones of the boy who’d died in the Wilderness and the one who’d died of yellow fever in Cuba. They were always gathered together. Until now. “Just what I expected of Will Howland,” Cousin Betsy said, “and imagine her lying all alone way out there. All by herself.”

Now it didn’t seem to me to matter much where you were when you were dead. One place was as roomy and fine as another. I might have said so too, only nobody asked me. Every time they saw me, they’d hush up whatever they were saying and get a sick look of consolation on their faces. “Poor child,” they would say.

At first when I heard, when the phone call came, I got a hard frightened lump in my stomach and it stayed for a couple of days while I felt lonesome and confused. But it didn’t last. I hadn’t seen too much of my mother since we’d moved back; even when she was living in the house with us, she was mostly lying down or reading in the summerhouse. It was Margaret who took care of us. And it was Margaret I missed when they left. But that passed too. After all they’d been gone a year, and that’s a long time to a child. You miss them and you wonder about them and you hurt—hard, for a while. But it eases and it’s over.

I met my grandfather and Margaret at the station and went home with them. We sat down on the front porch, while Margaret went inside to see to the housekeeping. My grandfather looked tired, and he was a good deal thinner. You could see the muscles in his neck and count them. We just sat for a while and watched a big black-and-yellow spider with thick furry legs.

“I didn’t bring her home,” my grandfather said as if I hadn’t heard. “It didn’t seem the thing to do.”

There were two spiders just about this time every year. They would come and live in that same bush with the yellow flowers—great heavy creatures.

My grandfather noticed them. “They come in their season,” he said, “everything does.”

I thought about the Biblical passage my cousin had given me to read the day we first heard my mother was dead. Something about the wind blowing over the grass and the seasons of things, but I couldn’t quite remember it.

“People around here,” my grandfather said, “they won’t like it, and they’ll talk, way they always do. Talk about the Howlands been their favorite sport for a hundred years. More fun than cards even for religious folk. …”

I picked up a stone that happened to be on the porch boards and tossed it at one spider. I hit it; the spider dropped down and disappeared.

“It was this way,” my grandfather said, not appearing to notice. “She hated to travel so, got so tired on the trip out, it didn’t seem right to make her come back. Hating a thing that much you’re bound to hate it still, even dead.”

The spider climbed back. I started to throw another rock, but I scowled myself into keeping quiet.

“Earth’s the same anywhere, I figured, and with her hating to travel. …”

His voice kind of trailed off and in a minute he got up and went inside.

“Now you can chuck at the spider,” I told myself.

That was all. Living back on the place again, I lost track of town. I didn’t hear any talk. I didn’t have anybody to hear it from. But they talked, I’m sure. It’s the way they are.

There was a memorial service, later, when my grandfather gave a stained-glass window to the Methodist church in town, with a memorial to Abigail Howland Mason spelled out at the bottom.

Some folks didn’t like that either, they thought it made the church look too Popish. Maybe they all felt that way, but they didn’t feel they could say no, not with the way Will Howland always paid the largest bills.

It took a year to get the window made. By that time the death was so far off nobody felt very sad any more. I even sort of liked going to church because I didn’t go very often. After the service, my Aunt Annie (who’d come down from Atlanta especially) gave a big supper. Like most of those things, there was a lot of likker and some of the men passed out on the grass, and some of the women went inside to pass out more properly. The boys got to drag racing on the mill road, and smashed their cars up and had to be taken to the county hospital (Dr. Armstrong was one of the ones who had passed out) to be sewed back together again.

That was the way my mother’s life ended, with a grave in New Mexico and a stained-glass window in the Methodist church in Madison City.

That fall Margaret’s second child, Nina, went off to school. Money was a lot easier now and so she went to an expensive girls’ school in Vermont (she eventually won the school’s prize for figure skating, though she’d never had a pair of skates on before she went North). She wrote, more often than Robert, and she sent pictures. But she never saw her mother again. And Margaret didn’t write. My grandfather answered her letters and Robert’s, and though he must have given them news of their mother, it was as if she were dead or a million miles away. He went to see both Robert and Nina now, and he went twice a year. Margaret never went at all.

She stayed with the last one, the baby, Crissy.

It seemed to me that Margaret was a lot more affectionate with her. I noticed that whenever she passed, she’d scoop her up and give her a hug—something I don’t ever remember her doing with either Robert or Nina. And in a way Crissy was the nicest of the lot. Her red hair was sort of curly and it was always sticking out in wisps around her head; her eyes were more green than blue, and she had a string of freckles across her nose and her chin. She was even-tempered and happy and almost never sick. She was also the brightest, a lot brighter than Robert, though everybody encouraged him more. She’d learned to read from the old magazines my grandfather gave her, and long before she was ready to go to school she was reading from my old story books. She’d curl herself up in the crotch of a tree with a book and she’d be settled for the whole morning. I liked her. She was just the sort of child you couldn’t help liking.

My grandfather liked her too, and evenings he would play with her by the hour. He’d never done that with the other children. Maybe he’d never had chance before. With my mother dead, he seemed to find more time for the last baby in the house.

Still—when I was sixteen and in high school—and Crissy was eleven, she went away, like the others. And like them, she never came back. Not even on vacation.

This time, because I was older, I asked about it. One day when my grandfather was repairing the pickets of the fence that enclosed the dooryard, I asked him straight out: “Don’t you miss Crissy some?”

He had a couple of nails in his mouth and he took them out slowly. “You could say I do.”

He had gained back the weight he lost during my mother’s illness, and he was a big heavy man again. His face was smooth and pink and unlined; his eyes were the same bright light blue. I was always surprised at how bright their color was—exactly like a winter sky in the soon of a morning.

“Why didn’t you let her go to school here,” I asked, “if you miss her?”

He yanked up a rotten picket and tossed it aside. “You know as well as I do, lady.”

“No,” I persisted, “I want to know why.”

He wasn’t bothering to look at me. “I reckon you want me to put it in words for you. … Seems I can remember when I was little I hated to put a thing in words. … Scared of the words somehow.”

He took the new picket and fitted it against the railing with the others. “You know what it’s like for a nigger here. And those kids, they fall right in the middle, they ain’t white and they ain’t black. …” He put a nail in place, gave it a few whacks with his hammer. “And what they go to do around here? The war don’t last forever. The plants’ll close and the shipyards. We’ll all go back to sleep again.”

Another nail and the picket was in place. He moved down the fence, shaking each as he went, looking for the rotted-out ones.

“There’s hardly a living for the people we got here now,” he said. “And they’re bright kids, they got a way to go.” He found one, knocked it free with the side of his hammer, and twisted it clear of the fence. “Since I got no place here, I’m sending ’em where they got room.”

“Oh,” I said.

“Seems I got the money to do it.” He stopped working and looked straight at me. “Happens you’re all that interested … Robert goes to Carnegie Tech this September.”

“That’s Pittsburgh,” I said, just to show I knew something.

“That what you wanted me to say for you, lady?”

“Well,” I said, “I can’t help wondering.”

“No,” he said, “I reckon you can’t.”

“What does Margaret think with all her kids gone?”

He was looking at me levelly, the bright blue eyes light and clear. “Our kids,” he said quietly.

It was the first time he had ever said that. It was as if my mother’s death had made things more open to him.

“Matter of fact,” he said, “it was Margaret’s idea.”

At the time I didn’t understand. I just thought it was odd. I thought all mothers always wanted to keep their children around them until the children themselves wandered off. I didn’t see what Margaret was doing.

I was sixteen and I was in love. It was a boy in my class. His name was Stanley Carter and he had great luminous brown eyes—mostly because he was very nearsighted. His father was the new druggist and they came from Memphis. I didn’t really get to see too much of him, because he lived in town, while I lived out on my grandfather’s place. So I spent most of the long afternoons and evenings—when I ought to have been studying—writing long letters to him, which I tore up afterwards. I wrote long poems too, about stars for eyes and clover breath and so forth. I pulled the curtains in my room and turned on one very small light and stretched out on the bed and wrote on a clipboard I held up—as if I were writing on the ceiling. Since I couldn’t write for long that way—my arms would start to ache and I’d have to let down the board—I spent most of the time staring at the cracked ceiling and the stained strips of wallpaper.

“Let her be,” my grandfather told Margaret, “it’s love and she’s pining.”

I tried to glare at him, but it’s hard when the other person is grinning right straight at you. “Nobody in this house,” I told him, “understands a single thing. Not a single thing.” And I flounced upstairs and started to write an epic poem about unrequited love and star-crossed lovers and all that. Pretty soon I got tired of fitting words into meter, so I read
Romeo and Juliet
straight through again, crying at the saddest passages.

Sometimes I’d climb to the top of the scuppernong trellis by the back door. I’d lie there for hours, staring into the sky and eating the soft yellow grapes. I’d try to see straight on up and through the sky, I’d try to see what was beyond the blue shell. Sometimes I’d think I could, that I was just about to. And then sometimes I knew I couldn’t and the sky was a hard china teacup clamped down on the world.

I was busy with things like that and I wasn’t paying attention to anything else. So it was only by accident I saw something one day.

That was one of the times I had not come down to supper. Margaret knocked on my door and I yelled that I was busy writing poetry and couldn’t possibly stop. (My grandfather never argued.) By nine o’clock, long after supper, I got hungry. I padded downstairs in my socks, the boards smooth and cool and silent to my feet. I remember hearing the faint crackle of wood in the living-room fireplace—it was late fall and the nights were sharp and damp. I came down the stairs carefully, silently. (I was still young enough to get a thrill out of moving without a sound, a hang-over from my days of playing Indian.) The hall was dark; the lamp that usually burned beside the mercury-spotted pier glass had been turned off. The only lights were in the living room, where Margaret and my grandfather were. They couldn’t see me in the dark hall and they hadn’t heard me. He was reading one of his papers, and she was sewing. I recognized the material—my dress. The whole room looked like a set, or a picture. Margaret stopped sewing, her hands fell into her lap. Her head lifted and she stared across the room into the fire. He must have felt her move because he folded his paper and laid it aside. She did not turn. Her masculine head on its thin neck held perfectly still. The wood of his chair creaked as he got up, the boards of the floor sighed under his weight as he walked over to her and bent down. Then because he was still too tall, because she was sitting in the low rocker with the swan-head legs, he knelt down and put his arms around her. She turned her head then, dropping it to his shoulder, pressing it into his neck.