The Keepers of the House (26 page)

I showed it to John. “I saw it, honey,” he said.

“You don’t read the Atlanta papers, do you?”

“My clipping bureau.”

“I didn’t even know you had one.”

“You didn’t ask.”

“Did you really look up your cousins-in-law?”

He grinned. “I had so damn many appointments that I didn’t even get to call them. … but it looked good in the paper.”

That evening—the first he had home in six weeks—he spent patiently crawling around the living-room floor with two small girls on his back. He’d also given them each a large picture and set it up in their rooms. “So they won’t forget what I look like,” he said. He loved them and they adored him. Our lives moved peacefully along, the girls and I, dull and uneventful until he came home. And he brought excitement with him—he always had been able to do that.

John must have thought my question about the clipping was some sort of criticism, because after that he brought them to me. All of them. I put them carefully in a box—I found it the other day—but I never read them. Sometimes when he handed them to me words would jump out of the print. Racist. Staunch segregationist. Strong friend of states’ rights.

I asked about that once, and wished I hadn’t. We were driving to the university where the student body had invited him to speak. It was one of those silvery grey winter evenings when everything is soft and delicate and the sky is a kind of pink and the ground shimmery and indistinct with fog. The car was new and shiny and smelled wonderful; the heater poured out a steady stream of warmth on our legs. It’s like nothing else, this feeling of a powerful car on good roads in hilly country. We were riding the rises and the falls of the land like the swells of the sea. I was glad to leave the children, too—I’d been home a lot. I was proud to be the wife of the invited speaker. And John had come home yesterday with a sapphire ring in his coat pocket. “Matches your eyes, old duck,” he said casually. I wasn’t deceived. I knew what money meant to him, and that ring had cost a lot. He’d been a good husband and a hard-working one, but this was the first time he had brought anything like that, a tribute. I thought how lovely it would be, as we went roaring over those hills, us growing old together and seeing our children grow to women and our grandchildren come home. All long sentimental thoughts, like the long grey hills. …

Lulled by that gentle light, I asked him something I’d been wondering, something the words in those clippings had reminded me of.

“John,” I said, “what do you really think about the Negroes? Not what you’re going to say tonight, but what you really think?”

He chuckled and swerved around a stock truck with a blast of his horn. “Love ’em dearly,” he said. “Like your grandfather.”

The silvery light went out of the evening, and the unborn grandchildren disappeared. It was just bleak winter country and a man driving too fast.

A few more years, pleasant, uneventful, broken only by the holidays that John had begun to afford. I remember the years by the vacations—the Jamaica year, the Bermuda year, the Sun Valley year. We went twice a year, summer and winter. The girls grew up. Crib to bed, stroller to bike, nursery school to first grade. They were handsome children, dark and blue-eyed like their father. He wanted more, I know. He asked about it once. I only said: “Let me get these launched. They’re so close it’s been a lot of trouble.” He was waiting; he would be too proud to ask again.

And my grandfather died. It was in January, a couple of days after the big snow. Now, we never have a fall of any size in this part of the country—just a few sprinklings like hoarfrost on the ground. But this time a level grey-green sky sifted down fifteen inches, and everybody was caught. The stock in their far-spread pastures went into a panic. They broke their fences, tore through the wire, leaving bloody gobs of hide on the barbs, and wandered into the wood lots and beyond. They were going to have to be gathered up again, a few at a time. Every man my grandfather employed was out working—looking for injured stock, mending fences.

For four mornings my grandfather left early in his truck, bouncing over the rutted frozen lumber roads that thawed slowly into puddles of mud. For three evenings he came home staggering tired, gulped supper, and went straight to bed. On the fourth evening he did not come back.

On that fourth day too, my grandfather was working alone. Oliver Brandon, who usually worked with him, had driven to town for some extra sets of wire clippers and a few things like that. He took Margaret’s car, the one that my grandfather had given her the past year, and was back by noon, when my grandfather was supposed to pick him up. When he didn’t come, neither Margaret nor Oliver worried. He’d gotten rather forgetful lately, as old men do, and it wasn’t in his usual habit of things to come back to the house at noon. Since he hadn’t said where he would be, Oliver could not look for him; instead he replaced the cracked boards in the porch floor.

Neither worried until dark fell, and then they found each other staring out the shadowy opaque windows. “Might could be working by headlights,” Oliver suggested.

Margaret shook her head.

“Didn’t rightly think so,” Oliver said.

Margaret went and stood by the window, head leaning against the cold glass, staring out where she couldn’t possibly see anything.

At ten o’clock Margaret called me. John happened to be home that evening, and the children were asleep—it was quiet and neat and enclosed and peaceful—until the phone rang. John answered; his face got more and more strained as he listened. “He didn’t come back.” He told me the story briefly.

“Where’d he go?”

John shook his head. “She didn’t know and there’s been too many trucks up and down those roads to follow tracks.”

We drove over at once. Margaret was alone. Oliver had gone home; he was an old man and tired. John talked to her briefly. Then went to the phone. He was on it almost an hour arranging for a state police helicopter. He wanted them to begin at once; they insisted on waiting for daylight. They settled finally on an immediate ground search.

He joined Margaret and me. The three of us sat in the living room and waited. By eleven o’clock we could hear the cars going by on the road, we could see their lights turn at the big hackberry tree where the trail led up to the wood lots and the timber stands behind that.

“There’re a lot of people,” I said.

“Better be,” John told me. “I promised five thousand dollars whoever finds him.”

I just stared at him. I would never have thought of that, but then I never thought of anything.

And the telephone began ringing. The whole county seemed to be waking up. By midnight I even had a call from my cousin Clara in Atlanta wanting to know if what she heard was true. I didn’t know it traveled that fast, even bad news. Margaret made the first pot of coffee and I made the next. At one o’clock John got out a bottle of my grandfather’s whiskey. I managed the first drink, but after the second I went straight to the bathroom and threw up. When I came back Margaret and John were sitting silent as mannequins, still drinking, waiting for me.

He said: “You better not try that again, honey.”

Margaret said: “No stomach for alcohol, Mr. John says.”

There was something in the way she said “Mr. John.” It was polite enough, but at the same time it was mocking. And knowing. Weary and amused all at once. Every now and then you’ll find a Negro who can do that. It’s always made me very nervous. I don’t want to be understood that much.

It didn’t seem to bother John. She may not have been completely at ease with him (and she wasn’t a woman who went around being easy in the presence of people) but he was certainly comfortable with her. He liked her and he got on very well with her. Much better than he did with my grandfather. Whenever he came in a room, John tensed up and got that flashy newspaper smile on his face. But he was at ease with Margaret, as he was that night. We were worried, all of us, worried sick. We waited there, just three people together.

While we sat in his parlor my grandfather sat dead in his truck.

The ground search found nothing that night. At daylight the police helicopter arrived, and began a methodical search, chopping its noisy way back and forth across the sky. They spotted the truck in half an hour, though it took much longer to get through the broken roads. You see, he wasn’t where anybody expected him to be. He must not have gone to tend stock or mend fences after all. He went down into the cotton bottoms, the old land, it was called. He drove across the open fields, and into a dense stretch of wood that climbed sharply up a razorback ridge. This was the land the first William Howland had claimed for himself. Stories had it that his fields were here, his first fields. But these weren’t fields any more; these were woods, thick and dense. There weren’t even roads through them, only narrow tracks. In this particular place, there wasn’t even room for a helicopter to land.

They got to him finally. He’d driven off the track, just a bit, and parked and turned off his engine and set his brake. So he must have had some warning of what was coming. He was still sitting there, hands on the wheel. Forehead touching the knuckles of his hands. As if he were waiting for something. As if he had stopped and was waiting for something.

The police didn’t telephone; they sent a trooper with the news. He came and told us awkwardly enough and then stood around, twirling his cap in his fingers, not being sure what else was required of him, not knowing what you have to say when you’ve found an old man dead in the woods. I remember looking at him and thinking how much he resembled John. A little heavier, maybe, but the same black hair and close-set blue eyes, the same jaw and the same thin mouth. John looked like everybody from the north part of the state. …

The plain bare statement the trooper brought didn’t hurt me much. I’d had all night to prepare for it. But it rocked John. His face drained white and then turned a kind of light green. He hadn’t shaved and the heavy beard, uneven and thicker in some spots than others, made his face look bruised. “Jesus God!” he said. “I’ve been thinking all night he must be hurt or sick, a heart attack or something like that because of his age.” He began to bite his nails nervously, something I’d never seen him do before. “I never thought he could die like that.”

He walked back to the patrol car with the trooper, and then he kept on walking down the muddy side of the state highway. I saw him through the window and started out after him.

“Let him be,” Margaret said emphatically.

I hadn’t thought of her—neither of us had. I had looked at the trooper and then at John. But I’d forgotten Margaret.

“Margaret,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

She didn’t seem to hear. Maybe because she wouldn’t take anything from me, not even sympathy. “Let him be,” she said after John.

“He hasn’t got a coat,” I said, “and it’s cold.”

“He be coming back,” Margaret said, “when he feel the cold.”

Her smooth round black face was unmoved. It was just the face of a middle-aged Negro woman who looked older than her years, and who wasn’t particularly concerned by whatever was happening around her. The black skin helped, of course—its color looked so silent, so impenetrable. It hid the blood and bone under it.

“He’ll come back with pneumonia.”

“He respected him,” Margaret said quietly. “Let him grieve.”

And she went into the kitchen to cook breakfast. Happiness or death, you had to eat, and she had to fix it.

Her feet were a little heavy as she walked away, and she shuffled a bit, as if the hold the earth had on her had gotten stronger, all of a sudden.

She was right of course. John respected him. And he grieved for him. Not that he loved him. No, it wasn’t like that. William Howland had not liked him and John knew it, so that left out love. But respect now, that was something else. A man was due that by reason of what he was. Will Howland had earned it; and it came naturally to John Tolliver to give it.

For me it was the other way around. I loved my grandfather but I didn’t respect him. That was why all that long night I had faced up to the fact that he was dead. And John hadn’t; he hadn’t been able to.

Margaret began to sing as she got breakfast. She never had before, she’d always been the silent dark woman. But she was singing now and her voice was light and high, delicate and gentle. “Cold thing here I can’t see, rubbing itself all over me. …”

I’d never heard that song before. I listened to the words and shivered. It was death creeping up and killing.

“Stretch my jaw, jerk my legs, break my bones until I’m dead. …

Margaret sang it as a kind of chant, monotonous and wailing. “Death spare me for another year.” She wasn’t talking about herself. She was mourning Will Howland, that he hadn’t had just another year. Just one more year.

We left her moaning that dirge, John and I, and went back into town. As we walked out the front door, the telephone began ringing. We hesitated. Margaret didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear it. So we didn’t answer it either. It would have been like interrupting a funeral.

All the doors of the house were open in spite of the cold and her singing followed us out to the car. I’m not sure, but I think John was crying.

Funerals are a good deal like weddings this part of the country. Only they’re a bit quicker and a bit smaller. And that’s the only way you get through them at all. But they do end, and people leave, and rooms are empty, and there is only the heaviness in your chest and the nasty taste in your mouth.

A couple of days after the funeral, I put the children in the car and went out to see Margaret—I was going to ask her what her plans were. I felt terrible. I almost threw up on the way over. And my girls, for some reason or other, had taken this time to sing over and over: “We shall meet, we shall meet, we shall meet on that bee-utiful sh-o-ore. …”

The front door was locked. I went to the back. That was locked too. I knocked and waited. Oliver came plodding slowly up from the barns: he had seen my car. He handed me a key. “That for the back door. Didn’t seem to be none for the front.”