The Keepers of the House (28 page)

We walked on the carefully placed stepping stones through the side yard, past the thick hydrangeas with their heavy sagging blue flowerheads. We came around the house and cut across the front lawn. Nina’s husband saw us coming and he opened the door and stepped out to meet us.

And then I saw what had happened, then I knew why Margaret called Nina dead.

Nina’s husband was a Negro. Tall, strikingly handsome, but very dark and unmistakably a Negro.

It made sense, then, it all made sense. I shook hands with him mechanically, not even hearing his name.

Nina said with a harsh laugh: “You look just the way my mother must have looked when she got our wedding picture.”

“Really,” I tried not to show that I was annoyed by the sharp edge in her voice, “I
am
dumbfounded. How could I know? I heard you were dead, and now it seems you’re alive and married too.”

“And you think she might as well be dead as married to me,” he added quickly.

I looked at that handsome dark face and I thought: I don’t like him, I should pity him, but I don’t even like him. “Well,” I told him evenly, “you said it, I didn’t.”

They both got into the car. Nina leaned across her husband: “Tell my mother you saw us.”

“No,” I said. “I won’t. I won’t do that.”

She lifted her carefully shaped eyebrows.

“I never could stand self-pity.” I was furious now; my voice was shaking and that made me even more angry. I did not want them to know that they had the power to make me that upset, to disturb me that much. “And I’m not going to pester an old lady just to give you a thrill.”

Nina’s pecan-colored eyes flickered a moment. “We shouldn’t have come.”

“Margaret didn’t ask you to come. Nobody sent for you.”

They would call me a white bigot. Let them, I thought. To hell with them and all their problems. I marched back into the yard. I yanked the baby out of his stroller and stomped into the house. I went straight to the bar in the corner of the living room. I plunked the baby down on the rug without a word and poured myself a stiff drink. He watched me, too amazed even to cry.

I soon forgot about Nina. I had my own life, my own excitements. We moved to the Howland place that summer when the house was finally finished. It was so elegant now, quiet and dignified and obviously very expensive. It was a magnificent house for entertaining, the house of a man who knows what his future is. I worked hard on the decorating, and John was pleased. “Looks great, old girl,” he said lightly. “You’ve got good taste.”

He so seldom complimented me that I felt myself blushing.

“You look prettier when you do that,” he joked. “You should always be doing a house. Agrees with you.”

My grandfather wouldn’t have recognized his place and he wouldn’t have recognized the life that went on inside it. He’d never kept any servants to speak of. He didn’t like people around his house, so he didn’t have them—though everyone in town was shocked. The matter of servants is so very important around this county, this state—kind of like stripes on a uniform sleeve. When John and I were living in town, we kept two, a cook and a nurse for the children—and people clucked and thought that awfully stingy of us. Out at the Howland place, we had a proper staff, and people were finally content. My Aunt Annie, who was now a very very old woman, her fat jolly flesh all melted away with age, paid one duty visit to us and nodded her pleasure. “First time this house has looked like anything since your great-grandmother’s time. Where’d you find a trained butler out in this wilderness?”

“John hired him in Atlanta.”

“Stole him from one of my friends?” she wheezed with amusement. “He’s a love.”

She could have meant John and she could have meant the butler. I didn’t ask.

She sat on the front porch and had bourbon and three lumps of sugar in an old-fashioned glass. She was at it steadily all day, so she was quite drunk by the time we put her on the plane home. Her great-grandson, who was with her, steered her to the steps very carefully, winking at me as he went. Aunt Annie looked at me too, her thin emaciated face still holding something of the Howland look. And she stopped with one foot on the ramp, puffing, and said loudly: “This boy’s something of a prick, but he’s the only one I got home now. He still winking over my shoulder?” She didn’t expect an answer. “Of course he is.”

She heaved herself up the steps and disappeared into the plane. She died a month later and that was the last of my close family.

Even John’s parents, dour and silent, visited us for two days. “They don’t like it,” he reported. “Smells too lush to be godly. Anything nice got to be sinful.” He chuckled and kissed me. “Leastways they still think you’re a good wife.”

“It doesn’t look like I’ll be bothered with visiting in-law trouble.”

“It’s a long way to Tolliver Nation,” he said. “And they don’t take to traveling.”

We were peaceful and smug and contented. Things went on smoothly, with only minor changes. Take John, for example. His plan was to run for governor when old Herbert Dade finished his term, and then go for the Senate. It didn’t work quite like that. Things weren’t changed, but they were delayed. Herbert Dade, who was a political power the like of which people had never seen and whom most people compared to Huey Long in Louisiana, got the state constitution changed, so he could—and he intended to—succeed himself. I thought John would be annoyed, but he only laughed. “Honey baby, the old boy has ulcers and high blood pressure and he’s started having strokes already. He can get himself this new term but he sure as hell can’t get himself to finish it.”

And there was another reason that he didn’t mention. Dade was naming John his political heir. Day after day in the papers you saw pictures of them together. I can even remember Governor Dade’s flat drawling old man’s voice saying: “This young fellow here thinks more like me than I do myself.”

John changed his plans slightly. He ran for the state senate and old Dade campaigned for him. That fall, Dade was re-elected by something like three to one. John was elected by something like eight to one.

About a week after the elections, late one night, after all the fuss had died down, I found John working at his desk. He had made one wing of the house into an office. In those four rooms, he kept two clerks and four secretaries. Officially his office was in town, but most of the work was done here. He wanted to keep the business and the clatter out of sight—to keep his official office carefully sparse and simple. Country fashion, he would say. He had even found a beat-up desk that belonged to his grandfather and moved it in. It brooded over the office, a hideous carved yellow oak thing. …

On this particular night, the children were asleep, and I was reading. All of a sudden the house seemed so empty and so lonesome that I went looking for John. I found him studying a breakdown of the election returns. He was doing it very carefully, polling place by polling place. He took off his glasses, and rubbed at his eyes. They were red with strain. “I was just coming in, honey.”

“How does it look?”

He grinned, and it was the good, slightly lopsided real grin that he gave to the children and not to the photographers. “They came through fine all right, white and black together.”

“You did as well in the Negro precincts?”

“You shouldn’t sound so surprised, honey, it isn’t flattering.”

“But the Citizens Council and that sort of thing.”

He chuckled again, the wise and knowing chuckle of a politician. “I’m just behaving the way a white man is supposed to behave. White and black both know it.”

“Did they count the votes? Really count them honestly?”

“Mostly, I think; they’re machines, honey child.” He turned serious. “Long as you’ve been in this state, you haven’t figured it out, have you?” He folded his glasses and put them in the leather case he always carried in his breast pocket. “The Negroes figure I’m not old Judge Lynch himself—and I’ve tried my damndest to see that they get that message straight. And everybody in the district pretty much knows about your grandpa’s bastards. That counts for something, I guess. As for the white people, well, they think I’m for just about whatever they’re for. And I’ve told ’em that myself.”

He popped up from his chair, grinning happily, and he looked an awful lot like the man I married fourteen years before. “Woman,” he said, “let’s go to bed.”

He was still the most attractive man I’d ever known. I remember that night, even now. I always think of it as the end of the happy times. And in a way it was—though there were some quiet months left to us.

Once I saw the boy who had brought me the first message from Margaret. He was standing outside the Woolworth store on Main Street. He had bought a couple of things, neckties and a baseball cap, and he was checking their colors in the daylight. He didn’t see me, he was so busy, and he jumped when I spoke to him. “How’s Margaret?” I asked.

He looked so very surprised that I wondered if I had the wrong boy. But I couldn’t have.

“You’re the boy she sent,” I told him. “Aren’t you living with her anymore?”

“Yes’m.”

“How is she?”

“She didn’t give me no message this time.”

His dark eyes had gone opaque like mirrors. “Don’t be the impenetrable African,” I said. “I just asked you how she is. … Do you know what impenetrable is?”

He shook his head, and I felt silly for snapping at him. He was only a boy after all, and I had pretty much jumped on him. “I didn’t mean to startle you. I just want to know if she’s well.”

The eyes didn’t change character at all. “She’s an old lady, Miss Margaret is, and they got their aches and pains.”

“You mean she’s sick.”

“No’m.” I could almost feel the evasion, his mind rolling away like a drop of water on oil.

“What do you mean?”

“She been low in her mind, you might say.”

“Well,” I said, “it can’t be easy for her.” And then I saw my two daughters running across the town square. They had been to the dentist and they each had a huge yellow balloon with the black lettering: “Dr. Marks Happy Friends.”

“Tell Margaret hello for me,” I said, and walked toward my own children, who were waiting impatiently at the corner for the light to change. It was the only traffic light in the whole town, and they always went to cross at that corner. They enjoyed it more.

Half an hour later as we walked toward the car to drive home, me holding the balloons and feeling the queer live tug of their strings in my hand, Abby asked: “Who was the boy you were talking to?”

“I don’t know, honey. I didn’t ask him.”

I had done what most white people around here did—knew a Negro and dealt with him for years, and never found out his name. Never got curious about who he was, and that he was called. As if Negroes didn’t need identities. …

Margaret died. Four years after my grandfather, on the very day when he had collapsed over the wheel of his truck and died in the woods. The anniversary of that day was bleak and cold and wintry, with everyone huddled inside by their fires. Margaret had not gone out all day. She never did any more, not even into the yard; she didn’t seem to care. In the late afternoon, just after the watery winter sun slipped behind the southwest ridge, she put aside her tatting and got up from her rocker. “Somebody calling outside,” she said. And she went, without a coat or a shawl, though the ground was already lightly frozen and crackled under her heavy steps.

Her cousin and the boy waited patiently. At midnight, the boy bundled up and took a flashlight and looked for footprints in the frosty ground. He found them at once. They led straight down the slope toward the trees and the winter-slowed creek. He followed them across the open places, but he hesitated at the dark of the trees—the beam of his flash seemed too small. He turned and scurried back to the house, his hands shaking and his face grey. He refused to go back again. He smelled death, he said.

He and his mother together—because neither of them would stay alone in the house—got into Margaret’s car and drove down the road to their family. They spent the night there, and in the morning, they got seven or eight people together and came back to hunt for her. It did not take long. Her steps were plain for everybody to see. They followed them through the trees to the creek and down the creek to the crumbling old brick baptistry. In the morning light the pool had the leaden look of water about to freeze. There, in the leaf-littered, twig-crusted, leaden-green depths they found her. She was bobbing gently to the flow a couple of inches below the surface. She was face down and her arms were spread as if she were flying. Since the baptistry was so deep and they didn’t know how to swim very well, any of them, they poked and dragged at her body until they maneuvered it close to shore. Then they lifted her out. She was a big heavy-boned woman and even heavier in the stiffness of frozen death—and the ground was uneven and broken with chunks of rock and bits of branches, and covered and slippery with ice—so they stumbled and dropped her. It seemed to them at that moment she was twisting away from them, was twisting back toward the pool.

Margaret’s cousin screamed and ran, her son right behind her. The others, grown men and women that they were, murmured a little rush of words and hurried after them. Even the preacher ran, though he wasn’t supposed to be afraid. (His name was Boyd Stokes and his father and his grandfather had preached in New Church in their time.) They all waited an hour or more, standing in the bare empty field, stamping their feet on the frozen ground, and watching toward the wall of trees, as if they were waiting for someone to tell them what to do. After a bit they sent for whiskey. The sun warmed their backs; the shadows shortened, the trees didn’t look quite so dark any more; and the likker warmed their souls. Boyd Stokes said a quick prayer and they did what decent people had to do: went back and gathered up the muddy, bruised, leaf-plastered body and brought it into the house.

That was all. That was the end of the girl my grandfather had met on a cool morning washing clothes in a little creek that didn’t have a name. When she died, she was an old woman—though she wasn’t all that along in years—tired and sick, and there wasn’t any part of the world that looked familiar or comforting to her. I wonder now what it was like living for four years, not wanting to, only waiting for your hold to weaken so you could finish up and leave.