The Keepers of the House (30 page)

Anyhow, I was awake, and I clearly wasn’t going back to sleep, so I decided to go home. I woke the desk clerk and the one bellboy to get the car; I was in a hurry and nervous about it. I didn’t really feel good until I was behind the wheel and on the way out of town, ignoring traffic lights because it was so early. The car was chilly, and I turned on the heater. Its little monotonous hum made me worry about falling asleep, as I always do when I am alone. So I turned on the radio. I got the usual early-morning program of hymns and yesterday’s quotations from various markets. Soon I was out of the city and there wasn’t anything but empty road unrolling in front of my headlights. It was still dark. I had no idea of time—I hadn’t looked before I left. The dashboard clock never worked. My own wrist watch was stopped; I had forgotten to wind it. It must have been about four o’clock; since it was still early spring, dawn was fairly late. Some of the farmhouses I passed had lights in them, one or two sleepy lights; now and then, if the house was very close to the road, I could catch a whiff of frying through the small crack of my open window. Then those houses ended, and the road swung directly south through empty lumbering country. There was no traffic, no house lights; there wasn’t anything except a stretch of concrete and stands of timber. There was just a black pre-dawn sky and two jabs of my headlights, the friendly glow of the dashboard, and the vibration of the heavy engine, straining slightly as I climbed hills without lessening speed.

I’ve always liked to drive alone at night. There is a sentimental brightness to things—it’s a good deal like being drunk. I always see the world perfectly then, see it in all its great pathetic clarity. I become invincible, beyond life and death. With the hum of wheels under me, I can love the human race, as I never can at any other time. I can think great cloudy thoughts, and tremble with the power of life surging in me. I resolve then to have a dozen children and live forever. It seems possible.

I drove very fast. I knew, as everyone else did, that the highway patrols went home at three and didn’t come back until seven. I was making very good time. The grades got steeper and I had to push a little on the accelerator to maintain speed—I was crossing the ridge of hills that separated the Great Central Valley from the smaller Providence Valley. The Providence River was the one you saw from the front of our house, the one that the first William Howland had followed when he was looking for a place to settle, the one he had named for his mother. I didn’t believe I could have gotten here so fast. I slowed and opened the window and looked out Pine trees, neat rows, neat fences, then a lumber road. I slowed even more and read the small identifying sign. It was the Eastman-Halsey tract, I was three-quarters of the way home.

I closed the window again, still puzzled by the distance I had come. I really should have looked at the speedometer. John would be furious if he ever found out.

But I didn’t slow down. I came out of the mountain ridges and zoomed down the straight level road through Madison City. The courthouse, street lights burning at each of its four corners. Post office, street lights broken in front of it. John’s office, shuttered and empty. (And how does the roll-top desk look in there, teetering on its too thin legs in the dark?) I startled a pack of dogs rooting in the garbage pails in front of the Happy Chicken Café. They bolted for the shadows, yelping. I passed Joe’s Place, on the outskirts of town, closed and dark, except for the string of small lights burning in its parking lot. Just then the radio went off. Very suddenly, without static, without any warning, its sound stopped. The lights still burned and I pushed all the buttons and worked the dials. It had never happened before—it was a new car—and it was very annoying.

I do not like to drive alone without a radio. What had been fun turns into something mildly threatening. The dark, which had been filled with the pleasant empty-headed chatter of the machine, closed back—and this time it was filled with its own sounds, not with yours. The sounds of empty country and empty roads—depressing, a little frightening. I was happy that I was almost home and that dawn was almost breaking. The sky was already lightening. You could see that the day would be overcast, at least until the ground fog rose and burned away. I came to the bend at Thatcher’s Creek and slowed down. No more than a mile now, I should see the house at the next turn. The sky was silvery-colored, fish-colored: the color of a swamp cat. The wild azaleas were blooming. I hadn’t realized how many of them there were. Their sweet wet perfume slipped through the crack of the window. The fog had left the road very wet. I felt the wheels skid once, slightly. I slowed down still more. This valley often had fogs when the higher, drier mountains had none. The road curved up to our pastures, edged by a barbed-wire fence covered with tight pink sweetheart roses, not yet in bloom. And then I came to the last turn and looked up the slope of ground toward the house. Somehow I had gotten the idea that it would not be there, would have disappeared like a ghost. (Damn that radio, I thought.) But of course it was there. Vague and indistinct in the fog, but there, just the way it had been for the last five generations. It looked very very large in this light, and empty. Fog covered the fields beneath it, so that it seemed to float without solid ground, just exactly like those fairy castles in a child’s story book.

I turned in the drive, through the great mass of azaleas John had planted. (When was that? Only six years ago?) These weren’t quite in bloom, their wet leaves shone black in the fog. I drove faster, the gravel rattling off my tires, until I came to the end, and there was the yard familiar and safe, stretching in front of me, full of known things. A power mower, forgotten and left out overnight. A rake leaning against the house. A bicycle. Empty clothes lines, cords frayed and fluttering.

At that moment the radio went on again. Very loud. I listened for a minute, then switched it off. As I walked to the kitchen door, pulling the key from my purse, shivering a little in the morning chill, I began to wonder. And the more I thought, the surer I was. There’d been a message of some sort. Something had brushed right by me—for good or evil I didn’t know. Because I hadn’t understood.

I had rocketed through the night alone, something traveling with me. And I had come out all right. The empty roads had saved me from a high-speed accident. And my own spiritual denseness hadn’t answered whatever it was that had called to me.

I went into my house and closed the door firmly behind me.

I
T’S
like this, when you live in a place you’ve always lived in, where your family has always lived. You get to see things not only in space but in time too. When I look at the Providence River, I don’t just see a small yellow river that crests into flood every year and spreads its silt over the bottom cotton lands. I see old William Howland, adventuring his way along, fresh from a war, seeking a place to settle. I see him coming along through its canebrakes and its swamps, the thin homely face of the portrait that now hangs in the dining room. … I can’t ever see the ridge that rises to the east without seeing more than the deep green of thick timber. I see Cousin Ezra Howland, shot through the middle at the battle of Tim’s Crossing, fifteen miles away, during the Civil War, who got to the top of that ridge, and no farther. They said he’d left a fifteen-mile trail of blood. He slipped off his horse and died up there, in sight of his home. His mother and his aunt and his sister, who were in the house alone, they saw the hawks and the buzzards circling and went out themselves and found him. … When I drive to Madison City itself, I don’t just see a small town with mangy dogs slouching about the gutters. I see the time when the bandit Whittaker brothers—all six of them—tied their boat at the river landing and came into town to rob and murder. When they left, to continue their way toward the Gulf coast, they took the daughter of the livery stable owner with them. People said it wasn’t kidnapping, that she offered to go, so it was her own fault that she was never heard of again and that a skeleton found way south, beyond the swamps, was said to be hers.

That’s the way it is with me. I don’t just see things as they are today. I see them as they were. I see them all around in time. And this is bad. Because it makes you think you know a place. Because it makes you think you know the people in it.

Things fell out this way. Old Governor Dade, who lasted four years longer than John expected, finally died after two years of his third term. His lieutenant governor took the oath of office. His name was Homer O’Keefe, and he was a handsome, silver-haired man, who came from the southern part of the state. He looked respectable, as old Dade did not, and he had been put on the ticket to draw the votes of the respectable well-to-do groups. But he was a stupid pompous fool.

When John told me about Governor Dade’s death, he said flatly: “Wait till you see the mess old Homer makes now.” He chuckled to himself. “Anybody coming after him is going to be swept in like Jesus Christ on Palm Sunday.”

He was right of course. I can’t remember all of them, but there was a highway scandal, and a welfare scandal. An instructor at the State Teachers College was discovered to be a card-carrying Communist. A school in Plainview burned down and the parents of the dead children and all the rest of the state blamed Governor O’Keefe for that. A hurricane that seemed headed for Yucatan turned right around and smashed into the Gulf coast. And that same summer there was a polio epidemic that closed every swimming pool in the state, and it was an unusually hot summer. That was probably the worst thing of all.

John looked more and more smug as we went on our usual rounds through the passing months. “Isn’t there something I can do?” I asked him once.

He winked. “You’re doing great.”

“I’m not doing a thing.”

“Why should I spoil you by telling you how to do things? You’re sweet and kind to everybody.”

“Don’t joke with me, John.”

“Honey, you’re perfect for the job, and that’s why I married you.”

I didn’t say any more because I wasn’t at all sure that he hadn’t told the exact truth.

I did nothing extra or special in the last weeks before the primary. John was almost never home, and the house was quiet. I only saw a couple of reporters who wanted to see how a candidate’s wife lived, and they were disappointed.

Once I got a phone call from my cousins Clara and Sam Hood. They were furious over the account of one of John’s speeches an Atlanta paper had carried.

I talked to both of them at once; they always picked up both ends of an extension.

“Really, honey,” Clara said, “he’s gone too far this time.”

“I haven’t seen it,” I said, “the papers here haven’t carried it.”

“I would think not,” Sam said. “Did your grandfather own the papers too?”

“You know better.”

“Maybe he really didn’t say it.” Clara asked: “Did he?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I told them.

“The contents of the average Negro skull is 169 milligrams lighter than the average white skull. His brain casing is on the average some 121 millimeters thicker. He is simply not suited by nature for equality with the white man. …”

I interrupted. “I’ve got the idea.”

“Honestly, my dear,” Sam said, “this business of not wanting them to marry your sister was enough to get votes, wasn’t it?”

Clara said: “I am really ashamed to be related to him. I thought I would die when the papers here carried that story.”

“Is that what you called to tell me?”

“We just couldn’t believe it,” Sam said.

Clara said: “We thought it was somebody else or a mistake.”

“I haven’t the slightest idea,” I said. “But I’ll tell John you didn’t approve of it.”

“You can’t be for things like that, not after the way your grandfather behaved.”

“I am very busy,” I told him. “I will call you back sometime later on.”

When I hung up, my stomach was icy stiff. Anger or fear, I didn’t know which. I went into the side yard, and stretched out in the sun there, waiting for the bright yellow rays to warm into my cold. I had plenty to do. I had the month’s accounts to check out I was supposed to call a man in Louisiana to say that we would buy his beautiful little roan Shetland for the children. But I did nothing. I lay still in the warmth and waited for it to seep through me. That sort of bodily cold frightens me. It reminds me of death.

John called the following day. “I got quite a spread in the Atlanta papers,” he said. “I suppose you’ve heard from your cousins about it?”

“Yes.”

“Those papers are no friends of mine,” he said. “I was sure they’d jump on this one.”

“Did you say that?”

“Sure,” he said. “Did you notice where I was speaking?”

“No.”

“The White Citizens Council.”

“Oh,” I said, “oh.”

“Honey,” he said, “I hope those bastards of cousins didn’t upset you.”

“It was what they wanted to hear, wasn’t it?”

“Sure,” he said. “The newspapers here won’t carry it. And there won’t be ten Negroes in the whole state who read the Atlanta papers. Anyhow,” he chuckled, “my opponent’s been saying a lot more rough stuff than that ever came close to being.”

“The phone is tapped,” I said.

“Honey child, they can hear this. …” He laughed. “My esteemed opponent got carried away with his own eloquence yesterday, and came out in favor of lynching.” He chuckled again.

“Oh,” I said, “oh.”

“I’ll call you tomorrow, honey. …”

“Yes,” I said.

“I love you.”

“I do too,” I said.

“Just think how that’s going to sound on their tape. … Just think what they can make of that: man and wife love each other. …” He laughed again. He was in an effusive humor. “Whole state can hear me, bye.”

I suppose that should have made me feel better, but it didn’t. I felt sicker and sicker.

John did come home once during those last days of campaigning. He got a virus infection of some sort, and a very high fever. In fact he was quite giddy when he first came home, bringing with him a doctor and a huge supply of antibiotics. After a day the fever was gone, and he was gone too.