The Keepers of the House (33 page)

No one had come to work. No one at all. I went back inside, and called upstairs again. “Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t alarm the children, Julia. Take them down to the ponies.”

The morning passed, quiet and empty. By afternoon I stretched out on the bed, not bothering to undress. At once I fell into a deep heavy sleep. I didn’t even hear John come in; he had to shake me. For a moment, muddled and drunk with sleep, I smiled at his familiar shape. Then his cold grim face came into focus, I remembered and sat up. He had a newspaper. Of course. The picture of Robert and me at the front door.

“Why did you let him in?” John asked.

“He rang the doorbell,” I said as if that explained everything.

“If I’d been here …”

“Well, you weren’t. There was nobody to tell me what to do.” John looked dirty. He hadn’t shaved for a day or so, and the heavy bluish beard line was now a definite crop of whiskers. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen. “Have you been up with your father?”

“Up that way.” Somerset County would still take him in, still hide him, fight for him if necessary. All the Tollivers walking around their cotton fields. All the Tollivers with the once-a-year racket of the gins singing in their ears. Where everybody stood together and blood was the answer to anything.

“Where’d he go?” John asked me.

“He said he was going to New Orleans and then home.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know.”

“He told you,” John said, “and you’re lying to me.”

“No, I’m not, but why would you want to know? To go after him?”

John gave his shoulders a little lift.

“I told Robert you would want to do that.”

John walked over and glanced out the window. When he lifted the curtain I got a flash of the bright sunny afternoon.

“I will take care of him, John,” I said. “I’ve started already.”

He turned back from the window and it was obvious he hadn’t heard me, he’d been too busy with his own bitter thoughts.

I pushed down the quilt that I had covered myself with, and I sat up. “If you’d hand me the brush, I could look a little more presentable.”

He did not move. “You look like hell.”

“It was a bad day.”

“Look,” he said, “why?”

“Why what?”

“Why’d he marry her? Do you know?”

It was incomprehensible to him. As incomprehensible as trying to chew up a stone. He didn’t understand that there were people who might want to try.

“Why’d he do it? To show us?”

“To show himself, I think,” I said.

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“He couldn’t let his children be bastards, even if their mother was a Negro.”

“There’s a lot of bastards around here.”

“He knew they weren’t going to be kept around here. Even then he knew that they would send them away.”

“Christ,” John said, “he must have been out of his mind.”

I shook my head. “I think maybe I understand.”

“Then you’re crazy as he is.”

“John,” I said, “you’re so involved and complicated, you forget some people are simple.”

“Simple, my God … and what about that other one. What’d I ever do to him? Why’d he have to come back?”

“It’s hard to explain.”

“What did you talk about, for God’s sake?”

“His wife and things like that.”

“A tea party. Christ!”

“I don’t think he knew quite what he was doing.”

“I know what he did,” John said. “Everybody’s pointed it out to me. I’m through in this state. I couldn’t get elected garbage man, and I couldn’t get a charity case.”

“Where will you go?”

“Home. For a while.”

And I started to say: This is your home. But I didn’t because I knew better. It wasn’t. He was a Tolliver and his home was in Somerset County with his blood.

“All right,” I said.

“Look,” he said, “why don’t you take the children and go away for a while?”

I shook my head.

He sat down abruptly on the foot of the bed. “Look,” he said, “if you won’t, at least send the girls away. Right now.”

“Where?”

He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Here. It’s a school in New Orleans. Ray Westbury—I’ve done some work with him, you met him here a couple of times—he has a daughter there.”

I took the slip and tucked it carefully under the lamp. To make it extra secure I put an ash tray on top of it. It was comforting, kind of a link. …

“I talked to him today—told him what was happening.” The thought of that rehearsal seemed to bother him, he hesitated a moment, remembering. “He arranged it … they’ll be expecting both girls.”

“Will you drive them down?”

He shook his head. “Oliver can do it.”

I brushed bits of lint from the soft velvet surface of the quilt, thinking, deciding. “Bundle them in a car and rush them off. …”

“They’ll be safer,” he said, “I’m thinking of them.”

“I know you are.” He was. He loved them, he was doing his best. I glanced at the little white piece of paper. “I’ll send them there, but not just now. In a while.”

He stood up with a little impatient jerk.

“They mustn’t be run out, John.”

“You won’t?”

“No. We’ll stay.”

“Oh Jesus,” he said.

“Is there going to be trouble?”

“How the hell would I know? I’m just telling you what I think.”

“If I left,” I said, “they’d probably burn this house.”

“I wish it’d been burned to the ground before I ever saw it.”

“Yes, I know you do. But I’ll stay.”

“Oh Christ,” he said. And walked toward the door.

“Are you coming back?” I asked him.

“No.”

“I didn’t think so.”

Then he was gone and all the things we hadn’t said still hung in the air and buzzed around my ears. I thought: That’s that. That’s all. I loved him once, but I don’t seem to any more, because I’m not too sorry to see him go.

When the children came in, I asked them: “Did you see your father?”

They shook their heads. He hadn’t bothered going down, though he must have seen them working their horses. They didn’t look upset. He had been home so little that they didn’t really miss him now.

After lunch I took the oldest aside. “Abby,” I said, “I want to talk to you.”

“I know,” she said solemnly.

“Who told you?”

“Oliver.”

Of course. They had been talking about it down at the barns.

“You won’t go back to school for a while,” I said, “and then maybe we’ll find you another school.”

“Oliver said we’d be run out.”

“Not run out,” I told her. “Just you and Mary Lee and just for school.”

“I wouldn’t care if I never came back.”

“Honey, you think that now, but it takes a while.”

Child, I thought, you don’t even know it’s possible to love a house and land that much. …

Abby said: “Nobody’s here today except Julia.”

“They’re staying away because they think there’ll be trouble.”

“Will there, Mama?”

She did not look frightened, so I told her the truth. “I think so.”

“Oliver said there would.”

“Oliver seems to know a lot.”

“He’s got a shotgun down in the harness room.”

I said: “Tell Julia to go home. Tell her I’ll let her know when I want her back.”

Abby trotted off. I looked at her thin legs under their faded blue jeans, and I thought mechanically: they must have some proper riding clothes. …

She came back, saying: “She was glad to go.”

“Thank you, Abby.”

“Is Daddy coming back in case there’s trouble?”

And then because she was only thirteen I lied to her. “He can’t get back, honey. We’ll have to do it ourselves.”

“Oliver’s been showing me how to aim a shotgun.”

Oliver again. “You keep the children here, Abby, I’m going down and talk to him.”

I found him tinkering with the latch on the back gate. “I didn’t know that needed fixing.”

“Wasn’t broke,” he said. “I’m keeping myself busy.”

“Showing Abby how to shoot.”

“Come in handy, maybe.”

He was an old man, a very old man, and as I looked at him I remembered all those drives to the top of Norton’s Hill with my cousins. Those drives where he’d sat waiting and carving strange little animal figures out of peach stones. … He still lived in the same house—his old-maid sister had died some five years before—by the big spring called the Sobbing Woman.

“You expecting trouble?”

He kept working on the latch. “We done took the stock from here over to the east lot.”

“For safekeeping?”

“Big target,” he said; “them animals cost money.”

“Go on home, Oliver, and take the children’s ponies with you.”

He did not seem to hear me. “There’s cars parked down the road right now, behind the rise, where you can’t see them from the house.”

His own calm was contagious. “What will they do?”

He shook his head. “Mr. John been gone?”

“Yes.”

“Coming back?”

“No.” I suppose I should have been ashamed, but I wasn’t. John’s leaving was just a fact like the cars down the road.

“I figure to stay.”

“Don’t be stupid, Oliver. If there’s trouble it might be rough on a Negro here.”

He didn’t lift his head. He just looked up at me, and the gentle old brown eyes were hard and bright. And I thought: There isn’t anything going to be harder than it’s been already.

“I don’t want you staying,” I said. “I don’t want to have to worry about you.” I was shivering with rage and fury. All my life I had been trained to depend on men, now when I needed them they were gone.

Oliver seemed to hear what I was thinking. “Your husband ain’t here, and your grandfather ain’t here, and your son ain’t into school yet. I be up to the house, when I get finished.”

The sun went down and the early winter dark began in the hollows and slipped up the hill. Abby kept the children amused and quiet and only now and then I’d feel her large blue eyes watching me. I fixed supper for them myself, fumbling and searching for pans and pots and dishes in my unfamiliar kitchen. I burned my arm on the oven door, smeared the red streak with butter, and put a bandage on top of that.

Then I called the children in. “Aren’t you hungry?”

Abby said: “Oliver took the ponies off.”

“He’ll bring them back.”

Her eyes studied me quietly for a very long time. Whatever she saw seemed all right. “Mama,” she said, “the butter’s making that bandage fall off. You need a new one.”

I left them eating, and fixed a new one in the bathroom. On my way back I passed John’s gun rack—the one that had been my grandfather’s—and I stopped and took down three shotguns. Oliver came to the door and watched me. I found the shells in boxes on the top shelf of the hall closet. I read the labels carefully, and took two boxes out.

I loaded the 20 gauge first. “For somebody that never could shoot you remembered how to load right well,” Oliver said.

“Number four shot,” I said.

He padded into the hall, bringing the ammonia smell of the barns with him.

I began loading the two big 12 gauge. “Double naught buckshot,” I said. I put the three guns on the hall table, their steel across the polished surface.

And then because I didn’t quite believe it, I called John’s father’s house. No answer. I called the state police, and told them that I thought there was trouble.

Oliver was still standing there, silently. I asked him: “You think they’ll come?”

He didn’t answer and he didn’t have to. They wouldn’t until too late.

“Go get some supper, Oliver. No sense you starving while we’re waiting.”

The children came out of the kitchen; they were finished and looking for me. “Abby, take them to the play room and let them watch television.”

“Mary Lee can do that, Mama,” she said. “Marge would rather have her anyway. And I’ll stay with you.”

I looked at her blue eyes and I wondered why southern children learn so early. …

There was a sudden flurry of shooting down by the roadside, out of sight. Abby understood before I did. “They mostly always come down to the fence at dusk,” she said, and her large eyes blinked a few times.

So they were killing the animals. I glanced at Oliver.

“I ain’t had time to move nothing, excepting the dairy cows. There’s quite a few steers they got to practice on.”

Abby said: “They came down to see what the cars were parked for.”

The irregular popping went on. Oliver cocked his head at the window. “Heard but one shotgun. Rest are pistols.”

“That’s why it’s taking so long to kill them,” Abby said calmly. I shivered and she saw me. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

My baby, I thought. You were born in the bedroom upstairs on the floor and Margaret wiped your face and cleaned your mouth and tied your cord. And Margaret is dead, and you aren’t a baby, standing there with your pinched white face, talking about how many shots it takes to kill a steer. …

I became very sleepy. I went upstairs and found John’s bottle of dexedrine tablets and swallowed two. It made me a bit lightheaded but the cutting edge of weariness was gone.

And it was just as well, because in the next hour they left their cars and their target practice and drifted on up the road toward the house. They smashed through the locked gate, and straggled up the graveled way until they stood in front of the house, just inside the low picket fence that framed the front yard. Some of them sat down, and some of them hunkered down and smoked. Six or eight of them leaned against the little wood fence and fell backward when it collapsed. They all seemed to be waiting.

Then we saw why. They were firing the big barn. You could see it, the steadily growing glow. Johnny cried briefly upstairs and Mary Lee told him: “Hush, now, behave yourself.”

I had plenty of time to study the group outside. They were men, all of them, and some of them were men only barely. I saw the Michaels boy, he couldn’t have been more than fifteen. His father was there too, the quiet grey-haired pharmacist. Lester Peterson, and his brother Danny—I recognized them. And the Albert brothers. Hugh Edwards from the post office. The small farmers: Wharton Andrews, and Martin Watkins, and Joe Frazer—they scratched out a living on their cotton farms just the other side of town, and shared that scanty living with their sharecroppers. Those three families were dirt poor, all right, their kids had bellies swollen with worms—but the rest of the people out there weren’t. They were respectable, they had a house and a car and money in the bank. There was Peter Demos, who kept the café, and Joe Harriman from the feed store; Frank Sargeant from the lumber yard. His son, who was one of the bookkeepers at the new mill. Claude King, who ran the Ford agency. … They were the good people out there.