The Keepers of the House (35 page)

And the glow below the hill—mine—got brighter and larger. Always like that. This one piece of ground now, fought over, blood spilled, outlaws and Civil War raiders, and before all of them, the Indians. … And modern raiders now, who came in cars instead of on horses, who shot at cats and steers. … They had only kept the fire and the fire was real enough. …

I heard a car racing up the hill, engine laboring at the steep fast climb. It was a Ford, a blue Ford. It spun off the drive and crashed through the fence, across the front yard; it was taking the shortest possible route to the barn. There were two men in it, I noticed as it passed not fifteen feet from where I sat. They had come late and, passing along the road, they had seen the second burning. The car roared up to the barn, close as it dared, its horn blaring wildly. With the wind standing the way it was, I couldn’t hear, but I knew they would be shouting. They were waving their arms, and the whole group was milling about. Some jumped in the car, and some more hopped on the back trunk, before it spun around and raced up the hill again. I saw it bounce slightly as it crossed the edge of the rose bed, smashed over a lawn chair. It would pass directly in front of me again. I picked up the 20 gauge. There was something about adjusting the choke. I had been taught once, but I’d forgotten. … For a fraction of a second too I wondered about the load. I seemed to remember that number four shot was what you used for geese and if that was true it wouldn’t hurt a man too much. I wasn’t at all sure, but I thought about it only for an instant as I swung the barrels up. Even if they had been loaded with rifled slugs, I would not have stopped now. I pulled both triggers. At that range even I couldn’t miss. The car swerved away sharply, brushed a fender against the big dogwood, crashed through another section of the fence, bounced down the small drop to the road. It righted itself, and sped off, a bit of white picket fence stuck to its bumper. The men who had been holding on the rear fell or dropped off at the swerve; they were running over the edge of the hill, looking for cover, and finding none, because John had cleared all that land down to pasture so that we should have a view of the river. And we had it now. Beyond the scurrying crouching men I could see the line of dark trees and the dull glint of lead-colored water.

As for the rest, most of them went racing past. They hadn’t quite seen what happened, or they didn’t understand, but they went streaming on by, without so much as a glance in my direction. They wanted to find out what had happened to their cars.

A few, five or six or so, stopped in the front yard, staring. I thought of the empty house behind me, the rooms with nobody in them, and I wondered how long it would take them to think of that too. Not soon. They wouldn’t be likely to believe I was really alone. But sooner or later they would come to it. And it would be so very easy to sneak up from behind. …

They were standing there on the lawn, a little group together, their faces expressionless. There was young Michaels, whose father was the pharmacist. Wharton Andrews, the farmer. Les Matthews, who worked at the gin. Joe Harriman from the feed store. Lester Peterson from the hatchery. Abruptly I stopped looking at them as people, and saw them only as shapes. It would be easier that way. I put down the empty 20 I had been holding, dropped it clattering by the side of my chair. I picked up one of the 12’s. I didn’t stand up. My legs were so weak and shaky I don’t think I could have. I aimed, and hoped my hands were steady. They weren’t, so I rested the barrel on the porch railing. Then I swung the other 12 up too, putting it right beside the first. Four round barrels, facing out.

“Get out,” I said. My voice was so very faint that I don’t think they heard me. I said louder: “It’s double naught buckshot, and I’m willing to try it.”

They didn’t move.

I pushed down with my right hand, lifting the barrels of that gun, pointing it slightly over their heads, and pulled one trigger. They saw the barrel’s angle, they knew the charge was going over them, but they winced and yanked up their shoulders, as the shot splattered down well beyond them.

They didn’t break and run, even so; they just hesitated. If they come, I thought, I’m going to aim carefully and fire. I’m going to kill some of them. … I didn’t hunt them down in the swamp, but I’m going to kill them just the same. I switched the guns, put the one with the two loaded barrels at my right hand, the single barrel at my left. The smell of burnt powder tickled my nose; I rubbed it against my shoulder, still keeping my eyes on them. And then we heard the siren. The wind had carried it a long way, but you couldn’t mistake it. We all listened; it got louder, it was coming this way, and no mistake. Now they looked really uncertain. I shifted the barrels against the railing, aiming more carefully. Just that little sound of metal on wood seemed to be enough.

They turned and hurried away. I fired the single barrel into the ground at their feet. They broke into a little trot and cut across the road and disappeared down the slope toward the wailing siren and the blazing cars.

I waited a bit to be sure they were gone. Then I left the two empty guns on the porch floor and put the loaded one across my arm, the way my grandfather had taught me years ago. (“Child, if you’re as tense as all that you’ll never hit anything.” And how would he feel if he’d held a gun with a load in it that could kill? Not aiming at birds, not aiming at deer, but aiming at men. …) I walked around the house, looking. Just looking, as if I’d never seen it before. The house itself hadn’t been touched. They hadn’t even come near the back, the lawns there were smooth and clear as ever. They had gotten to the south side, the side toward the barn. John’s greenhouse was destroyed. I looked at the shattered panes reflected brokenly in the bright yellow light of the barn and I wondered when that had happened. I hadn’t heard anything—it must have been while I was firing the cars. I thought of John’s orchids—the stiff ones and the soft climbing ones, all of them dying in the cold night air, their foliage and blossoms tattered by the glass slivers. And how much had that cost? I didn’t know, I rarely looked at the bills, but it had been expensive. … And it was wasted now. … Funny, tired and silly as I was, and not thinking clearly, not thinking at all, I felt sorrier for the orchids than for John.

I wondered how they had shattered so many panes. I supposed they had used a shotgun blast or two. I hadn’t heard that either. But then I’d been down under the hill and very busy.

Tomorrow, I thought, I must look in there and see if I can find any pellets, and see what size they are.

That was important. To know exactly what size.

The chairs that stood on the flagstone patio had been tumbled about and broken. There were a couple of dead cats and a hound pup in the bottom of the empty swimming pool, smashed and huddled against the concrete.

I circled the house, slowly, finding nothing else disturbed. When I was sure of that, when I was quite sure that I had checked everything, I stood—with the shotgun held crosswise in my hands and my scratched and torn legs aching feebly under me—and looked across the sheltering hill to the glow of the burning cars. The sirens were very close now; all at once they died away into a strangled yelp as the cars stopped. In the sudden silence there was a lot of shouting, the words too muffled to understand. I looked briefly at the house behind me, lit dimly by those two distant fires; it was white and smooth and lovely and unruffled. It would belong to my children. It would come to them the way it had come to me. Howlands were not run out, nor burned out.

“You didn’t think I could do it,” I said, looking around in the dark for my grandfather. It seemed I could see him standing in the dim corner of the porch, looking over at me. And he wasn’t alone. That corner was crowded with people, only I couldn’t exactly make out who they were.

You do what you got to do, he answered me.

“You were right about John,” I said. “But I loved him then.”

Do what you got to do, he said again. And I began to recognize the people with him. Some women, some men. Some tranquil-looking like their pictures that lined the dining-room walls. Some hurt and bloody. The girl who had been beaten to death against the kitchen floor. Cousin Ezra, who had died up on the ridge during the Civil War. Old Will Howland himself, scalpless and bloody from Indians. The young man who’d burned to death in the brush fires of the Wilderness in Virginia. And their wives: plain-faced and unsmiling, coy and gay.

I said to them all: “I bet you didn’t think I could.”

Do what come to you to do, my grandfather answered me. Then he and all his kin, like paper dolls drawn from the grave, disappeared.

I wondered why Margaret hadn’t been with them. Maybe they wouldn’t admit her as belonging with them. After all, she was a Negro. So maybe not. Will Howland and his wives—I wondered how the three were getting on together. No marriage nor giving in marriage, I remembered. Maybe that would solve it. And if not, the gentle little grey-eyed girl who had been his first wife would certainly make no trouble. Wherever they were.

But Margaret hadn’t been with them. … All of a sudden I realized why. She was not one of my ghosts. She would haunt her own children, not me. She was not part of me.

I stood on that cold windy grass and saw what I had done. I saw that it wasn’t bravery or hate. It was, like my grandfather said, necessity. And that’s pretty poor comfort but at times it’s all you’ve got.

The oily black smoke from beneath the hill drifted upward on the clear night air and stung my eyes in passing.

T
HAT WAS ALL.
T
HE
excitement and the fear left me when I saw that people had expended whatever energy and violence they had within them. Leaving only a bitter taste, a nasty taste in the sight of things as they really were. … Aimless anger had burned a barn, had killed cats and steers and a couple of hounds. And all my courage had only fired a parking lot and pumped a load of bird-shot into the side of the car.

The very next afternoon I noticed Oliver back at work. He was puttering around the smoldering heap that had been a barn. I watched his old man’s figure move back and forth across the scorched and trampled ground. He seemed to be sorting out the ruins; he seemed to be raking them into little piles.

I got a call from Stuart Albertson, the man who would now get the governorship. I warned him abruptly: “This is not a private wire.”

“What I say, Mrs. Tolliver, can be heard all over the country.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see.”

“I hope you don’t think what happened last night was planned by any political party.”

“No.”

“Your husband and I were political opponents—of course we were—but that sort of action is as abhorrent to me as it is to any other decent law-abiding citizen.”

He’s reading, I thought. He’s got a statement and he’s trying to make it chatty as he goes along.

“Look, Mr. Albertson, I certainly don’t think you were involved in the fuss last night.”

“I’ve taken the liberty—in the absence of your husband—to ask the state police to station a car on the road outside your place. Have you noticed?”

“No, I’ve been mostly looking at the barn.”

“Ah, well, it may be some comfort to know that two troopers are just down the hill.”

“I’m not afraid,” I said, “I know what to do, I can handle things.”

“But a little bit of comfort, still. …”

I gave up in the face of his persistence. “You’re right.”

Abruptly he came to the point. “That unfortunate incident did no credit to the people of our state—although it was a very, very small group.”

“I suppose.”

“The news does not have to be released, of course. It need travel no farther than it has already.”

“Can you stop it?”

“The local papers have advised me that they have no report on it at all. As for the, ah, persons directly involved—they would be confessing to arson—do you understand?”

“You’d like me to forget it?”

“Forget—no, of course not. But some things are better not publicized.”

“I don’t need to make news of this,” I said. “If that’s what you mean.” And then I had another thought: “Has my husband been in touch with you? Is John making some kind of a deal with you?”

“My dear Mrs. Tolliver …”

He sounded so shocked that I knew I was right. I wondered what John was gambling for now; I didn’t particularly care, but you had to admire him. He was tough. Maybe he was going to pull something out of the ruins of his career, the way old Oliver was pulling things out of the wreck of a barn. John was a politician born and studied. He might just manage it. …

“It’s none of my affair,” I said. “As you know, we’ve separated.”

“You’ll divorce, of course?”

Something in the quick way he said that. … Something. … The fault was not really John’s, if you looked at it one way. It was mine, mine alone. John was innocently led into it … Now I could see how he was thinking. But could he sell that story to the voters? It would take years, but John was patient. He would try. Of course he would. Without me this time.

“Tell him something for me, Mr. Albertson, if you happen to see him.”

“My dear lady, I don’t expect to.”

“If you do, tell him I only want what’s mine.”

“We’ve gotten so far off the subject. …”

“So we have. I was thinking out loud, I’m afraid.” And I looked into the receiver as if it was a face. “Thank you for your concern.”

I did not wait for him to say good-bye, I hung up.

A few hours later, I got a call from an Atlanta paper.

“Barns burn all the time,” I told them. “It’s one of the hazards of life.”

“How did the fire start?”

“I don’t know. It burned, that’s all.”

“Stock?”

“No, we got them out.”

“Any injuries?”

“Of course not.”

“There were two cases of shotgun wounds at the county hospital last night.”

So my wild shot at the car had been successful. The choke adjustment wasn’t important after all.

I smiled at my invisible informant. “There are always shotgun wounds around here, as I remember. Everybody hunts.”