The Keepers of the House (4 page)

Maybe if he’d lived in a city, things would have been different. Maybe if he’d met more people, he would have found somebody. But the farms in this part of the country were far apart, with nothing but sharecropper cabins in between. People worked hard spring and summer, with only that couple of weeks’ rest in August while the cotton was making. Once the fields were ready, once picking started, until the last of the crop was gone to the gin, William didn’t leave the place, not even on Sundays. After that there was the corn and the tobacco and the syrup making in the cool days of fall. Finally there was the slaughtering. When the kids all had their pig bladders to play with and the smokehouses put out their flavor on the cold air, the year’s work was over. Winters were party time, when there was only lumbering to be looked to, but winters are a short time, and William Howland did not find a wife.

Throughout all these slowly revolving years, William’s daughter Abigail grew. She had no resemblance to her mother at all—she might not have had one, she was so much like her father. She was not a very pretty girl, but she was bright and gay and cheerful. And interested in the world. In high school she made her father subscribe for the
New York Tribune,
though he grumbled a good deal that he already had three papers coming to the house every week: the
Wade County Ledger,
the
Mobile Clarion,
and the
Atlanta Constitution.

He gave in of course, as he always did. “Abigail,” he told her, “I hope they have sense to wrap that paper up tight or we won’t never hear the end of this.”

The
Tribune
came the way newspapers always came, open for anyone to read. In those days there was no delivery and William always went in to Madison City twice a week for his mail. He got quite a lot of it, because he liked to read:
The Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, National Geographic,
and all the farm papers. The first time the
Tribune
arrived, Roger Ainsworth, the postmaster, leaned on the counter and said: “William, I am plain afraid you have lost your mind.”

Now the post office was half of Ainsworth’s Feed and Grain Store without so much as a wall between. That particular morning there were five or six people inside, there always were about that many. They came in to play checkers, or to pass the time of day, munching on the platter of parched corn and peanuts that stood on top the iron stove. From the way they sat, expressionless and waiting, you could tell they knew all about it, and had been talking it over already.

“How come, Roger?” William asked.

Roger Ainsworth dumped a pile of magazines on the counter. “These here’s yours.” He reached over to a special spot where he had put the
Tribune.
He held it up, silently.

“That?” William asked.

Ainsworth nodded. The people in the store shifted expectantly. A cane chair creaked, and a board. And somebody snapped a hard corn kernel between his teeth.

“What about it?” William asked.

Ainsworth said: “Didn’t used to be like you to go reading the Yankee press.”

“My daughter wanted that,” William said, and then because he didn’t want to seem to be hiding behind a girl, he said more loudly: “but I reckon I’ll be reading some of it too.”

There was a stir behind him, as if they were all taking a breath together. William picked up his mail. “Roger,” he said quietly, “you are more of a jackass than I thought.”

Mariah Peters, a short fat brisk woman, popped in the front door, and bustled over to the counter. “Three postcards, Roger,” she said. Then: “You look like you could plain eat on nails.”

“The way some people turn traitors,” Roger said grimly, “you wouldn’t think their granddaddies got killed in the war.”

William chuckled and dragged the newspaper from under Roger Ainsworth’s protesting fingers. “Wasn’t my granddaddy; ’twas my granduncle and I don’t reckon anybody’ll know whether he was glad to give his life for a cause or not.” He shuffled the papers in his hands, reflectively. “I always kind of felt he wasn’t so happy,” William Howland said. “He burned to death in the Wilderness, and from what I seen of brush fires I don’t believe nobody wants any part of ’em.”

As he was leaving he saw Ernest Franklin slip out the door ahead of him, and go hurrying off down the street to spread the news. He was an old, arthritic man and he scuttled like a frightened crab up to the front veranda of the Washington Hotel. He scrambled up the steps there, yanking himself along by the brass railing, and disappeared behind the sheltering lattice of morning glory vine.

William Howland, they say, just stood in the middle of the main street, the hot dry dust coming up to touch the cuffs of his trousers, and laughed. People popped their heads out the front door of Ainsworth’s Feed Store and thought he had a touch of sunstroke or had gone out of his mind for being a secret drinker. When he finally wiped away the last of the tears with his big blue handkerchief and scrubbed dry his cheeks and his chin, he looked at them solemnly. He looked at the line of heads and the shifting and jostling as those caught back in the store tried to push their way up to see too, and he said very loudly and very clearly: “You old bastards!” He didn’t even sound very angry when he said it.

It took the town a while to get over that. Lucy Whittemore, who’d been one of the heads in the Feed Store doorway, even considered not asking him to her daughter’s wedding. When William met her on the street, a week or so later, Lucy was a bit stiff, because he ought to have known that she was thinking of not sending him an invitation and that would make him just about the only one in town she had left out, excepting the youngest Lykes girl, who had married a Catholic in his church and wasn’t spoken to by anybody any more, even though they all liked her parents, with whom she lived while waiting for her first child. William only seemed amused by her formal answers. His blue eyes were bright and laughing as he asked after her daughter: “How is she? And how is her new husband?” Lucy answered stiffly: “They are not married yet.” “Oh,” William said gently, “first things first and all in good time.” And he bowed his way off. Lucy Whittemore went on with her shopping, quivering with anger at her daughter and telling herself fiercely that people who had to have shotgun weddings shouldn’t be too surprised at what they got. And she decided that she couldn’t not ask William Howland, in spite of his crude references.

The town’s anger never lasted long—especially at William Howland. The Frasers didn’t ask him to supper on the first Sunday of the month as they always had done. And the Patersons didn’t ask him over to meet their visiting cousin from Lafayette. But he didn’t seem to care and the visiting cousin had gotten in poison ivy the very first picnic and berry-picking party they had taken her to, and that happened in a corner of the Howland land.

In a couple of weeks things were back to normal. Not that they had forgotten the business of the
Tribune
or the way that laughing word “Bastard” had sounded in the still heat of a dusty morning. … But there wasn’t anything they could do besides adding it to their stories about him. He was still the most eligible man around, and they couldn’t understand why he seemed content to raise his daughter all alone. Every person in the county had thought about that problem, and a good many of them had tried to find a solution to it. By then of course William Howland was well into middle age, but he might have had any of the widows, grass and sod, and even quite a few of the younger girls too, the ones just coming to marriageable age. He was still a strong-looking man, though his hair was thinning and he had shaved off his mustache. And he was a Howland, the real Howland, best blood in the county, best land, and most of the money.

His sister Ann—who came to visit him every year (since he had refused to stay with her), bringing the last of her children for his inspection—she was the only one who dared to speak of it openly. She often did, those afternoons when she sat in a cane rocker on the screened front porch of one of her girlhood friends, busy with sewing or knitting, or coloring Christmas cards for the Ladies’ Evangelical League. She would purse her lips and say: “It’s indecent. He needs a wife and he ought to have one, with her dead these sixteen years and him acting like she was only off on a trip.”

And the other ladies nodded their heads and agreed that that was just exactly the way he did behave.

William’s daughter Abigail finished high school, a tall thin girl, with long blond-white hair. Though most of the girls at her age had at least one serious caller, she had none. She did not seem interested. She was too shy to enjoy parties, and she did not dance at all. She spent her evenings in the big upholstered rocker in the living room, reading, steadily reading. After the first week or two, she found the
Tribune
too difficult for her. The copies kept coming, year after year, but she almost never opened one any more. She read nothing but poetry. Shelley in a fancy morocco binding with her great-grandmother’s name in it. Yeats for reciting aloud. She sat looking out at the screening wisteria and the glittering day beyond and she would say to the soft greenness:

The wind blows out of the gates of the day

The wind blows over the lonely of heart

And the lonely of heart is withered away.

While the fairies dance in a place apart. …

The people in the house, the servants and her father, soon got used to her singsong sounds. They were even rather proud of her. It was very elegant to have a young girl murmuring verse to herself of an afternoon, quite alone with only her wide bright eyes showing the excitement and the aching of seventeen.

She went away to college, to Mary Baldwin in Virginia. Her father took her there, and that was the first time she had ever left the state. She was not even particularly eager to go. But since her father expected it, she packed dutifully.

When she was gone, the town settled down to think of her future. Most thought of her as an old maid, sitting up in the big house, turning the pages of her books with papery dry hands. And they shook their heads sadly that the real Howlands were not only going to disappear in name but in fact also.

That first summer she came home thinner than ever, with only a slight flush to her cheeks from the cold mountain winter. She immediately got her father to buy her a horse, an elderly and gentle grey mare, and she took long early-morning rides, always alone. People wondered and clucked about that, but the talk soon died down, because she still spent her afternoons in the little gazebo in the corner of the lawn. Her father had built that for her as a homecoming surprise. It was a very special gazebo, and everyone in town knew all about it, though few of them had actually seen it. It had trellis work delicate as lace and gingerbread hung from the rafters and eaves in great swirls and grape-like clusters. The benches built around its octagonal walls were cushioned in blue-and-white-striped cotton, and there was an octagonal table in the center of the room. It had been made specially to match the shape of the house. Abigail Howland spent her summer afternoons there; she wrote poetry now. And letters too—Roger Ainsworth at the post office soon noticed that she got at least one letter a week. He also noticed that the handwriting was the same, though the postmarks were different. So Mr. Ainsworth decided that Abigail Howland had at last gotten a beau and that he was a traveling salesman. What else, he argued to the people clustered in the back of the Feed Store, crunching their parched peanuts and corn, could explain the different postmarks on the letters?

So all that summer the town watched and waited to see who would come. No one did. Not even William’s sister, whose last child was too young to travel. Just the letters. By the end of the summer when Abigail went back to college the town had forgotten all about her. They were busy watching the doings of Calvin and John Robertson. They’d made likker for years, like their father before them. Ridge runners, people called them, because they stayed off the roads and brought their produce directly across the ridges. The Robertsons had been supplying two counties around for almost a generation; they ran an honest still and had a fine reputation. As prohibition extended year after year, and good likker began to be harder and more expensive to get, the Robertsons found that they had far too many orders, from all over the state. Their yard (Calvin had moved to a little white house in town, to be more available) was always crowded with horses and buggies, and even a few cars. …

Business was so good that the Robertsons built a new still. People said they built it right in the middle of the Honey Island Swamp. Nobody knew too much about that place; nobody bothered finding out. Some said there was a great spring-fed lake in the middle and only the edges were swamp. Others said there wasn’t anything in the middle but more swamp. Old people sometimes talked about an island of solid ground out there, where the fishing was so good blue gill sunfish ran to two pounds or so. Where every other tree was a honey tree and the bears and gators fought and roared all night long. Nobody believed them.

Honey Island Swamp was a huge area; on maps you could see that it took up about a quarter of the county, in the southeast corner. It began abruptly in a sharp dip of the sandy ground, a wide irregular stretch of swamp—of river birch and water oak, of black gum and dahoon bushes grown into full-sized trees. And cypress, mile after mile of dreary moss-hung cypress and oily thick water. Boys played around its margins, crawfishing in the spring, gigging frogs at night, chasing the big sirens, the eel-like animals that flashed along the water. But nobody dared go very far inside—until the Robertsons hinted that they did. They said they had a great fine still boiling away—and everybody knew it must be mighty big by the quantity of whiskey that came out. The Robertsons had no trouble because they worked so quietly. People suspected that they brought the likker out in skiffs and packed it on mules for the rest of the trip to the places where they left it. They were careful never to come across anybody, anybody at all, even if it meant extra miles walking up and down the ridges. There were lots of ways a man could go, if he knew the country and wasn’t in a hurry.