The Keepers of the House (5 page)

William Howland had been buying from the Robertsons for years; he’d always had a taste for corn likker. At first he paid no attention to the talk of a new still. Gossip, he thought. Then as the summer wore on, he began to wonder more and more about its exact location. They must have found an island in the swamp, much bigger than the usual hummock. It couldn’t be any other way. He’d been to the swamp a lot when he was a boy. He’d found deep clear lakes with sandy bottoms, and that was passing strange, but he’d never found any island large enough and high and dry enough to hold a still. And where would it be?

Those long summer evenings, after supper when he sat in the new gazebo with his daughter, fanning gently at the gathering mosquitoes, he wondered about it. Abigail was reading to him. She had come home from school with a passionate desire to read poetry aloud to someone; alone would not do any more. She had a teacher, she told her father, who said it was absolutely the only way to appreciate the full quality of the sound. This particular evening she was reading
Paradise Lost,
and he was not listening. He never listened. He heard the gentle tones of her voice in the same way he heard the buzzing of the mosquitoes and the louder thumping of the beetles as they bumbled their way along, the whizzing sound of the swifts’ wings as they fed on them, the deeper pumping of the owls’ wings as they began to move. The tree frogs and the bullfrogs. The locusts and the crickets. He heard them all and he heard none of them. They were as vague and misty, as remote as the western sky with its evening star swimming into view through the pink haze. Did they still tell children, he wondered, that if they looked up a chimney they could see stars in daylight? He would have to ask Abigail if her nurse had told her that. There was so much he hadn’t asked her, that he never seemed to get around to asking. … Now, that much color in the sunset might mean something toward rain and that wouldn’t do the cotton any good. And wasn’t it a peculiar thing, good summer for cotton made a bad one for corn. Seemed you couldn’t get the two together.

Her soft gentle voice went on, blurring into the dusk. There was the smell of cut grass from the house lot, of dust from the road.

The dry clean smells. … William began to remember how a swamp smelled, thick and sweet. And how the water bubbled with rising gases when you stirred it with a stick, how the crawfish hung on the underside of a log, and you picked them off like fruit. The sharp angle a swimming moccasin made—the jut of the neck and the V of waves fluttering out behind. The close smell of unmoving water, of decay. The roar of gators mating, and their wobbling waddle as they launched themselves into the water. The sweet sick odor of the nest banks, the wallows.

I’ll find it, William said silently to the bright dry dusk. If the still is there, I’ll find it.

And Abigail wondered why, all of a sudden, her father raised himself upright and began to pay particular attention to the details of the battle of the angels.

Later on, a few weeks later, she wondered why he was so cheerful at her going. Usually she felt a great twinge at leaving him, he was so plainly distressed. This time, he waved her off with a real smile and a secret satisfaction that glared out of his face at the passing world.

He stayed overnight in town, because the next day was market Saturday and he wanted to hire some extra hands for the cotton picking. It was the busiest day of all, it always was, the streets lined with wagons, the sidewalks and the town square full of people walking about, or just standing, watching the passing. The porch of the Washington Hotel was lined solid with chairs, but you had to be early to get one of them. There was even a line of men, chairless, hunkered down against the front of the building. They were spitting tobacco juice at big greenbottle flies. Now and then a winner would stick out his hand and collect the bets. The still hot air smelled of dust and sweat. If you listened, over the chatter of people you could hear the sounds of the animals in the back lots. The town was only one street wide; their racket like their smell carried clearly.

William Howland finished his business and began to think of going home. Crowded streets always made him a little restless anyway. He was walking to where he had left his buggy, wondering if the little Negro boy he had brought in with him had remembered to get the horse from the livery stable, when he passed Calvin Robertson. William stopped dead still, grinning suddenly. “I been thinking about you, Cal.”

“You needing anything this week?” Calvin asked politely.

“Maybe not this week,” William said, “but I’ll come fetch it.”

“I reckon I can bring you whatever you have a mind for.”

“What I have a mind for,” William said, “is something else.” And he reached out and caught the arm of Dr. Armstrong, who was just passing, carrying a wooden crate full of chickens.

“Harry,” he said, “I want you to listen to this.”

Harry Armstrong put down his crate, wearily. “What, Will?”

“A sporting proposition.”

Harry Armstrong took out his large brown handkerchief and wiped his face. “You figuring to outproduce Calvin?”

“No,” William said, “I’m figuring to locate his still.”

Harry Armstrong just looked at him. “You going chasing around Honey Island Swamp?”

“That’s where I hear tell it is.”

Perspiration beaded Harry Armstrong’s face again. He rubbed at it with the back of his hand, shook his wrist dry, and got out the handkerchief again. “My mother was a Howland,” he said into the handkerchief, “so I reckon I can’t be blamed for speaking, but that whole family always was crazy.”

William chuckled. “This here is a sporting proposition, Harry.”

“No, it ain’t,” Calvin said.

“Don’t be a sour bugger,” William said, “I’m betting you a gallon of your likker I can find out where you are.”

Armstrong sighed gently. “You better take it, Calvin,” he said. “Or you never going to hear the end of it.”

“No,” Calvin said.

“No bet, then,” William said. “I’ll do it for free.”

Armstrong said: “The whole family been like that for years.”

“Just to make it come out right,” William said, “if I ain’t been seen for a couple of days I’ll be in the swamp. If it’s more than four, I’m in trouble. If it’s a week, Dr. Harry Howland Armstrong goes and fetches the rest of my cousins and tells them that my blood is all over Mr. Calvin Robertson’s hands.”

“Aw, Will,” Calvin said.

“Games,” Armstrong said. “The Howlands never did grow up either.” He picked up the crate, resting it on his round belly. “A man’s got to work.”

“You going in the chicken business?”

“Ours died,” Harry Armstrong said. “Yesterday morning we went out and the whole yard of ’em was laying there, upside down, dead and stinking.”

“A doctor ought to do better with chickens. Makes you wonder about his human patients.”

Harry Armstrong sighed. The sweat was back, trickling down his face, but he had no free hand to wipe it. So he sighed again, bowed his good-bye with a quick jerk of the head, and trudged off.

“You be looking for me, now,” William told Calvin Robertson, who just grunted, spun on his heel, and walked away.

That afternoon, as they sat down to a late lunch, Harry Armstrong told his wife: “Guess what Will Howland is going to do now?”

She did not ask. She did not need to. After thirty-five years she knew that her husband would tell his story just the way he wanted.

“He’s going still-hunting,” he chuckled. “Told me about it to keep Calvin Robertson from shotgunning him in the swamp.”

Mrs. Armstrong clucked her tongue sympathetically. “He’s not for turning them in?”

Harry was startled. “Will Howland, best blood in the county?”

She looked ashamed. “I just was asking.”

“He won’t be figuring on nothing like that,” Harry said flatly. “He’s just making up games to amuse himself.”

Will Howland set about his game carefully. First he went to see Peter Washburn, the Negro who built skiffs. He found him planing away, outside his shed on the riverbank, the willows all around him whistling and rattling their thin dust-caked leaves. Will bought a skiff, one that was just begun, and waited impatiently for it. Washburn worked slowly—William Howland made two special trips to town to check. When everything was finished finally, he and Peter Washburn put the skiff on the river, to let the wood swell and tighten. They moored it to a river birch and swamped it, leaving just the gunwales showing—to age and ripen in the muddy water.

Then William had no more time, for the cotton was ready. He put a sack on his shoulder and did a few rows himself, because he liked to keep his hand in. It wasn’t hard work, picking, all the small children did it. And in a way it was easier for them: a man his size had to stoop considerably. Picking did give you a very muscular hand: you yanked the cotton out of the prongs of the boll with the tips of your fingers. William Howland’s right hand was much bigger than his left. He was rather proud of that fact.

The pickers worked until the fields were stripped, seven days a week, under skies that were brilliant blue and edged with huge black thunderheads. There was almost never rain this time of year. Though the clouds piled themselves higher and higher, they never moved from the horizon. They seemed fixed there, like mountains. The first sun picked them up in the mornings, and they turned purple red with the last of its light. Sometimes the pickers worked by moonlight, and when they stood up to stretch and rest their backs, they would see those same clouds rising at the edges of the world, silvery and shining white.

William fell into bed at night, not bothering to take off his clothes. Sometimes in the very few minutes before he fell asleep, he would think of his new skiff and the swamp, and what he would do when the picking was over and the roar of the gins had ceased. … He and Peter Washburn would drag the skiff from the muddy shallows and slosh it clean with fresh water. Then they would put it on a wagon and haul it across the Howland roads, ones that generations had cut into the red sandy hills, following their own pursuits, lumbering or hunting, or just for the pleasure of marking a new way. Finally they would set the skiff down in the little stream that was called Deer Run. From there he would have to find the way into the swamp alone. He was sure he could.

William Howland found himself remembering more and more as the picking season moved to a close. “I’ll be going soon,” he sent word to Peter Washburn.

But he didn’t. The very afternoon he had decided that he was ready to leave, he got a letter from his daughter. She wrote as she read, slanting, ornate, vague. She had dashed off this note quickly and folded it before the ink dried. William studied it, the beautiful shapes of the letters, the soft perfume that lifted from the paper, the smeared unintelligible words. About the only thing he understood was that she was coming home.

He met the train.

She was as always tall, thin, and blond. But this time her vagueness seemed to have disappeared. She rushed up to him and—something she had never done in public—hugged him. “Papa!” She giggled in his ear: “And weren’t you surprised, and wasn’t it wonderful, it just couldn’t be better, it just was perfect.”

Patiently William Howland explained: “The letter was smeared, lamb. There wasn’t much I could make out.”

He saw her face fall, her underlip quiver. “You folded the paper too soon,” he said gently, “but tell me now.”

She stepped back and said loudly, spacing the words carefully, the way you would for a deaf person or a foreigner. (And William suddenly wondered if he were not.) “I am going to be married.”

He looked at her, conscious only that Rufus Matthews, the stationmaster, grabbed for his broom and began sweeping the dusty dry platform, to pretend he hadn’t heard.

“You’re surprised, aren’t you, Papa?” Abigail giggled. “Isn’t it lovely? I know you thought you’d never get me off your hands.”

“No,” William said, “I can’t say I was bothered about that.”

“Not being pretty … it worries a girl.”

Had it? he thought. She seemed not to have noticed, seemed never to have given it a wisp of consideration. … He saw endless unknown stretches opening up before him. She thought, she worried.

Behind that bland smooth face, those gentle eyes. … He had never before imagined her as having thoughts or feelings of her own. She had always seemed so content. …

“Aren’t you going to say something, Papa?”

“I wasn’t worried about your finding a husband when you’re not twenty.”

She took his arm and they started for the waiting buggy. William Howland was in no hurry to own a car. The roads were too bad for them most of the year.

“He is the most wonderful man.” She hugged her father’s arm, remembering.

“He from town?”

She stopped, and laughed. “Mercy sakes, no!”

Rufus Matthews dropped his broom. Served him right, William thought grimly. People who listen got to take their chances.

“I met him at Mary Baldwin,” she said.

“I might could’ve guessed that,” William said.

“He teaches there. English.”

All those poems, William thought. All of them, and all that reading aloud.

When he did speak, he surprised himself by asking: “So he wrote those letters you got last summer?” The amusement showed in his voice.

Abigail looked at him sharply. “How could you know?”

“Whole town knew,” William said. And he lifted his voice for Rufus’s waiting ears. “Old Ainsworth spent most of the summer speculating on it.”

As they drove home, Abigail told him: “His name is Mason, Gregory Edward Mason.”

“He come from Virginia?”

“Mercy no!” (William wondered why she used that word so often when she never had before.) “He’s from England, from London. He’s just teaching there.”

William said: “Your great-great-great grandaddy’d be spinning in his grave and he knew you were marrying an Englishman.”

She answered complacently. “I know.”

The wheels wiggled and jolted in the ruts in the road. Six or eight quail scuttled across the gravel and disappeared into a stripped-bare corn field. William said: “I reckon I should know more about weddings, but what do we do now?”