The Keepers of the House (9 page)

Somebody had been tending the still, and not long ago. Perhaps they’d noticed him coming and slipped away. Or perhaps they were making the rounds of the other stills.

In a crate under a palmetto-roofed shelter there were a dozen filled bottles. William took them out and lined them up in a zigzag path that anyone would have to notice. Then he took a bit of charred wood out of the fire and scratched laboriously on a flat board: W. Howland. It was not too clear but it was enough. After all, they had been expecting him. …

He was quite tired now, and hungry too. He prowled around the camp, finding two things: A can of beans, which he opened with his knife and ate at once. And four otter skins stretched carefully on a rack of twigs and branches. One was fresh.

He chuckled. The energetic Robertsons were even doing a little illegal trapping while they ran their illegal stills.

He would have to start back now; he’d already taken longer than he’d expected. It had been a greater effort too. He wasn’t young any more, he acknowledged wryly to a big oak tree, and he was feeling the strain.

He filled his canteen with water; he also filled a small empty bottle with whiskey. The Robertsons could spare him that. …

He stepped wearily into his skiff and picked up his pole with a twinge of back and side muscles. He pushed free of the hummock, and checked his compass. He decided to go straight west. It would be shorter. He should reach the edge of the swamp around New Church, and he could walk home from there, if he found no one to give him a lift.

He poled steadily west, and the falling sun shone straight into his eyes. He jammed his cap way down on his forehead and squinted his eyes tight as he could, but the glare still gave him a headache. He stopped and took a few swallows of whiskey. He poled through miles of moss-hung cypress stands where gators splashed away from his bow and moccasins swam alongside with their bright intelligent stare. He jabbed at these with the pole. Now and then he hit one, but the pole was heavy and he soon gave up that extra effort. At sunset he was crossing a grassy marsh, sweeping his way along a fair-sized slough. As the sun dropped, a cloud of biting gnats rose from the grasses—the saw grass and the oyster grass, and the duck grass—until the sky was dark with them. William felt his whole body begin to tingle. Not just his hands and face and neck, not just the exposed skin, but his whole body burned as the tiny insects slipped inside his clothing. He dropped the pole for the oars and rowed frantically, trying to reach the edge of the cloud. It did not work: either it was a very large cloud, covering the entire marsh, or it was moving along with him. He gave up trying to outrun them, and slammed the skiff into the bank. As rapidly as he could, he stripped off his clothes, grimacing with pain as the needles jabbed harder into his naked body. He scooped up handfuls of black muck and plastered it all over his body and his head, thick as he could. He tied a handkerchief across his nose and mouth and ears. When the mud was partially dry he put back his clothes, fixing them to hang loosely and not disturb the protective caking.

Then he resumed his poling. The mud stank of decay, of stagnant water and dead roots, but it helped with the gnats. William took a few more swallows of whiskey to help him get over the smell.

He chuckled, thinking how he must look. A big heavy bald man, smeared with mud like an Indian, his blue eyes buried in the black smear of his face.

He crossed the open marsh, and then a small lake. This one, now, seemed to be fed by sulphur springs, because the odor lay heavy over its almost still surface. With the last of the dusk the full moon rose, heavy and yellow, behind him. His shadow and the shadow of the skiff stretched out longer and longer like rubber on the water ahead. With the rising moon, cats began to prowl in the distance. He heard a couple of panthers yeowl, and a couple of screeches that he recognized as bobcats. As the water birds settled for the night gators began to prey on them, and he heard the loud snapping of their huge jaws.

Beyond the lake, following the compass, he entered swamp again. The bright moon was reduced to a tiny glow inside the shelter of the tall trees, filtered to nothing by the tangled strings of moss. He kept poling steadily, checking his direction, maneuvering his way around those spots where cypress had fallen on cypress and their knees stuck out so thickly that a skiff could not pass between them. Now and then, disturbed by his passage, tree frogs dropped down and splashed gently into the water. He ate the last of his cornbread and had a bit of bacon. It was beginning to taste strange, spoiling in the sun.

There were millions of mosquitoes now, though he couldn’t see them in the dusky moonlight. They sang fiercely around his ears and he felt them brush his face and hands. They did not sting very much—perhaps it was the caked mud, or perhaps it just wasn’t their season for needing blood.

He was extremely sleepy, but he did not want to stop here. There were too many snakes overhead and one was sure to drop down unless he could make a fire. He remembered that old-time swamp men had always carried a little brazier in the bow of their skiffs and dugouts. They had the security of a fire whenever they needed it. He had to keep going until he found a hummock.

He did finally. He cleared a little space among the palmettos with his machete and grounded the bow of the skiff firmly. His legs, numbed by the cramped hours in the skiff, stumbled and shook under him as he gathered dead wood. He kicked aside a dry palmetto and uncovered a rattler. He felt the shape slip from under his foot; he heard the quick annoyed shake of rattles; but in the dark he saw nothing until the snake struck. He was wearing high woods boots and the fangs scratched harmlessly against the heavy leather. He killed it with a few quick blows and kicked the twitching shape aside. When he had gathered wood and started his fire he looked down at the smear of milky venom on the side of his boot; he scraped it away with a leaf. He built a big fire and a smoky one, and settled himself down in the skiff. He would not sleep but he would doze a bit until dawn came.

On the afternoon of the following day, across the shimmering wind-marked marsh grass, he saw a line of trees, clearly more than just a hummock. He poled toward them, eagerly. Long before he reached the edge of the grasses he felt the tug of a current on his skiff. Between marsh and trees there must be a strong-flowing river, and that could only be the east branch of the Providence. He had come out of the swamp. … He was tired, he let the current move him slowly along. He stared into the thick syrupy oily brown water, resting his eyes from the brilliance of the afternoon. As he did, he remembered his Creole grandmother’s name for these narrow channels in a marsh:
trainasse.
He hadn’t thought of her, in years, that thin silent beaked-nosed woman. Her English had remained stilted and formal all her life, she had never seemed quite at home with it. But she had not made any effort to teach French to her children or her grandchildren. She hadn’t wanted to go to France either, though she had more than enough money for the trip. She simply hadn’t seemed to mind not belonging. She hadn’t seemed to mind perching uncomfortably on the edge of her world. …

William forgot about her again as he concentrated on getting the skiff out into the river, and safely across, avoiding the snags and the sand bars, and keeping a special watch out for whirlpools. This stretch of the river, always swift and deep, was spotted with those swirling circles. They could tear a boat apart in seconds, sucking it down to their depths. And that wasn’t all. You had to watch what did get sucked into their swirls. … William hesitated at the edge of the marsh, looking up and down the river carefully. He saw only one whirlpool, slightly upriver from his position. It seemed small enough. Then he noticed a log, an old one that rode very low in the muddy water. He jammed his pole into the bottom and held his skiff steady. The log was moving directly toward the whirlpool. As he watched it was caught by the gentle outer rim, swung slowly about. Its speed increased as it moved to the center, faster and faster until it disappeared into the cone, slowly, silently, like a picture without sound. William, leaning on his pole, swung his eyes slowly downriver, waiting. The log reappeared fifty yards below, bursting to the surface, end first. It rose a couple of feet in the air and traveled some ten feet downstream before it splashed back into the water.

William rowed across quickly. There did not seem to be any house nearby, so he decided to pull the skiff up on the bank and leave it there. He took his machete and chopped a series of V’s into the gunwales on both sides of the bow. They would make it easy to identify when he sent back for it later.

He looked at the empty bottle in the bottom of the skiff, the bottle that had held whiskey from the still. It seemed a mighty small thing for all the work and ache of the last three days, for the plagues of mosquitoes and gnats. A damn-fool bet to start with, he thought. You’d think I’d plain have better sense. …

He’d made a bet, he’d gone on through with it, and he’d won. And it was still a damn-fool thing. That’s what came of being a Howland, he thought, they always were kind of crazy.

He picked up the empty bottle and tossed it out into the river.

He did not know precisely where he was—somewhere around New Church, he figured. So it was just a matter of cutting across the ridges until he fetched up in his own back lot. He folded his blanket and slung it across his shoulder. He put the shotgun across the blanket, settled his pants more comfortably on his hips, and made up his mind to a long walk. Some hours later, when he had scrambled up and across two ridges, he realized that it was getting dark, and that he was very tired. He had had only light restless naps in the skiff. He selected a good high spot, a stand of shortleaf pine with a heavy fall of needles; he rolled in his blanket and went to sleep.

He woke with the first dawn, the false dawn. He lay with his hands behind his head, waiting for the true light, listening to the birds, to the insects, to the nervous rustling of pine needles. And—from a long way off—wind-borne, he heard the sound of running water. William stood up and stretched, and the sun swung over the edge of the intervening ridge and flashed in his eyes. He was very thirsty; and in spite of the sour apples, his mouth was foul-tasting and fuzzy. He listened again for the running water, found it, fixed directions before the birds drowned it out.

He swung his shotgun to the pad of blanket and started toward the sound, rubbing his hand briskly over his beard, which made little crackling sounds in the cool morning. He passed a Negro graveyard, its trees dangling with sand-filled blue bottles and martins’ nests of gourds; its graves, smooth-worn heaps, decorated with broken cups and glasses and plates, all glass, all turned lavender by years of sun. He passed the faintly outlined foundations of what had been a church, its burned bones picked clean by scavengers. The sound of water came, sharp and distinct, from the other side.

He quickened his steps, came to it. He saw that a baptistry had been built across the stream a hundred yards or so above the church. There was a little natural fall there and pious men had lined and blocked it with bricks to make a pool for their services. There was always a drain in the bottom, William knew, but this one had not been used for a long time (like the burnt church it belonged to) and the plug had gotten clogged. The flow now spilled over the top.

He decided to go above it. The water would be fresher—he did not know what sort of trash was tangled and held there to rot. He saw that there was a kind of footpath, not well-defined but still visible. It followed the easiest natural way, winding as the land went, swinging in a wide arc from the stream. William followed it. When he thought he’d gone far enough he cut back to the stream. He was now well above the baptistry. He drank and hung his head in the cold water, until the ache and weariness of the past day and night were gone. He washed his face and his neck and his arms until all traces of the swamp muck were gone. He dunked his head in and out like a duck, letting the water run down his neck, holding his head under, feeling the soft flow of the water, the soft taste of leaf-filtered water. He sat back on his heels and wiped his face with his hands and combed his hair with his fingers.

Resting, he looked down the stream to the baptistry. He could see it clearly from here—nothing fancy, just a brick widening of the natural bed, to make a small pool The water there was the opaque brown-grey of leaf-litter, and heaps of dead branches and small tree trunks were snagged against the banks. His eyes followed the stream to the edge of the baptistry, seeing the lean shapes of the willows, the shiny leaves of the sweet bay trees, the dahoons with their red berries, the titi bushes with their yellow fruit. His eyes circled the pool twice before he saw the woman. She was that earth-colored.

She knelt at the side of the creek, just above the baptistry, washing clothes. Her dress was brown, her hair black as her skin. Only a flash of bright yellow from the material in her hand caught William’s eye.

She had not heard him. She went on quietly lifting and bending, wringing the clothes and stacking them on a clean stone beside her.

In the sudden noise of fighting mockingbirds the sounds of her splashing disappeared. William wondered for a minute if she were really there at all—if, soundless, she wasn’t a part of the morning fog that twisted between the trees behind her.

Watching, William remembered some of the stories he’d heard years and years ago. Stories of Alberta, the great tall black woman who lived up in the hills with her man Stanley Albert Thompson and drank likker all day, while waiting for his huge gold watch to strike the hours. She had nothing at all to do except wash his clothes. Sometimes you would see a kind of froth at the edge of streams, and women would say: “Alberta’s been doing her load here.”

A great tall woman, free and easy in her movements as if her skin was white. Mostly she and Stanley Albert Thompson wandered around in the high peaks of the Smokies, but sometimes they came down south. Sometimes. During the crackle and sparkle of a blackberry winter their hills would get too cold to suit them and they would drift south for a bit, laughing and drinking. Out in the woods and around, people would hear them, hear their laugh or the sound of the chiming watch. And sure enough they’d find the place where those two had lain down to sleep, pine needles stirred and flattened by the violence of their loving. And thin wisps of smoke way up in the ridges—those were their fires, they were cooking that night. Sometimes too, when they were restless and bored they would toss rocks—you could hear the rattle of the slides for miles—and Alberta slung stones like a man. When they were tired of their game they’d stroll off, leaving the hillside torn and gashed by the falling rocks. Oh yes, Alberta and Stanley Albert Thompson always left their marks in passing, and the next day or the following week people could read them plain.