The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Most of the message was not understandable, but the meaning was clear—the wedding had her approval and she was delighted.

  William sighed. “Least I can tell the thought of the whole.”

  He was having an awful lot of trouble with messages lately, he thought. Even telegrams. … He hadn’t got one of those since the time his wife died. …

  “Wedding here?” Rufus asked.

  “I suppose,” William said. “You ask my sister and Abigail.”

  Gregory Edward Mason came, as he had said he would, and had the proper talk with his future father-in-law. William was vague and polite; he did not think very much of him—this tall, thin, sandy-haired man with very bad teeth—but said nothing beyond commenting that he sat a horse with unusual grace and ease.

  Abigail and Greg rode almost constantly for the two days he was there. William watched them dashing about, the calm certain elegance against Abigail’s hesitant amateurishness.

  And William remembered something else. Abigail had not liked horses as a child, had refused all offers of a pony. Only the past summer had she wanted one. So it was like the poetry read aloud. … It hadn’t been his doing at all. William began to wonder if he had given her a single thing besides her blood.

  He took her to Atlanta to buy her trousseau, to have her wedding dress cut and fitted. Abigail stayed for four weeks. William came home the very next day, over his sister’s squeals of protest.

  That single day had been enough. He had not recognized the city. A few landmarks were vaguely familiar, but distorted in a new setting. Even his sister’s house—it had been painted and added to—was different, as was she, older and heavier. There were strange infants playing in the front hall, the first of her grandchildren. … And Howland Campbell, his brother-in-law, whom he had not seen in ten years—William shuddered. Always fat, he was now surrounded by tiers of flesh. His eyes peered out from a face that had run, the way icing runs on a cake. His neck was enormous, scallops of fat overhanging his collar. When he took off his coat, his extra-long tie dangled midway down his arch of stomach; his trousers were pasted on beneath the curve, like the egg dolls children make at Christmas and call Humpty Dumptys. William found only the shadow of the man he had known, the man who had come courting his sister.

  The whole city was like that. Just enough resemblance to confuse him. The one afternoon he was there, he went looking for the house in which he had been married, the house where his wife’s parents had lived, with his wife’s sister next door. The old people were dead, the sister moved away to Florida, but still he went. He could not find the house. He could not even find the neighborhood. He might have asked, but he did not. He simply walked and walked, down streets he did not recognize, hunting for what had been there. He kept looking all through the summer evening, kept at it so long that he missed supper.

  “Honestly, Willie, honey,” Annie said, “we were worried to death about you. Let me fix you an egg, right now.”

  “No,” he said, “I’m tired and I reckon I’ll go straight to bed.”

  “Now, Willie,” she began, but he simply ignored her. In the softness of an unfamiliar bed, he solved the whole confusing problem by falling fast asleep. His tired body decided him. And he dreamed confusing dreams about not being young any more, of things lost and of endless searches.

  He slept late. Only his sister was waiting for him at breakfast.

  “We’re not young any more, Annie.” He was ashamed of how silly that sentence sounded in the hard light of the morning.

  “Willie.” She put a pudgy hand on his arm. “It’s the first wedding. It gets you down, but everything’s all right with the first grandchild. You’ll see.”

  He brushed her aside. “It isn’t so much that. It’s more like where did it go? It moved off while I was looking at it, and I didn’t even see it.”

  “Willie, lamb,” she said, “you best go back to bed, and take some tea. You look bone tired to me.”

  He shook his head. “I’ve got a ticket, and there’s work to do at the mill. You know there ain’t nobody but me can touch those wheels.”

  “Willie, lamb,” she said, “you are killing yourself dead.”

  He kissed her good-bye, smelled the old-woman smell of her, was appalled and shivered inside his shirt. He patted her grandchildren good-bye, took up his little suitcase.

  Way down in the pit of his stomach there was a soft tugging, as if he were straining toward the earth. And though it was a very hot October day, and his shirt was drenched with sweat, he kept believing that he was cold. On the train he had a couple of quick drinks from the bottle he always carried, but they didn’t seem to do much good. He had a couple more, and the straining lessened.

  It had frightened him, this feeling of wanting to crawl into the earth. He had a few more drinks and leaned his head back against the seat and felt the hot air pour in the window and run over him like warm water.

  When Abigail came back to Madison City, Annie came with her, and trunks and boxes began to clutter the front hall. “Willie,” Annie told him abruptly, “this house is a mess.”

  He shrugged. “Fix it to suit yourself.”

  “Do you know there’s a bat hanging from the tester in Mama’s room?”

  “Somebody left the window open,” William said.

  “Colored girls, Willie,” Annie said, “they are sinfully careless. You got to watch them.”

  He only shrugged.

  “You look like a Dago doing that,” she said sharply. “And where are the people going to sleep? The bedrooms are terrible.”

  “What people?”

  “Oh, Papa, don’t be so silly,” Abigail said. “All the people who’ll come for the wedding.”

  He gave up then. “Suit yourself,” he said.

  They did. Annie and Abigail together. My God, William thought, they look alike too. …

  They hired six maids and got all the silver out and polished it on the back porch; the strong ammonia smell drifted through the house. They washed all the glassware and polished it carefully and scrubbed the cabinets and the buffets, trying to remove the old old smell of sweet fruitcake. They washed down the walls, and they polished the floors by hand, creeping across them like some sort of beetles, swirling rags ahead. They opened up all the wings of the house, wings that had been closed for years. They brought in painters, and those bedrooms were done quickly, just one coat, because there was no time. All the sheets and spreads were washed and boiled in a big tub over a charcoal pot in the back yard, left spread out on the grass for the dews to bleach out the brown age spots. And the curtains were washed and starched. The wooden frames of stretchers with their lines of tiny nails crowded the open sunny spaces—with a child left there to keep the birds away. When those curtains finally were finished, they stood stiffly by themselves and had little decorations of browned blood in the corners from the sharp tiny nails. Abigail showed them to William. “Aunt Annie says there’s got to be blood on a curtain or it’s not clean.”

  “Your aunt,” William said, “knows a great many things.”

  He was annoyed. He had never been able to get on with her, not from the days when they were children together. It was something about her voice. She made him nervous. …

  “I’m not used to women in my house,” he said. “And when I got two of them tearing it apart, I just plain got to get out.”

  He left the house to them finally, and moved down to the mill his grandfather had built on Wilcox Run. In the old days, long before William could remember, a miller lived there, a Scotch bachelor who was first hired as a builder. He had traveled all over the South, building mills on one creek or another. He’d just happened to be at work for the Howlands when he’d felt the first stings of age come on him. So the journeyman turned miller and lived out his days in the last of his mills. He’d made two small rooms for himself in the building and they were still there—dirty and grimy, unused except for storage for fifty years. William Howland brought a cot down from the main ho
use and took a couple of blankets under his arm and lived there.

  He liked the cool watery sound of the mill, and the constant all-night scurrying of the little animals that came to feed on the scattered grain. He looked at the corn that sprouted below the mill—the second toll, his father would have called it: fee for grinding, fallen kernels to sprout. Most of the grinding was over now, but there was still a bit to do now and then. At times like that, William himself would go up behind the mill and open the gates and start the water into the race. He would watch it run its way through, talking like a thing alive, and fall into the cups of the cypress wheel. Then he would go inside and throw the gears that started the sheller and the great granite grist wheels, and the floor would rattle and shake with their motion. He always stood there and watched carefully, because a wheel the least bit out of line would be apt to crack and turn useless.

  Water mills were out of date; there weren’t even many of them left. I like it, William told himself, I reckon I’ll keep it.

  In a few weeks, the grinding was finished—completely this time; and the mill was swept clean and its roof tightened against the winter. William had seen to that, and to his other work. The tobacco hung in its small curing shed. The sorghum cane had been cut and crushed and boiled into syrup and the bottles sent up to the big cellar under the main house. The hogs were fattening on acorns and molasses, waiting for slaughtering time.

  Annie sent her brother a note by a passing Negro child. It had one line: “You can come back now. P.S. Give this child a nickel.”

  William left his dirty quiet room, which was getting rather chilly at night, and went back to his house.

  He was startled at the change. The porches were painted, the big front one, and the kitchen one and all the other little ones that different generations had hung on the building. There were screens at all the windows—William had never gotten around to doing that himself—and they glistened coppery in the light. Inside, the house reeked of paint and Octagon soap powder. William felt his eyes smart at the unaccustomed fumes.

  Annie bustled out of the back hall leading to the kitchen. “There you are, Willie. I just replaced your pump.”

  Her fat figure was wrapped in a huge white apron, and she had a wad of cheesecloth wound around her head. “You look kind of like a sausage. … What pump?”

  “The well pump, and we’ll be getting a big new pressure tank too. It’s down in Madison City waiting for you to send and fetch it.”

  “We needed more water, Papa.” Abigail floated down the stairs in a long whispery silk robe and kissed him gently. “Aunt Annie’s done a wonderful job around here, don’t you think?”

  Annie looked at her brother and chuckled. “Liars’ tongues drop off, William.”

  “It looks lovely,” Abigail insisted.

  “Oliver,” Annie said abruptly, “if you’re going to meet that train you got to leave.”

  Oliver Brandon was short and stocky and middle-aged. Chucklehead Negro, people called him, from the way his round head sat on his thick neck. He had worked for William Howland for twenty-five years as a handyman and helper. He was really manager for the place, though being a Negro he didn’t have that title. This particular afternoon, he was wearing polished shoes and black pants, a white shirt and a black tie. He had parted his thin kinky hair, and plastered it down with brilliantine.

  “What you dressed up for?” William demanded. And of Annie he asked: “What train?”

  “There’s only two a day, William, and Oliver’s got to meet each one every day until the wedding.”

  “For God’s sake, why?”

  “Now, Willie,” Annie said, “be sensible. You’ve got a lot of people coming down, and it’s getting to be about time to start looking for them.” She wiped her perspiring face on the corner of her apron. “Even if they telegraph just exactly when they’re arriving, Rufus Matthews is likely to lose the messages or get them wrong.”

  William had to admit that was true. “Leastways,” he said, “I don’t like the idea of my man asking everybody that gets off the train at Madison City if they’re coming to Miss Abigail Howland’s wedding.”

  Annie darted him a look of disgust. “Are so many people going to get off the train that he’s likely to make a mistake?”

  So William gave up and went to fix himself a drink. The strange odors of the house no longer bothered him; he seemed to be getting used to them already. He stopped in front of the hall table and studied its great silver bowl, glistening dully in the light. With his finger he touched the tracing of grapes and leaves on the top edge. “Where’d this come from?”

  Abigail giggled delightedly. “The attic. … I bet you didn’t even know that there was a box of silver up there.”

  William shook his head. “No. …”

  “I used to look at it sometimes and swear to myself that I’d have it at my wedding.”

  “You went up to the attic?” There was rat poison up there and it was strictly forbidden.

  “Oh, Papa,” Abigail said, “I’m not a child any more. I don’t have to be afraid of saying what I did.”

  “No,” William said, “I guess not.”

  “It’s lovely, from the initials it must be Grandma Legendre’s.”

  “I wasn’t saying anything about that,” William said, “I was just remarking on the number of things that I didn’t know about, even while I was living with them.”

  “Oh, Papa,” Abigail said.

  In the following days, William watched his house fill up with cousins and second cousins and great-uncles and -aunts by marriage. People he hadn’t seen for thirty years, old people, crusty and fragile with age. Their stolid children. And their grandchildren, scurrying around, stumbled underfoot, slammed by doors, scratched by brambles, blotched by poison ivy whose unknown clumps they wandered into.

  One afternoon he noticed a line of Negro children, small ones, nine or younger, straggling across the yard, carrying huge armfuls of smilax. “What in God’s name is that?”

  “We needed it,” Annie said calmly, “for decorations.”

  “I went down to the school,” Abigail said, “and told them all that you’d pay them ten cents an armload.”

  William did. Some of the children were so badly scratched from the thorns of the catbriar and blackberry bushes that he gave them double. As they dumped their greens on the porch on the shady side of the house and fetched buckets of water to pour over them, William noticed some poison ivy in the lot.

  He said nothing, wondering idly if his sister was susceptible. She must not have been, because she hung the loops of green with her own gloveless hands, and he heard no more about it.

  The day of the wedding, he met Gregory Mason on the early train. Mason looked tired—William saw that at once. His thin face was gaunt, his tall lanky body seemed stretched and fragile in the chill winter light.

  William shook hands with him, marveling again that this was the man his daughter had picked for a husband. “Hard trip?”

  “I believe so.”

  There were dozens of people getting off the train, milling about on the small platform. “Will,” they called to him, “here we are!”

  And William saw that they were his cousins from Jackson. He was surprised. He thought they’d arrived yesterday—but no, now that he thought about it, the ones at his house were from Montgomery. A different branch altogether. As he moved across the platform to greet them, he thought how stupid he’d been to mix them up. But then the various branches of his family had always seemed a good deal alike to him.

  As he began shaking hands, he had a sudden thought. White men often said all niggers looked alike, but to him now, niggers looked different. …

  He covered his chuckle with a bland welcoming smile and went about dutifully pumping arms and kissing cheeks. When he was done, he and Gregory Mason walked off toward the Washington Hotel.

  “You got the Groom’s Breakfast,” William told him abruptly. “Abigail tell you?”

  “I don
’t believe she did.”

  “Expect she was scared to. … Every man that’s come for the wedding’ll be there, blood and in-law and friend. I reckon you’ll see.

  “It’s customary, I suppose,” Gregory Mason said.

  “Hereabouts, it is. Hotel’s right there.” As William pointed, a man stepped out on the lattice-trimmed porch and waved to them. “That’s Harry Armstrong,” William said. “He’ll be best man, seeing how you don’t have any family here.”

  “A cousin?”

  William looked for mockery, found none. “His mother was my father’s sister. Harry’s a great man with the bottle, but I reckon you’ll see that too.”

  By the middle of the afternoon William Howland found himself sitting alone in the dining room of the Washington Hotel. His elbow was propped on the long glass-littered table, his hand was holding his head up, and the walls were singing and zooming around his ears. He was watching Gregory Mason stagger through the door, guided by Oliver’s black arm.

  “Careful with him,” he shouted to Oliver. And then softer, to no one in particular: “Holds his likker right well, that fella. And who’d thought it?”

  William Howland took his fist from under his chin and turned his head carefully and slowly. He discovered that he wasn’t alone at all. Almost hidden by a row of bottles and jugs, Harry Armstrong dozed, head down on the table. “You poor son of a bitch,” William said aloud, “wake up.”

  Harry Armstrong did not even move or mumble. “Son of a bitch,” William said again as he looked around the room. The guests were gone, helped to their beds by teams of servants directed by Oliver. Except for one—William finally noticed him. In the far corner of the room someone slept on the floor. Face to the wall, he was covered with a grey blanket and there was a pillow under his head.

  Good for Oliver, William thought, Oliver and his boys. …

  William stood up carefully, holding the room steady around him. He walked slowly over and shook Harry Armstrong’s arm. “They gone,” he said.

  “Who?” Harry Armstrong pushed himself up, using both hands.

  “Who was here.”