The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  And what would it be like to be dead? To be in the ground, with the Death Cups rising higher and higher over your head. To be a ghost, haunting with the ghosts of your people, drifting through the dark pine woods, drifting between the cypresses of the swamps. … And what did you do, and what did you think when you were dead?

  She looked down at Abner Carmichael. He was staring with his eyes open but he did not seem to see her. As if he were halfway there already. …

  She touched his shoulder. He turned his head slowly.

  “I come to tell you I was leaving.” He did not move; she wondered if he understood. “I got to go.”

  He nodded. His dark skin was beaded and reamed with sweat.

  “If somebody, they ask for me—” And who would that be? Nobody. Nobody, but maybe one. “If somebody comes asking, like my mama, maybe …”

  The old eyes, hooded like a bird’s, slipped open and looked at her.

  She held her own face steady. “You got to say that Margaret has gone away from New Church. She gone to work on the Howland place and she don’t expect to be coming back.”

  He didn’t look surprised. “Nothing for you to do here,” he said slowly. “You got to be moving on.” His voice wavered off absently.

  When she was littler, Margaret might have hugged and kissed him. But that time was past; that time was gone. She wasn’t a child any more and there was nothing for her to do. So she only turned and began to walk away, steadily, unhurriedly, knowing she had a long stretch ahead.

  Behind her, her grandfather said abruptly: “It’s hot and I’m miseried.”

  She wasn’t little any more. She was a woman grown, and making her own way. So she kept walking, leaving him to his old man’s ache, and his old man’s dullness.

  For a while the landmarks were familiar. Then she passed into country she’d never seen before. She walked steadily, shifting her bundle from hand to hand as she went. Not hurrying, not stopping either. She had brought nothing; at first she did not miss food. She felt light and strong and drifting. When dark came, she slept in the woods along the road, curled up on the leaves and the pine needles, shivering a bit in the night cold. In the morning she felt her hunger, sharp and demanding, so she chewed a few pine needles and a couple of pieces of bitter grass. Once she stopped to ask directions of a woman feeding a flock in her dooryard. Margaret smiled at the funny bobbing walk of the chickens. They’d had their toes smashed to keep them from running away.

  The woman, heavy-bellied with child, answered her politely, while she stared at the unfamiliar face. “From New Church,” Margaret said, and watched the expression harden. Indian blood wasn’t a good thing, and the New Church people had always kept pretty much to themselves. Margaret moved off, not minding. After all she had only asked directions because she wanted to talk to somebody. She wasn’t lost. She only needed to follow the road until she came to the white-painted house on the fourth slope up from the river.

  She recognized it at once. She turned off the road and climbed the rutted, gravel-crusted footpath that cut across the weedy fields. She found herself in a dusty silent yard. Slowly she looked about her—at the higher ridges to the north, at the Providence River almost hidden behind its thick trees, at the sagging barns and the cluster of sheds off by the pasture lots. She walked around the house, searching. She found a family of cats, yellow and white spotted. And she found the kitchen door under the sheltering frame of the back porch. Without hesitating, she pushed through the sagging torn screen. The kitchen was empty. She walked through the dark rooms of the lower part of the house, as far as she dared, as far as she could without opening any closed doors, afraid to open them, but curious just the same. Then she went back to the kitchen. She waited a little while there, sitting at the big center table. Then she waited outside on the back steps, sitting in the sun, body curled over her legs to stop the aching of her stomach, her black skin sweating gently into the heat of the afternoon.

  William Howland came home just before dusk. He left his wagon by the barn, unhitched his mules, turned them into the lot. He closed and fastened the gate—moving slowly, weighted down by a day’s dust—and climbed the hill to his house. He’d come half the distance before he even lifted his head. As soon as he caught sight of her, he began to hurry. She sat perfectly still and waited.

  “My God,” he said. “I plain wasn’t looking for you so soon.”

  She did not answer. She followed him inside.

  “You walk here?”

  “Not far.”

  “From New Church?”

  She nodded.

  “Ramona!” he called. The sound echoed around the house; no one answered.

  “You have anything to eat?”

  “No.”

  “Not at all?”

  “Not today.”

  “My God,” he said. “Ramona!” And to Margaret: “You got no cause to do that, child.”

  “I didn’t have nothing to take,” she said simply. It was true.

  “Ramona!” he shouted, out the back door.

  “I didn’t see nobody,” she said, “and I been here a while.”

  He ruffled his lips in a half whistle. “She be coming by for supper … but you can’t wait none that long.”

  He walked over to the great wood range, black and sticky with grease. He opened a couple of pots and looked in. “She cooked it anyhow. …”

  Margaret sat down in a straight wood chair, her stomach cramps making her weak-kneed all of a sudden. She had thought he wouldn’t notice, but in a moment he was standing beside her, and there was a hand on her shoulder.

  She laughed, ashamed. “Bitter grass make you lightheaded somehow.”

  The hand was pulling her to her feet. “Go get a plate—I’ll get it—and eat something, whatever that is there.”

  Outside a man’s voice shouted: “Will Howland!”

  “You feed yourself, and when the old woman comes in, tell her to come see me.”

  “Hey, Will,” the man outside roared, “where you want your hog molasses?”

  “Take you time,” William said, “don’t fret.”

  So she sat in the kitchen alone, eating quietly. She listened to the voices of the men outside, and then she heard the trace chains clank as the wagon moved. Her hunger eased, she looked around the kitchen. It was a large room, at one end the greasy black range, with the greasy black skillets on it. At the other was a brick fireplace, tall enough for a half-grown man to stand in, black with years of use. Over it was a heavy scrolled and carved mantel. Over that, a long musket and a powder horn, slung crosswise.

  Margaret let her eyes run around the room a few times. Gently, inquiring. She finished her plate and shoved it away. Slowly she got up and poured herself a cup of coffee from the blue enameled pot on the back of the range. Holding the cup in her hand, she looked down the room again, into the black open hole of the fireplace. It was as familiar to her then as if she had always lived here.

  When the old woman Ramona came back, Margaret stood up politely, waiting. The old woman looked at her, shifting the wad of snuff from her lower lip to her cheek. “I seen Mr. William already,” she said. “And I got to open a bed for you.”

  Margaret followed her through the house, through doors she hadn’t dared open earlier. They climbed a wide bare stair, its dark rail chipped with years of use; they went along a dark hall that smelled strongly of new paint. At the back of the hall, next to a small low door, was a tall mahogany armoire with mirrored doors and a heavy flaring crest on top. The key was missing and there was no handle; Ramona simply pried it open with her fingernail, yellow and hard as horn. Inside the wardrobe was lined with smooth swirled bird’s-eye maple, but someone had put shelves across it, in the space where clothes might once have hung. They were not new shelves, because the unfinished wood was already darkening, but they had been put in crudely. They rested unevenly on strips of wood.

  Ramona hunted through the piles of cloth, pulling out one sheet after the other, shaking her
head and putting them back. She found one finally. She took it out, and held it up. There was a rip down the middle. She nodded to herself.

  It took half an hour to find a pillow and a blanket that were raggedly enough. Then Ramona tucked the lot under her arm and opened the low small door.

  It led to the ell at the back of the house, directly over the kitchen. It must have been the oldest part, for the rooms were smaller and the ceilings lower. There were two rooms here, one leading into the other. They were musty and stuffy, and the mattresses on the beds had been rolled up and covered with newspapers.

  Ramona put down the sheets and started for another door on the far wall. “Goes to the kitchen,” she said. “You come up and down this way. Lights there.” She yanked a cord and the single naked bulb hanging from the rafters overhead snapped on. “You get enough supper?”

  “Yes’m,” Margaret said.

  The old woman started down the steps, groaning and wheezing. “Mr. William, he say I got to ask if you have everything.”

  “Yes’m,” she said again.

  Margaret did not feel tired, though her legs ached slightly from the long walk. She ran down the stairs, avoiding the eyes of the old woman, who was now warming supper at the stove, and got the broom she had seen in the corner there. She ran back up and opened her windows, all of them, so that the cool evening air came pouring inside. She brushed down the walls and chased out the spiders, and swept the floors. She unrolled the mattress and put the sheet on it.

  I got to fix that rip tomorrow, she thought. It was the first sheet she had ever had. At home they always slept on the bare ticking.

  She stood in the center of the room, studying it. And it also looked familiar to her, though these two rooms were as large as her grandfather’s house. She wondered why she did not miss that more. After all she would be alone up here, and she had never before been alone in a house. But then, she told herself, it wasn’t any different from being alone outside, and she had done that lots of times.

  All at once she was tired. Very tired. She began having trouble standing up, and she weaved from foot to foot, as she slipped out of her clothes. Downstairs she could hear the old woman rattling pans and dishes in the kitchen, and singing under her breath.

  She had forgot the light. She got up slowly and pulled the cord. In the dark she stumbled back to bed, slipped under the unfamiliar blanket. And naked in a strange room, she fell asleep.

  William Howland had been busy. First there was the hog molasses, and then he decided to have a look at the new smokehouse that they were just finishing for him. Then, because he was thinking about it, he walked down to where the wallow was, and looked at the hogs, fat and lumbering and filthy. He was satisfied. When it got cold, which couldn’t be very long now, they would have the hog sticking. With the great boiling tubs of water set in the yard, and four extra men brought up from town. … He liked the smell of a smokehouse.

  He liked to take care of the fires himself, just to be sure that they were banked correctly. A slip could ruin a whole season’s meat, and he was a particular man.

  He turned and began his trip back to the main house, noticing the new light in the window of the ell over the kitchen. That would be the room Ramona had given Margaret.

  He wanted to stop, but he didn’t let himself. Damn-fool thing for a grown man to stand staring at a light. … He kept putting one foot in front of the other, steadily, until he got to the porch. And then it was easy to open the door, call to Ramona, and go to supper.

  “Let her help you,” William Howland said when the old woman asked about Margaret. “Got to be something the child can do.”

  He saw the wad of snuff flutter at the word “child” and he chuckled. “She’s kind of big, for sure, but she’s not old. … Anyway seems my sister was telling me just a little while ago that the house needed some extra hands.”

  “She come out New Church,” Ramona said.

  William shrugged. Those people had a bad name among Wade County Negroes. As a matter of fact, they didn’t usually come down this way—and that made it all the stranger, this girl’s coming to work for him.

  William remembered again how he had first seen her washing clothes, and how the Alberta story had come popping into his mind. She seemed more like that, somehow, than like somebody who’d come out of the flooded bottoms and the piney uplands of New Church.

  She was around the house for a week before he even saw her again. Ramona must have been giving her things outside to do. He was aware that the sprawling Cherokee rose by the dining-room window had been pruned, and that somebody had been working in the herb garden his mother had put in years ago. It hadn’t been tended since then. The mint ran out of its bed and spread its roots across the adjacent yard. The thyme, once planted along the walk, had crawled over the stones and eaten them up. The rosemary formed large stiff bushes bristly with spiky shoots. A single enormous clump of chives lifted its seed globes through the crushing weight of the creepers. Margaret’s fingers pulled out the weeds inch by inch, the red earth lay torn and startled under the sun.

  When the garden was finished—ripped naked, forced back to its proper bounds—and there was no more, Margaret went hunting for fruit to preserve. She did not know these woods and fields, but she learned quickly. She was used to finding and taking whatever the country had to offer. At New Church foraging was something that older children taught younger. So now, Margaret came home with her sacks full of quinces and persimmons and apples and pears. And lines of glasses cooled on the window sills. One afternoon she rooted in the tangle of the vegetable garden, and she brought out pumpkins and acorn squashes, sturdy things that had survived their neglect.

  William saw them heaped on the back porch, glistening yellow even in the shade, and he wondered why he had not thought about them for all these years, them growing out there under the tangle of grass and creepers, year after year, season after season, with only deer to nibble them.

  They looked right pretty piled there, he thought, pumpkins and squash and the bumpy ornamental gourds that somebody had planted—somebody forgotten now.

  Toward the end of the first week, he came across her, sitting at the kitchen table, under the hanging green-shaded lamp.

  He’d worked late that day. First at the spring house: the new pump (the one his sister had ordered in time for the wedding) was giving trouble. He’d still been tinkering with it at suppertime, so he sent for Ramona to bring him down his food. When he finished with the pump, he still wasn’t through. There was one more thing to do: he had to go to the mill. All that day there had been small tornadoes about, sudden funnels dropping from the low puffy black sky—he’d been watching them. One, he thought, had passed close to the mill. He’d have to see. He’d have to be sure that the winds had not damaged the building or the stones—they were both old and brittle. And so he went, hunched over his horse’s back against the blowing rain. He checked the building carefully and thoroughly by the yellow light of his kerosene lantern (only the main house had electricity). The mill was secure. The winds of the afternoon had cracked a window, no more.

  William stood for a quiet while looking at the great stones that were getting harder and harder to find these days, when almost nobody ground their own meal any more. He listened to the dropping wind outside, and to the scurry of the mice and the small animals who always lived in any mill. He sat on the floor, tired and thoughtless, resting in the shelter of the roof, waiting for the sky to clear.

  So it was near ten o’clock when he finally unsaddled his horse and climbed the slope to his house. He saw the light in the kitchen. It could not be Ramona. She would have left long ago for the house she shared with her husband and her old-maid daughter a quarter of a mile down the road.

  William Howland walked across the yard, noticing through a gap in the eastern clouds the outline of the Bear. He saw the bright starry shape clearly. Head down, tail up, it had always looked more like a skunk to him.

  So few people watched the stars
any more, he thought. His uncle now had been able to tell the names of every constellation as it lifted itself over the shelter of the trees.

  He stepped quietly to the back porch, and glanced in the window. It was Margaret (always in his mind he called her Alberta and corrected himself now). She had greased her hair and pulled it straight back, pinning it flat to her head. He saw the twin tendons of her bent neck, the same delicate arch that he had noticed when he stood up to leave her by the creek in New Church.

  It was strange, he thought, standing on his porch in the chilly night, how she changed. Sitting she was a child, delicate, uncertain. When she walked, she moved with the stride of a country woman, long steps, arms hanging motionless at her sides. A primitive walk, effortless, unassuming, unconscious, old as the earth under her feet.

  She was sewing, William noticed, but not very well. He had seen his sister whip the needle back and forth through the material, quick, deft, sure. Margaret sewed slowly, pulling the thread out to its full length after each stitch.

  She did not know how, he thought. But she would never have had the time or the chance to learn over at New Church. …

  The bend of the neck, the slow clumsy stitching—he caught his breath, aching, as the sight of poverty always hurt him.

  If she wants to learn, he told himself, I’ll get somebody to teach her. If she wants to learn. …

  He went inside. She turned her head slowly at the sound of the door.

  “Just me,” he said. “Go ahead.”

  She folded her hands over the material. He glanced at it. He had seen that flowered cloth somewhere. … Yes. His sister had bought it to make curtains for the hall upstairs. This must be the remnant.

  She did not say anything, so he asked: “You’re making curtains?”

  “No,” she said. “No.”

  “If you want to learn,” he said, “I can find somebody to teach you.

  “My grandmama showed me,” she said softly, and her voice was wispy and dry. “I be all right if I can remember me what she say.”

  Her voice always vanished like smoke on the air. He felt uncomfortable. “Whatever you want.”