The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  And how did I know? Because I’ve spent my time sitting on porches on a sunny dusty afternoon, listening to the ladies talk, learning to see what they saw. …

  They taught me my Bible lessons the exact same way. And to this day I am very good at spotting signs of Negro blood and at reciting the endless lists of genealogies in the Bible. It’s a southern talent, you might say.

  Funny how memory is. There are places—months and years even—when I cannot recall a thing. There are simply blank spots with nothing to fill them.

  And I have tried. Because somehow or other I convinced myself that if I could just remember—could have all the parts—I would understand. And even so I can’t. I’ve lost it somewhere.

  I can remember coming to my grandfather’s house. I can remember that one particular train ride, out of all the others. But I can’t remember what I thought of the house. And of that first night there. I can’t remember what I thought of Margaret and her children. Maybe I didn’t think of them at all.

  I don’t remember when I figured out that Margaret’s children were also my grandfather’s children. Not even that. I suppose it just came to me slowly, the way things seem to do. I never have any great revelation—I’m too dull for that. But bit by bit, fraction by fraction, a thing impinges on me, inches its way into my mind, until by the time it is full-grown I am quite used to it. I suppose that was the way with the children my grandfather and Margaret had together. By the time I knew, by the time I understood, it was as if I always had.

  No one told me. I’m sure of that. I don’t know what my mother thought, but she never said a word. She always pretended to believe that Margaret’s children had just come.

  Maybe that was what she had in mind when she told me all the old Negro stories about Alberta. Her children, now, had just come to her, without a father. They had just come sneaking into her body when she was asleep in the soon of a foggy morning, come sneaking as gently as the dew that dripped off the tips of the pine needles. Her children had no father, and they were born alone too, in the tops of the highest ridges where there was nobody but some noisy jaybirds to hear her panting in labor.

  There were no more children for Margaret. The last had been born—and died—two years before we came, so it wasn’t until much later, when I was a grown woman, that I found out Margaret, unlike Alberta, didn’t go away up on the ridges to bear alone. She got on the train and went to Cleveland and bore them in a hospital there. That way their birth certificates didn’t have the word “Negro” on them.

  The first time I ever heard any talk about Margaret’s children, it was a little girl in my class at school—third grade or so—a blue-eyed girl with frizzy blond hair that her mother put up in papers every afternoon. It was a sniggering remark, and all I could think of was: Sure, I know. But I couldn’t let her get away with it, it wouldn’t have done my standing as a Howland any good. A couple of days later, I poured a half bottle of India ink into that fuzzy scalp. And a week later I managed to work a large blob of nail polish into it too. It had dried before she noticed. You could see it shining through the thin hair.

  I wasn’t startled, I wasn’t hurt. Somebody had just put into words what I had known for a long while.

  Margaret’s children didn’t go to school with us, of course. They went to the Negro school four of five blocks away. We didn’t even go in together. Some mornings my grandfather drove me—if he had business in town—and sometimes Oliver Brandon did. Oliver had worked for my grandfather from the time he was twelve, at one job or another. He was in his forties now, and he could do just about anything, from doctoring sick animals to tinkering with the cars, and in those days cars needed a lot of tinkering. It wasn’t too unusual for them to break an axle on the ruts in the road.

  Cars weren’t common in our part of the country. Not with the depression thick and heavy still. I suppose there were a dozen of them in town, no more. The horses were still scared of them.

  But every morning I drove into town to school—barely two miles by the direct road, but nearly five the way a car had to go, keeping to the best of the graded roads. It took me almost as long as it did Margaret and her children. They went by wagon, a new one that handled easily and wouldn’t tire the mule. Margaret drove them every day, along with any of the other Negro children who wanted to go. In bad weather she’d be bundled up in an old waterproof of my grandfather’s and the children would be crouched down in the bed of the wagon under their tarpaulins. In fine weather they’d ride up on the seat beside her. But they went. Every day. She was strict about that. I could fake colds and sore throats and general aches, and spend long lazy days in bed, playing tent with the quilt. My mother didn’t object. But if Margaret’s kids complained, she paid no attention. Robert whined for days about being sick, before he broke out in flat blotches of chicken pox. Margaret let him stay in bed then, but she’d pushed him too hard, because he caught pneumonia and almost died. You could hear his strangled wheezy breathing through half the house. You could even hear it over the noisy gusty spring storm that was roaring outside.

  My grandfather, with Oliver Brandon, went to fetch Dr. Harry Armstrong. They stomped into his hall, rain pouring off them both, and my grandfather shouting for him at the top of his voice.

  “My gracious, Cousin Will,” Miss Linda Armstrong said from the parlor, “he’s only just stepped down to the cellar to see about the rats.” She was a pretty girl, and a bold one, and she smiled directly at him, something no lady was supposed to do. “Would you like to talk to me for a while?”

  “Go fetch him,” my grandfather said to Oliver. “Cellar door’s off the kitchen.”

  “Why, Cousin Will, you are in a hurry, for sure. You got somebody sick?”

  “I wouldn’t be likely to come yelling for a doctor if I hadn’t.”

  “Oh my now.” She had straw-colored hair and large brown eyes and fine-shaped breasts.

  He looked unimpressed. “You grown up, Linda,” he said. “I can remember you in pigtails.”

  Oliver came back with Harry Armstrong. The three of them bundled into raincoats and went off, and Linda scurried down to the drugstore during the next pause in the storm and told everybody there that the Howlands were all crazy. She often spent evenings talking in the drugstore, after she gave her father his supper. She liked company, and somebody always brought her home.

  My grandfather didn’t tell Harry Armstrong who was sick until they were on the road out of town, and driving steadily on.

  Harry Armstrong just shook his head, unbelieving. “God damn it, Will, you get me out on a night like this for a nigger kid?”

  “Looks like,” my grandfather said.

  “You said it was little Abby.”

  “No I never,” my grandfather told him. “You figured that yourself.”

  “Jesus Christ,” Harry Armstrong said. “I got to be thinking of my practice.”

  They hit a washed-out rut and yellow water sprayed out like sheets on all sides of them and ran through cracks in the windows. The car rocked and skidded, but stayed on the road, and they spun their way through a patch of loose gravel to a hard surface again. Oliver Brandon pulled out a cloth and began to wipe up all the water he could find inside the car.

  Harry Armstrong rubbed a splash off his face and went right on. “God damn it, Will, with your money you got no cause to worry, but I got to figure what your damn-fool trick’s going to cost me.”

  “I’ll pay you,” Will said flatly.

  “When people find out I treated a nigger kid, what kind of a practice do you reckon I have left?”

  “To hell with them,” my grandfather said.

  They were still squabbling when they got to the house and went inside. Harry Armstrong took a look at Robert, and gave him some codeine to make him feel better, and aspirin to bring his fever down, and whiskey to keep him from sinking too low. Since he didn’t know much else to do, he left Margaret there and came back to the kitchen.

  We were waiting, my grandfather, my
mother, and me. “I reckon I’ll be going home,” he said.

  “Have some supper,” my grandfather said.

  Harry Armstrong shook his head. “Thanks.”

  “You didn’t have none at home,” my grandfather said.

  “I’ll get some right enough.”

  “I’m telling you you’re staying the night.”

  Harry Armstrong stared at him. He might have had a lot to say if my mother hadn’t been right there. He finally just sat down with a whistling sigh. “What I ever do to you, Will?” He turned to my mother. “Abigail, your father has plain done me in tonight.”

  She looked at her father and said nothing.

  “Staying all night to treat a nigger kid—ain’t a patient I got will stand for that.”

  My mother’s delicate face got hard and worried. “He’s right, Papa,” she said. “We should have thought of that. … Cousin Harry, it’s little Abby that’s got chicken pox.” She looked at me, thoughtfully. “I can see the spots, child, go to bed and the doctor will come right up.”

  I gaped at her. My grandfather chuckled.

  “Cousin Harry,” she said, “you’re spending the night because your little cousin is so sick. Nobody would mind that.”

  “No,” he said, slowly.

  “We’ll keep her in bed for a few days or a week.”

  “Hey,” I said.

  “In your room, then, missy.”

  My grandfather chuckled again. “Have some supper, Harry.”

  “Anyway,” my mother said quietly, “Margaret will be very glad to have you here. She’s worried frantic over the boy.”

  And that was another thing. My mother liked Margaret. Maybe because Margaret had everything she hadn’t: size and strength and physical endurance. Maybe my mother was so sure of her own position that she couldn’t be challenged by her father’s Negro mistress. And maybe too, maybe as simple as this: my mother was a lady and a lady is unfailingly polite and gentle to everyone. …

  Before I went to bed that night, Harry Armstrong had settled down to a glass of whiskey and water by the kitchen fire. He’d stopped complaining, even. He looked in on Robert every hour or so all night long, drinking steadily in between times with my grandfather. In the morning Robert was better, so maybe some little trick of his had made the difference.

  I spent the next week in my room, and my grandfather got me all the books I had been wanting: The Swiss Family Robinson and Kidnapped and Jo’s Boys. I had a fine time, reading and watching the rain on the window glass. I never had liked school.

  Though a lot of people knew about it, that story never got out. When I really did get chicken pox, we called it a second case of measles.

  Robert got up after three weeks in bed, and walked around on shivery uncertain legs. He was so pale and thin you kept thinking that you could see right through him if he stood in the sunlight.

  By the time he was able to go back to school, it was too late: summer vacation had started. The next September he went off to boarding school in Cincinnati. He was eleven then, and he never came home again, not until he was long past a man. But that’s another part of the story.

  Money was tight those depression days, but my grandfather managed to keep Robert away at school and at camp, and off on one visit or another. It must have been very expensive for him then, but he did it, because the boy was his son, the only one he had, and because Margaret wanted it so.

  Margaret never visited him, and he never came South. She wanted it that way too. Once every year, usually during the slack in the middle of the winter, my grandfather would get on the train and go North to see how he was making out. And of course Robert wrote to his mother—the one letter a week that the school required.

  I remember other letters too. I remember my grandfather padding stocking-footed (he had left his dirt-crusted boots on the back porch) into the living room with the mail. My mother selected one particular envelope and held it up to him. “You see, Papa, unopened.” She tossed it into the fire. “That’s what I think.”

  I noticed it then, and noted it, but didn’t think about it. Now I wonder how many letters from my father went unread, that flared and shriveled and turned to crinkly ash in the living-room fireplace.

  The days went rattling by at a good fast pace. There weren’t many people around but there were lots of things to watch and see. Lots of them.

  Like the great canebrake below the house, down by the edge of the river. I remember the enormous rattler some men found down there, thick around as my arm, head smashed by an ax. The man who’d killed it brought it up to the house to show, and there was still some life to it, some movement. All the dogs slunk off howling.

  I remember the way the branches of the pecan rubbed against the boards of the house. Faint squeaky brushings, the ghost noises that peopled my dreams. … The way a hunting pack sounded, the carefully picked voices. And the men’s faces flushed and red in the light of the pine knots. Back-country hunting, on foot, with lots of whiskey. … The way cattle sounded when they were turned into a dry corn field. … The sweet-bitter smell from the windrows of the first haying; the crisp clean odor of the later stacks when you slid down them. … How the land looked under the moon, soft and sweet like water, even the rocks gentle and tender in the light. The bones of the earth, old people called those chalk white out-croppings. Where the giants were buried, where earthquakes had thrown up their bones. … How the frost looked lying heavy and blue as mold at night on the roof, on the ground. … A chicken hawk caught by a shotgun blast, spun to the ground. … My pet coon torn by the dogs into bits of bloodied fur. … And over and over again, animals straining in birth. Cows in the pasture lots, an occasional mare in the shelter of the barn. Cats under the porch, backs arched and crouching. And the hounds—they whelped in the kitchen with Oliver watching over them, and my grandfather puttering around the house doing all the things that had needed doing for months and that he hadn’t ever got to until then.

  His heart was in the dogs. He did not really like cattle; he raised them only because there was money in it. He had good stock, he took good care of them, and he never enjoyed a minute of it. When, now and then, an animal died, he and Oliver checked to see what happened. Sometimes it was a fall. A few of the pastures had sharp rocky drops down a slope: cattle lost their balance and tumbled over, and they starved with a broken leg. You could tell that in a glance: their skin hung loosely on their bodies. You could tell too when they died of snake bite: just that leg was swollen while the rest of them was perfectly normal. When they were swollen all over, why, then they had died of poison: lambkill, or sheepbane, or Jisson weed, or one of the poisonous creepers. My grandfather would give the hide a kick, wrinkling his nose at the smell. “Damn-fool creatures,” he’d say, “know what’s poison and they still eat it.”

  He thought the cows and steers were stupid. But he really hated his bull. He had a fine one, a beautiful monstrous ring-nosed creature, who lived in a special lot down below the peach orchard. He was injured when a bolt of lightning struck a pine under which he was sheltering during a storm, and he had to be destroyed. My grandfather looked almost pleased, in spite of the money that was going to be lost. He went to the cabinet where he kept his ammunition, and took out a handful of .303 cartridges grimly. He never kept another bull, because by then the Department of Agriculture was supplying the artificial ones.

  The cattle business was good, and little by little he let his cotton acreage go, and increased his herds. But—excepting his hounds—he never got to like any animal. Though he could have afforded it, he never kept horses for pleasure. And he had as little to do with his mules as he could manage. Unless something was very wrong, he never went down to the lot when the hands were hitching up in the early mornings as I did. I liked sitting on the rail fence, above the reeking hoof-torn mud. There was hardly a blade of grass that their long yellow teeth hadn’t destroyed. The trees had been stripped of their leaves too, high as the animals could reach. Even the trunks had a blot
ched look: their bark had all been rubbed off. The mules scratched themselves against those trees every chance they got. Though they were sprayed and dipped and treated, and though they never had those great harness sores, like white-rimmed welts across their backs and forequarters, the way a lot of work animals did, they never did seem to get over being itchy. They were stupid and mean, and they would bite. A lot of times I had to tumble off the fence because one was coming for me.

  When the men began getting them into harness and between the shafts of the wagons (maybe it was picking time and every animal on the place had to work), it got noisy. The mules snorted and screeched, and the men yelled back at them, and whacked them with sticks and palms and fists, and twisted ears and twisted tails. By then the sun was up and the whole place warmed, and your nose began to wrinkle with the thick sweetish odors of sweat and animals and mud.

  My grandfather eventually got rid of them all, and had a flock of tractors to take their place. First time they were ready, he sniffed the clear sharp gas odor and told me: “Smells one hell of a lot better than a mule.”

  He was a strange man, and decided in his tastes. The only animals he liked were his hounds. Though he himself wasn’t too fond of hunting, he kept a very fine pack. And when—three or four times a year—he held a hunt, every man in the county was there. It was a pleasure to watch a pack like that work, they said. Now, a hunting dog doesn’t live too long what with accidents and heart worms and just plain exhaustion, and William Howland had to put a lot of money in that pack. He didn’t seem to mind, though he was pretty close with money as a rule. I’ve known him to pay five hundred dollars for a likely Blue Tick bitch. And whenever a whelping was finished, he would come quickly and look over the litter as they scrabbled for their mother’s teats. He always believed you could tell a lot about a brand-new pup—that you could actually see how it would look full-grown—while it was still wet and ruffled, before it took on the lumpy butterball shape of a puppy. He and Oliver would talk it over; then they would select the pup they wanted to keep, and they would mark it, because within a day it would look no different from the rest of the litter.