The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  Neither worried until dark fell, and then they found each other staring out the shadowy opaque windows. “Might could be working by headlights,” Oliver suggested.

  Margaret shook her head.

  “Didn’t rightly think so,” Oliver said.

  Margaret went and stood by the window, head leaning against the cold glass, staring out where she couldn’t possibly see anything.

  At ten o’clock Margaret called me. John happened to be home that evening, and the children were asleep—it was quiet and neat and enclosed and peaceful—until the phone rang. John answered; his face got more and more strained as he listened. “He didn’t come back.” He told me the story briefly.

  “Where’d he go?”

  John shook his head. “She didn’t know and there’s been too many trucks up and down those roads to follow tracks.”

  We drove over at once. Margaret was alone. Oliver had gone home; he was an old man and tired. John talked to her briefly. Then went to the phone. He was on it almost an hour arranging for a state police helicopter. He wanted them to begin at once; they insisted on waiting for daylight. They settled finally on an immediate ground search.

  He joined Margaret and me. The three of us sat in the living room and waited. By eleven o’clock we could hear the cars going by on the road, we could see their lights turn at the big hackberry tree where the trail led up to the wood lots and the timber stands behind that.

  “There’re a lot of people,” I said.

  “Better be,” John told me. “I promised five thousand dollars whoever finds him.”

  I just stared at him. I would never have thought of that, but then I never thought of anything.

  And the telephone began ringing. The whole county seemed to be waking up. By midnight I even had a call from my cousin Clara in Atlanta wanting to know if what she heard was true. I didn’t know it traveled that fast, even bad news. Margaret made the first pot of coffee and I made the next. At one o’clock John got out a bottle of my grandfather’s whiskey. I managed the first drink, but after the second I went straight to the bathroom and threw up. When I came back Margaret and John were sitting silent as mannequins, still drinking, waiting for me.

  He said: “You better not try that again, honey.”

  Margaret said: “No stomach for alcohol, Mr. John says.”

  There was something in the way she said “Mr. John.” It was polite enough, but at the same time it was mocking. And knowing. Weary and amused all at once. Every now and then you’ll find a Negro who can do that. It’s always made me very nervous. I don’t want to be understood that much.

  It didn’t seem to bother John. She may not have been completely at ease with him (and she wasn’t a woman who went around being easy in the presence of people) but he was certainly comfortable with her. He liked her and he got on very well with her. Much better than he did with my grandfather. Whenever he came in a room, John tensed up and got that flashy newspaper smile on his face. But he was at ease with Margaret, as he was that night. We were worried, all of us, worried sick. We waited there, just three people together.

  While we sat in his parlor my grandfather sat dead in his truck.

  The ground search found nothing that night. At daylight the police helicopter arrived, and began a methodical search, chopping its noisy way back and forth across the sky. They spotted the truck in half an hour, though it took much longer to get through the broken roads. You see, he wasn’t where anybody expected him to be. He must not have gone to tend stock or mend fences after all. He went down into the cotton bottoms, the old land, it was called. He drove across the open fields, and into a dense stretch of wood that climbed sharply up a razorback ridge. This was the land the first William Howland had claimed for himself. Stories had it that his fields were here, his first fields. But these weren’t fields any more; these were woods, thick and dense. There weren’t even roads through them, only narrow tracks. In this particular place, there wasn’t even room for a helicopter to land.

  They got to him finally. He’d driven off the track, just a bit, and parked and turned off his engine and set his brake. So he must have had some warning of what was coming. He was still sitting there, hands on the wheel. Forehead touching the knuckles of his hands. As if he were waiting for something. As if he had stopped and was waiting for something.

  The police didn’t telephone; they sent a trooper with the news. He came and told us awkwardly enough and then stood around, twirling his cap in his fingers, not being sure what else was required of him, not knowing what you have to say when you’ve found an old man dead in the woods. I remember looking at him and thinking how much he resembled John. A little heavier, maybe, but the same black hair and close-set blue eyes, the same jaw and the same thin mouth. John looked like everybody from the north part of the state. …

  The plain bare statement the trooper brought didn’t hurt me much. I’d had all night to prepare for it. But it rocked John. His face drained white and then turned a kind of light green. He hadn’t shaved and the heavy beard, uneven and thicker in some spots than others, made his face look bruised. “Jesus God!” he said. “I’ve been thinking all night he must be hurt or sick, a heart attack or something like that because of his age.” He began to bite his nails nervously, something I’d never seen him do before. “I never thought he could die like that.”

  He walked back to the patrol car with the trooper, and then he kept on walking down the muddy side of the state highway. I saw him through the window and started out after him.

  “Let him be,” Margaret said emphatically.

  I hadn’t thought of her—neither of us had. I had looked at the trooper and then at John. But I’d forgotten Margaret.

  “Margaret,” I said, “I’m so sorry.”

  She didn’t seem to hear. Maybe because she wouldn’t take anything from me, not even sympathy. “Let him be,” she said after John.

  “He hasn’t got a coat,” I said, “and it’s cold.”

  “He be coming back,” Margaret said, “when he feel the cold.”

  Her smooth round black face was unmoved. It was just the face of a middle-aged Negro woman who looked older than her years, and who wasn’t particularly concerned by whatever was happening around her. The black skin helped, of course—its color looked so silent, so impenetrable. It hid the blood and bone under it.

  “He’ll come back with pneumonia.”

  “He respected him,” Margaret said quietly. “Let him grieve.”

  And she went into the kitchen to cook breakfast. Happiness or death, you had to eat, and she had to fix it.

  Her feet were a little heavy as she walked away, and she shuffled a bit, as if the hold the earth had on her had gotten stronger, all of a sudden.

  She was right of course. John respected him. And he grieved for him. Not that he loved him. No, it wasn’t like that. William Howland had not liked him and John knew it, so that left out love. But respect now, that was something else. A man was due that by reason of what he was. Will Howland had earned it; and it came naturally to John Tolliver to give it.

  For me it was the other way around. I loved my grandfather but I didn’t respect him. That was why all that long night I had faced up to the fact that he was dead. And John hadn’t; he hadn’t been able to.

  Margaret began to sing as she got breakfast. She never had before, she’d always been the silent dark woman. But she was singing now and her voice was light and high, delicate and gentle. “Cold thing here I can’t see, rubbing itself all over me. …”

  I’d never heard that song before. I listened to the words and shivered. It was death creeping up and killing.

  “Stretch my jaw, jerk my legs, break my bones until I’m dead. …

  Margaret sang it as a kind of chant, monotonous and wailing. “Death spare me for another year.” She wasn’t talking about herself. She was mourning Will Howland, that he hadn’t had just another year. Just one more year.

  We left her moaning that dirge, John and I, and w
ent back into town. As we walked out the front door, the telephone began ringing. We hesitated. Margaret didn’t answer, didn’t seem to hear it. So we didn’t answer it either. It would have been like interrupting a funeral.

  All the doors of the house were open in spite of the cold and her singing followed us out to the car. I’m not sure, but I think John was crying.

  Funerals are a good deal like weddings this part of the country. Only they’re a bit quicker and a bit smaller. And that’s the only way you get through them at all. But they do end, and people leave, and rooms are empty, and there is only the heaviness in your chest and the nasty taste in your mouth.

  A couple of days after the funeral, I put the children in the car and went out to see Margaret—I was going to ask her what her plans were. I felt terrible. I almost threw up on the way over. And my girls, for some reason or other, had taken this time to sing over and over: “We shall meet, we shall meet, we shall meet on that bee-utiful sh-o-ore. …”

  The front door was locked. I went to the back. That was locked too. I knocked and waited. Oliver came plodding slowly up from the barns: he had seen my car. He handed me a key. “That for the back door. Didn’t seem to be none for the front.”

  I looked at the key, an ordinary Yale key to the night lock on the kitchen door. “Where’s Margaret?”

  “Been gone.”

  “Where?”

  “New Church.”

  My children were chasing the big grey cat around the yard. “I didn’t know she had any family there to go to. I didn’t know she even thought about going back.”

  Oliver looked at me, patiently. “She got a house there, five, six years ago.”

  “Oh,” I said. “I didn’t know.”

  “Mr. William give it to her.”

  “Well, Oliver,” I told him, “I didn’t know that either.”

  He smiled, a tiny curl of the black lips. “I reckon you didn’t.”

  “Tell me where it is and I’ll go see her.”

  He said: “She come to you.” He walked away then, leaving me to stand on the empty porch with a small key in my hand. I started to go in but changed my mind. I would only cry, and I did not want to do that in front of the children. So I gathered them up again and we drove back home.

  We saw the will, a few days later, and there wasn’t a mention of Margaret in it. “John,” I said, “we can’t let it go like that. It isn’t right.”

  The mottled look hadn’t quite gone from his face. It made him look sick. “Don’t be a pea brain, honey,” he said. “Can’t you figure it out?”

  “Margaret’s got to live.”

  “God save me from well-meaning people and idiots.”

  “You don’t have to get nasty.”

  “Margaret’s car, the one she left in—you remember that?”

  “Don’t be mean, John.”

  “It was her car. It was in her name.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “That’s one thing.” He took a deep breath. “I know what you’re going to say to this, because I know what you think—but a respectable man just doesn’t list a Negro woman in his will as one of the major beneficiaries. Not if he’s got children by her. He wouldn’t embarrass his white children with his woods colts.”

  “I didn’t know you knew about that.”

  He flushed impatiently. “Think for once, God damn it. Just don’t ooze good will and female charm.”

  “Well, I didn’t know.”

  “Look, honey, I don’t know anything either, except maybe this one thing. He took care of Margaret. He gave it to her, years ago, I bet. He left her plenty to live on, and their kids too. Trust funds when they were in school or something like that.”

  “He never said anything.”

  “It’s easy enough to do if you want.” A tight little flicker of a smile: “And the gift tax is a lot less than the estate tax. That would amuse him too.”

  In about a month, Margaret sent me a message, as Oliver said she would.

  That particular afternoon, I had been shopping. As I turned in our street I noticed a green-and-white Plymouth standing in front of the house. It was Margaret’s car, license and all. I hurried into the kitchen, packages spilling out of my arms, expecting to see Margaret’s heavy greying head. But there was only a slender dark boy, fifteen or so. I tumbled the packages to the counter.

  “Didn’t Margaret come?”

  “No’m.”

  “Oh.” I was disappointed. “It’s her car.”

  “She sent me.”

  He was a handsome boy, and he looked familiar. “You related to her?”

  “Her ma and my granny was sisters.”

  “You look like her.”

  “She sent me to carry a message to you.”

  “Fine,” I said.

  “She say to tell you that she is living at New Church, if you ever have need to find her.”

  “Where, exactly?”

  He looked puzzled. “You can’t say hardly, but anybody there’ll show you. It’s kind of back by the baptizing place on the river, sort of.”

  Automatically I began to unwrap the things I had bought. Two pairs of sneakers, a wad of blue cloth for a gym suit. They looked silly and forlorn on the bright yellow formica counter top.

  “What else did she tell you?”

  “That I got to make sure Mr. John ain’t home before I come in.”

  That was Margaret, self-effacing, discreet. Margaret, dark and bitter. Except to my grandfather. And what had he seen that was hidden to everybody else?

  “Is she living alone?” I asked the boy. “But she wouldn’t be.”

  “No’m. My ma’s there and me.”

  “Just three?”

  “Well,” he remembered, “when she first built the house, the old lady, her aunt, lived there.”

  “Not any more?”

  “She swelled up and died.”

  “When Margaret first built the house, when was that?”

  He scratched his head. “I wasn’t nothing but a kid then. Six, seven years ago.”

  So that was how long ago my grandfather had given it to her. Oliver had known; he’d told me the truth.

  “Well,” I said, “tell her if she needs anything let me know.”

  “No’m,” he said, “she don’t have to work.”

  “Tell her anyway.” John had been right, too. It had all been settled long long ago.

  “She don’t want nothing.” His eyes flicked over me, curiously. After all, we were related in a way.

  “Tell her something else.” He turned around in the door. On his face the patient mocking mask of the Negro. “Tell her that I’ll be coming up to see her. That there are some things I want to ask her.”

  There were so many things. … All the time we’d been in the same house, and not able to talk. So many things about her. About my grandfather. … How she’d met him, and how she’d come to move into his house, and how it had been during the thirty years she was there. And what it was like to send your children away, one after the other, when they were still so young. And never let them come back, so they wouldn’t feel the blame of being a Negro. And never go see them, so they wouldn’t have the weight of their mother’s black face. They were white and she had made them that way.

  Margaret’s house in New Church was easy to find. I asked once at the gas station and then managed the dirt roads without a single mistake. It was a new house, four or five rooms and a wide lattice-covered porch. It was painted and neat, with a clean-swept dirt yard, and beds of petunias and lantanas growing at the front.

  Even when we didn’t talk (she was still a silent woman) we communicated. It was just in the air of that house, in the musky Negro-smelling air. I felt at home and comfortable. This was my mother, she had raised me, my grandmother too. … When I finally had to leave, she asked me quietly: “You tell Mr. John you was coming?”

  For a second I considered lying, but then I couldn’t. “No.”

  She didn’t seem hurt or even s
urprised. “He’s not like us.” And as she said it, there were suddenly three of us, the other was my grandfather.

  On the drive back, he rode right along beside me, telling me how it had been when he had lost his way in the swamp, and had to walk home from New Church. Not on the road (there was no paved road then), but on the trails over the ridges, through pines not touched by the lumberman, with fallen needles so thick there was no sound as you walked.

  He was sitting beside me. I could see him. If I looked straight ahead at the road, he was there, right in the corner of my eye. Once I turned to look at him directly and he disappeared. The car swerved and the tires spun up yellow dust from the shoulder. Watch the road, child, he said. I didn’t look at him directly any more after that, only peeped with the corner of my eye. And he stayed there. I could even smell the metallic odor his sweat had always had, a farmer’s sweat, sun-dried on skin and cotton cloth.

  I could talk to him too. Why didn’t you tell me anything? You didn’t. Not one thing. You should have, you should have.

  By the time I got home that evening, I did understand. As if he’d explained to me at last. He’d protected and cared for so many females in his life, that he just looked on us as responsibilities and burdens. Loved, but still burdens. There’d been his wife, the vague little bumbling girl, who’d been so lovely and who’d died so young. There’d been my mother, who’d read poetry in a summerhouse and married a handsome Englishman, who’d come scurrying home, heartbroken, with another girl. She’d lingered around the house and around the bed until she died. And there was me, the orphan, and my two daughters.

  Sometimes he must have felt that he was being smothered in dependents. There hadn’t been a man of his blood in so long. And that must have worried him too.

  All those clinging female arms. … And then there was Margaret. Who was tall as he was. Who could work like a man in the fields. Who bore him a son. Margaret, who’d asked him for nothing. Margaret, who reminded him of the free-roving Alberta of the old tales. Margaret, who was strong and black. And who had no claim on him.

  IN the years that followed, John worked harder than ever, building a solid foundation for his political career, building himself a statewide machine. “Going to be better than the one the Longs have in Louisiana,” he told me once.