He liked hunting with their brothers and their fathers, and every house party invariably included a hunt. Coonshine, they sometimes called it.
No women ever went with them. It was a man’s hunt. On foot, back-country style. (Now and then the women talked about the mounted English hunts and wondered how becoming a formal black habit would be. But none of them could ride well enough, and the country was too broken anyway.)
The hunt began about midnight. First the Negro handlers arrived with the dogs in a wagon; a squirming yelping pack. Then the hunters and their servants crowded into other wagons and bumped their way to a likely spot. The handlers released the pack; they scattered and circled, yelping, looking for a trail. The hunters lounged around the wagons, talking, laughing, listening to the hounds work, waiting for them to pick up a scent. When they did, the men trotted after them. They went for miles sometimes following the hounds, crashing through underbrush, resting on fallen logs. If they found they had treed a bobcat (a painter some people called them) the Negroes shook it down from the tree, and let the pack finish it. When that happened, William walked quickly away from the brief scrawling tussle; afterwards he avoided passing that particular spot of torn ground and scattered bits of fur. (He could stick a hog and he often worked in the slaughter pens in the early-winter killing, but he did not like to kill wild things. He never had since the day he went dove shooting with his father in the pasture lots at home, and the matted bloody feathers made him vomit.)
Most times they did not even see any game, and anyway white men almost never killed on a hunt. They had bearers for their guns, and these usually dropped behind early in the chase—so the hunters could not have fired, had they wanted to. (Sometimes William wondered why they bothered bringing guns along at all.) The Negroes clubbed the game to death … coon or possum for the pot, the fox’s tail to decorate the side of a cabin. After all, no white man ate possum or coon, unless he counted himself trash. Once a possum was cooked in the house, people said, twenty years later you could smell it….
After a couple of hours the hunters tired. They built a fire and waited for their gun bearers to catch up with them. With the bearers came several boys carrying jugs of whiskey, panting under the awkward load, staggering over the broken ground.
William Howland, back against a pine, legs aching with the unaccustomed exercise, lungs aching with the effort of scrambling up and down the razorback ridges, drank the warm whiskey and stared into the blazing fire, listening to the pack work in circles around him. And even before the whiskey, he felt drunk. It was the race through the night, with the bright moon whirling around your head as you went, and the dogs on after something, calling to you. It was the smell of the night, of leaf mold, of bark. It was the feel of the night earth, of the sleeping ground.
He was in Atlanta two years; he left when he married. Her name was Lorena Hale Adams.
(There are no pictures of her. No pictures at all. He burned them one summer afternoon.)
He was not supposed to have married her. He was not even supposed to have met her. She was not at any of the house parties and dances. She was not at the concerts or the assemblies or the memorials. She was not at the teas, or the receptions, or the Sunday dinners. That he met her at all was an accident.
Soon after he came to Atlanta he acquired a mistress, Selma Morrisey, the widow of a contractor. She was Irish-born—she kept a faint touch of the brogue—nearly forty, with two children in their teens. She rented rooms, and William Howland saw her pleasant pecan-shaded yard and wide, gingerbread-fretted porch, and moved in. In a couple of weeks he had left his small upstairs room for the larger and far more comfortable one downstairs, the one that held the enormous double bed her mother had brought from Ireland.
Selma Morrisey was a pleasant comfortable woman, and they were very happy. Now, William never came back to her house at noon. Each day he had dinner with his cousin Michael Campbell and his wife, a long slow heavy meal, in their huge dark dining room. Afterwards the two men went back to the office. This particular day, Michael Campbell had been trying a case, and William as his clerk scurried back and forth, carrying notes, running errands. It was May and very hot. Heavy morning rains gouged ruts in the streets and turned to steam in the heavy air. William’s face was red and streaked with dirt, his mustache was ruffled and wispy. His linen coat showed huge blotches of sweat across the back. The starch in his shirt stuck to his body in dabs and gave out a strange sweet smell in the heat. At the noon recess, Michael Campbell sent him off to change his clothes.
For the first time in two years William went home, walking the few blocks rapidly so that he could feel the currents of air moving about his body. He swung through the front gate, bounced up the steps, and burst into the parlor, whistling loudly. He had expected Selma. Or no one. But there were two women sitting over their teacups at the dining-room table. He bowed politely, apologizing.
“This is my cousin,” Selma Morrisey said, “Miss Lorena Hale Adams.”
He bowed again, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the soft gloom of the drawn shutters. He looked, and then looked again.
She stood up, politely, still having the manners of a child. She was very young; her cheeks were smooth and round and bright pink. Her nose and mouth were very small and her eyes were very large, and a luminous grey. She was also extremely tall for a woman, the face that looked across at him was almost at his own level.
“We’ll go into the parlor,” Selma Morrisey said. “William, would you like some tea?”
“I have to go back,” he said.
But he went into the parlor. They sat on the linen covers of the horsehair furniture, and he studied Lorena Adams carefully. Her face was round, her skin very white. Her hair, which she had pulled back over her ears into a crisp bun at her neck, was straight and heavy and black. William thought he could see her glowing, and all the verses of Poe, of which he was so fond, began running through his head.
In half an hour or so, he left, because he had to, and changed and went back to work. All the rest of the long hot day he was conscious of a silly smile quivering the ends of his mustache. They lost the case, and he did not care. As he was pushing his way through the crowded corridors, an old man hawked and spat, and the slimy white wad hit William’s shoe. He wiped it clean with a clump of rain-washed grass. And that was when he decided that he could never manage the law. That he was a farmer and nothing more.
Much later that evening—when it had gotten cooler, with a little breeze blowing down off the hills to the north—he lay in bed and waited for Selma. The room was dim. They had only one very small lamp burning, because of the heat. Nothing so stifling as the smell of kerosene, Selma said.
She had been making her nightly round of the house, opening the shutters on the west side, closing them on the east against the rising sun. William could hear her moving about, and he folded his arms under his head and stretched contentedly. She came finally, closing the door behind her, stopping at the dresser to take the last of the pins from her hair, and do its regular brushing. William, for the first time, noticed the nightgown she wore—the long plain gown of lawn, drawn tight to the neck with a drawstring, falling loosely to the wrists, falling straight to the floor. A shapeless proper night gown … a wifely motherly gown … he would have supposed that a mistress would have something more fancy, more seductive … He chuckled; it had never been like that for them.
“You are laughing,” she told him through the mirror.
“I’ve never noticed your gown before.”
“They are all alike,” she said.
He chuckled again, and she smiled back at him.
“Selma,” he said, in a bit, “I’m going home.”
“I have been wondering when.”
“I’m no lawyer.”
She brushed regularly, slowly. “You have been thinking of this?”
“Just today.”
“Oh,” she said.
“I’d rather go home.” He lay silent staring
at the faintly lit ceiling, thinking how it would be there. Then he said: “You won’t mind, will you? There wasn’t anything between us, nothing to keep us.”
She turned around now, finished with her brushing, tying the hair into the wide pink ribbon she used every night. “No,” she said. “No, I imagine not.”
He sat up at her tone, surprised. “But there wasn’t. I haven’t taken advantage of you.”
“You are a gentleman,” she said, “and so formal. No, of course not.”
She had forgotten the bedroom shutters; he got up and began closing them. “And your cousin,” he said, “do you think I could call on her?”
She walked slowly to bed, bringing the lamp, setting it on the small table. “She is seventeen,” Selma said. “I think so.”
“You’ll tell me where she lives?”
“Yes.” Selma stretched herself out on the bed. It was so hot that they slept without even a sheet to cover them, and she lay on the open bed, staring at her toes.
“What sort of cousin is she of yours?”
Selma said: “Her mother and my husband were first cousins. Their mothers were twins.”
“She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”
Selma reached over and blew out the lamp, so that he had to find his way to bed in darkness.
He courted Lorena Hale Adams, quickly, impatiently, because he wanted to leave Atlanta. He scarcely noticed her family; he neither liked nor disliked them, though he realized that his own parents would have called them trash. Mrs. Adams was a thin plain woman, with wiry black hair and loose-hanging arms; she kept a bottle of gin in the kitchen safe, and sipped at it all day long. There was a brother too—William forgot to ask his name—who had run off to a ship at Savannah and disappeared. He had written once, from Marseille, over a year ago. They thought he must be dead. Only his mother insisted stubbornly that he was fine—that he was hiding from them all in Turkey. “Why there?” William asked and started to add: “Do you even know where it is?”
“He was always an aggravating child. … Sharper than a serpent’s tooth. … I forget the rest.” Mrs. Adams got up. “I think the cat’s come inside.” She slipped out into the kitchen to have another drink.
There was an older sister, married to a railroad engineer. They lived next door, in a neat white house with four red-headed children, and raised fighting cocks in the back yard.
Mr. Adams was a railroad telegrapher, a slight gentle man. He carved bits of soft yellow pine, and the surface of every table and every mantel was covered with the grotesque results of his enterprise. His people had been storekeepers at Mobile before they drifted north during the hard days right after the Civil War. His mild grey eyes, large, luminous, with their look of infinite tenderness, of grief for all things living, never changed. His daughter Lorena had them too.
In two weeks William was engaged. In four weeks he was married and on his way home.
They lived with William’s parents in the old house by the Providence River. They added another wing, and a broad gallery, which Lorena planted with white wisteria. It was finished just in time for the birth of their first child, a girl. They called her Abigail.
Within a year, in the following August, Lorena delivered again, a boy, called William.
He was a strapping child, heavy and fat. Lorena lay in her bed and smiled, her large grey eyes gleamed. “That wasn’t bad at all,” she told her husband. “They get easier all the time. This one was easy.”
Three days later the colored nurse noticed that her eyes glittered too much and too wildly. She felt her cheek, then her neck. Lorena said: “This is a hot day, but in August they always are.” And the nurse smiled, and slipped down the hall to call William’s mother. She went for her son. “The fever,” she said simply. “Fetch the doctor.”
William went; his horse was so worn that he had to leave it and come back in the doctor’s surrey. By then it was almost sunset. Lorena’s skin was dry and rough to the touch; her lips were split and blistered. “It is such a hot day,” she said, “I hope the baby doesn’t get covered with rash.”
She fretted about that. Finally they brought in the child to show her. She opened the cotton blanket and searched all over his body before she would believe that he did not have a heat rash. As the fever rose, she laughed and talked, calling on people William did not recognize. She sang bits of songs too, particularly that one whose title was her own name: Lorena.
They covered her with wet sheets sprinkled with camphor. They gave her the spoons of whiskey and quinine the doctor ordered. They even sent for the Negro voodoo woman. She hung her snakeskin bags in the four corners of the room, and then went outside to the corner of the yard just off the new porch—she stayed there all night, over the little fire she had built in spite of the heat, praying to her gods for them.
The fever lasted through the night and into the next day. William slept in a corner of the room under one of the voodoo bags. His parents went to bed, old people, frightened and afraid. The doctor dozed upright in a chair. Only Lorena seemed happy. In the very early morning when William woke, he found her luminous eyes on him. She was humming gently, and he took a chair and sat by her. He was no longer frantic with fear. That had passed. He was numb with exhaustion; his head was a great ball that bobbed about at the end of his neck. The color of her round smooth face, the pinched look about her nose, and the vague faint smell that rose from the bed—he understood with quiet icy finality.
Lorena waved her hand weakly at invisible people, smiled at them, and kept humming, tunelessly now. All the rest of his life William remembered sitting and watching those great grey eyes, watching the light fade from them, gradually, bit by bit, until he was not sure when it had happened exactly, when it was gone. Until it was gone completely—the humming, the movement, and he sat looking into a pair of open dead eyes. Not grey, not any color, only lightless. He closed them himself.
The doctor still slept, but the colored nurse was coming down the hall as William stepped through the door. He heard the rattling of her starched white skirts; he smelled the odor of sun and hot iron. He noticed these things detachedly, as if they had nothing to do with him. He saw that the nurse was hurrying toward him, her fat black legs pumping under the starched cloth. With a single jerk of his head he motioned her into the room. Then he walked through the hall to the gallery and along its length, noticing as he did the smell of the new boards and the new paint in the hot sun. He crossed the yard and was swinging himself through the rail fence, when he heard the nurse’s sobbing scream, muffled by the walls of the house. William walked through the pasture lot, vaguely aware that behind him other voices answered the nurse and a tangle of sound spilled out across the sun-scorched fields. He climbed the fence on the other side of the pasture and entered the woods. He walked slowly, naming the things that passed before his eyes, naming them to himself as if he had never seen them before. He looked into the sandy ground, mostly bare under the fall of pine needles, and he saw how grainy it was. And he saw the ants and the doodlebugs and the other little things that tunneled through it. He stood for the longest time in front of a dense clump of white titi, studying its shape and its thickness, noticing how the white flowers had given way to the beginnings of yellow berries. He saw that the wild azaleas, past their bloom, looked brown and dry. He moved slowly, as if he were in a park, looking. Looking at the bushes and the flowers he had seen his whole life long. Bayberry, fragrant in the sun, sparkleberry, the poisonous coral bean. Catbriar, where the shrikes stored their prey, white jasmine. He named them to himself silently. And the flowers too—the Cherokee rose, blooming now; the grass pinks, and the gentians; the milkworts and the live-forevers; the railroad vine and the truehearts and the greenfly orchids. He found a fallen pine and he rested on that, sitting quietly so that the squirrels ran down the trees and looked into his face and chattered and screamed at him.
In a while, more than two hours, but less than three, he got up and started back. He walked lightly,
easily, as if his body was no weight to him. He did not feel that he was within it any more.
He came out of the woods and saw the house lying against its green flower-fringed yard. He heard the mourning from the kitchen, the rising and falling wails that had no pattern beyond the movement of the singer’s body. There was a Negro boy sitting on the back porch, a small boy, no more than four. William did not remember seeing him before. I must ask about him, he thought. He must be somebody’s child and I just haven’t noticed him. The child sat perfectly still on the top step, turning his head slightly to follow William as he went past. William nodded to him. The child nodded back.
William went around the house, passing the new wing he’d built for his wife and for his children. The broad gallery was edged by the white wisteria vines Lorena had planted two years before. Those vines had grown and spread; their blooming past, they were covered with feathery leaves. William circled around the house, listening to the heavy tromp of his shoes on the soft sun-baked grass. When he found himself at the front door, he went inside, sniffing the sudden odor of furniture polish. They would be opening the parlors, cleaning them for the wake.
Where are my parents? he asked the maids, and was surprised to find that he hadn’t spoken aloud. They were so busy at their work that they did not turn or notice him.
He found his parents in the dining room. Two old people sitting in the big rockers by the bay window. They were just sitting, looking out through the open window at the slope of the grass down to the orderly green rows of the fields, where the cotton was making. He stood across the dining-room table from them, his thumb rubbing the smooth mahogany surface in little arcs. “I will need the tomb,” he said. “After all.”
His parents had built it, five years before, when they hired a regular tomb builder to come from Mobile. It stood on the highest slope of the Methodist graveyard in Madison City. It was brick, whitewashed, with a curving arch of a roof and a cross on the very top. There were two marble steps, and two urns flanking them, and the smooth unmarked sheet of marble over the front where names would go.
The Keepers of the House Page 2