The Keepers of the House

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The Keepers of the House Page 9

by Shirley Ann Grau


  “You never done it before.”

  “That so,” Margaret agreed.

  The old woman bent her head to cough, holding one hand tight across her mouth so the lipful of snuff wouldn’t get away. The headband gleamed again, white and purple.

  “Where that come from?” Margaret said. “The band.”

  The old woman straightened up and carefully arranged her thin figure in the chair again. You could see her stretching and placing every one of her vertebrae. Finally she settled her spine against the straight wood back and gave a little sigh of relief. Her bare yellow-soled feet had shaken apart during the paroxysm of coughing. Now she brought them together again and placed them properly, heels together, toes with their nails like yellow horns pointing slightly out.

  Margaret waited.

  “Made it,” the old woman said.

  One autumn when she was a little girl they had gotten the clams and the mussels from Dead Man Shoals, a long way to the north. During the following winter they had ground down and polished the shells into beads.

  “Nobody do that any more,” she said aloud.

  They’d forgotten most of the Indian things that had come to them with their blood. Nobody made beads, not even the old people any more. They kept what they had, wore them, but that was all. They probably didn’t remember how to make them any more. And nobody else had learned, none of the younger people at all. The old woman sighed. Even the shoals were gone. Dead Man Shoals, where the river swirled and broadened and the pines were thick on both sides, so thick that it was always dim under the interlocking branches, so thick that nothing could grow in the heavy mat of needles, not even a single blade of grass. At night it was like an enormous bed, without end, one that was soft and sweet-smelling and warm on a gusty fall night.

  “You never been up them hills,” the old woman said. “Never once.”

  “No.”

  The air was cool and light in the summer. Nothing like the steamy denseness of the bottomlands. Even the trees were different. The pines had heavier trunks and longer needles. The sassafras was thicker and better; they always dug the roots there and brought them back for tea and medicine. The hickories were bigger and taller; even the mockernuts promised more. Just before they left for the south, they always gathered hickories and walnuts and beechnuts—cleaned out the woods—after the first hard frost had set their bones to shivering.

  Nobody did that any more. And even the shoals were gone. There was a dam below them now; all that region was flooded and the little sand beach was gone twenty feet or more under the water.

  She sighed, the windy dry sigh of an old old woman. “You give Matt your hat.”

  “I’m going inside,” Margaret said. “I’m going back to bed.”

  The old eyes flickered their answer, old black eyes, hooded like a bird’s.

  “I’ll gig me some frogs tonight,” Margaret said. “I reckon you like ’em enough to eat a leg or two.”

  The hoods dropped and opened.

  “Old woman,” Margaret began. But she forgot the rest and lost interest and instead of standing and trying to remember what it was she had been thinking to say, she turned and went inside. She didn’t unroll her pallet from where it lay neatly placed by the wall; she climbed into the iron bed that stood with three others, filling the room, and fell asleep almost at once.

  She never again slept on a pallet on the floor like the other children. She never had to because she no longer slept at night. She never again woke to see the lumpy quilt-wrapped shapes huddled on the floor among the round iron posts of the three real beds. She slept her days in the comfort of the bed, and spent her nights outside. Nobody bothered her; nobody noticed.

  Only during the coldest nights of the winter she stayed home, when it was way below freezing outside and rain was falling. Then she sat up by the kitchen stove, feeding it little bits of wood, staring into the black iron surface and the red-tinged cracks. Those cold winter nights, all the others got into one bed, all who could get in, body piled on top of body, skinny limb to fat, sucking warmth. The underside of the mattress was lined with newspapers, and between the covers were more newspapers, and every time a child turned or stirred the whole quiet night was full of the sound of moving papers, crackling like a fire.

  There was also the sound of breathing, the sound of moving air, in and out. Quick and rustly like squirrels on a roof. Heavy and slow like a giant dying. Creaky and thin like the turning of a wheel.

  It seemed to Margaret that the room rocked and echoed and shook with the noise. How did I sleep before, she thought, and I couldn’t now. …

  She remembered that winter beds were lumpy things, with always an elbow or an arm, strange bodies pressing together for warmth.

  All through the winter nights she sat at the stove, while hoarfrost crusted like mold on the ground, and the puddle-filled ruts of the road froze solid, just the way the last passing had shaped them. When the sun came up, Margaret left the house quietly. She had found a hollow tree trunk, up the slope about a mile away. Its hollow, which faced toward the south, was partially covered by another fallen tree. In this shelter she built a small fire and kept it going with bits of moss and twigs until the sun had swung up high enough to give some warmth.

  She liked the hours she spent crouched inside the trunk. It was warm, it was alone, and she could listen to the shrunken winter sounds of the woods. She always waited until the steady dripping of the night ice ended, then she stopped feeding her fire and watched it go out. She never once stomped the coals—somewhere in the back of her memory was a warning never to kill a fire on your hearth. Way back, from a story long ago—she did not think about it, did not question or wonder, she merely obeyed. The same way she never put a hat on a bed, nor entered and left a house by anything but the same identical door.

  When her fire was gone, died of itself, she would get up, feeling her knees prick and shiver with their long cramping. She would shake herself and smooth down her hair. And she would go back to Abner Carmichael’s house for something to eat. Most times there was cornbread and drippings and sorghum syrup, thin and stale. Sometimes there would be fatback or cold bacon. And sometimes there wouldn’t be anything. Specially towards the first of spring, when the pantry shelves were stripped bare, and the bottom of the meal sack squirmed with weevils. Margaret did not mind—she was not hungry—and only children fretted when they found nothing to eat until dinner. Margaret did not really care about food. What she wanted most, she now had. Those mornings, the bed and the room were hers. The empty bed, its lumpy moss-filled mattress resting on old-fashioned rope slings, its heap of quilts faded muted splotches of bumpy color. There were no pillows, and the bed smelled faintly of kerosene, with which it was sprinkled every month, against vermin. It smelled of the many bodies that had lain on its bare striped ticking, the stale sweet smell of old sweat and sex. Margaret curled into it, sleeping hard and without the annoyance of dreams.

  ALONG toward the end of that first winter, her great-grandmother was taken sick, struck down in her chair on the porch—in the thin pale sun this time—so that her head dropped to her chest and her wad of snuff fell out of her lips with a little wet plop on the bare boards of the floor. They moved her inside, her daughters and granddaughters, and sent children running in all directions to tell the men at their work about it. They brought her into the bedroom, an old woman, shriveled red-brown body, small and dry like a husk, dying by inches. Her eyes were open but they weren’t seeing; even when it got dark and they lit a lamp close by her head she didn’t turn toward it, or even blink at its yellow shine. Her shriveled flat old chest rose and fell, shuddering each time in a deep rasping snore.

  Margaret was asleep when they carried her great-grandmother in and laid her down in the narrow bed she had occupied all her old life. Margaret woke to the sound of rattling breathing and hushed whispering and quiet feet scurrying over the boards. She rolled out hastily and went into the kitchen. She stayed there, slumped sleepily in a corner, wa
tching, while the evening dark deepened, and the stars finally began to come out, clear and frosty.

  The first of the old woman’s children and grandchildren and relatives began arriving: they crowded the porch until the beams sagged. When it was too chill to stay out there, they jammed themselves into the kitchen, talking in whispers, passing a gallon jug of corn likker from mouth to mouth. The house shook and groaned under their weight.

  In a bit, the preacher drove up, a short heavy man, whose name was Robert Stokes. They all hushed and listened to the short mutterings of prayer in the bedroom, giving responses themselves now and then. When Robert Stokes came out and took his place at the table, the muffled conversations began again. Since he was the preacher, they gave him his whiskey mixed with water in one of the few glasses they had. He waited with them, death-watching with them, talking crops and markets and animals with the men. His round black head nodded, solemnly sleepy. He was as tired as any of them, he farmed like them, and preached and watched in his spare time. He wasn’t young, everybody remembered him always being there, preaching on Sunday mornings, and visiting the sick and the dying every hour of the night. It had been forty years past that he and his bride built their first house. Not that it was a house really, it was just a lean-to against some big pines, but it was warm and dry and enough for them, and it would do until they got around to building something more. They had the spot picked already, stones marking the ground where the foundations would be. It was a nice spot, on a little rise with two big pecan trees and a spreading dogwood that turned sparkling every March, like moonlight. It was four years before they got to do anything, and then they used the old-fashioned mud-and-moss between lathes. Their grandfathers built houses like that; they brought the method with them when they spread north from the Gulf coast, slaves on the run maybe, or hungry freemen. There had even once been a special name for the way it was done, but that word was long forgotten.

  Robert Stokes built his house that way, room after room, year after year.

  He’d been lucky in his wife too. He’d taken a young skinny girl, an orphan living in her cousin’s house and not welcome there. Kettle cousins, people called them. They got to do most of the work and to lick the kettle when everybody else was done. She couldn’t have been more than thirteen when they married; he himself was only fifteen, but he had reached his full height: he had the same square dumpy figure. His skinny small girl grew after her marriage, until she stood almost six feet tall. She had only sons and she bore them—all of them—alone. It did not occur to her to have a woman stay with her as her time approached. Maybe she thought there was no one to ask. The first time she was weeding her garden, seeing that the bugs did not eat up the tomatoes and fastening down the stakes of the beans, when the ammonia-smelling water spurted down her legs and stained the ground by her bare feet. With the first quiver of her belly muscles straining, she went back to the lean-to, stood her hoe carefully against the wall. Inside she spread a quilt on the floor and squatted, shaking with the spasms and panting with relief in between. When her husband came home that evening, late because he worked as long as there was light in the sky, the baby was sucking, the bloody quilt was folded away in the corner.

  Even at her present age, she still worked the fields with her husband and her five living sons. Robert Stokes was a lucky man, the Lord had been good to him. He was saying so as he sat at the kitchen table with the family of a dying old woman. He had a deep voice, best voice in the county, and the words of praise for his lot and for the soul of the old woman struggling to leave her body blended together.

  “And you hear that now,” he said abruptly. They all went silent, listening. Margaret heard nothing but the wind and the stamping and rattling of the tethered mules on the frozen ground. He pointed up to the roof. “Jesus and his angels waiting to carry off the soul of our sister.” Everybody looked up, at the soot-stained and water-streaked ceiling. Margaret glanced out the window into the dark cold winter sky. “You hear their wings, children,” the preacher said. “Yes, Lord,” somebody answered, and they all fell silent, listening again. This time there were two great strangled snores from the dying woman. They dropped their eyes, cleared their throats, and moved about. Some went on the porch, some fetched the likker jug.

  As the crowd shifted and parted, the preacher saw Margaret standing by the corner window, where she had been staring into the sky, looking for the brushing wings. “I don’t know you, child,” he said kindly. “I ain’t never seen you before for all that you look familiar to my eyes.”

  Somebody bent down and whispered into his ear: “It’s nothing but Sara’s baby, the only one she had.”

  “Jesus save us,” he said, and looked at her again. This time with curiosity. Margaret stood perfectly still, knowing that he was searching her face and body for some sign of white blood. She stared her great brown eyes directly into his small black ones, shrewd and bright in the folds of his fat face. She stared, daring him to ask her more, daring him to say anything. … She held her breath.

  He looked away. Other bodies slipped between them, people moved about, and he disappeared.

  Margaret began to breathe again. But now the air in the room had gotten too hot for her, it was too full of the smell of whiskey-laden breaths. She had to go outside. She pushed her way through the room, using her elbows.

  The night was very cold. The ground glistened with frost. It was marked like snow, with footprints going off in one direction to the privy, in the other around the yard to the small barn where the visitors’ mules were sheltered. Margaret stared at the two trails, visible in the dim kerosene light from the window, and wondered where she could go. It was too cold for her hollow tree; even with a fire she was sure to have frostbite by morning. Even the porch was too cold. The snuffling snort of a mule decided her. She went to the barn. It was jammed with animals, but she found an empty feeding trough and climbed in. Here, the steamy reeking air was passably warm—in spite of the cracks and holes in the walls—and Margaret settled down to study the watery dark eyes and the slope of the varicolored flanks that surrounded her. The sharp heavy odor was a kind of anesthetic, and she slept with her eyes open, staring at the pattern of light and dark, lulled by the animals’ breathing and their occasional shuffling.

  She was aware that time was passing, but she could not see out to gauge the movement of the stars. She heard nothing and noticed nothing until the first shriek from the house.

  The animals stirred slightly and backed, their rope halters creaking. There was a second cry, the long descending wail of mourning. The old woman was dead.

  Margaret settled back. No need to go in, just an old woman who had died, worn out with the revolving years. No need at all. … Then all of a sudden in the dark empty space over the back of the big grey mule that belonged to her cousin Zelda, Margaret saw her great-grandmother. Saw her clearly, just as she used to sit on the porch—shawl around her shoulders, band around her head. Her blackbird eyes under the folds of brown skin glared out, angry as always. She lifted her hand, the one that had the jagged scar of a ceremonial magic cut across the back, and she beckoned.

  Margaret stared at the hand, at the design of the scar, at the veins raised like vines on a wall, at the long fingernails, thick and yellow as horn.

  “Come into the house,” she told Margaret.

  Her voice was strong and loud just the way it had been before. But that, Margaret thought, would be because she wasn’t more than a minute or so dead, and her soul hadn’t had time to fade off, to go wherever it was that dead souls went, off somewhere in the pine hills to the north, where people said they saw them sometimes on warm summer nights, walking around, taking the breeze as if they were alive.

  “Plenty people in the house,” Margaret told her, “you see that kitchen, there isn’t a foot of open space. And your brother’s family from over Tchefuncta Creek that still got to get here.”

  The ghost turned her head, looking over her shoulder, back at the house. The purple and
white beads of her headband winked.

  “You see,” Margaret said. “I been telling you.”

  The head swung back, and the eyes fastened on her again. “Come to the house,” it said, “child of my daughter’s daughter. My flesh and blood.”

  She slipped lower then and faded into the grey of the mule’s flank.

  Margaret stared at the place where she had been, feeling the tug of the blood in her veins, feeling it pull her out of the stable into the house. The old woman’s blood bringing her back into the family group in the kitchen.

  Grudgingly Margaret crossed the empty yard, swept clean by a twig broom each week, and frozen now so that it crackled beneath her feet. “Only half my blood,” she said aloud into the night.

  “Be with my blood,” her great-grandmother’s voice said emphatically though fainter this time. “Go.”

  Margaret looked up, into the clear, star-freckled night. “Is that where you are,” she asked, “up there?”

  She stood and squinted into the depths trying to make out the figure of her great-grandmother drawing farther and farther off, dodging her way among the stars.

  Margaret sighed and nodded after her and did her bidding. She went into the house.

  The bedroom was noisy and bustling now—Margaret glanced through the door. All the oldest women had crowded themselves into the narrow spaces between the beds to begin the waking. They had brought straight wood chairs with them, lined them up close as possible there. Now they were sitting straight-backed in those close-packed rows, hands folded across their chests, rocking their bodies back and forth from the waist, mourning. It was a descending long nasal wail, repeated over and over again, each one exactly like the one before. It was not a hymn. It had no tune; it did not even have any rhythm. No two voices were together. It was only a raggedy picket line of sound to keep the evil spirits away from the dead.

  Three younger women were bent over the bed, washing and preparing the body, putting half-dollars on the eyes. They were singing a familiar hymn: “Will There Be Any Stars in My Crown.” They were singing more softly and they kept losing the melody in the noise of the mourners, but they just picked it up again and went on.

 

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