Margaret turned back to the kitchen. A few people were leaving—to carry the news—so the room was no longer unbearably full. Robert Stokes still sat at the table, alone now. All the other wooden chairs had been taken into the bedroom for the mourners, and only the preacher was left his. The men squatted on the floor, some hunkered down in the middle, others resting their backs against the walls, talking quietly or just staring out into the center of the room. The children were propped in the corners, sound asleep; now and then one cried or whimpered. The women—all those who weren’t actually waking in the bedroom—were jammed into the far corner around the wood range. Pots clattered on the iron top and the sweet odor of squirrel stew mushroomed up with the steam.
All during the following day they came, from twenty-five miles around, the old woman’s descendants, jolting along behind the patient rumps of their mules. The house floors sagged and groaned under their weight. The hams and the cold joints and the fowls they brought with them crowded the shady north corner of the porch, hung there out of the way of raiding varmints. The old woman had been washed and laid out in her plain pinewood coffin. Candles stuck in blue bottles were burning in a triangle at her head.
It was so noisy, Margaret thought as she huddled in the farthest corner of the kitchen, it was so very very noisy.
She slept in the barn that night, patiently waiting for the end. In the morning, she stood on the porch in the little pool of cold winter sunlight and waited while they nailed closed the coffin, and carried it outside to the wagon for the five-mile trip to the cemetery.
There was a band now, a five-piece band. They looked pretty tired because they had been playing at a dance over in Mill River, but they took a few quick drinks and swung into place behind the wagon. Their feet crunched on the frozen mud and the mules snorted and grumbled, but they played their saddest marches: “Garlands of Flowers” and “Westlawn Dirge.” The trombone and the trumpets lifted clear and sad in the cold morning air, the drums gave a slow dull beat. Everybody walked the whole way along the rutted road. The men had gone out the day before and cut pine branches and spread them across the muddiest parts so the wagon with the coffin and the band and the first of the line of marchers got across dry-shod. But the branches sank farther and farther into the mud, and by the time the end of the procession came, the puddles were as deep as before, only now they had bits of twig and broken stalks of pine sticking up in them. Those in the last of the line had to make their own way, had to jump across or clamber up the low slopes on each side, slipping and sliding on the icy rocks.
Margaret was among the last, with the smallest of the children who could walk on their own. She hitched up her skirts and jumped. The children chattered and clambered around. And all this time the drum kept a steady funeral beat.
The graveyard was only partially fenced by a single strand of barbed wire, but no animals ever wandered in. Under the tall thick pines, no bushes and practically no grass grew. The sandy stretch stayed clean and open with only the gentle drift of pine needles across it. There had been no burials for quite a while; the graves had all sunk into gentle rises, smoothed by the rain. Most had no headstones; a few still had their wooden ones, cut into the rough outline of an hourglass—they would soon fall away. Two or three had been covered with cement poured into wood molds. In the cement, under a pane of glass, was a colored picture of the dead. Margaret remembered one: a young man standing stiffly, hand in coat. A wedding picture for a grave. …
It would be over there, the east corner, Margaret thought. I don’t have to see, I know it’s there, with the name and date scratched under it. … But nobody does that any more.
All they did now was outline the grave with white stones, set that wood hourglass marker at the head, and put the dead gifts on the top. …
Every grave had them. Cups, and glasses turned purple by the sun, and china animals—dogs and cats, and a broody hen or two. And plates. Lots of plates. Most of these stood on two-inch-high spires of sandy mud, jutting out like mushrooms from the grave. The rain had given them that form, and the plates that sat on that thin rain-carved stem were called Death’s Cups. If you touched one, old Death himself would come riding after you on his white horse with a long tail that rattled in the wind because it was made of little finger bones. …
There was a black smear around the open grave. To lighten their work, to thaw the first inches of ground, the diggers had built fires there. They had not watched too carefully because the flames had left their bounds, spread through the strand of barbed wire, and run up a young pine tree. Soot and ash lifted and hung in the air as the tramping feet passed through.
The band became silent, only the drum thudded slowly. Margaret felt her skin quiver across the back of her neck. There were the grunts of men bearing the coffin and the squeak of ropes. Abruptly the drum stopped.
For a moment there wasn’t even a wind. Then there was a scuffle at the grave and the wailing began again—a dozen or more voices this time, high-pitched, echoing off the tallest of the pines, shaking the buck vines that twisted high overhead. Somebody had jumped into the grave and they were pulling them out. Even women who did not know how to wail the way the old ones did were screaming softly now, with a slow breath-like rhythm. The preacher began a proper hymn as he picked up a handful of mud. He dropped it into the grave, letting the sandy grains trickle between his fingers like sugar, savoring the feel of the earth. He moved aside, gesturing with a swing of his arm. Then there was shuffling as everyone pressed in to drop other handfuls on the pine boards. “Jesus save, Jesus save,” the preacher sang at the top of his fine voice. Margaret noticed a couple of black crows circling high up in the clear sky, watching. What do they think? she wondered. Whatever do they think?
A couple of men picked up shovels, and the dirt filled back in with a rush, whispering as it went. The preacher finished his singing and said something, briefly and softly. Margaret did not listen; his grave speeches were all the same. Then everybody shook hands, and kissed cheeks. The oldest women and the musicians got in the wagon for the ride back. The trace chains clanked and the mules plodded out. As they passed, Margaret noticed that Elfetha Harris, the youngest of the dead woman’s granddaughters, was covered with mud. She had jumped into the grave. Now she sat wiping her eyes, looking less and less sad with each turn of the wheels of the wagon. She always jumped in, Margaret remembered. When her husband died, and her sister, and her own child that had been born a cripple, and her husband’s father—it was part of every funeral, Margaret thought.
They started the walk home. The short winter sun, deep in the south, showed afternoon. The rutted stone-littered road climbed a rise, narrowing as the woods darkened and pressed in at the crest. It was there, lurking in the darkness of a grove of pecan, sweet gum, and persimmon trees that Margaret saw her great-grandmother again. She beckoned but Margaret did not stop. She beckoned again, and Margaret told her: “Quit bothering me. You got your grave to lie in.” The ghost stood stock still and watched her. Margaret said: “We threw in the mud and I threw in my handful and we covered you up and you got to stay there.”
“Flesh and blood,” the ghost mourned.
“I buried my blood with you,” Margaret said recklessly. “I’m using only the other half now.”
The ghost didn’t answer, just got fainter against the bare tree trunks.
“Go back to your grave,” Margaret said, “and quit pestering me.”
She turned and walked on, hearing nothing from the trees on top of the hill behind her, not even the stirring of a breeze.
The rest of the funeral lasted for the next three days, but then funerals for the oldest people usually did. It was as if the old people had left more to mourn, despite it being in the course of things that they should die. Infants and children were buried quickly and it was all over.
Margaret wondered about that. A mother mourned a child, for sure, and a father too. And maybe a brother or a sister, but not many more. It seemed strange … when the
y were the ones who weren’t supposed to die.
Margaret shrugged. Things came in a certain form and that was all there was to it. …
She had gone for a walk, leaving the crowded house and the noisy people. She had walked straight north, climbing the slopes until she got to the open stretches of clear pine and hickory, vineless and brambleless.
There was another funny thing about funerals, she thought. They let you see people you wouldn’t otherwise see one year to the next … people who only came for important funerals. Cousin Mary’s family, for instance, from over Twin Fawns way. That was twenty-five miles of bad roads straight north, toward the rising hills. But they were cousins, first and second and third, and so on, and they had a duty. So they came, just the way they had this time. And there were always new people with them, not counting the babies. Men who’d gone North to work and come back, not finding a job or not liking the living there. Families who’d been in Mobile and had finally come home, cash in the sock. New wives and husbands that the cousins had gathered.
This time there were five people she had never seen before. There was Jack Tobias and his wife Kate. They came back from Cincinnati and went to farming again with his father because cotton was bringing near a dollar a pound and it was worth your work. (Margaret recognized them easily: Tobiases all looked alike.) There was Grover Kent too—she remembered him as the boy who’d bummed his way over to Port Gibson and joined up with a circus there. He’d come back with a hernia that gurgled and bulged when he took off his truss—he did that to make the children laugh. And there was Roger Ellis, a short thin man who’d married Elfetha Harris’s widowed daughter. He’d broken his hip working at a gin in Memphis two years before and it mended crooked. He was the one carried a banjo with him. Could he play it now? …
Margaret shrugged. It was getting cold and she turned to walk back.
Roger Ellis was sitting on the porch when Margaret got home, in the warm corner where the thin sun reached, the same corner where the old woman was struck dead. Nobody had dared to go there before. Like there was a fence around it, Margaret thought. But now there was this little man, grey-haired, with a tiny mustache, chair tipped back against the wall, playing his banjo. He was singing too, very softly, an old blues. Margaret didn’t know its name, if it had one, but she recognized the one line that repeated in it, and she liked its soft sad sound: long lonesome home. She stopped on the edge of the porch by the steps and listened. She shivered and it wasn’t so much from the cold as from the sad turn of the melody: “Who chop you cotton when I’m gone?”
One or two people looked out the door, some came on the porch to listen to him.
“Roll me a pallet on your floor, oh yes.
I’m leaving for that long lonesome home.”
Margaret shivered again. She saw it all. The generations of weeping that had been done, the generations of weeping that were to come. She could feel it all, feel the pulse and the heartbeat in the banjo chords and in the gentle light voice that sang across them. “Going where those chilly winds don’t blow, oh yes.”
Margaret felt herself grow big and bigger until she stood way above the house. So tall she could look down the chimney and see the soot-blackened inside. So tall she could look down on the pine trees growing at the very top of the ridge that sheltered the house from the north. So tall that she could see way up and down the river, following it in its twists and turns, through its willows and its birches. Following it southward, looking down on even the huge river birches and the water oaks, following it all the way to the Gulf. … She could feel too, great like her size. She could feel the earth move under her feet, breathing slowly as it passed from season to season. She could hear the sound the stars made in their rounds, as they passed by her hair.
Her body grew great and full, and she thought, I’ll never be put in a box and lowered into the earth. I’ll never grow old and watch the veins on my hands begin to work their way out of my skin. … It was funny, now, the way all the inner workings of old people moved to the outside. Their muscles and their sinews got hard and ropy and hung on the outside of their skins. Their veins rose up, so where you hadn’t been able to see them before you could see them now. There were little blue ones that appeared on the forehead, jagged like a saw blade, where the skin had once been smooth. There were others like cords wrapping their way across the backs of hands, and along legs. And pulses turned up where they never had been before. The throat one now, you didn’t even know it was there, until one day you saw it, naked and exposed, pumping your blood for everybody to see. … I won’t be like that, Margaret thought. I won’t ever get old and I won’t ever die. I couldn’t. …
She saw that the women had come out of the kitchen to listen to the singing. They crowded out and stood in a raggedy line across the porch, all of them wiping their damp or greasy hands on their aprons. They were all wearing print dresses, their best ones, the ones kept specially for funerals and weddings.
Those always come together, Margaret thought. Why would that be? One was life and one was death and nothing could be more different, but they always seem to fall together. … There was Cousin Hilda now, and the youngest of Robert Stokes’s boys. They had slipped out to the barn just last night, and Margaret had huddled back and pretended she wasn’t there and pretended that she hadn’t seen or heard. It was then, in the dark ammonia-clouded barn, that she felt the first real tug of longing, and way back in her mind she wished that she had been Hilda. It was the tug, the pull, the first time. … She cursed herself and men, and hated her body for what it would do to her. … She ached all over with the effort and the struggle. And in the morning she felt like she had chopped cotton for days. …
Margaret looked at Hilda now, standing on the porch among the women, and she saw how slight and shapely her figure was, even under the two long raggedy sweaters. How she carried her hands in front of her, a gentle manner, almost pleading. How soft and unmarked her face was in the harsh winter daylight. Except for the dark circles and the sleepy eyes.
Margaret glanced down at her own hard angular body. Fit for the woodlot or the fields. Clumsy and out of place in a kitchen. With a man. She turned away, near to crying.
The following day people began leaving, the Twin Fawns group first, because they had the longest way. Margaret stood in the littered, rutted yard and watched them load up.
Roger Ellis, who was driving one of the two wagons—a bright blue one with a small young mule in the shafts—looked down suddenly, directly at her. “Morning.”
She did not answer. The mule twitched its ears at the circling deer flies.
“You favor you mammy,” he said.
“Might be,” she said.
“She was a right pretty woman.”
Margaret felt herself blushing with pleasure and hated it. “I got no mammy,” she said. “Leastways, I always heard I took after my daddy.”
She spun on her heel and went into the house, carrying her tall broad body defiantly.
THE short hard winter passed. Fine early-spring rains began, light delicate ones like fog or smoke, that dusted the surfaces of houses and trees and earth—the gentle ones. The sun shone fitfully, the sky was an even light grey, and the ground warmed every hour. The farmers went out and tested it, laying their hands flat on it, seeing whether it gave or took away heat. It was only a thing to do. They knew before they started that the warmth of the ground would pass into their hands. They could almost feel the earth begin to breathe. Those whose fields were high began to break for their cotton and peas and corn. People in the bottomlands waited for the floods to come, to cover their fields with rich black silt brought down from the north. For them, early spring was a time of rest, almost like the winter had been. It was the last bit of slack they would have until the end of summer, those short weeks when the cotton was making and there was nothing to do but wait for it.
Margaret no longer huddled in her hollow tree. She could walk anywhere, warm and comfortable now. She counted off the sign
s of spring as they passed in front of her eyes: the grass pinks were blooming up in the damp pine woods. Other small nameless pink flowers showed in the bottom of the meadows, and in the deeper bogs pitcher plants raised their greenish heads in search of flies. The swamp azalea appeared, white and pink. And the flame azalea, with tiny flowers like glowing coals. And the sweet shrub, bubby blossoms, whose dark flower was the color of a woman’s nipples.
Margaret counted the mild days, waiting. She saw the river, which had been rising steadily all the last month, top its low bluffs and inch across the land. Finally, she saw the thick heavy clouds boil over the horizon and the heavy hail-spotted rains begin. These hard falls—tempests, old people called them—sent the creeks boiling white along their courses, ripping up trees and rolling rocks, tumbling along the drowned bodies of animals under a thick lightning-streaked black sky.
Margaret helped her family move out of the house, load everything on wagons, cover them with torn tarpaulins, mold-spotted, and drive them away. The crates of chickens and the first of the spring calves riding, the stock driven on behind. The squeals of the bound calves and the nervous calling of the cows softened and blended in the steady falling rain.
Margaret waited until last, until Abner Carmichael was ready to leave. He looked over the house carefully, checked the cables that anchored it to the nearest trees. He checked his small barn too. He had knocked almost all the lower planks out of those walls and tied them securely to the rafters. The flood water would flow directly through—across the dirt floor—and unless some very large object smashed into it, the building would stand.
Margaret watched him finish and turn to leave. The water was already at the lower side of the dooryard and this was about as late as they could get mules and wagons out. She watched his grizzled head look from one side to the other, as he plodded away, putting his heels down hard against the ground, as old men will.
The Keepers of the House Page 10