He went to bed. And only the aching tiredness of his muscles pushed him to sleep. He kept wanting to stay awake and listen. To be sure she had finished in the kitchen and come safely upstairs to bed.
It was Sunday—its bright warmth carried an edge of winter in the yellow sun and the hard blue of the sky. The fields were deserted and so was the dirt road. Ramona came plodding along early in the morning and fixed dinner and left it on the back of the range. She was the last person to pass by. Sundays were like that, empty. No one moved about. Some of them—the good people—had been to church and were now home resting after their heavy Sunday dinners. They sat on their sunny porches in big cane rockers, bobbing gently to ease the distention of their bellies, on the porch boards beside them were sweating highball glasses with their slivers of ice.
And the other people, well, some of them would still be out on Saturday-night hunts, shacked up back in the woods, beside a fire, drinking corn likker straight from the jug. And some others would be fishing, dozing over their poles among the willows.
William Howland sat alone on his front porch and mended traces, a glass of bourbon and water by his side. When he had finished with them, he got out his guns and his cleaning rags and brushes and went over them carefully. He even took down the old long rifle from the kitchen wall, the one that had belonged to his great-great-grandfather who’d drifted down from the Tennessee hills with it over his shoulder. William Howland always kept it clear and clean and oiled. He didn’t dare fire it. He didn’t have the ball and he wasn’t sure of the charge and he didn’t believe the old barrel would hold together anyway. But he kept it clean just the same.
When he finished that—and it was just like any other Sunday—it was time to go down for the milking. Oliver Brandon was alone at the barn—nobody else around on a Sunday. William helped whenever he wasn’t going out to supper. He enjoyed it, even the three-times-a-day milking schedule of full summer. He liked the smell of the cow’s flanks pressing against his cheek. He liked the way the teats felt under his hand, the way the milk pulsed under his fingers, he liked the feeling that his hands had a life apart from his body. When he was through in the barn, he got himself supper in the kitchen, walking up and down, prowling around among the cupboards.
This particular Sunday he found a mouse’s nest in the large china tureen at the top of the deepest closet. (He remembered the tureen, though it hadn’t been on a table since his mother was alive and only rarely then. It belonged to the Lowestoft service his Creole grandmother brought with her as a bride.) He clapped the cover on and carried nest and mice to the back yard and flung them out. As he came back inside, he heard the wooshing swoop of an owl’s wings, and he nodded to himself, satisfied. He hated animals and vermin in the house. He would have to talk to Ramona, he thought. She was getting unusually careless.
He went into the living room, and under the light of the gooseneck lamp he began the newspapers and the magazines he had been too tired to read during the week. He still kept glass and bottle close at hand, and as usual at Sunday bedtime, he was quite drunk. He had been drinking steadily most of the day.
He put down the last magazine, snapped off the lamp, picked up the liquor, and began his trip upstairs in the dark. He did not need a light. He knew the rooms so well. No piece of furniture had been shifted in all the years he had been living here alone. And almost none had been shifted since the time his parents were alive. …
His parents. He stopped for a minute and thought about them, the way he hadn’t for years.
He stood in the dark hall and looked across the living room to the bright squares of moonlit windows. It seemed he could see them sitting in the humps of maple rocking chairs by the big fireplace.
They always had sat there. … His mother. Crocheting by the hour, filling all the tables with centerpieces, all the beds with spreads. There were even crocheted curtains at the bathroom window. His mother had stopped everything else and done them especially for that room, when they first got inside plumbing. She crocheted capes and gowns for all the babies in the county, white and black—and William smiled to himself in the dark—the same pattern over and over, only the ones for black babies did not have the three tiny ribbon bows stitched on top. … William took another swallow from his glass. Poor old lady, he thought, with everything hanging on those three bows of ribbon. You had them. … You did not. … And that was your whole place in life.
William was not the first to notice the significance of the ribbons. His father pointed it out to him one day, shortly before he went off to Atlanta to read for the law. “Damn silly thing, but just plain like her. … And you was to tell her, she’d throw a fit right at you.” His father chuckled, contentedly. “Should have your women spoiled,” he told his son. “Leastways Howland women is always spoiled.” It had been his mark of manhood, his wife’s soprano giggles, her great penchant for collecting cut-glass and rose-flowered Haviland china. …
William turned away from the dark parlor. But across the hall, on the other side, the door to the dining room was open, and he saw his parents again, in there. Saw them sitting in the little bay window, where plants used to be kept but which was bare and empty and dusty now. They were sitting right where they had been the day of his wife’s death, that afternoon when he had come and told them he would need to have the tomb. The laughter was gone; they were two old people, shivering, paralyzed with fear.
And it ends like that, William thought. The gaiety and the pride in fear and death.
William closed the dining-room door, shutting them in there. He would work again tomorrow and be too tired for such thoughts.
He began his slow drunken climb up the steps. He dragged his hand heavily along the rail, and his fingers passed over the charred spot that dated from his great-grandfather’s time. One evening bandits came upon the house (there were a lot of them on the trace at that time). They caught and killed the youngest daughter—found her asleep in bed, in the room that was now the kitchen—kicked her to death on the brick floor. They lit a bonfire in the center of the big main hall, and were cooking their supper when that William Howland and his four grown sons and their slaves came back. The old man stayed behind to put out the fire and tend the broken body of his youngest. The rest of them drove the robbers into the cane-brake in the dark and killed them there, one by one as they wallowed hip deep in the swamp. … The railing had been one of the things that the fire had charred. They kept it to remember by. Generation after generation. When they enlarged the house, they added the old railing to the new stairway. … To remember by. …
Killing and death, William thought as he rubbed his fingers across the charred rail, those were the things you set yourself up to remember. And the others went to their graves unmarked.
He’d told Abigail the stories, all the stories he knew. She’d listened of course, but how much would she remember? Women never took those things too seriously. His sister Annie now, she hadn’t remembered, hadn’t even tried. She’d simply forgotten everything before the time she married and moved to Atlanta. Even the long days of their childhood. How they’d hunted tupelo honey and found the bobcat’s young in an old eagle’s nest. …
His lips were numb. He must have had more to drink than he thought. He put his knees firmly into the business of lifting him upstairs.
Sometimes he felt the age of the house, felt the people who had lived in it peer over his shoulder, wondering and watching what he was doing. He felt them now, like mice in the walls, voiceless and rustling. It seemed to him too—tonight especially—that he could hear their breathing, all of them, dozens of them, breathing together, deep and steady, the way they had when they were alive. …
He dropped down on the bed, not bothering to take off his clothes. And he chuckled to himself. He had been listening to his own rasping breath. No more.
He rested a few minutes, before he crooked one leg and pulled off the heavy boot and tossed it into the far corner of the room. It made so much noise that he stopped and l
istened, startled.
He was thinking about the other boot when Margaret came in.
He’d left his door open. By the moon which slanted bright and low through his east windows, he noticed her standing just inside the room. She was wearing a nightgown of a familiar flowered material, high neck and long sleeves, a bit like a choir gown, he thought.
“I scare you with that noise?” He was surprised at the huskiness of his voice.
“I can take the other one off,” she said. And she did, standing it carefully by the side of the bed.
“If you wasn’t so young,” he said, “I’d offer you a drink.”
“What you read down in the parlor?”
“Huh?” he said. “The papers.”
She sat on the side of the bed and the moonlight picked out the pattern of her nightgown. He recognized it. “That’s what you were sewing on, the other day in the kitchen.”
“I found it,” she said.
“It was right clever of you,” he said. “Reach me my drink, child.”
She handed him the glass. He shook his head, and reached across her to get the bottle. His unsteady hand brushed her breast. It wasn’t until the hand had come back with the bottle in it that he realized her nipple was hard and erect.
He put the bottle down on the floor beside the bed carefully, in case he should want it later.
He wondered if she’d been waiting all these nights to come because she hadn’t had a nightgown. He started to ask her. But there was something—she had her hair pinned back and she was studying her own hands—that changed his mind. She seemed small and fragile again, and for the first time in his life he wanted to hit a woman. It was the bend of the neck that did it. It was so exposed and patient.
She bore him five children, all told. Three of them lived, two girls and a boy.
ABIGAIL
I CAME TEN YEARS later, my mother and I. The two Abigails. Mrs. Abigail Howland Mason and Miss Abigail Howland Mason. Coming back home.
We came on the overnight train from Lexington, Virginia, to Atlanta, and we had to wait around a couple of hours there. For some reason or other—I suppose she just felt too awful—my mother hadn’t told her Aunt Annie, so there was nobody to meet us. It was just us two waiting in the station, which was stifling in the summer heat, just two of us sitting on the hard benches not far from the stand where a man sold oranges and newspapers.
Like I said, we had to wait around for a couple or three hours for the local—Number 8—to Madison City. You could see that waiting was hard on my mother. You could see her getting tireder and tireder. I guess she hadn’t slept very much on the Pullman the night before, and it even looked like she wouldn’t make it down the long flight of steps to the tracks. But once we got on and settled in our seats—in the dirty coaches that still carried spittoons in the far corners of them, where luggage was always falling out of the sagging racks high over your head—she took off her hat and put her head back and dozed a bit.
I hung out the open windows and chattered to myself. First I talked about getting my head cut off by passing poles and an occasional boxcar on a siding. Then I tried to see how much I could remember from the last time I came this way. (We had visited my grandfather every Christmas since I was old enough to travel.)
“I came here when I was three months old,” I told a cotton field full of pinkish blooms.
I have been here all along, the field told me back.
“But I remember more.” And to prove it I chanted out the names of towns along the way.
Actually, I didn’t remember much more than the string of names. Because a year is a long time at eight and from one to the next was an immense distance. I couldn’t even have told you what my grandfather looked like.
I suppose my talking bothered her, because my mother opened her eyes and patted the bun of hair at the nape of her neck back into place and looked at her watch and looked out the window and sent me down the car to ask the conductor exactly where we were. We were then three and a half hours late and we got steadily later. It annoyed my mother, though she should have known better. That train was always late. There was some trouble with a switch just out of Opelika, and then we waited for a fast freight. There was trouble with a hot box that took an hour to fix. And the signals were wrong for the bridge crossing over the Red River.
All she said to me finally was: “Please, child … you’ll have to be good if I’m to travel with you alone.”
I fell silent after that, remembering all the things I had been told. That my mother wasn’t well, that I must not disturb her. That my father was gone, for years anyhow, and I must help her just as he had.
When we got near our stop, the conductor woke my mother. “Thank you, Mr. Edwards,” she said. He took our baggage and piled it ready on the platform. When we felt the grating as the brakes began to take hold, he shook hands with my mother. “I am right proud to have Will Howland’s daughter home again.”
She smiled at him. She wasn’t a pretty woman, but she always looked radiant when she smiled. “I’ve been gone too long, Mr. Edwards,” she said, “but I’ll be staying now.”
Then the train stopped and I found I did recognize my grandfather, after all.
Right then and there the first part of my life ended. And the second began. Sometimes as the years passed, the hot dusty country years, I found myself thinking back to the first part, to the smooth green college town. And wondering if it had happened at all. I remembered so little. The clean light mountain air, evenings when your nose would just shiver with the sparkle in it. The smooth roll of the campus and the columned buildings. My father walking off to teach his class in the mornings, leaving a thin line of pipe smoke behind. The way leaves fell in the fall until there were great bright heaps on the ground (they don’t do that this far south). I remember a small town, all brick and narrow streets, shabby-looking. It had been burned in ’63 when the whole Valley was fired. There was only one house left standing, way on top of the highest hill in town. Not a pretty house—it was too squat for its row of white columns—but a real old one. It had been used as headquarters during the war because of its great view. They were supposed to burn it when they left, but they must have forgotten. … There was also a river, down between sharp banks, a trash-littered river. I saw them pull a body from it one day, when I had gone to fetch something from the grocery. A couple of fishermen dragged it out, one by an arm, one by a leg. I remember it was a Negro, I saw the dark skin clearly, and it was naked.
I remember too that my parents weren’t getting along. You could feel how stiff they were to each other sometimes. Often as I lay in bed, I’d hear their angry voices through the closed doors. And her eyes were red for days on end.
Maybe that was the reason my father was so anxious to go back to England when the war started in 1939. I remember him going around quoting Rupert Brooke over and over to my mother, until she dabbed at her eyes openly. It was about going to meet Armageddon.
He went of course. The week before he left there was a great deal of partying—for him, I guess. I had never known them to go out so much. Then he was gone, and my mother, silent and red-eyed again, went about the business of moving home to her father.
Once I was back in Madison City, it seemed I’d never been away—the flat cotton fields, the tangled pine uplands, the stretching swamps were home. I had no personal memory of the place—not very much anyway, but everybody assumed that I would have an atavistic one. And maybe I did. Within a single day I felt that I had always lived there. My father was gone; I never even had a letter from him. (My mother did, but she didn’t talk about them or show them to me.) He just disappeared from my life, and that was all. People always called me the Howland girl, and it was hard to remember sometimes that my real name was Mason. Whenever I’d go calling with my mother, making a little procession up somebody’s front walk—my mother first, then me—all the ladies greeted us the same way: “Why, my dear, it’s the two Howland girls!”
We were Howlan
ds and we were living where the Howlands always lived. I forgot my father, there were so many other things. He hadn’t forgotten, though; he tried to see me once after the war, he came back to the country just for that, I guess—but by then it was too late. And now, today, I don’t even know where he is. I don’t have any address. I don’t even know what country. He is gone as completely as if he never existed.
Sometimes I feel that my grandfather was my father. And that Margaret, black Margaret, was my mother. Living in a house like this you got your feelings all mixed up.
She was his wife, only she wasn’t. She kept house for him and the law said they couldn’t marry, couldn’t ever. Their children took their mother’s last name, so though they were Howlands they all had the last name Carmichael.
The oldest was Robert. He was a year older than I, tall for his age, very tall (he’d gotten his mother’s height). He had red hair, and his freckled skin was fair. At first glance you would not have thought he had any Negro blood. But if you looked sharper—and if you were used to looking—you could see the signs. It was the planes of the face mostly, the way the skin sloped from cheekbone to jaw. It was also the way the eyelids fell. You had to look close, yes. But southern women do. It was a thing they prided themselves on, this ability to tell Negro blood. And to detect pregnancies before a formal announcement, and to guess the exact length of gestation. Blood and birth—these were their two concerns.
In the South, most people could tell that Robert was a Negro. In the North, he would have been white.
After Robert there was Nina, a couple of months younger than I, so she would have been almost eight that summer we came back to Madison City. Then there was a gap of three years: that child had died. Then there was Crissy, Christine. Both girls were fair, with red hair like their brother’s. Their other blood showed in the shape and color of their eyes, in the waxy pallor of their skins, in the color of their fingernails.
The Keepers of the House Page 13