The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  One day Margaret packed my clothes and pushed me in the car and Oliver drove me into town to stay with my cousins, the Bannisters. On the way over he told us that Margaret’s children were going to stay with him. I don’t think he was very happy about that, he and his old-maid sister, with children in the house for the first time—but there wasn’t anybody else.

  Margaret and my grandfather took my mother to a sanitarium near Santa Fe. They were there the best part of a year. And only my grandfather and Margaret came back, my mother was buried out there.

  But all this was still in the future that cloudy gusty day in June when Oliver drove me to my cousins’ house and carried my suitcases inside. Clara and Reggie and Maxie were lined up on the porch waiting for me. Maxie was chewing the top of the porch railing.

  “You’ll get lead poisoning,” I told him, and he stopped. “Don’t you take care of him?” I asked Clara. “Don’t you know anything?”

  I wasn’t particularly happy to stay with them, and I really didn’t like being in town where you never could get away from people’s eyes. They knew when you walked down the street, whether you went to the drugstore or the dentist, whether you had a cherry Coke or a root beer. The only secrets you had were the ones inside your head. …

  These particular grown-up cousins (they were Peter and Betsy Bannister; he ran the Pyrofax office in town) were just about the only ones my family was on good terms with. There were others I liked a lot more (I had dozens of them all around), but these were the only ones my family approved of.

  It went back beyond the turn of the century, to the time of the Catholic Mrs. Howland from New Orleans. What with her religion and the way her father made his money, the Howland family had not treated her very well; they split into those who would accept her and those who wouldn’t. Now she was long dead, but the different cousins went on being cool to each other. I once asked my grandfather why we didn’t see some cousins who lived only a little way out of town and who had four sons and the oldest was the star basketball player on the high school team. He shrugged. “Damn-fool thing, child, but they were right mean to my grandmother.” He didn’t try to change it though, maybe because he didn’t want to have to deal with more family than he already had.

  And that was why I found myself staying with the Bannisters. Cousin Peter traveled a great deal—I forget why—and he was supposed to have a mistress in Birmingham. He was a diabetic, so he didn’t smoke or drink and he carried cans of special diet food with him. He always seemed to be eating fruit of some kind, and when he did sit down at the table with us, his plate was never like ours. Years later, on one of those trips to Birmingham, he happened to go to a revival meeting, and he was converted. Now, this preacher was a healer who told him that he didn’t need insulin if he believed in God’s Grace and Healing Power. He sent Cousin Peter home with God’s Holy Words rolled up in a little wad and tied around his neck with thread. Cousin Peter did believe, so he threw out his syringes and he sat on the porch (it was a hot day) praying for a miracle, until he passed into a coma. Cousin Betsy hesitated to call a doctor because she didn’t think Peter would like it if she interrupted a miracle or anything like that; and by the time she got him to the hospital it was too late and he died.

  But the time when I lived in his house was long before he got religion and killed himself. In those days he was just a kind pleasant man, who didn’t seem to be around very much.

  Cousin Betsy was a short stout woman, quiet and easygoing. She had two or three servants but the house was always dirty. “All this town dust,” she would cluck, “it just comes in all the cracks.” It also came in all the windows, because nobody ever bothered to shut them, even if it was raining or blowing. They closed them for warmth in the winter, but not before. And the heavy greasy cooking that you could smell from the minute you began climbing the front steps came from a black wood range (Aunt Betsy had never gotten around to changing and the cook liked this one) that had grease and soot a quarter inch thick all over it.

  Like the windows, the doors were always open and the screens sagged partially ajar, and animals wandered through. A cat dropped her litter in the hall closet—it was a stray cat and I don’t know why she picked that spot—but Cousin Betsy fed her until she decided to leave. And of course birds flew in and out of the upstairs windows. It was an old house and they had never got around to screening the second story. We all slept in tester beds hung with mosquito netting. (And that probably wasn’t such a bad idea because in those days there was considerable malaria in this part of the country.) Once wasps built a great nest in the upstairs hall, right over the picture of Cousin Betsy’s father, the one who’d been Senator from South Carolina. She didn’t seem to notice, though the rest of us used to dash along that part of the hall for fear of them. They finally bit Jeff, the cook’s husband, while he was changing the bulb in the overhead light. He almost fell off the ladder and he did drop the glass cover with a great crash. He and his wife went after the wasps then, wrapping themselves up in layers of mosquito netting, and got rid of them. Afterwards the upstairs hall was lighted by a bare bulb because the glass shade was broken, and things like that didn’t bother Cousin Betsy.

  There was only one thing that did, as far as I remember. That was underwear. Everybody in that house always had new or almost-new and very fancy underwear. She kept careful check. “Now, honey,” she explained to me, “if you were walking downtown and you were run over by a truck and they took you to the hospital and they saw that your panties were all torn and ragged and your slip was pinned at the shoulder by a safety, you’d be so ashamed you’d have to die.”

  “And just think how people would talk after,” I tried to joke with her.

  She didn’t see it. “And think of that,” she said seriously. “Yes, indeed.”

  But it really wasn’t bad living with them, not bad at all. Aunt Annie, my grandfather’s sister, came down to see me every month or so, I suppose it was her way of checking up on the Bannisters. (She was such a neat woman that house must have made her sick.) The rest of my life was almost the same. I went to school, the same one, only I could walk, and it was rather nice not having to make that long drive every day. Once you got used to it, there were lots of things to do in town. There were even lots of things to do in the house, though it never seemed to occur to Clara, Reggie, and Maxie to do any of them. I had to show them. Maybe it was because they lived there, and just didn’t see any more.

  Take their house itself. It was one of the funny old town houses built and rebuilt so many times that nobody was sure exactly where anything was. It had a narrow front, but it was very long, extending almost the length of the entire lot. There were halls and wings and different levels. Lots of people had added to the house but they hadn’t bothered to attach their different wings very carefully. I once broke my arm because I forgot and sprawled down the step that went from the breakfast room to the kitchen behind it.

  The farthest back rooms of the house, the ones behind even the second kitchen, were used for nothing but storage. They were full of wrapped and lumpy things, an occasional dead bird, rat poison, old trunks, and hat racks. Clara, Reggie, Maxie, and I would open the trunks sometimes, the ones that weren’t locked. It was a way to spend a rainy day. A lot of the trunks were full of dresses, of wedding dresses mostly. In some the cloth was so delicate that it tore when you picked up the bead ornaments. The egret feathers fluttered into dust when we lifted them out. There were musky furs too; we had to tear open the cloth bags they were stitched into. There were diaries and journals and letters. And one of the trunks had half a dozen old pistols, two cavalry sabers, and four dress swords. We played soldiers with them all one long afternoon.

  I suppose we destroyed quite a bit of the stuff we handled. But I didn’t think of it then, and I don’t feel badly about it now, because it was just lying there, in storage, and the moths and the roaches were doing more slowly what we did rapidly.

  They were lovely rooms, stuffy and hot; dust hung i
n the air like smoke, and the motes drifted back and forth in the panels of light from the dirty windows.

  As you went through the line of storage rooms, you noticed that they got smaller and smaller toward the rear. Those must once have been slaves’ or servants’ quarters. The very end of the house wasn’t even a room really, but a kind of last-minute addition. It was painted the same color as the house, and at first glance looked the same, but it hadn’t been built for an all-weather room at all. It was more of a tool shed. There were no inside walls—just the studs and the outside boards—and the floor had been laid any old way, with great gaping cracks in it. There was a door leading to the outside yard, but it had been nailed shut years before, probably to keep out burglars. The nails were bleeding streaks of rust down the wood.

  The room itself was completely empty. There was just the dusty uneven floor and the dirty unfinished walls, and that was all. The walls weren’t even very solid. Unlike the rest of the house, which was clapboard, the boards of these walls ran straight up and down; there were cracks between all of them and large knotholes in some of them.

  It wasn’t the room. It was what you could see from there. We found out by accident, but once we knew we kept coming back. Just to see.

  The room wasn’t more than three feet from the board fence that marked the property line. Now this fence had been built seven boards high, but it sagged a great deal until part of it was actually leaning against the house. If you stood in the Bannister yard, it looked like a good solid fence and it really was way over your head. But when you were inside you stood on the foundations of the house—and because it was an old house, its foundations were very high. (They thought it gave them good circulation in the old days and kept down the fevers.)

  The other house, the house on the next street, also extended almost to the property line. Though it was an old house too (there were few new ones in town at that time), the additions had been done recently. They had been done very cheaply too, and so they sat almost right on the ground. Because they were so low and the board fence was so high, people over there seemed to think they couldn’t be seen. They never bothered pulling the shades. Through the corner crack of that tool room—if we stood on a crate to give a little more height—we could see right in.

  We saw a dresser, of some dark wood, mahogany or walnut. It had a lace scarf hanging across the front in scallops and down the sides in long fringes. There was a line of china ornaments too, but we couldn’t make out exactly what they were. I thought elephants, but Clara said no, they were china dolls. There was a bed with a pink spread and a couple of bright blue pillows. There was also a brown-haired lady whom we caught sight of now and then. She always seemed to be wearing a pink ruffly robe. The material seemed a bit stiff and shiny, so maybe it was taffeta. We never did see her face, because the head of the bed was out of sight around the corner of the window. And she didn’t seem to be home very much unless she was expecting a caller.

  All that long vacation the first thing we did every morning was to take a peep through the crack into the room. If it was empty we went outside to play in the yard. Usually we stayed near the back fence, so when we heard feet on the cinder walk, and a knock on the door that led into that back addition, we could go tearing into our tool house and start squabbling over who would get to stand on the box.

  She took the pink spread off the bed first, so it wouldn’t get spoiled. She always did it quickly, right after they’d first come in. With her long brown hair swinging around the sides of her face, she’d turn the spread back and hang it over the foot of the bed. Then she’d step to the other side of the room, out of our sight. There seemed to be something else over there, chairs maybe and a table, I don’t know. The two of them stayed over there quite a while sometimes, and we’d get pretty tired waiting. Once Reggie didn’t believe that nothing was happening for so long and he yanked the box out from under me, and I tore my leg on the head of a nail as I fell.

  Sooner or later they’d get to the bed. Their heads were completely out of sight under the window ledge. All we ever saw was the tangle of moving bodies. Sometimes they were dressed and sometimes they were naked—it was pretty much the same heaving lump, wrapping and unwrapping, pumping and jerking.

  We watched all through that one summer. Even when we had to go to school we kept it up—until the late afternoons got too cold to be standing by a crack in a tool shed. And by the time winter was over, we’d almost forgotten. It wasn’t the thing to do any longer.

  We didn’t care who she was. It wasn’t who that interested us. It was what. Years later, when I thought of it again, I remembered that Dr. Harry Armstrong, who was my grandfather’s cousin, lived there, and his daughter Linda had brown hair. Her mother was dead and her father was pretty poor, so they only had one servant, who fixed them dinner in the middle of the day and left them a cold supper on the stove. I don’t remember Linda Armstrong very clearly. She was much older and she went to Chicago to find a job, after a while. She married there and moved to Des Moines, and never came back. When her father got very old and had a stroke and was kind of silly and half crippled too, he sold the house and moved out with her.

  I suppose we left the boxes in place under the crack of that tool house, and eventually somebody found them, and figured out what had been going on. Because, that following spring when I proposed that we go back there, my cousins got a funny expression and said no, they weren’t allowed in that room any more. Their little pudgy pasty faces looked scared, but I didn’t think anything of their mother—I figured she wouldn’t dare do anything to me. I went swaggering back to the shed, but both doors had new hasps and padlocks. …

  In May my mother died at the hospital in New Mexico. She was buried there.

  When they heard, the whole family was terribly upset. They thought she should have been brought home, all the Howlands had been buried in Wade County since the first one had wandered in here. They’d even brought home the bones of the boy who’d died in the Wilderness and the one who’d died of yellow fever in Cuba. They were always gathered together. Until now. “Just what I expected of Will Howland,” Cousin Betsy said, “and imagine her lying all alone way out there. All by herself.”

  Now it didn’t seem to me to matter much where you were when you were dead. One place was as roomy and fine as another. I might have said so too, only nobody asked me. Every time they saw me, they’d hush up whatever they were saying and get a sick look of consolation on their faces. “Poor child,” they would say.

  At first when I heard, when the phone call came, I got a hard frightened lump in my stomach and it stayed for a couple of days while I felt lonesome and confused. But it didn’t last. I hadn’t seen too much of my mother since we’d moved back; even when she was living in the house with us, she was mostly lying down or reading in the summerhouse. It was Margaret who took care of us. And it was Margaret I missed when they left. But that passed too. After all they’d been gone a year, and that’s a long time to a child. You miss them and you wonder about them and you hurt—hard, for a while. But it eases and it’s over.

  I met my grandfather and Margaret at the station and went home with them. We sat down on the front porch, while Margaret went inside to see to the housekeeping. My grandfather looked tired, and he was a good deal thinner. You could see the muscles in his neck and count them. We just sat for a while and watched a big black-and-yellow spider with thick furry legs.

  “I didn’t bring her home,” my grandfather said as if I hadn’t heard. “It didn’t seem the thing to do.”

  There were two spiders just about this time every year. They would come and live in that same bush with the yellow flowers—great heavy creatures.

  My grandfather noticed them. “They come in their season,” he said, “everything does.”

  I thought about the Biblical passage my cousin had given me to read the day we first heard my mother was dead. Something about the wind blowing over the grass and the seasons of things, but I couldn’t quite remembe
r it.

  “People around here,” my grandfather said, “they won’t like it, and they’ll talk, way they always do. Talk about the Howlands been their favorite sport for a hundred years. More fun than cards even for religious folk. …”

  I picked up a stone that happened to be on the porch boards and tossed it at one spider. I hit it; the spider dropped down and disappeared.

  “It was this way,” my grandfather said, not appearing to notice. “She hated to travel so, got so tired on the trip out, it didn’t seem right to make her come back. Hating a thing that much you’re bound to hate it still, even dead.”

  The spider climbed back. I started to throw another rock, but I scowled myself into keeping quiet.

  “Earth’s the same anywhere, I figured, and with her hating to travel. …”

  His voice kind of trailed off and in a minute he got up and went inside.

  “Now you can chuck at the spider,” I told myself.

  That was all. Living back on the place again, I lost track of town. I didn’t hear any talk. I didn’t have anybody to hear it from. But they talked, I’m sure. It’s the way they are.

  There was a memorial service, later, when my grandfather gave a stained-glass window to the Methodist church in town, with a memorial to Abigail Howland Mason spelled out at the bottom.

  Some folks didn’t like that either, they thought it made the church look too Popish. Maybe they all felt that way, but they didn’t feel they could say no, not with the way Will Howland always paid the largest bills.

  It took a year to get the window made. By that time the death was so far off nobody felt very sad any more. I even sort of liked going to church because I didn’t go very often. After the service, my Aunt Annie (who’d come down from Atlanta especially) gave a big supper. Like most of those things, there was a lot of likker and some of the men passed out on the grass, and some of the women went inside to pass out more properly. The boys got to drag racing on the mill road, and smashed their cars up and had to be taken to the county hospital (Dr. Armstrong was one of the ones who had passed out) to be sewed back together again.