The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  He knew. And that always amazed me—how much he knew, how much he noticed behind his abstracted busy front. …

  He finished school all right, with all the honors, but there was one thing he hadn’t counted on—Korea. Since he’d kept his army commission, he was called up immediately. He was desperate and furious and raging impotently. His face flushed a blotchy grey and red, and he tore a great hunk out of the upholstered arm of a living-room chair. I just sat there, behind my thickening belly, and watched him wrench the chair to pieces. “Two years in Germany,” he yelled. “Why the hell don’t they take the others? Let them see what its like, freezing in the mud.”

  He said a lot more, and he didn’t sleep for two nights, and he scarcely told me good-bye when he finally left. But it didn’t turn out badly for him after all—not at all. But then very few things did. He was adaptable. No matter what happened, he could turn it to his advantage. It was that way with his Korean service. He went to Washington and spent three years in the dim dismal barracks of a purchasing unit’s offices. But he saw something else in Washington and he liked it. He saw a size and a scope of things that his family sitting up in Tolliver Nation had never dreamed about. He also saw a place for himself.

  He told me about it just before I got on the train to come home. Washington was crowded, the hospitals were jammed, and everything was horrid. I was going back to my grandfather’s house to have the baby. On the way down to the station, he told me what he wanted and how he proposed to go about it. It started with governor and it ended with senator. “There isn’t a chance of my being president.” He patted my taut belly gently. “Too small a state and a southerner couldn’t anyway. … I’ve been forgetting to tell you, I joined the Citizens Council and the Klan before I left.”

  “Oh,” I said. “Oh, for heaven’s sake.”

  “Your grandfather belonged to the Klan.”

  “It was different then.”

  “Justice Black belonged too.”

  “But not any more.”

  “Honey,” he said, “when I get where he is, I’ll quit too.”

  So I went back to my grandfather’s house during those bright crisp days of early winter. I sat in the sun on the back porch in the morning and the front porch in the evening and passed the time of day with people who came visiting. There were a lot of them too, ladies in the daytime, couples at night. I could tell from their way of inquiring after my husband that John had impressed them.

  One evening my grandfather asked me: “He going into politics?”

  “Yes.”

  He chuckled. “Too many old men in politics in this state. You just plain get tired looking at their ugly faces. Seems like we’re about ready for a brave young soldier back from a war. And you get to move into the governor’s mansion—I reckon that’s what he’s after.”

  “He thinks so.”

  “No reason why not.”

  “You still don’t like him, do you?”

  “Don’t have much taste for politics, child, and never did. … You still like him?”

  And I told him the truth. “Not as much as I did. But I love him.”

  “Makes a difference,” my grandfather said.

  One cold December morning, when there were a million speckles of frost glistening on the porch railing, and the sky was a bright hard winter blue, I sat down to breakfast. Without warning, I flooded green-flecked ammonia-smelling water down my legs, through my robe, and into a puddle on the floor.

  Foolish and dull and heavy in my state, I just stared at it thinking: How nasty it smells. How horrid it looks. I kept staring at it, wrinkling my lips; I almost didn’t notice Margaret, who had jumped up and was dialing quickly at the wall phone. While it rang, she turned to me. “You feel anything?”

  I shook my head. “Who’re you calling?”

  “The barn. He’s down there.”

  My grandfather, of course. She never called him by name. At least to me.

  Nobody answered. Margaret let it ring for quite a while, then she called Harry Armstrong, the doctor in town. He wasn’t there, and she left a message. She went out on the porch and looked up and down, but the winter-swept yards were empty. She came back, bringing the sharp cold wind on her dress.

  “You feel anything?”

  “Feel queer.” I was sleepy all of a sudden. And I had trouble pronouncing my words.

  She put her hand to my stomach, right where the swelling of child began, and pressed it tight. She held it for a moment. Then she got me by the arm and stood me on my feet. “We got to get you to bed.”

  She helped me up the stairs and into my bed. She went into the hall to call the barn again; still no answer. My grandfather would be out somewhere, and he had the only car. I had left mine in Washington with John.

  So I would have to have it at home. I thought: How silly. I can’t do anything right. I can’t even get to the hospital in time for a baby. …

  Margaret came back. “How long has it been?” I asked her.

  “Not five minutes, child.”

  I was terribly groggy, my eyes couldn’t seem to stay open. All of a sudden, my body shivered and shook like a gigantic sneeze. At the end of it I screamed.

  Margaret was pulling me out of bed. She had gotten my clothes off. Naked and sweating in the chilly room, I leaned against the side of the bed, swaying and wanting so to go to sleep. “Squat down,” she told me. There was a sheet spread on the floor—I hadn’t noticed that before. I squatted on it. She slipped behind me, sitting on the bed, her legs around my body, her hands holding my shoulders firmly. “Now,” she said, “go on.”

  Two more tearing pains and the white sheet held a puddle of blood and a baby and some slimy cord.

  Margaret was kneeling beside me now, my head rested against her shoulder. She was wiping out the baby’s mouth with a corner of the sheet. It was making small chirping sounds. For a minute I thought that the window was open and I was hearing the sounds of birds outside. But it was the blood-smeared ammonia-smelling bit of flesh I had delivered.

  We crouched, the two of us, until delivery was finished. Then Margaret helped me back into bed. I forgot about the baby and I fell asleep.

  When I woke there was a fire burning and the room was warm, and Margaret was sitting rocking by the fire and there was a basket right beside her. She saw my eyes open and she came over at once.

  “They be having a drink downstairs, your grandpa and Dr. Armstrong. They been having quite a few drinks.” She smiled gently, but the smile faded and she said with a little hesitation: “I got to call them. … Might be better if you was to say the baby birthed in the bed.”

  “Oh,” I said.

  “White ladies don’t squat down to drop on the floor.”

  I didn’t know if she was mocking me, but I didn’t take a chance. I never said a word and everybody assumed that the baby had been born on a mattress, proper and decent.

  Anyway it was a girl. And I was sick with disappointment. We named her Abigail.

  The next one—just thirteen months later—was born in a hospital, properly. Even the doctor was different. It was Otto Holloway. By then Harry Armstrong had had a stroke and retired. But this baby was a girl too. Mary Lee. I put my head down on the coarse hospital sheets and cried bitterly. I had wanted a boy so much, so very much. John, who’d managed to come down this time, hung around the bed, looking worried and wondering. “Don’t take on so,” he kept saying. “It isn’t serious, it isn’t that serious.”

  I had been a girl and the only child; so had my mother. I had assumed I would do better. I’d always pictured myself with a great family of sons.

  John didn’t understand. He couldn’t. “Oh go away,” I told him. “Please go away.”

  “It isn’t just the baby, is it?” he asked sharply. “It’s something else.”

  I hardly bothered to listen. “Go away.”

  “I know it is. Who’s been carrying stories to you?”

  His tone was sharp and angry; there was even a litt
le rasp of fear in it.

  “Everything you do, innocent as all hell, people read their way, with their dirty little minds.”

  Numbly, I lay back on my pillows and looked indifferent while he told me how innocent his life in Washington had been, but how open to misinterpretation. I listened, and everything he said, I understood the opposite.

  I went back with him though, and we stayed in Washington until his tour was over. (He asked me to come. “People will stop talking if you’re there.”) Every party we went to, I found myself looking and wondering: Was that the one? Was it she? But I was in love with him, and as my grandfather said, that made a difference.

  Korea ended. We came back to Wade County and John set up his office right on the main street in Madison City next to the Rexall Drugstore. He worked, hard as he had in college. He was building his practice, and he was making his political debut. Every week, practically, he’d be off on a speaking trip somewhere in the state. He’d talk on anything from conservation and the boll weevil to the godlessness of youth—always perfectly serious and sincere. One particular weekend he was scheduled to talk to a farmers’ group about the state’s role in reducing anthrax. I had to say something.

  “For heaven’s sakes, John,” I asked, “what do you know about anthrax?”

  He grinned the bright happy smile that was beginning to look like it was adjusted for photographers. “Asked your grandfather at dinner last night,” he said. “Bacteria, live in the soil, dormant for as long as thirty years. … That’s all I need.”

  “Oh my.”

  “I’m not telling them about anthrax, honey. I’m telling them about John Tolliver.”

  He was also an extremely successful lawyer, who had a way with judges and juries all over the state. Of course he was in a good position. He was a Tolliver and that meant he could call on practically all the north part of the state. His wife was a Howland, and that meant kinship with practically all the central counties. As for the three or four southern counties, they didn’t interest him. As a matter of fact he usually refused to even speak there, claiming that their Catholic majority was hostile to him. I don’t know that there was any truth to his charge. But he often used it to enlist a lot of Protestants who wouldn’t have been with him otherwise.

  I sat back in my house in Madison City and watched.

  We had a new house, we had built it. At first John wanted to take over one of the old empty houses around town (there were quite a few of them). “It looks better for me to live in an old house,” he told me. “Substantial, like a wool suit in the summertime.”

  “I want a new house,” I said, fearfully, because if I got in an argument with him I always lost. I just didn’t want to have him talk me out of this, so I said something I’d never said before. “It’s my money.”

  For a minute there was a terribly mixed-up look on his face. It wasn’t angry, it wasn’t hurt. I don’t know what it was. Maybe it was just surprised.

  “Anyway,” I added quickly because I was afraid I’d said too much, “the only old house I ever want to live in is my grandfather’s.”

  He flashed the smile again. “When he leaves that to you, sure. It’ll make a great place with some money spent on it.”

  “All right,” I said, though I felt a little tremor in the pit of my stomach—disposing of a man’s things while he was still alive.

  I built my shiny new house, and my children slept in shiny ruffled bedrooms. The whole town buzzed when I had a contractor from Mobile do the kitchen and the bathrooms. The master bath had a sunken tub and a tiny sun-bathing patio. The kitchen was right out of House and Garden: it had everything, every gadget that could be installed. I found out what the town thought of that from Margaret. She had brought us some quail from my grandfather, not more than a week after we moved in. She stared around the kitchen, hands on thickening hips; she pursed her lips and said nothing.

  “Like it?”

  “Mighty fancy kitchen for a nigger to work in.”

  She said it flatly. She might have been sarcastic. Or it might have only been a simple statement of fact. Or it might have been her father’s blood talking.

  I never knew when she was serious and when she was mocking. I think she intended it that way.

  Maybe by that time she’d noticed some of the references to John that had been appearing in papers round and about. The first one I saw was a little clipping from an Atlanta paper my cousin Clara Hood sent me. (She was a Bannister cousin from Madison City. She’d married a young Methodist minister named Samuel Hood and moved to Atlanta. He was a plain sandy-haired man, very earnest and devout, and a strong defender of Negro rights. Since she’d met him, Clara Bannister had abandoned all her early White Citizens Council training and become, among other things, a member of the NAACP. Even her vague bewildered mother was shocked. My grandfather found it very amusing.) The clipping was an interview with John. It was on a back page somewhere and it wasn’t long and it wasn’t particularly interesting. It was full of folksy talk about being glad to come to town and see my wife’s people, and always being happy to be in Atlanta. It ended with a phrase that stuck in my mind: “Mr. Tolliver is a rising young lawyer and is considered to be the brightest hope of the southern segregationists.”

  I showed it to John. “I saw it, honey,” he said.

  “You don’t read the Atlanta papers, do you?”

  “My clipping bureau.”

  “I didn’t even know you had one.”

  “You didn’t ask.”

  “Did you really look up your cousins-in-law?”

  He grinned. “I had so damn many appointments that I didn’t even get to call them. … but it looked good in the paper.”

  That evening—the first he had home in six weeks—he spent patiently crawling around the living-room floor with two small girls on his back. He’d also given them each a large picture and set it up in their rooms. “So they won’t forget what I look like,” he said. He loved them and they adored him. Our lives moved peacefully along, the girls and I, dull and uneventful until he came home. And he brought excitement with him—he always had been able to do that.

  John must have thought my question about the clipping was some sort of criticism, because after that he brought them to me. All of them. I put them carefully in a box—I found it the other day—but I never read them. Sometimes when he handed them to me words would jump out of the print. Racist. Staunch segregationist. Strong friend of states’ rights.

  I asked about that once, and wished I hadn’t. We were driving to the university where the student body had invited him to speak. It was one of those silvery grey winter evenings when everything is soft and delicate and the sky is a kind of pink and the ground shimmery and indistinct with fog. The car was new and shiny and smelled wonderful; the heater poured out a steady stream of warmth on our legs. It’s like nothing else, this feeling of a powerful car on good roads in hilly country. We were riding the rises and the falls of the land like the swells of the sea. I was glad to leave the children, too—I’d been home a lot. I was proud to be the wife of the invited speaker. And John had come home yesterday with a sapphire ring in his coat pocket. “Matches your eyes, old duck,” he said casually. I wasn’t deceived. I knew what money meant to him, and that ring had cost a lot. He’d been a good husband and a hard-working one, but this was the first time he had brought anything like that, a tribute. I thought how lovely it would be, as we went roaring over those hills, us growing old together and seeing our children grow to women and our grandchildren come home. All long sentimental thoughts, like the long grey hills. …

  Lulled by that gentle light, I asked him something I’d been wondering, something the words in those clippings had reminded me of.

  “John,” I said, “what do you really think about the Negroes? Not what you’re going to say tonight, but what you really think?”

  He chuckled and swerved around a stock truck with a blast of his horn. “Love ’em dearly,” he said. “Like your grandfather.”
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  The silvery light went out of the evening, and the unborn grandchildren disappeared. It was just bleak winter country and a man driving too fast.

  A few more years, pleasant, uneventful, broken only by the holidays that John had begun to afford. I remember the years by the vacations—the Jamaica year, the Bermuda year, the Sun Valley year. We went twice a year, summer and winter. The girls grew up. Crib to bed, stroller to bike, nursery school to first grade. They were handsome children, dark and blue-eyed like their father. He wanted more, I know. He asked about it once. I only said: “Let me get these launched. They’re so close it’s been a lot of trouble.” He was waiting; he would be too proud to ask again.

  And my grandfather died. It was in January, a couple of days after the big snow. Now, we never have a fall of any size in this part of the country—just a few sprinklings like hoarfrost on the ground. But this time a level grey-green sky sifted down fifteen inches, and everybody was caught. The stock in their far-spread pastures went into a panic. They broke their fences, tore through the wire, leaving bloody gobs of hide on the barbs, and wandered into the wood lots and beyond. They were going to have to be gathered up again, a few at a time. Every man my grandfather employed was out working—looking for injured stock, mending fences.

  For four mornings my grandfather left early in his truck, bouncing over the rutted frozen lumber roads that thawed slowly into puddles of mud. For three evenings he came home staggering tired, gulped supper, and went straight to bed. On the fourth evening he did not come back.

  On that fourth day too, my grandfather was working alone. Oliver Brandon, who usually worked with him, had driven to town for some extra sets of wire clippers and a few things like that. He took Margaret’s car, the one that my grandfather had given her the past year, and was back by noon, when my grandfather was supposed to pick him up. When he didn’t come, neither Margaret nor Oliver worried. He’d gotten rather forgetful lately, as old men do, and it wasn’t in his usual habit of things to come back to the house at noon. Since he hadn’t said where he would be, Oliver could not look for him; instead he replaced the cracked boards in the porch floor.