He was staring at me, not quite believing.
“But you didn’t come back to help the Negroes around here. Or hurt them either.” I had another irresistible fit of giggling. “You’re doing it for more personal reasons, you’re paying off an old grudge. Your mother or your father?”
“They’re dead.”
“Makes it harder that way.” I fixed myself another drink, very slowly, waiting to see what he would do. He seemed frozen or fixed. He was staring at the refinished Seignouret table.
“Does your wife know you’re here? But she doesn’t, of course. She doesn’t know anything about this or you wouldn’t have called me from a pay phone.”
He shook his head. “Why should I bother her with this mess?”
“She home?”
“Yes. … No, she’s gone to the hospital to wait for the child. She’s Rh negative, and they’re all born that way, with transfusions and so forth.”
“So she wouldn’t be likely to read the papers too closely, if the papers there carried it.”
“No.”
“Anyhow the papers always call you Robert Carmichael. She wouldn’t think anything of that, would she, even if she saw it?”
“Why should she?”
“She married a white man,” I said quietly, “what would she do if she found out he was a Negro?”
He just stared at me.
“You won’t have told her. … No, not you. But when she knows, what sort of a difference will it make?”
He stood up and walked over to me, his face flushed waxy white again. I sat perfectly still and leaned my head back and looked at him. I was not afraid, my heart was pumping steadily, my lungs were pulsing gently.
“You forgot, Robert,” I told him, “or you wouldn’t have come. We’re all together, you and me and Crissy and Nina. You came to ruin me”—I could feel my lips giving a slow smile (and that was another thing, when my lips moved, I felt how cold they were)—“but I can do that too, I think.”
Now that he was so close I could see that his face was covered with sweat. The drops had gathered into streams on his neck; they were soaking his coat collar.
“I can find you, wherever you live. I can appear there, just the way you’ve appeared here. And I can tell my story. … How much does your wife love you?”
Upstairs the baby wailed and then fell silent. Robert jumped and glanced toward the sound.
“I’m not saying I will do that,” I told him, “I am only saying that I could, if I wanted to. I haven’t made up my mind yet.” It will depend on how angry I am and how much I want to hurt you in return, I thought. And when you go home you will have to wonder whether I am coming or when I am coming. …
That sweaty white face hung there in the air over me. “Sit down, Robert,” I said petulantly, “you’re making me nervous.” He stepped back a bit—I was surprised. I hadn’t expected him to listen to me. But then it had been such a long time since anyone had listened to me. If ever before.
And I said something that I didn’t mean to say, something that sounded horrible to me even while I was saying it. “Robert, I know what you are, and I know why you came back. And I know something else. Your skin may be the same color as your wife’s, but your blood’s not—and you believe that. You really believe that.”
There was a tiny tremble to his lips. To stop it he swallowed, and I heard the tiny sound of that.
I looked at him, my grandfather’s son, his only son. I looked at his face, haggard and old. And I could hear my grandfather saying: Lady, lady, what are you doing?
I answered him back, wherever he was, wherever ghosts go: Why did you have children, for them to tear each other apart?
But it was over for me, this baiting, this swaggering in the face of collapse. I wanted Robert out of my house. I wanted him away from me.
“I’m sick of it,” I said. “Go away.”
He got to his feet. Again I was surprised that he had obeyed me.
“Look,” I said, “I hope you’re leaving tonight. My husband’s family is wild enough to kill you.”
“I’m going directly to New Orleans and then home.”
“It was risky coming,” I said. “If John had been here there might have been real trouble.”
There was a faint sad smile. “I figured you’d be alone.”
“And so I am.” He had known that. “Go on ahead now.”
I went to the porch with him, and watched him walk off down the dark slope of hill toward the waiting car. “Robert,” I called after him, “I may be coming to find you. You’ll expect me, you won’t forget?”
He didn’t turn and I wasn’t sure whether he’d shaken his head or not. But it didn’t matter. He would remember me and he would look for me all the days of his life.
As for my part I would remember too. I would see my grandfather’s face, creased, and hurt, and torn with emotion. I didn’t sleep that night. I didn’t even bother going to bed. At breakfast time the house was still quiet, without its familiar morning sounds. There were no voices downstairs, no sounds outside. Today they had planned to mow the big front field, but the sunny morning was silent and empty: no rattling tractors and clanking mowers. I heard the children’s alarm clock ring sharply; I wondered why they bothered to set it, when they knew they would not be going to school. Perhaps they had not believed me. I went downstairs, passing the charred section of banister that Howlands kept to remember by. I walked through the large center hall: the night light was still burning. That was the first thing the butler turned off when he came in the morning—so he was not here. I went into the kitchen; it was empty. The light by the back door was burning too; I snapped it off. No one at all had come this morning. The whole staff was staying away. They expected trouble. …
I put on the kettle for coffee, and used the house phone to call the children’s nurse, Julia. She would be frightened when she saw the empty house; I had to explain. “I’ll see that you get home before there’s any trouble,” I promised her. And as I dripped the coffee I wondered about that. What if I couldn’t. …
I went outside briefly and looked around. The winter-stripped land looked the same. The state road below us was empty, except for a passing car that went directly by without slowing or stopping. The sky was bright and clear and windy, filled with crows riding thermals endlessly. The yard and the big front field were completely deserted, not even a cat crouching in the shadows. Like the house staff, the farm hands had not come. Their equipment was still parked behind the bathhouse: their tractors and mowers and graders, and all their attachments. And the gasoline drums were still there.
No one had come to work. No one at all. I went back inside, and called upstairs again. “Whatever you do,” I said, “don’t alarm the children, Julia. Take them down to the ponies.”
The morning passed, quiet and empty. By afternoon I stretched out on the bed, not bothering to undress. At once I fell into a deep heavy sleep. I didn’t even hear John come in; he had to shake me. For a moment, muddled and drunk with sleep, I smiled at his familiar shape. Then his cold grim face came into focus, I remembered and sat up. He had a newspaper. Of course. The picture of Robert and me at the front door.
“Why did you let him in?” John asked.
“He rang the doorbell,” I said as if that explained everything.
“If I’d been here …”
“Well, you weren’t. There was nobody to tell me what to do.” John looked dirty. He hadn’t shaved for a day or so, and the heavy bluish beard line was now a definite crop of whiskers. His eyes were bloodshot and swollen. “Have you been up with your father?”
“Up that way.” Somerset County would still take him in, still hide him, fight for him if necessary. All the Tollivers walking around their cotton fields. All the Tollivers with the once-a-year racket of the gins singing in their ears. Where everybody stood together and blood was the answer to anything.
“Where’d he go?” John asked me.
“He said he was going to New Orl
eans and then home.”
“Where?”
“I don’t know.”
“He told you,” John said, “and you’re lying to me.”
“No, I’m not, but why would you want to know? To go after him?”
John gave his shoulders a little lift.
“I told Robert you would want to do that.”
John walked over and glanced out the window. When he lifted the curtain I got a flash of the bright sunny afternoon.
“I will take care of him, John,” I said. “I’ve started already.”
He turned back from the window and it was obvious he hadn’t heard me, he’d been too busy with his own bitter thoughts.
I pushed down the quilt that I had covered myself with, and I sat up. “If you’d hand me the brush, I could look a little more presentable.”
He did not move. “You look like hell.”
“It was a bad day.”
“Look,” he said, “why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d he marry her? Do you know?”
It was incomprehensible to him. As incomprehensible as trying to chew up a stone. He didn’t understand that there were people who might want to try.
“Why’d he do it? To show us?”
“To show himself, I think,” I said.
“That doesn’t make sense.”
“He couldn’t let his children be bastards, even if their mother was a Negro.”
“There’s a lot of bastards around here.”
“He knew they weren’t going to be kept around here. Even then he knew that they would send them away.”
“Christ,” John said, “he must have been out of his mind.”
I shook my head. “I think maybe I understand.”
“Then you’re crazy as he is.”
“John,” I said, “you’re so involved and complicated, you forget some people are simple.”
“Simple, my God … and what about that other one. What’d I ever do to him? Why’d he have to come back?”
“It’s hard to explain.”
“What did you talk about, for God’s sake?”
“His wife and things like that.”
“A tea party. Christ!”
“I don’t think he knew quite what he was doing.”
“I know what he did,” John said. “Everybody’s pointed it out to me. I’m through in this state. I couldn’t get elected garbage man, and I couldn’t get a charity case.”
“Where will you go?”
“Home. For a while.”
And I started to say: This is your home. But I didn’t because I knew better. It wasn’t. He was a Tolliver and his home was in Somerset County with his blood.
“All right,” I said.
“Look,” he said, “why don’t you take the children and go away for a while?”
I shook my head.
He sat down abruptly on the foot of the bed. “Look,” he said, “if you won’t, at least send the girls away. Right now.”
“Where?”
He pulled a piece of paper from his pocket. “Here. It’s a school in New Orleans. Ray Westbury—I’ve done some work with him, you met him here a couple of times—he has a daughter there.”
I took the slip and tucked it carefully under the lamp. To make it extra secure I put an ash tray on top of it. It was comforting, kind of a link. …
“I talked to him today—told him what was happening.” The thought of that rehearsal seemed to bother him, he hesitated a moment, remembering. “He arranged it … they’ll be expecting both girls.”
“Will you drive them down?”
He shook his head. “Oliver can do it.”
I brushed bits of lint from the soft velvet surface of the quilt, thinking, deciding. “Bundle them in a car and rush them off. …”
“They’ll be safer,” he said, “I’m thinking of them.”
“I know you are.” He was. He loved them, he was doing his best. I glanced at the little white piece of paper. “I’ll send them there, but not just now. In a while.”
He stood up with a little impatient jerk.
“They mustn’t be run out, John.”
“You won’t?”
“No. We’ll stay.”
“Oh Jesus,” he said.
“Is there going to be trouble?”
“How the hell would I know? I’m just telling you what I think.”
“If I left,” I said, “they’d probably burn this house.”
“I wish it’d been burned to the ground before I ever saw it.”
“Yes, I know you do. But I’ll stay.”
“Oh Christ,” he said. And walked toward the door.
“Are you coming back?” I asked him.
“No.”
“I didn’t think so.”
Then he was gone and all the things we hadn’t said still hung in the air and buzzed around my ears. I thought: That’s that. That’s all. I loved him once, but I don’t seem to any more, because I’m not too sorry to see him go.
When the children came in, I asked them: “Did you see your father?”
They shook their heads. He hadn’t bothered going down, though he must have seen them working their horses. They didn’t look upset. He had been home so little that they didn’t really miss him now.
After lunch I took the oldest aside. “Abby,” I said, “I want to talk to you.”
“I know,” she said solemnly.
“Who told you?”
“Oliver.”
Of course. They had been talking about it down at the barns.
“You won’t go back to school for a while,” I said, “and then maybe we’ll find you another school.”
“Oliver said we’d be run out.”
“Not run out,” I told her. “Just you and Mary Lee and just for school.”
“I wouldn’t care if I never came back.”
“Honey, you think that now, but it takes a while.”
Child, I thought, you don’t even know it’s possible to love a house and land that much. …
Abby said: “Nobody’s here today except Julia.”
“They’re staying away because they think there’ll be trouble.”
“Will there, Mama?”
She did not look frightened, so I told her the truth. “I think so.”
“Oliver said there would.”
“Oliver seems to know a lot.”
“He’s got a shotgun down in the harness room.”
I said: “Tell Julia to go home. Tell her I’ll let her know when I want her back.”
Abby trotted off. I looked at her thin legs under their faded blue jeans, and I thought mechanically: they must have some proper riding clothes. …
She came back, saying: “She was glad to go.”
“Thank you, Abby.”
“Is Daddy coming back in case there’s trouble?”
And then because she was only thirteen I lied to her. “He can’t get back, honey. We’ll have to do it ourselves.”
“Oliver’s been showing me how to aim a shotgun.”
Oliver again. “You keep the children here, Abby, I’m going down and talk to him.”
I found him tinkering with the latch on the back gate. “I didn’t know that needed fixing.”
“Wasn’t broke,” he said. “I’m keeping myself busy.”
“Showing Abby how to shoot.”
“Come in handy, maybe.”
He was an old man, a very old man, and as I looked at him I remembered all those drives to the top of Norton’s Hill with my cousins. Those drives where he’d sat waiting and carving strange little animal figures out of peach stones. … He still lived in the same house—his old-maid sister had died some five years before—by the big spring called the Sobbing Woman.
“You expecting trouble?”
He kept working on the latch. “We done took the stock from here over to the east lot.”
“For safekeeping?”
“Big target,” he said; “them animal
s cost money.”
“Go on home, Oliver, and take the children’s ponies with you.”
He did not seem to hear me. “There’s cars parked down the road right now, behind the rise, where you can’t see them from the house.”
His own calm was contagious. “What will they do?”
He shook his head. “Mr. John been gone?”
“Yes.”
“Coming back?”
“No.” I suppose I should have been ashamed, but I wasn’t. John’s leaving was just a fact like the cars down the road.
“I figure to stay.”
“Don’t be stupid, Oliver. If there’s trouble it might be rough on a Negro here.”
He didn’t lift his head. He just looked up at me, and the gentle old brown eyes were hard and bright. And I thought: There isn’t anything going to be harder than it’s been already.
“I don’t want you staying,” I said. “I don’t want to have to worry about you.” I was shivering with rage and fury. All my life I had been trained to depend on men, now when I needed them they were gone.
Oliver seemed to hear what I was thinking. “Your husband ain’t here, and your grandfather ain’t here, and your son ain’t into school yet. I be up to the house, when I get finished.”
The sun went down and the early winter dark began in the hollows and slipped up the hill. Abby kept the children amused and quiet and only now and then I’d feel her large blue eyes watching me. I fixed supper for them myself, fumbling and searching for pans and pots and dishes in my unfamiliar kitchen. I burned my arm on the oven door, smeared the red streak with butter, and put a bandage on top of that.
Then I called the children in. “Aren’t you hungry?”
Abby said: “Oliver took the ponies off.”
“He’ll bring them back.”
Her eyes studied me quietly for a very long time. Whatever she saw seemed all right. “Mama,” she said, “the butter’s making that bandage fall off. You need a new one.”
I left them eating, and fixed a new one in the bathroom. On my way back I passed John’s gun rack—the one that had been my grandfather’s—and I stopped and took down three shotguns. Oliver came to the door and watched me. I found the shells in boxes on the top shelf of the hall closet. I read the labels carefully, and took two boxes out.
The Keepers of the House Page 26