The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

  I loaded the 20 gauge first. “For somebody that never could shoot you remembered how to load right well,” Oliver said.

  “Number four shot,” I said.

  He padded into the hall, bringing the ammonia smell of the barns with him.

  I began loading the two big 12 gauge. “Double naught buckshot,” I said. I put the three guns on the hall table, their steel across the polished surface.

  And then because I didn’t quite believe it, I called John’s father’s house. No answer. I called the state police, and told them that I thought there was trouble.

  Oliver was still standing there, silently. I asked him: “You think they’ll come?”

  He didn’t answer and he didn’t have to. They wouldn’t until too late.

  “Go get some supper, Oliver. No sense you starving while we’re waiting.”

  The children came out of the kitchen; they were finished and looking for me. “Abby, take them to the play room and let them watch television.”

  “Mary Lee can do that, Mama,” she said. “Marge would rather have her anyway. And I’ll stay with you.”

  I looked at her blue eyes and I wondered why southern children learn so early. …

  There was a sudden flurry of shooting down by the roadside, out of sight. Abby understood before I did. “They mostly always come down to the fence at dusk,” she said, and her large eyes blinked a few times.

  So they were killing the animals. I glanced at Oliver.

  “I ain’t had time to move nothing, excepting the dairy cows. There’s quite a few steers they got to practice on.”

  Abby said: “They came down to see what the cars were parked for.”

  The irregular popping went on. Oliver cocked his head at the window. “Heard but one shotgun. Rest are pistols.”

  “That’s why it’s taking so long to kill them,” Abby said calmly. I shivered and she saw me. “I’m sorry, Mama.”

  My baby, I thought. You were born in the bedroom upstairs on the floor and Margaret wiped your face and cleaned your mouth and tied your cord. And Margaret is dead, and you aren’t a baby, standing there with your pinched white face, talking about how many shots it takes to kill a steer. …

  I became very sleepy. I went upstairs and found John’s bottle of dexedrine tablets and swallowed two. It made me a bit lightheaded but the cutting edge of weariness was gone.

  And it was just as well, because in the next hour they left their cars and their target practice and drifted on up the road toward the house. They smashed through the locked gate, and straggled up the graveled way until they stood in front of the house, just inside the low picket fence that framed the front yard. Some of them sat down, and some of them hunkered down and smoked. Six or eight of them leaned against the little wood fence and fell backward when it collapsed. They all seemed to be waiting.

  Then we saw why. They were firing the big barn. You could see it, the steadily growing glow. Johnny cried briefly upstairs and Mary Lee told him: “Hush, now, behave yourself.”

  I had plenty of time to study the group outside. They were men, all of them, and some of them were men only barely. I saw the Michaels boy, he couldn’t have been more than fifteen. His father was there too, the quiet grey-haired pharmacist. Lester Peterson, and his brother Danny—I recognized them. And the Albert brothers. Hugh Edwards from the post office. The small farmers: Wharton Andrews, and Martin Watkins, and Joe Frazer—they scratched out a living on their cotton farms just the other side of town, and shared that scanty living with their sharecroppers. Those three families were dirt poor, all right, their kids had bellies swollen with worms—but the rest of the people out there weren’t. They were respectable, they had a house and a car and money in the bank. There was Peter Demos, who kept the café, and Joe Harriman from the feed store; Frank Sargeant from the lumber yard. His son, who was one of the bookkeepers at the new mill. Claude King, who ran the Ford agency. … They were the good people out there.

  They had trouble firing the barn. One by one, the entire group left the front of the house and drifted down there to help. It was quite a way—a good quarter mile—and the wind was wrong, so you couldn’t hear anything much. You could see them milling about, knocking over rail fences and smashing small windows. There were a couple of flat pops. I looked at Oliver. “I reckon they found the cats,” he said.

  Abby shivered. Her frail young girl’s body shook all over. The thought of the cats terrified her. Against the firelight we saw a man swinging something by its tail. He let go and the dark shape sailed through a window and into the blaze.

  Abby said: “Oh. Oh!”

  She was green. “Don’t be silly, Abby,” I said sharply, “or you’ll have to go back with the children.”

  Her face straightened out, but it stayed green. “Listen now,” I said, “when the bandits killed that Howland girl in the kitchen—right over there, the same room that’s the dining room now—her family hunted them into the swamp and found them and killed them. They say her mother went there to watch.” The men dragged the bandits out of the swamp and hanged them, living and dead, from the tallest trees to swing until the animals and the birds cleaned their bones. They say that Mrs. Howland stood under those white oak trees, looking up, and laughing. … It hadn’t been glee at vengeance, I thought, the way the stories had it. She’d been having hysterics at the blood that was wasted. And she’d been seeing her daughter’s death agonies repeated over and over in the agonies of her murderers. …

  I stood thinking about that old tragedy, its violence and its pain, all of it. And all of a sudden I knew what I should do.

  “Abby,” I said firmly, “go get the children. Don’t wake Marge. Mary Lee is to carry a blanket for each of you. Run.”

  “Oliver,” I said, “do you know those big drums of gas back by the tool house? The tractor’s still there. Can you hitch up and drive to where the cars are parked?”

  His bright eyes glittered and shifted like oil in the light.

  “They’ll all be watching the burning,” I said. “They won’t be thinking of that. … You go ahead. It’ll take you longer.”

  He went, still carrying his shotgun across his arm. I fixed two bottles of milk for Marge, and picked up a box of cookies for the others. “Abby!” But they were already coming downstairs.

  I put Marge on my shoulder. Abby took Johnny’s hand—he was staggering with sleep, but quiet and bewildered. Mary Lee carried the blankets. We went out the back door, across the half-lighted yard. There was a little scuffling and a clank of metal as Oliver cleared the tractor. “I’ll leave the children up by the spring,” I told him as we passed. There were no lights on in the yard, we were all standing in the deep shadows of the building, the flickering fire-lit sky was way over our heads—but my skin crawled. I nodded to the dark hills. “I kind of feel like I’m being watched.”

  “You’d make a hunter,” Oliver said briefly. “There’s eyes there.”

  “Who?”

  “People.”

  “They won’t bother the children?”

  He snorted. “They come to watch.”

  We crossed the last of the yard and slipped through the back gate and cut across the corner of a pasture, as fast as we could. The barn was down the slope on the other side of the house, so it wasn’t likely anybody would see us, but even so I was glad when we finally reached the path in the deep sheltering woods. There were pines and oaks and hickories and hackberries and it was dark under their branches, darker than night.

  We stopped a minute, letting our eyes find their way.

  “I know where you want to go,” Abby said. “I’ll go first.”

  I held Marge with one hand and got my fingers around Johnny’s fat wrist while Abby led. It was much easier following her light shirt than looking for the path itself. We were climbing steeply, and Johnny began to whine. “You take the blankets, Mama,” Mary Lee said. “I’ll take him.” She rolled the blankets tight as she could and I tucked them under my arm. Johnny clambered o
n her back, and clung there, arms and legs wrapped around her, his sleepy black head dangling on her left shoulder. He looked monstrously large against her tall thin body.

  We felt the spring before we actually got there. Abruptly, there was a feel of damp, an odor of wet leaves, of wet earth. The ground underfoot was trampled and soapy-feeling. I remembered a stand of pine, running off at an angle, like a narrow ribbon through the jam of the other trees. That ground would be drier and softer with the heavy load of needles spread on it. “There,” I motioned to Abby. You could hear the spring now, its steady sound loud in the quiet night.

  “I tasted that water once,” Abby said, as she cleared a space of fallen bits of branches and patted the pine needles smooth. “Tastes awful funny.”

  I spread a blanket and put Marge on it, covering her carefully. She hadn’t waked. I went over to check the spring. It flowed gently from between two lip-like folds of rock. It was not a deep spring and the water was almost warm and quite flat.

  “It’s all right,” I told Abby. “It always did taste like that. It’s just not a bubbly spring.”

  I spread the other blankets for them. “Stay till I come back for you.”

  They didn’t say anything. Their eyes followed me for the short distance I was visible in the tree-shaded dark.

  I hurried down another way, brushing through tangles of vines and scrambling over rocks. I hadn’t been up here in a good many years and the land had changed somewhat. Freezes and thaws had moved the boulders about, sometimes tumbling them far down the hillside. There were berry brambles where there had been none before. Two or three times I had to retrace my steps and go around an impenetrable patch. I was wearing a skirt and low shoes—I hadn’t thought about the brush—and my ankles and legs were streaked with blood. But I found a way through the woods and came out on a low clear hummock, some people said it was an Indian mound. Away to my right the sluggish spring ran into a little marshy hollow. You could hear the bullfrogs and the tree frogs and the crickets in there. They were singing at the top of their voices. All those open cold throats, all those horny legs grinding together. … It also meant that there was nobody over there.

  The children were on the dark slope of the hill behind me. They were so shut in by trees that they couldn’t see me—but as I stood on that open mound, I felt eyes again. Negroes, in the dark that matched their skins, were watching. I remembered something my grandfather had said: “When there’s anything going on,” he said, “the woods gets so full that you can practically see ’em heave and shift with all the goings and comings.”

  Why don’t they help me? I thought bitterly. And I answered myself just as bitterly: “Because I’m white, and anyway there isn’t anything they could do that wouldn’t make things worse.” I started to cry, but in the soft cool night air the tears vanished. Their gentle source dried up and disappeared. And out of the cracks and barrenness of its leaving, I felt the shaky ghost of my pride begin to rise. Poor tired pride, beaten and sick, it came back after all, and in a moment I stopped being ashamed of what my grandfather had done, if only because he was my grandfather. … A warm trickle of anger ran along my scalp.

  I scurried down the hummock, panting with the unaccustomed exertion, cursing my body for not being young and strong anymore, for softening over the child-filled years. … Oliver was waiting in the fold of the slope, in the shadow of a rhododendron bush. He was sitting on the tractor seat, small and black and shriveled, for all the world like those figures he carved from peach stones. … The gasoline drums were hitched behind. “All right,” I said.

  The motor sounded frantic. We both looked around, but nothing moved, nothing happened. Oliver shifted gears and slowly edged out of the shadow. The drums were fitted and braced tightly on the wheeled platform, leaving no room for a rider. I trotted along behind; we had barely a hundred yards to go.

  There were about a dozen cars. Three had parked on the road, the rest had driven through a light rail fence into a flat field. It made a wonderful parking lot, but it hadn’t made good pasture. For some reason or other (maybe because there are just spots where cattle refuse to graze) it had been allowed to run to weeds and trash grasses. We hadn’t had rain in weeks, the fall was always like that—Novembers particularly—and the grasses were rustling dry. We had even had one hard frost to bleach them; they gleamed dully with their own light. I looked back once—I couldn’t see the house itself, but I could see the glow in the sky from the burning barn beyond it. I didn’t look again.

  Oliver stopped by the first of the cars parked on the road.

  These drums were made exactly like the big cans of kerosene that used to stand on crossed wood legs by every kitchen door: on their lower front edge they had a little spigot. Over the mouth of the spigot we had installed a length of hose. It had worked fine fueling the tractors and the graders and the mowers, and it worked fine now. I opened the spigot, held the hose up high to keep the gas from splattering around and wasting. Oliver waited, the motor clucking in neutral. He wasn’t even looking at me. He was the chauffeur again—as he had been on those afternoon rides, so long ago. He might have been taking four little cousins and their nurse for a breath of air.

  I opened the first of the car doors, bent inside, and with my hose soaked the seats and walls. I backed out and quickly lifted the hose again. Only a few drops splashed on my coat. I would have to remember to take that off, I thought.

  I finished those cars and sprinkled the grass around them. Once I even opened a gas tank and stuffed a handful of dry grass in the top. I don’t know if that worked. It was just something I thought I’d try.

  Oliver drove the tractor through the broken fence into the field. The hidden burrs of the waist-high dry grasses tore at the already bloody skin of my ankles and my legs. In my excitement, the pain felt warm and comforting as I went from car to car, soaking the grasses beneath them, drenching as much of seat and wall as I could reach. I even began to leave the doors standing open—the little interior lights made it easier to see the next car.

  This field was in the narrow pass between two slopes, and the rising night wind now blew through it strongly. Needlenose, old people call this particular stretch, and it is supposed to hold ghosts. The wind blows harder here than elsewhere—when I was a child this was where we came to fly our kites, because they sailed easier and higher. Every night between midnight and dawn, the wind whimpers and giggles through this pass, the way freak air always does.

  It was jabbering like that when we finished and went to the upper side of the field to spread the last gas there. I took off my splashed and splattered coat. We both rubbed our hands with mud to clean them. Then we set the fire. Oliver’s match lit at once. My first two went out in the wind. I knelt and sheltered the third match with my body the way I might do an infant, and burned my hand with the cupping protection I gave it—but I got my grass alight. We stood a moment or two and watched the flame grow. A patch, a blob of light, pushed forward like spume by the wind. Then the two blobs, Oliver’s and mine, joined and spread into a line, and the line grew from a flat thing on the ground like a child’s mark, to a thing with height and width, and a crackling voice.

  Hastily, Oliver drove the tractor back the way he had come. I followed, stopping only once to light the grass by the roadside cars. I scrambled up the Indian mound, panting, with the singing of gasoline-fed flames in my ears. I stumbled and fell full length, the breath jarred out of me, my tired body aching and resisting and wanting to stay huddled against an earth that seemed so warm on the chill windy night. But I got up—just a moment to rest—and ran through the sheltering woods, circling back to the house. And all the way, the pistons of my legs pushing me up and down, the pressure of my lungs bursting my ribs, I kept worrying: Will it be there? Will they have gotten to it in the little while it was left alone?

  When, through the last fringe of trees, I could see that the house stood white and untouched, I stopped and felt sick with relief. I leaned against a thin pine and reste
d my head on its bark. Oliver popped out of the dark, on foot this time; he had left the tractor hidden in the trees. I asked: “How long before they can’t put out the fire back there? How long will that take?”

  “I never done nothing like that before.”

  He was an old man and he was breathing very hard.

  “Oliver,” I said, “you go stay with the children, I’ll mind the house.” I added: “They’ll be scared out of their wits up there, and Abby too proud to admit it.”

  He may have nodded in the dark but I didn’t see it. I only saw him walk off in the direction of the path that led to the spring.

  I went back into my house and I called the state police again. “There’s a barn burning and a dozen cars afire in a field, and the next thing somebody will get killed. You wouldn’t come last time, but these aren’t Howland cars, and they aren’t Howlands that are going to be getting shot, so maybe you’ll come now.”

  I hung up and knew they would come. This time they would come. I took the three shotguns and went to sit on the front porch. The yard was empty. The crowd was all down by the barn.

  But now that wasn’t the only glow in the sky. There was another one, one that increased steadily, over the low sheltering hill to the right. The wind brought me the smell of burning from that direction, just as it carried away the smell of my own barn going down to ashes. Once I heard a sort of muffled explosion. That was how a gas tank sounded. I had never heard one before, but it wasn’t too unlike the shots that had killed the cattle out that way.

  One for one. Like it was before. You kill my child in the kitchen and I murder you in the swamp. … I was lightheaded, and exhausted, I began to giggle. … They were shooting steers and cats. The Howland they wanted was dead. His Negro wife was dead. Their children disappeared. And so they were wrecking the only thing that was left of him, of them. First the barn and then the house. …

  They had finally gotten the barn to burn satisfactorily. They had struggled with it a long time. But then I guess none of them were used to setting fires of that sort.