The Keepers of the House (10 page)

The Negro woman by the stream stood up, and William saw that she too was tall, very tall. She moved like a young woman, big but lithe. She stretched her cramped back, hands on hips. Moved her shoulders up and down, hands running over buttocks. Tilted up her head, hands smoothing over cheeks and eyes.

The only sounds were the birds’ screeching and fussing and feather-tearing fights, the running stream, the rustling shivering leaves. William couldn’t get the tales of Alberta out of his mind as he walked downstream toward her. He expected at any moment to hear the chimes of the watch.

She was looking away from him, across the leaf-littered baptistry, out at the trees sliding off down the slope, their green blocking out the sight of the burned church and the graveyard. Wasps came and settled on the little pile of twisted laundry at her feet, humping about on their straddled legs until they settled in the right spot, sucking moisture from the cloth.

She did not hear him. For all his size, he had kept the hunter’s ability to move silently, even over broken ground. Finally when he was about ten feet from her, he deliberately put his boot to a twig and snapped it.

She turned around. Not spun around, not jerked around as he expected her to. Turned slowly, curiously. The large brown eyes studied him, not startled, just surprised.

She was not pretty, William saw that at once. The face was too dark, and too long. And she was a Freejack. The Indian showed in her high cheekbones.

“I was up a way,” he said finally.

She didn’t answer. The mixed-blood face waited patiently.

“I been walking some, and I figured I might be lost. Where’s this?”

“New Church,” she said.

Her voice was not deep, nor high. It was neither gentle nor harsh. After she stopped speaking, you had to wonder if you really heard anything. You couldn’t remember what she had sounded like. As if, when she had done, the space all around her closed in again, tight, and wiped all traces of her from the air.

“I wasn’t too far off,” he said. “This branch got a name?”

“No,” she said.

She did not say no sir. Most Negroes would have. William wondered: “You from around here?”

For the first time she moved her head, Negro-like, self-effacing. “Down there.”

“Whose place?”

“Abner Carmichael.”

He shook his head. “There’s so many people in the county I never heard of.”

“He’s the one with the floating house.”

William nodded, then. “I heard tell of him.” An old man who lived in the bottomlands and who had built his house like a boat. Every spring when the flood crests came down the Providence River and all the creeks overflowed their banks, the land where his house stood was flooded. So each year he and his family (large family, not all his, cousins and sisters and brothers scrambled together) moved away to camp on high ground until the water subsided. He had built his house tight and sturdy like a boat, on mud and rock foundations that washed away with the seep and rush of water and left the house floating, half dry even in the flood. He had anchored it too, like a boat. It wasn’t a large house and he had circled it with great ropes that he had brought himself from the wharfs of Mobile (he’d once worked there to make a little hard cash). He ran the ropes around the house—directly around as if he were tying it together—and he had fastened other ropes to it, running loosely to the trees on either side. When the water went down, the house would be there. He and his menfolk would build new foundations under it, and lever the house onto them. His women would wash out the inside, getting rid of the mud and whatever drowned animals were caught there. And then they would be set for the next ten months.

“I heard of him,” William said. “You his daughter?”

“Granddaughter.”

He smiled at her quick correction. “I reckon you don’t look old enough to be much else.”

“I’m eighteen,” she said.

He just smiled again, and nodded.

She added: “My name’s Margaret.”

That was the way it began. That was how he found Margaret, washing clothes by a creek that didn’t have a name. She lived with him all the rest of his life, the next thirty years.

Living with him, she lived with us all, all the Howlands, and her life got mixed up with ours. Her face was black and ours were white, but we were together anyhow. Her life and his. And ours.

F
IRST THERE WAS NOTHING
but cold and the noisy rustling crackling nights. Those were the earliest things she remembered.

Then she remembered the shapes of the floor boards and the way the undersides of tables looked, streaked and dirty. And she remembered being stepped on and stumbled over; and pinched by the rockers of rocking chairs. She even remembered the weight of her diaper—hippin, her mother called it—sagging behind.

It was funny though, she could remember all that, and she couldn’t remember her mother’s face—only a vague black shape and a name. Sometimes Margaret wondered how she had come to forget a face so completely. Why, she even remembered the way her mother’s hands looked—holding the rusty, greasy handle of an iron skillet at the stove; skinning and gutting catfish on the back steps. … She could even remember one day when her mother stood on the edge of the porch, light behind her. She, the baby Margaret, had been in a corner of the rail-less porch, hemmed in by chairs laid on their sides, and the whole world of woods and the swamps and the shining sky lay beyond her. She had looked up and saw her mother standing on the edge of the porch, black figure against the bright stretching world. And she had never forgotten that. The small neat figure, bare feet jutting out from under the almost ankle-length dress.

That was finally the way her mother stayed in her mind—just hands and a shape against the light. A stark figure, lonely and slight. An outcast, by her own desire. Sheltered by her family because she had no place to go, but part of nothing. Living in the house, the small house that rose like a boat with the spring rains and the floods from the swamp. Living there, but not being there. Waiting. A whole long youth of waiting. Who would have thought a small slight body would have so much determination in it?

The stubborn head, the steady shaking no. He will come back. … He said he would come back.

A youth of waiting. With a child, first a baby and then a girl, growing, day after day, like her mother, so like her mother. No trace of white blood showing. No trace at all.

A black baby with kinky hair and knobby arms and legs. … A black girl, like the other girls of New Church. … A woman, tall and angular and black. Her father’s rangy build, but none of his coloring.

By the time she was three or four, her mother was smearing her face with buttermilk, was dampening her hair and sitting her in the blazing sun to bleach, was sending her to the voodoo woman for a charm to bring out her white blood, to bring it to the surface. …

When Margaret was eight, her mother left. And they never heard of her again. She went south to Mobile, they thought. She was looking for somebody. She left her daughter Margaret in her grandfather’s house, in Abner Carmichael’s house, to be raised with all the other children, only more alone.

Margaret was eleven or so before she dared ask about her father. She was afraid. She saw how the other people deferred to her, how they pretended she wasn’t there. But in the end, she got up her courage, and her great-grandmother told her all about it. Half a dozen sentences, that was all.

It began when the state decided to run a new highway down from the capital to the Gulf coast. Everything about that highway was bad luck. It came through Wade County the same summer weevils first really destroyed the cotton, the time people went hungry with their whole year’s work eaten out. Some thought that cutting and grading for the road brought the weevils out of the earth where they had been sleeping. Some said the damage wasn’t weevils at all—that some old, forgotten law had been broken and this was punishment. And it was true that when the road crews blasted their way through McCarren Hill, they turned up an Indian graveyard, so old that nobody knew it was there. For a while every bite of their shovels sent skulls and bowls and arrowheads rolling out into the light of day, the way they weren’t supposed to. People said that those dead Indians wandered about and moaned on nights when the moon was down, fretting and cursing how they had been thrown from their beds to walk the damp pine woods. Nobody went abroad at night, not knowing what a strip of fog might be, not knowing what a bullfrog’s croak might signify. People jumped at the caw of a tree frog and even the ridge runners, the bootleggers, stayed home at night, and dropped a couple of extra pieces of lightwood on the fire to keep the room from getting too dim. Nobody hunted, dogs ran alone after the foxes and the bobcats and the rabbits. And all around, houses began to show signs of magic—the mark on the porch post, the bottle swung from a tree, the circle of powerful stones. People who thought they had forgotten began to remember ways of working protecting magic.

It was in those days that Margaret was born. Her father was one of the surveyors for the new road. He spent two weeks in New Church that summer. He and another white man lived in a tent, and directed the first crews. After a couple of weeks the line of road moved too far toward the south to be in easy reach, so they took up their tent and packed it in the back of their state truck and went on. One of them told a young Negro girl that he would send back for her.

Most likely he never thought of it again. Most likely he didn’t even remember. But she did. Her mother fussed and screamed at her, and called her a fool, but the words washed right over her head. Like the words of the men who would have married her, men she had known all her life, good men from the New Church community. She was small and pretty, and they would have married her together with the baby girl she had borne that terrible season when Indian ghosts walked the hills.

She preferred to wait. When she tired of that, she left. Alone.

That was the story the old woman told Margaret. Told it quickly and flatly. When she was done, she sighed and blew into the lump of snuff under her lip, turned and walked away. She had work to do; it was midsummer and the tomato plants needed her time. It was a pretty poor woman who couldn’t grow enough tomatoes to line her pantry shelves for the winter.

Margaret watched her go, watched the horny yellow heels plop up and down in the dust of the swept yard. Then she herself left. Not thinking quite what she was doing, just moving. She got into the skiff, the light one that the smaller boys usually took, poled it out across the river and into the swamp. She put the full strength of her shoulder to the pole, sending the boat scooting through the shallow water, dodging around the cypresses, fish jumping out of her way, birds rising up overhead, furious at her passing. She crossed a wide slough, using the pole as a paddle in the still lead-colored scum-frosted water. Out of breath finally, she stopped with the bow of the skiff resting against the rotten pointed knee of a cypress. She shipped the pole and sat down, her body rocking rhythmically with the spasms of her breathing. The crows settled into the tops of the cypress trees again, and the black-and-red ricebirds came back. The mosquito hawks—mamselles, old people called them—skimmed the surface of the water, chasing the fluttering mosquitoes, while the croakers and the turtles and the frogs lunged after them.

Margaret sat and looked at the cypress knees, naked and slimy, at the still, unmoving swamp water. She peered down into its depths and saw the light spot that marked a place where bream had their bed. Then she looked at her own reflection in the water, distorted and glazed by the bright sky overhead. She looked at her own arms and hands: thin, striped with muscle and sinew. Bones showing clearly, the shell of bone with skin stretched over it.

Black skin. She looked at it, pinched it between her fingers, rubbed it. It was black, and that was all. Her father’s blood, where would it be? It had to be somewhere, because it had gone into her. It would be inside maybe. Inside she would be white and blond-haired like him. … Her father’s blood now, maybe it had given her her liver and her heart and her lights. But none of them was any use. And maybe too he’d left her her bones, the shell over which her mother’s skin was stretched. …

Margaret watched a water moccasin swim slowly across the water and slither up a dangling branch. Congo, some people called them, because they were black.

She had always thought of her body as solid, one piece. Now she knew it was otherwise. She was black outside, but inside there was her father’s blood.

She thought about this carefully. And her body seemed to expand, to swell, growing like a balloon. She thought of all the distance between the two parts of her, the white and the black. And it seemed to her that those two halves would pull away and separate and leave her there in the open, popped out like a kernel from its husk. She bent her head down into her lap and fought against the separating until bitter tears poured off her face and the front of her stained pink dress was soaked with salt. She wrapped her arms tight around her middle to keep herself together, and her ribs quivered and shook under her fingers.

A tree frog fell on her neck. She felt the little pat of his suction-cupped toes. She didn’t dare look up.

There was a scab on her knee, an old one, half healed. She released one hand and scratched at it quickly. She wrapped herself up again and set her head so that one eye was close to the welling spot. She studied the dark red liquid that bubbled and finally flowed down the slant of black skin. And that was what white blood looked like. … She stuck out her tongue and nudged the edge … and that was what white blood tasted like. …

She watched until the blood lost its glassy color and clotted into dark streaks. She straightened up, releasing her body carefully, gingerly. The two parts of her seemed to hold together.

She looked around curiously, as if she had never seen this stretch of swamp before, surprised to find it familiar. There, a little way over, turtles lived: a small one was sunning himself on a fallen log. Farther over, across that second slough she saw dimly through the maze of vines and cypress and dead fallen trees, was a gator wallow. If she were closer she could smell the sweet sickish odor of those places.