The Keepers of the House (24 page)

“I suppose he isn’t.”

We went to the Chicken Shack & Roof Garden. Its name made no sense. It was just a one-story building with the usual peaked roof: you couldn’t have put a garden up there if you wanted to. And there wasn’t even one blade of grass outside. The building was surrounded by black asphalt right up to the edges of the walls.

The Chicken Shack had a bar, a long red leather one stretching the length of the building—though the county was dry. (You’d see state police cars parked in back now and then, half hidden by the high fence. They’d be stopping by for a drink or a payoff.)

I ordered bourbon and water, as I always did. John Tolliver said: “They’ve got a real good bar here so let’s use it. Two martinis.”

I didn’t mind the correction. I would have to remember that, I thought. And the next time I would order properly.

“My grandfather mentioned Tolliver Nation,” I said. “Where’s that?”

He shrugged. “Just another name for Somerset County.”

“You’re the Somerset County Tollivers?”

He nodded.

Somerset was the northernmost county with the darkest, bloodiest past in the state. The breeding plantations had been up there, during the first half of the nineteenth century. They bred slaves and sold them, like stock. There was money in it, but not much else. Even in those days people didn’t think too much of the slave runner and the slave breeder. They bought from them, but—as they did with Jew traders—they spat into the dirt to clean out the taste when they were gone. Those breed stations were always discontented and seething. Slave uprisings often began there. Mostly they were stopped before they left the county. But sometimes they weren’t and they spread down into the rest of the state. There’d been a big one in the forties, one that left a wide trail of burned houses and bodies hanging on trees. As for the white people of Somerset County, well, they were violent too. Travelers in the old days used to shiver and keep their guns ready when they passed along that section of the North Trace … it was robbers’ country. During the Reconstruction they’d gone in for family feuds and for twenty years they killed each other. When it was over, just about the only families left bore the name Tolliver. They settled down peacefully enough—about this time the railroad came through there—and cleared their fat black land and raised huge crops of cotton. The new railroad hauled it off.

Nothing dramatic had happened up there for a long time, but the name remained, somehow, and whenever you said Somerset County, people would think a minute, remembering. It was that sort of name.

John Tolliver was different, too. He carried himself confidently, and that dark head of his was very handsome.

I didn’t see too much of him—we were out only that once before it was time for the Christmas vacation. After that came the flurry of exams, and I sort of forgot about him. When he did call, it was almost February.

“Where would you like to go? Harris Pier?”

“No,” I said abruptly, and then explained. “I nearly drowned there year before last.”

We drove over to the next county, to a café that was supposed to have terrific pizzas. Like all places near the university it was jammed with students and the jukebox was far too loud. We got the last of the empty booths, back in a corner by the kitchen door.

“It’ll take all night to get supper,” John Tolliver said.

“I don’t mind. Anyway, noisy places are kind of friendly.”

The jukebox hesitated for two seconds, whirred, and began King Cole’s “Mona Lisa.” “That’s such a pretty song,” I said. “I love it.”

“I’m sorry I can’t ask you to dance,” John Tolliver said. “I never learned.”

“I don’t really care for it.”

“I’m glad.”

“But how could you avoid it?” I said. “I thought everybody was forced into dancing school.”

His blue eyes were level. “You don’t know Tolliver Nation.”

“No,” I said, “no, I don’t.”

“There’s nobody to teach dancing. If there was, they’d only have the babies. By the time you’re seven, you’ve got your chores to do.”

“Oh,” I said, “I see.”

“It’s not like Wade County, you know. It’s just cotton and more cotton. No timber lands like your grandfather’s got.”

“Yes,” I said, not wishing to appear too ignorant, “I guess timber is valuable.”

He laughed at me. And I found that I didn’t mind that at all, because his laugh was friendly and intimate.

“Can I have a bourbon and soda?” I said. “It’s what I really do prefer.”

He had to get up and go over to the bar for the order. It was that kind of place. When he came back, he put the glasses carefully on the table. “I haven’t called you before this,” he said abruptly, “because I wanted to get myself free from another entanglement.”

I didn’t know what to say, so I said: “Oh.”

“I’ve never dated more than one girl at a time. Does that sound silly to you?”

“No.”

“I work at the library every week night until it closes at ten,” he said. “I’ll pick you up then.”

So every evening after work he met me at the sorority house. Every evening the same time: ten minutes past ten. Mostly we went for a drive and parked and played the radio and talked. He had very little money, and he wouldn’t let me pay. So we drove to a different spot every night, and smoked cigarettes, and watched the silly little coals burn red in the dark. The first time he kissed me good night, it was polite but firm. His skin smelled like clover grass. “Now,” he said, “that’s enough for now. Go on inside.”

He sounded like a man with a plan. And that was sort of nice. Most people I knew just drifted and let things happen to them—not John Tolliver. He ordered and directed events himself. Since no one had ever told me what to do before, I liked it immensely.

One evening, my roommate said: “Honey child, if you don’t be careful, you are going to be in trouble.”

“What?” I was too vague and too happy to understand.

She picked up the green plastic case that contained my diaphragm. “I was looking to see if you had a Band-Aid in your dresser—damn shoe slashed my heel to ribbons—and I found this.” She waved it at me. “That’s pretty careless.”

“I don’t need it. I’m not sleeping with him.”

She tossed the box back into the drawer, shrugging. “Have it your own way.”

“I’m not—I’m going to marry him.” I hadn’t dared to think like that before, but as I said it I knew it was true.

When he proposed a month later, it was in the same matter-of-fact tone. “I would like to marry you,” he said. “Would you?”

“Yes,” I said, “I think I would.”

Rather than tell my grandfather by phone or write him, I decided to go home during the short Easter holiday.

I drove down overnight, so excited and happy I didn’t need sleep. I walked in just as he was having breakfast with Margaret in the kitchen. Without a word she got up and laid another place for me. “Well,” my grandfather said, “looks like you got good news this time.”

“I’m going to get married.”

“I been expecting that.” He calmly poured himself a cup of coffee from the old-fashioned flowered pot.

“Don’t you want to know who?”

“I expect I do,” he said. “But I figured to find out sooner or later.”

“John Tolliver.”

He went on drinking his coffee slowly.

Margaret said: “You want breakfast?”

“I’m starving.”

My grandfather said: “He’ll do all right. There’s some of his family that’s bums, but there’s some of ours we can’t look too hard at. We could start listing with your father.”

“John has one more year at law school.”

“That family’s had things pretty much their own way up in that county past three or four generations. Tollivers everywhere you look. Having things that way kind of gives a man a strange cast.”

“No more than being a Howland,” I said.

He smiled and shrugged that one off. “I reckon not.”

“Anyway,” I said, ashamed that I had snapped at him, “John doesn’t want to go back.”

“Back?”

“To Tolliver Nation.”

“Got too small for him,” he said easily. “Eat your breakfast.”

When we were done, I went with him to the back porch, while he put on the heavy boots he used for working. “Near stepped on a copperhead yesterday,” he told me as he laced them up.

“You don’t like John.”

He went on lacing. “Don’t know him.”

“You introduced us.”

“I recognized him by the family face that he’s carrying, same way I’d know any Tolliver.”

“But you don’t like him anyhow.”

“Know some things about his family I can’t give much room to.”

“But that’s not him.”

“No,” he said. “I reckon it ain’t. You in love with him?”

I felt myself blushing. “I’m not ashamed of it. Yes, I am.”

“Didn’t say you had cause to be ashamed.”

He finished with his boots and straightened his legs out, the way old men will, and he looked across the back yard—muddy as it always was in the spring—down to the barns and the silos and the smokehouses and the other buildings, behind them the fenced lots, and behind them the woods.

“You don’t seem happy about it.”

He had begun to fill his pipe. “Honey, I’m just too old to get excited. Seems like all I can remember is how many times the same thing has happened to me. Right now you’re telling me this. And seems all I can remember is your mother and me, just the two of us driving back from the station in a buggy and coming up that front drive there, same drive, same plants, same everything, and her telling me she was in love and getting married.”

“John’s not like my father.”

“And seems I can remember me coming home to tell my parents I was in love and getting married. And they didn’t look surprised either, nor very happy.”

“It’s not the same with me,” I said, “it’s different.”

“When you’re as old as me,” he said, “you’ll see that there ain’t very much that’s different or separate or unusual.” He stood up. “I’m so old I can remember back before there was any such thing as a boll weevil in this country. … You better call your Aunt Annie. Seems like she runs all my weddings for me.”

“Okay,” I said.

He started off across the yards; he always began the day with a quick look at the barns and the stock there. He hadn’t gone more than two feet before he turned and said: “Robert’s finished his M.S. and he’s got himself a job.”

“I didn’t know that,” I said. “That’s wonderful. Where?”

“San Francisco,” he said. “They need engineers there.”

“I bet Margaret is happy.”

He looked at me, that same level surprised look, as if he hadn’t seen me before. Not ever. “That’s a mighty proper and polite thing to say. And I do think she is.”

On my way to bed, because I was terribly sleepy now, I passed Margaret, taking the dead flowers out of the vases on the hall table.

“I just heard about Robert,” I said. “That’s terrific.”

“He’s a good boy,” she said quietly.

“He ought to be getting married soon.”

“Yes,” she said. “He will soon.”

Then I went to bed, and before I fell asleep, I thought how much older Margaret looked. She’d always been tall and rawboned, and she still was, but now there was a thickening around her hips, and the smooth black skin of her cheeks was lined and there were crinkles around her eyes. She had a little smattering of grey in her hair too, her white blood had given her that. While I was trying to figure out her age—she was about as old as my mother and that would have been in the middle or late forties—I fell asleep.

We had a big June wedding, as everyone expected. The biggest wedding of the year. My grandfather took over the Washington Hotel in town for the extra guests. Even that wasn’t enough, and the Bannister cousins (Peter Bannister was dead by this time) opened their huge house.

It seemed to me that I drove over the whole state going to receptions, to cocktail parties, to showers, to dances. Old-fashioned week-long house parties on the Gulf coast. Hunts in the woods of the northern counties. And more dances: black tie, square dance, masquerade. … Two weeks before the wedding I went up to Somerset County to meet John’s people. They gave no parties—weddings were nothing so special for them—they were serious religious folk. We spent only one day there, and they were polite and kind, after their fashion, but I was very relieved to go. “You see,” John said on the way back, “what I mean. It isn’t like Wade County.”

I nodded. “Did they like me?”

“They approve of you.” He flashed that bright smile dryly. “That’s a lot better in their books than liking you.”

“Your parents say anything at all?”

“Said you’d make a good wife.”

“Oh.” I sounded doubtful.

“It’s their way,” he said. “Don’t fuss with it.”

On the day of the wedding, I was so tired that I stumbled and almost fell coming down the stairs on my grandfather’s arm. When the ceremony was done and the reception over, and we drove off in the new Thunderbird convertible that my grandfather had given us, I fell asleep almost the moment we left and slept half the way to New Orleans. I woke to find the car had stopped and it was way past midnight; we were parked on the Gulf coast (you could see the water shining under the moon) and John was sleeping behind the wheel. I settled back and let him sleep. It was dawn before we drove the rest of the way to New Orleans.

Two weeks later we were home; two months later we were back at the university and John was finishing his last year of law school. I was shocked at how hard he worked. I’d never known anyone to do that. My grandfather certainly hadn’t; I’d never seen anybody work with such fierce intensity. We had a tiny bright apartment right by the campus, and that whole last year we were there I almost never saw him. I met him for lunch, a quick dash through the university cafeteria, and then I saw him again at night when the library closed, when he came home and pounded on the typewriter for an hour or so. He corresponded with a great many people; the letters were carefully written and carefully thought out. “They could help me someday,” he said when I complained. “When you start at the bottom you’ve got to use everything.”

He was away so much—and because I had nothing else to do, I began to suspect. Finally one evening after supper, I followed him to the library. He was working in one of the rooms on the lower floor and from a seat on the front steps I could watch him. He stayed there hour after hour, hunched over, reading. He did not speak to anybody; he did not seem to notice that there were other people in the room. He didn’t even stop for a cigarette; he hardly shifted in his uncomfortable wood chair. I sat on the concrete steps for three hours, feeling lonely and sick, and when it was closing time, I scurried home at a run to be there before him.