The Keepers of the House (3 page)

“Selma,” he said, in a bit, “I’m going home.”

“I have been wondering when.”

“I’m no lawyer.”

She brushed regularly, slowly. “You have been thinking of this?”

“Just today.”

“Oh,” she said.

“I’d rather go home.” He lay silent staring at the faintly lit ceiling, thinking how it would be there. Then he said: “You won’t mind, will you? There wasn’t anything between us, nothing to keep us.”

She turned around now, finished with her brushing, tying the hair into the wide pink ribbon she used every night. “No,” she said. “No, I imagine not.”

He sat up at her tone, surprised. “But there wasn’t. I haven’t taken advantage of you.”

“You are a gentleman,” she said, “and so formal. No, of course not.”

She had forgotten the bedroom shutters; he got up and began closing them. “And your cousin,” he said, “do you think I could call on her?”

She walked slowly to bed, bringing the lamp, setting it on the small table. “She is seventeen,” Selma said. “I think so.”

“You’ll tell me where she lives?”

“Yes.” Selma stretched herself out on the bed. It was so hot that they slept without even a sheet to cover them, and she lay on the open bed, staring at her toes.

“What sort of cousin is she of yours?”

Selma said: “Her mother and my husband were first cousins. Their mothers were twins.”

“She’s the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen.”

Selma reached over and blew out the lamp, so that he had to find his way to bed in darkness.

He courted Lorena Hale Adams, quickly, impatiently, because he wanted to leave Atlanta. He scarcely noticed her family; he neither liked nor disliked them, though he realized that his own parents would have called them trash. Mrs. Adams was a thin plain woman, with wiry black hair and loose-hanging arms; she kept a bottle of gin in the kitchen safe, and sipped at it all day long. There was a brother too—William forgot to ask his name—who had run off to a ship at Savannah and disappeared. He had written once, from Marseille, over a year ago. They thought he must be dead. Only his mother insisted stubbornly that he was fine—that he was hiding from them all in Turkey. “Why there?” William asked and started to add: “Do you even know where it is?”

“He was always an aggravating child. … Sharper than a serpent’s tooth. … I forget the rest.” Mrs. Adams got up. “I think the cat’s come inside.” She slipped out into the kitchen to have another drink.

There was an older sister, married to a railroad engineer. They lived next door, in a neat white house with four red-headed children, and raised fighting cocks in the back yard.

Mr. Adams was a railroad telegrapher, a slight gentle man. He carved bits of soft yellow pine, and the surface of every table and every mantel was covered with the grotesque results of his enterprise. His people had been storekeepers at Mobile before they drifted north during the hard days right after the Civil War. His mild grey eyes, large, luminous, with their look of infinite tenderness, of grief for all things living, never changed. His daughter Lorena had them too.

In two weeks William was engaged. In four weeks he was married and on his way home.

They lived with William’s parents in the old house by the Providence River. They added another wing, and a broad gallery, which Lorena planted with white wisteria. It was finished just in time for the birth of their first child, a girl. They called her Abigail.

Within a year, in the following August, Lorena delivered again, a boy, called William.

He was a strapping child, heavy and fat. Lorena lay in her bed and smiled, her large grey eyes gleamed. “That wasn’t bad at all,” she told her husband. “They get easier all the time. This one was easy.”

Three days later the colored nurse noticed that her eyes glittered too much and too wildly. She felt her cheek, then her neck. Lorena said: “This is a hot day, but in August they always are.” And the nurse smiled, and slipped down the hall to call William’s mother. She went for her son. “The fever,” she said simply. “Fetch the doctor.”

William went; his horse was so worn that he had to leave it and come back in the doctor’s surrey. By then it was almost sunset. Lorena’s skin was dry and rough to the touch; her lips were split and blistered. “It is such a hot day,” she said, “I hope the baby doesn’t get covered with rash.”

She fretted about that. Finally they brought in the child to show her. She opened the cotton blanket and searched all over his body before she would believe that he did not have a heat rash. As the fever rose, she laughed and talked, calling on people William did not recognize. She sang bits of songs too, particularly that one whose title was her own name: Lorena.

They covered her with wet sheets sprinkled with camphor. They gave her the spoons of whiskey and quinine the doctor ordered. They even sent for the Negro voodoo woman. She hung her snakeskin bags in the four corners of the room, and then went outside to the corner of the yard just off the new porch—she stayed there all night, over the little fire she had built in spite of the heat, praying to her gods for them.

The fever lasted through the night and into the next day. William slept in a corner of the room under one of the voodoo bags. His parents went to bed, old people, frightened and afraid. The doctor dozed upright in a chair. Only Lorena seemed happy. In the very early morning when William woke, he found her luminous eyes on him. She was humming gently, and he took a chair and sat by her. He was no longer frantic with fear. That had passed. He was numb with exhaustion; his head was a great ball that bobbed about at the end of his neck. The color of her round smooth face, the pinched look about her nose, and the vague faint smell that rose from the bed—he understood with quiet icy finality.

Lorena waved her hand weakly at invisible people, smiled at them, and kept humming, tunelessly now. All the rest of his life William remembered sitting and watching those great grey eyes, watching the light fade from them, gradually, bit by bit, until he was not sure when it had happened exactly, when it was gone. Until it was gone completely—the humming, the movement, and he sat looking into a pair of open dead eyes. Not grey, not any color, only lightless. He closed them himself.

The doctor still slept, but the colored nurse was coming down the hall as William stepped through the door. He heard the rattling of her starched white skirts; he smelled the odor of sun and hot iron. He noticed these things detachedly, as if they had nothing to do with him. He saw that the nurse was hurrying toward him, her fat black legs pumping under the starched cloth. With a single jerk of his head he motioned her into the room. Then he walked through the hall to the gallery and along its length, noticing as he did the smell of the new boards and the new paint in the hot sun. He crossed the yard and was swinging himself through the rail fence, when he heard the nurse’s sobbing scream, muffled by the walls of the house. William walked through the pasture lot, vaguely aware that behind him other voices answered the nurse and a tangle of sound spilled out across the sun-scorched fields. He climbed the fence on the other side of the pasture and entered the woods. He walked slowly, naming the things that passed before his eyes, naming them to himself as if he had never seen them before. He looked into the sandy ground, mostly bare under the fall of pine needles, and he saw how grainy it was. And he saw the ants and the doodlebugs and the other little things that tunneled through it. He stood for the longest time in front of a dense clump of white titi, studying its shape and its thickness, noticing how the white flowers had given way to the beginnings of yellow berries. He saw that the wild azaleas, past their bloom, looked brown and dry. He moved slowly, as if he were in a park, looking. Looking at the bushes and the flowers he had seen his whole life long. Bayberry, fragrant in the sun, sparkleberry, the poisonous coral bean. Catbriar, where the shrikes stored their prey, white jasmine. He named them to himself silently. And the flowers too—the Cherokee rose, blooming now; the grass pinks, and the gentians; the milkworts and the live-forevers; the railroad vine and the truehearts and the greenfly orchids. He found a fallen pine and he rested on that, sitting quietly so that the squirrels ran down the trees and looked into his face and chattered and screamed at him.

In a while, more than two hours, but less than three, he got up and started back. He walked lightly, easily, as if his body was no weight to him. He did not feel that he was within it any more.

He came out of the woods and saw the house lying against its green flower-fringed yard. He heard the mourning from the kitchen, the rising and falling wails that had no pattern beyond the movement of the singer’s body. There was a Negro boy sitting on the back porch, a small boy, no more than four. William did not remember seeing him before.
I must ask about him,
he thought.
He must be somebody’s child and I just haven’t noticed him.
The child sat perfectly still on the top step, turning his head slightly to follow William as he went past. William nodded to him. The child nodded back.

William went around the house, passing the new wing he’d built for his wife and for his children. The broad gallery was edged by the white wisteria vines Lorena had planted two years before. Those vines had grown and spread; their blooming past, they were covered with feathery leaves. William circled around the house, listening to the heavy tromp of his shoes on the soft sun-baked grass. When he found himself at the front door, he went inside, sniffing the sudden odor of furniture polish. They would be opening the parlors, cleaning them for the wake.

Where are my parents? he asked the maids, and was surprised to find that he hadn’t spoken aloud. They were so busy at their work that they did not turn or notice him.

He found his parents in the dining room. Two old people sitting in the big rockers by the bay window. They were just sitting, looking out through the open window at the slope of the grass down to the orderly green rows of the fields, where the cotton was making. He stood across the dining-room table from them, his thumb rubbing the smooth mahogany surface in little arcs. “I will need the tomb,” he said. “After all.”

His parents had built it, five years before, when they hired a regular tomb builder to come from Mobile. It stood on the highest slope of the Methodist graveyard in Madison City. It was brick, whitewashed, with a curving arch of a roof and a cross on the very top. There were two marble steps, and two urns flanking them, and the smooth unmarked sheet of marble over the front where names would go.

It had been built for the old people. But when William came back from the woods and saw the great black ribbon on the front door, and the maids cleaning out the summer-closed parlor, he knew what he had to do.

“I don’t want a grave for her,” he told his parents. “I want the tomb.”

They nodded, agreeing silently. Behind him, there was the scrape of a chair as the maids began to turn the mirrors to the wall.

William had his name carved across the top of the tomb—in the long days after the funeral, when the stonecutter came from Mobile. Lorena’s name was there, no other inscription besides the two words that preceded it: My Wife.

A year later William carved another set of dates and the words: My Son.

Then there was a war, and William went off to Camp Martin in New Orleans. That was as close as he got to the trenches of France, though he did almost die there—in the flu epidemic. He came home finally, thin and spindly and shaky. He went back to his parents’ house and to his only daughter, and he almost never left the county again, except for business trips every four or five months to Chattanooga.

Now, William Howland had a younger sister, whose name was Ann. She married a second cousin, Howland Campbell, the son of the man in whose office William had read for the law. (Howlands often married cousins. It was a way they had, there was no plan to it; it just happened.) Ann was a tall, noisy, capable woman, who worried about her brother, widowed at thirty. She wrote him endless letters, in purple ink, begging him to come spend some time with her. “A change of scene would be so good for you,” she always said.

William always answered her letters politely, though he hated to write and even his account books were trouble for him. Year after year he explained patiently why he could not come. Weevils were in the cotton; he had a new red clover he was trying in his pasture lot; he was working on a new variety of field corn.

Ann Howland Campbell sat in her big white house on the tree-lined Atlanta street and read the letters and showed them to her jolly fat husband.

He chuckled and tossed them aside. “Honey,” he told her, “you can plain right now stop trying to match him up.”

“I didn’t say anything about that.”

“He knows well as I do what’s going to happen if he ever sets foot in here.”

Ann looked out at her house filling up with children, at her own belly swollen with the newest one, and she folded her hands protectively across it. “He needs a wife. The first one he had wasn’t at all suitable for him, and he’d found that out pretty soon.”

“Well,” her husband said, “seems he don’t agree.”

Years—many years—later when he took his granddaughter for a picnic in the cemetery with a Negro gardener or two along to clean up, William Howland talked about his wife Lorena. “There was such a light to her,” he said, “all over her. I used to think she’d glow in the night.”

He hadn’t mourned for her, not the way a widower is supposed to. It seemed that part of him had died with her and in a way it was a mercy that it hadn’t been left behind to grieve.

On that sunny morning he looked at the tomb that had his name carved across the top and he said: “She might have turned into the same sort of drunk her mother was. And maybe all that gentleness would have gone like her father’s. …” He shrugged and smiled. “But it didn’t.”

He went on living a widower. He may not have been very happy, but he certainly wasn’t unhappy either. There was a lot for him to do, what with the cotton and the cattle and the new demand for lumber and pulp. And he had his daughter to raise and his parents to bury. (They never got around to building another tomb. They were dropped into the sandy red earth with a blob of grey granite at their heads.) The days passed imperceptibly: short cold winter, long hot summer. He wasn’t a hermit, and he wasn’t unfriendly. He went to church when he wasn’t too busy, and to parties all over the county. He was a fine dancer, he played the mandolin and sang all the popular songs in his pleasant light baritone. He just didn’t seem interested in the daughters or the widows. Not at all. If he had a mistress, she didn’t live in town. Perhaps he had some sort of arrangement in Chattanooga, but no one ever knew for sure. It just gave them something to talk about.