The Keepers of the House (7 page)

Annie looked at her brother and chuckled. “Liars’ tongues drop off, William.”

“It looks lovely,” Abigail insisted.

“Oliver,” Annie said abruptly, “if you’re going to meet that train you got to leave.”

Oliver Brandon was short and stocky and middle-aged. Chucklehead Negro, people called him, from the way his round head sat on his thick neck. He had worked for William Howland for twenty-five years as a handyman and helper. He was really manager for the place, though being a Negro he didn’t have that title. This particular afternoon, he was wearing polished shoes and black pants, a white shirt and a black tie. He had parted his thin kinky hair, and plastered it down with brilliantine.

“What you dressed up for?” William demanded. And of Annie he asked: “What train?”

“There’s only two a day, William, and Oliver’s got to meet each one every day until the wedding.”

“For God’s sake, why?”

“Now, Willie,” Annie said, “be sensible. You’ve got a lot of people coming down, and it’s getting to be about time to start looking for them.” She wiped her perspiring face on the corner of her apron. “Even if they telegraph just exactly when they’re arriving, Rufus Matthews is likely to lose the messages or get them wrong.”

William had to admit that was true. “Leastways,” he said, “I don’t like the idea of my man asking everybody that gets off the train at Madison City if they’re coming to Miss Abigail Howland’s wedding.”

Annie darted him a look of disgust. “Are so many people going to get off the train that he’s likely to make a mistake?”

So William gave up and went to fix himself a drink. The strange odors of the house no longer bothered him; he seemed to be getting used to them already. He stopped in front of the hall table and studied its great silver bowl, glistening dully in the light. With his finger he touched the tracing of grapes and leaves on the top edge. “Where’d this come from?”

Abigail giggled delightedly. “The attic. … I bet you didn’t even know that there was a box of silver up there.”

William shook his head. “No. …”

“I used to look at it sometimes and swear to myself that I’d have it at my wedding.”

“You went up to the attic?” There was rat poison up there and it was strictly forbidden.

“Oh, Papa,” Abigail said, “I’m not a child any more. I don’t have to be afraid of saying what I did.”

“No,” William said, “I guess not.”

“It’s lovely, from the initials it must be Grandma Legendre’s.”

“I wasn’t saying anything about that,” William said, “I was just remarking on the number of things that I didn’t know about, even while I was living with them.”

“Oh, Papa,” Abigail said.

In the following days, William watched his house fill up with cousins and second cousins and great-uncles and -aunts by marriage. People he hadn’t seen for thirty years, old people, crusty and fragile with age. Their stolid children. And their grandchildren, scurrying around, stumbled underfoot, slammed by doors, scratched by brambles, blotched by poison ivy whose unknown clumps they wandered into.

One afternoon he noticed a line of Negro children, small ones, nine or younger, straggling across the yard, carrying huge armfuls of smilax. “What in God’s name is that?”

“We needed it,” Annie said calmly, “for decorations.”

“I went down to the school,” Abigail said, “and told them all that you’d pay them ten cents an armload.”

William did. Some of the children were so badly scratched from the thorns of the catbriar and blackberry bushes that he gave them double. As they dumped their greens on the porch on the shady side of the house and fetched buckets of water to pour over them, William noticed some poison ivy in the lot.

He said nothing, wondering idly if his sister was susceptible. She must not have been, because she hung the loops of green with her own gloveless hands, and he heard no more about it.

The day of the wedding, he met Gregory Mason on the early train. Mason looked tired—William saw that at once. His thin face was gaunt, his tall lanky body seemed stretched and fragile in the chill winter light.

William shook hands with him, marveling again that this was the man his daughter had picked for a husband. “Hard trip?”

“I believe so.”

There were dozens of people getting off the train, milling about on the small platform. “Will,” they called to him, “here we are!”

And William saw that they were his cousins from Jackson. He was surprised. He thought they’d arrived yesterday—but no, now that he thought about it, the ones at his house were from Montgomery. A different branch altogether. As he moved across the platform to greet them, he thought how stupid he’d been to mix them up. But then the various branches of his family had always seemed a good deal alike to him.

As he began shaking hands, he had a sudden thought. White men often said all niggers looked alike, but to him now, niggers looked different. …

He covered his chuckle with a bland welcoming smile and went about dutifully pumping arms and kissing cheeks. When he was done, he and Gregory Mason walked off toward the Washington Hotel.

“You got the Groom’s Breakfast,” William told him abruptly. “Abigail tell you?”

“I don’t believe she did.”

“Expect she was scared to. … Every man that’s come for the wedding’ll be there, blood and in-law and friend. I reckon you’ll see.

“It’s customary, I suppose,” Gregory Mason said.

“Hereabouts, it is. Hotel’s right there.” As William pointed, a man stepped out on the lattice-trimmed porch and waved to them. “That’s Harry Armstrong,” William said. “He’ll be best man, seeing how you don’t have any family here.”

“A cousin?”

William looked for mockery, found none. “His mother was my father’s sister. Harry’s a great man with the bottle, but I reckon you’ll see that too.”

By the middle of the afternoon William Howland found himself sitting alone in the dining room of the Washington Hotel. His elbow was propped on the long glass-littered table, his hand was holding his head up, and the walls were singing and zooming around his ears. He was watching Gregory Mason stagger through the door, guided by Oliver’s black arm.

“Careful with him,” he shouted to Oliver. And then softer, to no one in particular: “Holds his likker right well, that fella. And who’d thought it?”

William Howland took his fist from under his chin and turned his head carefully and slowly. He discovered that he wasn’t alone at all. Almost hidden by a row of bottles and jugs, Harry Armstrong dozed, head down on the table. “You poor son of a bitch,” William said aloud, “wake up.”

Harry Armstrong did not even move or mumble. “Son of a bitch,” William said again as he looked around the room. The guests were gone, helped to their beds by teams of servants directed by Oliver. Except for one—William finally noticed him. In the far corner of the room someone slept on the floor. Face to the wall, he was covered with a grey blanket and there was a pillow under his head.

Good for Oliver, William thought, Oliver and his boys. …

William stood up carefully, holding the room steady around him. He walked slowly over and shook Harry Armstrong’s arm. “They gone,” he said.

“Who?” Harry Armstrong pushed himself up, using both hands.

“Who was here.”

Armstrong looked at his watch. “Can’t see a damn thing.” He rubbed his eyes and squinted harder. “Past two. I’m going to bed.”

“Harry,” William said, “who’s that on the floor there?”

Harry Armstrong looked. “Can’t see his face.”

Oliver came back. His white jacket was rumpled and stained. A button was pulled off, and the pocket ripped. The too heavy brilliantine on his hair had run down on his forehead and his neck. He scrubbed at it with a large blue handkerchief but he couldn’t seem to get it off.

“You put the groom to bed?” William asked him.

Oliver nodded. “I reckon everybody gone now.”

Harry Armstrong chuckled and pointed. “You forgot him, Oliver.”

Oliver looked at the sleeping huddled form with the pillow tucked neatly under its head. “You want me to move him?”

Harry Armstrong stood up, gingerly. “See who it is.”

Oliver walked over and peeped into the face. “Mr. Bannister.”

William said: “He’s comfortable, let him be. I’m going for a swim.”

Harry Armstrong thought a minute. “Me too.”

So Oliver put an overcoat over his white jacket and followed them down to the foot of the street. He watched them shed their clothes and slide into the icy water of the Providence River. He turned up his collar and found a log to sit on, waiting patiently. A group of black children gathered around him, giggling.

That evening, bathed and shaved and aching, they rode—all the men together, thirty-odd of them—to the Howland place for the wedding.

In his crowded parlor, during the ceremony when John Hale, the Methodist minister, was pronouncing the familiar words in his very best manner, William’s eye focused on a swatch of green that hung directly over the portrait of his grandfather. He could have sworn that in the massed and twisted leaves he saw the unmistakable shape of poison ivy.

Afterwards, bride and groom gone, Annie said to him: “It was the loveliest wedding I have ever seen.”

And he answered: “Do you get poison ivy?”

“For heaven’s sake, Willie … no.”

“I saw some, all bound up with the others.”

She gave him a quick smile, the sort of smile that he had not seen on her face since they had been very young children together. She winked at him too, a vague dipping of an eyelid. “It’s green like the others,” she said, “and we were running short.”

That evening Annie giggled like a young girl, had far too much to drink, and sat at the piano and played and sang “Juanita” and “The Rosewood Spinet” and “Kathleen” and “The Letter Edged in Black” until she fell asleep across the keys. Then, because she was such a heavy woman no one dared carry her upstairs (the staff by this time had drunk as much as the guests), they put her to sleep on a sofa in the dining room. Later still when the moon came up, most of the men went off on a hunt, stumbling and singing their way across the fields and over the fences, followed by unsteady Negro boys with bottles of whiskey, preceded by the swift brown-and-white flashes of dogs.

William started them off, as was polite, but soon turned back, cut toward the road, and followed it home. He was remembering the wedding parties he’d been to when he was a young man, here in these same woods and ridges, and in the counties around Atlanta. They were all pretty much like this. Drunken men still sounded alike. And the dogs still sounded familiar, and the night wind hadn’t changed, nor the ground underfoot.

Bit by bit, day by day, the wedding broke up. By the end of the second week, they were all gone, except for his sister Annie. Her husband left the day after the wedding itself—he had an office to run—and he took his children back with him. Annie stayed on to close up the unused portions of the house.

She did not even ask William if he would like it. She and the six maids hired for the wedding (Ramona, the cook, was old and crotchety and stayed home) were busy for a week. They pulled and fastened shutters, took curtains down and folded them in chests, rolled rugs and sprinkled them with mothballs against the grey mice, covered mattresses with sheets of brown paper. They jammed chimneys with newspapers against the swifts and swallows. They closed doors one by one, doors of rooms, doors of wings. Until it was finished.

On her last evening Annie said: “Do you know there are twenty-two bedrooms in this house, if you count the three upstairs in Grandpapa’s wing?”

“I didn’t know that,” William said.

“We been living here all of our lives and somehow never took it into our heads to count the bedrooms.”

“Funny,” William said.

“It was all open for my wedding,” Annie said, remembering, “but I suppose Mama did that. I know I didn’t have a thing to do with it.”

To please her William said: “That was quite a wedding you had.”

She smiled brightly. “Always meant to ask Father how much it cost, only I never got to it. … But it was lively.”

While the women squealed their admiration, the men shot all the windows out of the church, and rode their horses in and out of the drugstore, the hotel, and the railroad station. It was July, and the railroad platforms were piled high with watermelons awaiting shipment. Thousands of them. Next morning the whole main street was slippery and slimy with the pulp and seeds of the smashed melons. …

She remembered, chuckling.

William patted her shoulder, pleased with himself for having pleased her. She wasn’t bad, he thought. It wasn’t her fault that she was fat and old and a little dull. … Like me, he thought, just like me.

“I don’t suppose those rooms’ll be opened now, until Abigail’s children come to getting married.”

“I reckon so,” he said shortly.

She leered at him impishly, and said: “Willie, you are jealous.”

“Annie,” he said, “you are a silly old woman.”

She sat grinning at him, not hearing, until he thought he would like to smash something down on her head. Just as he was about to, she got up and poured him a whiskey, and brought it to him, taking one for herself.

Sitting in the old chairs, in the old house, scrubbed unnaturally clean now, and empty of the people who had sheltered in it, they drank to each other.

“Luck!” William Howland toasted his sister.

“The future, Willie!” And again there was that faint ghost of a wink.

“Annie,” he said, “go home.”

“In the morning, Willie.”

She did. And he was left alone, except for Ramona rattling pots in the kitchen or muttering her way through the rooms, flipping a feather duster at the edges of the furniture. The house was no more empty than it had been with Abigail at college. But it felt emptier. One morning toward the end of the first week, William discovered that he was talking to himself. He had just waked up. He was lying in the big tester bed, staring at the glowing square of shaded window, and he said aloud: “Wind’s to the west.”

He heard himself and jumped. And looked around guiltily, wondering: How long have I done that?