Read Online The Keepers of the House by Shirley Ann Grau - Free Book Online

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.”
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