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

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