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

away.
    That afternoon, as they sat down to a late lunch, Harry Armstrong told his wife: “Guess what Will Howland is going to do now?”
    She did not ask. She did not need to. After thirty-five years she knew that her husband would tell his story just the way he wanted.
    “He’s going still-hunting,” he chuckled. “Told me about it to keep Calvin Robertson from shotgunning him in the swamp.”
    Mrs. Armstrong clucked her tongue sympathetically. “He’s not for turning them in?”
    Harry was startled. “Will Howland, best blood in the county?”
    She looked ashamed. “I just was asking.”
    “He won’t be figuring on nothing like that,” Harry said flatly. “He’s just making up games to amuse himself.”
    Will Howland set about his game carefully. First he went to see Peter Washburn, the Negro who built skiffs. He found him planing away, outside his shed on the riverbank, the willows all around him whistling and rattling their thin dust-caked leaves. Will bought a skiff, one that was just begun, and waited impatiently for it. Washburn worked slowly—William Howland made two special trips to town to check. When everything was finished finally, he and Peter Washburn put the skiff on the river, to let the wood swell and tighten. They moored it to a river birch and swamped it, leaving just the gunwales showing—to age and ripen in the muddy water.
    Then William had no more time, for the cotton was ready. He put a sack on his shoulder and did a few rows himself, because he liked to keep his hand in. It wasn’t hard work, picking, all the small children did it. And in a way it was easier for them: a man his size had to stoop considerably. Picking did give you a very muscular hand: you yanked the cotton out of the prongs of the boll with the tips of your fingers. William Howland’s right hand was much bigger than his left. He was rather proud of that fact.
    The pickers worked until the fields were stripped, seven days a week, under skies that were brilliant blue and edged with huge black thunderheads. There was almost never rain this time of year. Though the clouds piled themselves higher and higher, they never moved from the horizon. They seemed fixed there, like mountains. The first sun picked them up in the mornings, and they turned purple red with the last of its light. Sometimes the pickers worked by moonlight, and when they stood up to stretch and rest their backs, they would see those same clouds rising at the edges of the world, silvery and shining white.
    William fell into bed at night, not bothering to take off his clothes. Sometimes in the very few minutes before he fell asleep, he would think of his new skiff and the swamp, and what he would do when the picking was over and the roar of the gins had ceased. … He and Peter Washburn would drag the skiff from the muddy shallows and slosh it clean with fresh water. Then they would put it on a wagon and haul it across the Howland roads, ones that generations had cut into the red sandy hills, following their own pursuits, lumbering or hunting, or just for the pleasure of marking a new way. Finally they would set the skiff down in the little stream that was called Deer Run. From there he would have to find the way into the swamp alone. He was sure he could.
    William Howland found himself remembering more and more as the picking season moved to a close. “I’ll be going soon,” he sent word to Peter Washburn.
    But he didn’t. The very afternoon he had decided that he was ready to leave, he got a letter from his daughter. She wrote as she read, slanting, ornate, vague. She had dashed off this note quickly and folded it before the ink dried. William studied it, the beautiful shapes of the letters, the soft perfume that lifted from the paper, the smeared unintelligible words. About the only thing he understood was that she was coming home.
    He met the train.
    She was as always tall, thin, and blond. But this time her vagueness seemed to have disappeared. She