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

rushed up to him and—something she had never done in public—hugged him. “Papa!” She giggled in his ear: “And weren’t you surprised, and wasn’t it wonderful, it just couldn’t be better, it just was perfect.”
    Patiently William Howland explained: “The letter was smeared, lamb. There wasn’t much I could make out.”
    He saw her face fall, her underlip quiver. “You folded the paper too soon,” he said gently, “but tell me now.”
    She stepped back and said loudly, spacing the words carefully, the way you would for a deaf person or a foreigner. (And William suddenly wondered if he were not.) “I am going to be married.”
    He looked at her, conscious only that Rufus Matthews, the stationmaster, grabbed for his broom and began sweeping the dusty dry platform, to pretend he hadn’t heard.
    “You’re surprised, aren’t you, Papa?” Abigail giggled. “Isn’t it lovely? I know you thought you’d never get me off your hands.”
    “No,” William said, “I can’t say I was bothered about that.”
    “Not being pretty … it worries a girl.”
    Had it? he thought. She seemed not to have noticed, seemed never to have given it a wisp of consideration. … He saw endless unknown stretches opening up before him. She thought, she worried.
    Behind that bland smooth face, those gentle eyes. … He had never before imagined her as having thoughts or feelings of her own. She had always seemed so content. …
    “Aren’t you going to say something, Papa?”
    “I wasn’t worried about your finding a husband when you’re not twenty.”
    She took his arm and they started for the waiting buggy. William Howland was in no hurry to own a car. The roads were too bad for them most of the year.
    “He is the most wonderful man.” She hugged her father’s arm, remembering.
    “He from town?”
    She stopped, and laughed. “Mercy sakes, no!”
    Rufus Matthews dropped his broom. Served him right, William thought grimly. People who listen got to take their chances.
    “I met him at Mary Baldwin,” she said.
    “I might could’ve guessed that,” William said.
    “He teaches there. English.”
    All those poems, William thought. All of them, and all that reading aloud.
    When he did speak, he surprised himself by asking: “So he wrote those letters you got last summer?” The amusement showed in his voice.
    Abigail looked at him sharply. “How could you know?”
    “Whole town knew,” William said. And he lifted his voice for Rufus’s waiting ears. “Old Ainsworth spent most of the summer speculating on it.”
    As they drove home, Abigail told him: “His name is Mason, Gregory Edward Mason.”
    “He come from Virginia?”
    “Mercy no!” (William wondered why she used that word so often when she never had before.) “He’s from England, from London. He’s just teaching there.”
    William said: “Your great-great-great grandaddy’d be spinning in his grave and he knew you were marrying an Englishman.”
    She answered complacently. “I know.”
    The wheels wiggled and jolted in the ruts in the road. Six or eight quail scuttled across the gravel and disappeared into a stripped-bare corn field. William said: “I reckon I should know more about weddings, but what do we do now?”
    “Oh, Papa,” she said, “ you don’t do anything. I’ll write Aunt Annie and ask her to come down. If you can stand having her in the house.”
    “I’ve stood her my whole life,” William said to the horse’s back. “I can manage a bit more.”
    “Well, that’s all there is to it. Really.”
    William said: “I’m right glad to hear it.”
    As they were turning into the drive that led to the front door, Abigail said: “And I nearly forgot. … Greg is coming down next Friday.”
    “For the wedding?”
    “Oh, Papa. …” She clucked her tongue at him and he thought for a fraction of a second that she sounded just like her grandmother, the slatternly drunkard who kept a bottle of gin hidden in the kitchen safe and