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

clucked her way to and from it.
    “Well, what?”
    Abigail giggled, the smug contented giggle of that same woman. “Greg is so proper that he’s coming all this way just to ask you for my hand.”
    “Oh,” William said. “Well, I’ve never known it done at such long distance before.”
    “Nobody marries from their home town any more,” she told him confidentially. “Really.”
    William did not have to flip the reins; the horse stopped at his proper place. “Tell me what to do, lamb.”
    “Absolutely nothing,” she said. “I’ll write to Aunt Annie and you won’t have to do a thing.”
    She danced a little step in the dust of the drive, her long blond hair spinning around her eyes. “There’s just such a lot to be done, Papa. I haven’t got a single thing for a trousseau. It came up so sudden.”
    “How sudden?”
    “The day before I wrote you. But you couldn’t read that either, could you?”
    William shook his head.
    “Do you think I could go to Atlanta for a trousseau? Aunt Annie would know all about it.”
    He just nodded silently. He followed her inside, not bothering to call the servants, carrying her single bag himself, feeling for the first time old and solid and tired. She was a baby he had held, a baby who had wet his pants and vomited across the front of his shirt. And she wasn’t. … His feet felt rooted to the earth. The round hoops of his ribs seemed awkward and stiff like barrel staves. I am forty-eight, he thought, and that is old.
    Abigail was talking to him, and he nodded his head, not listening, just agreeing.
    Our children grow up, he thought, echoing something he had heard long ago and had not remembered for the years since. “Our children grow old and elbow us into the grave.”
    William went to the dining room and poured himself a whiskey. Looking at the light yellow liquid, he thought of the still in the swamp and how he had planned to hunt for it. He didn’t seem to want to any more. He didn’t seem to have the energy for it now.
    He took the drink and went back to the porch. He sat in his rocker, and put the drink on its arm. He looked out across the road to his fields and his woods beyond them.
    At least, he thought, the ground was solid. The sandy ground you knew so well you got to thinking of it as a person. Tricky, hard, not particularly agreeable. But the same, still the same, for you, for your father, for your children. And that helped. That was a comfort.

ANNIE H OWLAND C AMPBELL sent a long effusive telegram from Atlanta. William held the yellow sheet in his hand, and said to Rufus Matthews, who was the telegrapher as well as the stationmaster: “Cost her a lot of good money. …” Rufus nodded. “Seeing that,” William went on, “a person would think you’d get more sense out of it.”
    “I took it off just the way it come in,” Rufus said, miffed.
    Most of the message was not understandable, but the meaning was clear—the wedding had her approval and she was delighted.
    William sighed. “Least I can tell the thought of the whole.”
    He was having an awful lot of trouble with messages lately, he thought. Even telegrams. … He hadn’t got one of those since the time his wife died. …
    “Wedding here?” Rufus asked.
    “I suppose,” William said. “You ask my sister and Abigail.”
    Gregory Edward Mason came, as he had said he would, and had the proper talk with his future father-in-law. William was vague and polite; he did not think very much of him—this tall, thin, sandy-haired man with very bad teeth—but said nothing beyond commenting that he sat a horse with unusual grace and ease.
    Abigail and Greg rode almost constantly for the two days he was there. William watched them dashing about, the calm certain elegance against Abigail’s hesitant amateurishness.
    And William remembered something else. Abigail had not liked horses as a child, had refused all offers of a pony. Only the past summer had she wanted one. So it was like the poetry read