The Keepers of the House

by Shirley Ann Grau

They are dead, all of them. I am caught and tangled around by their doings. It is as if their lives left a weaving of invisible threads in the air of this house, of this town, of this county. And I stumbled and fell into them. The

Those long summer evenings, after supper when he sat in the new gazebo with his daughter, fanning gently at the gathering mosquitoes, he wondered about it. Abigail was reading to him. She had come home from school with a passionate desire to read poetry aloud to someone; alone would not do any more. She had a teacher, she told her father, who said it was absolutely the only way to appreciate the full quality of the sound. This particular evening she was reading Paradise Lost, and he was not listening. He never listened. He heard the gentle tones of her voice in the same way he heard the buzzing of the mosquitoes and the louder thumping of the beetles as they bumbled their way along, the whizzing sound of the swifts’ wings as they fed on them, the deeper pumping of the owls’ wings as they began to move. The tree frogs and the bullfrogs. The locusts and the crickets. He heard them all and he heard none of them. They were as vague and misty, as remote as the western sky with its evening star swimming into view through the pink haze.

And isn’t it funny, she thought, that it takes two generations to kill off a man? … First him, and then his memory.

Cousin Peter traveled a great deal—I forget why—and he was supposed to have a mistress in Birmingham. He was a diabetic, so he didn’t smoke or drink and he carried cans of special diet food with him. He always seemed to be eating fruit of some kind, and when he did sit down at the table with us, his plate was never like ours. Years later, on one of those trips to Birmingham, he happened to go to a revival meeting, and he was converted. Now, this preacher was a healer who told him that he didn’t need insulin if he believed in God’s Grace and Healing Power. He sent Cousin Peter home with God’s Holy Words rolled up in a little wad and tied around his neck with thread. Cousin Peter did believe, so he threw out his syringes and he sat on the porch (it was a hot day) praying for a miracle, until he passed into a coma. Cousin Betsy hesitated to call a doctor because she didn’t think Peter would like it if she interrupted a miracle or anything like that; and by the time she got him to the hospital it was too late and he died.

I spent four blurred vague years at college. Green lawns, white-columned buildings, and flowerbeds. Fingers that ached with note-taking, head that ached with cigarette smoke, legs that ached with long hours in spike heels. The unfamiliar singing of alcohol in my ears, and lips that went suddenly numb. And parties. There was a place on a TVA lake, a pretty spot with woods close all around except for the single road that led to the landing. It was called Harris Pier and it had rowboats moored in lines on each side. At the very end was a large float with a diving board. It was where you went on Saturday nights after the restaurants and cafés and clubs had all closed. It was always jammed—not that anybody particularly wanted a big group, but there was only one float and everybody crowded on it. Sometimes there’d be a guitar and we’d sing. Once Ted Anderson brought a harmonica. He didn’t play too well, not nearly like I’ve heard Negroes play. But it was good enough. And the soft sad reedy sounds drifting out over the still water and softening their edges on the pines—well, you remember things like that. And you remember how warm bourbon tasted, in a paper cup with water dipped out of the lake at your feet. How the nights were so unbearably, hauntingly beautiful that you wanted to cry. How every patch of light and shadow from the moon seemed deep and lovely. Calm or storm, it didn’t matter. It was exquisite and mysterious, just because it was night. I wonder now how I lost it, t...

“Honey, I’m just too old to get excited. Seems like all I can remember is how many times the same thing has happened to me.