Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  The rain never let up, and now the sky was completely clouded over.

  To be heard over the noise of the rain beating against the windows and the roof, Annie Bell Driver had to speak as loudly as if she were delivering a sermon in a Mobile church. Rain rattled the windowpanes and splashed off the sills and dripped down the chimney until the entire room smelled of rain-soaked evergreens.

  Bray had put the couple’s suitcases in the Torpedo earlier, and Elinor wouldn’t even take an umbrella to get through the downpour to the automobile parked in front of Mary-Love’s house. The temporary stitches in her sleeve pulled apart as she lifted her arm to wave to everybody on the front porch. She sat laughing on the front seat as soaked-to-the-skin Oscar drove off down the street that was three inches deep in churning water dyed the color of the clay beneath—dyed red, Perdido red.

  Chapter 7

  Genevieve

  By the afternoon of the first Monday in June the weather had turned hot in Perdido. The river behind the Caskey houses flowed low, muddier and redder than ever before. Mary-Love and Sister sat on the side porch out of the reach of the oppressive declining sun. Mary-Love had two large pieces of patterned cotton, one in light blue and the other in a pale violet, and by a cardboard pattern was cutting out squares and triangles. Sister, who had patience and a steady eye, was stitching these together to form large squares. In another week or so, they’d have enough to put together a quilt.

  Sister looked up when Oscar’s automobile pulled up in front of the house; Mary-Love didn’t.

  “Is that them, Sister?” Mary-Love asked calmly.

  Sister looked apprehensively at her mother and nodded. Upon her return from Mobile the Saturday previous, Mary-Love had learned immediately from Sister of her son’s precipitous wedding with the red-haired schoolteacher. But from the moment that that dread news fell trembling from Sister’s lips, Mary-Love had allowed no one to speak a word about the subject. Friends—even Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk—with congratulations sincere or ironic, had been turned from the door. People felt that Mary-Love was taking it badly, but no one could know for sure. Certainly it must have been humiliating for your only son to get married one afternoon when you were down in Mobile picking out curtain material. Mary-Love hadn’t even gone to church, and Sister for two days had been afraid to speak for fear some chance word would kindle her mother’s dangerously smoldering resentment into searing flame.

  “What is Miss Elinor wearing, Sister?”

  “She looks real pretty, Mama.”

  “I’m sure she does,” said Mary-Love, and her scissors went clack-clack.

  Elinor and Oscar came up the flagstone walk to the front porch.

  “We’re around here!” Sister called from the side porch.

  Elinor rounded the corner unhesitatingly. Oscar, with two suitcases, hung back. He had allowed himself to cherish a faint hope that his mother had decided to leave town for a few weeks, and he stood still a moment, recovering from the disappointment that she was sitting there on the porch, awaiting their return with a pair of scissors in her hand.

  “Afternoon, Sister. Afternoon, Miss Mary-Love. Oscar and I are back now.”

  “Oh, you’re so pretty!” cried Sister, getting up so quickly that the unsewn squares and triangles of material spilled out of her lap onto the rug at her feet.

  “Sister,” cried her mother reproachfully, “I have gone to so much trouble...!”

  “Mama, I’m sorry, but isn’t Miss Elinor pretty, she—”

  “She certainly is,” said Mary-Love quickly. “Come here, Elinor, and kiss me.” Obediently, Elinor went over and lightly kissed Mary-Love’s upraised cheek. “Oscar,” said Mary-Love.

  Oscar came around the corner. “Mama, we’re back.”

  “Aren’t you going to kiss me?”

  Oscar did so, and then the newly married couple stood together before Mary-Love’s chair.

  “So,” said Mary-Love, “you just couldn’t wait.”

  “Not one minute longer,” said Elinor.

  Mary-Love looked at them together for perhaps five seconds. Then she picked up her scissors and her cardboard pattern again. That was all she intended to say.

  “Mama,” Oscar began apologetically, “it’s not that we didn’t want you at the wedding, it’s—”

  “Don’t apologize to me!” cried Mary-Love quickly, looking up at him once more. “I wasn’t the one getting married! This has saved me trouble and expense! But you know, Oscar, that house next door is not ready for you yet. It’s not near ready—”

  “I know, but, Mama—”

  “Where do you and Elinor intend on living, I’d like to know?”

  “With James,” replied Oscar. “James said we should just stay on in Elinor’s room until our house is fixed up. He didn’t want to lose us at all, and it would do him good to have us both around, he said. He said Grace wasn’t ready to let go of Elinor, either.”

  Sister’s teeth went clack-clack.

  “What’s wrong?” Oscar asked.

  Elinor had seated herself in the swing across from Mary-Love, and Oscar backed down into it beside her.

  “You’re not gone be staying over there,” said Mary-Love.

  “You cain’t stay with James!” cried Sister. “Poor Grace!”

  “Why not?” demanded Oscar. “James told me—”

  “Sit real still,” said Mary-Love with her scissors poised. “Sit real still and be quiet.” Elinor stopped rocking the swing, anchoring it with her foot. Oscar and Sister held their breaths. From across the yard they heard a woman’s strident voice within James Caskey’s house. Oscar then also noticed the absence of footprints in the sand between the houses, which was strange, for the constant back-and-forthing had resumed in recent months. The strident voice within the house rose and fell, and as they listened, it moved from the dining room window to the kitchen window.

  Oscar had turned pale.

  “Poor Grace,” sighed Sister.

  “Poor Roxie,” said Mary-Love quickly. “Poor James.”

  “Lord,” whispered Oscar, “Genevieve is back.”

  Elinor resumed her rocking. “When did she get here?” she asked.

  “Yesterday morning,” said Sister. “She was sitting on the front porch with two suitcases when James and Grace and I came back from church. She stood up and held out her arms and said, ‘Grace, you come hug me,’ and Grace wouldn’t do it.”

  “Do you blame her?” said Mary-Love. “Would you have done it?”

  “Genevieve is Grace’s mama,” said Sister.

  “Elinor,” said Mary-Love, “I don’t know whether I’m glad or sad that you weren’t here yesterday morning.”

  “Why is that, Miss Mary-Love?”

  “There’s nobody in this family that can handle Genevieve. I cain’t. Sister, can you?”

  “No!” wailed Sister. “Course I cain’t!”

  “And I know Oscar and James cain’t. I have always thought that maybe you could. That is what I have hoped.”

  “I bet she could,” said Oscar proudly. “I bet Elinor could handle anybody. Elinor,” he said, turning to his wife, “why are they not asking you to head up the League of Nations? You have any idea why you have been passed over?”

  Mary-Love ignored her son’s facetious interruption. “But maybe it was better you and Oscar were off somewhere—where’d you go, anyway?”

  “We were at Gulf Shores,” replied Elinor. “I asked Oscar to take me there because I enjoy the water so much.”

  “Y’all ought to have seen Elinor in the waves,” said Oscar proudly. “Elinor is not one bit afraid of undertow.”

  “I bet it was pretty!” cried Sister.

  “It was,” said Elinor. “But when it comes down to it, I feel more at home in fresh water than salt.”

  Mary-Love ignored this exchange as well. “Genevieve knows all about you, Elinor.”

  “What does she know?”

  “Knows how you were living in James’s house. Kno
ws how you took care of him, and took care of Grace,” said Mary-Love. “Knows everything there is to know,” she concluded with a little meaningful nod.

  “How does she know?” asked Elinor.

  “Grace told her,” said Sister. “Yesterday afternoon we were sitting here doing just what we’re doing now, and there was Genevieve on the porch again with poor old Grace having to stand right in front of her and tell her everything that’s happened in the past fifteen months.”

  “That’s how long Genevieve has been in Nashville,” Oscar explained. “We were kind of hoping she would stay away a month or two longer.”

  “We were hoping,” Mary-Love corrected, “that she would stay away for the remainder of eternity. That is what we were hoping. I cain’t deal with her—I get so mad!”

  Mary-Love Caskey was in an ethical quandary. She couldn’t approve of her son’s sudden marriage to Elinor Dammert any more than she really approved of Elinor Dammert herself, but she had in her honesty acknowledged that she had never known James Caskey as happy as Elinor had made him since his mother’s death. That point in Elinor’s favor had become apparent really only with Genevieve’s return. Mary-Love knew, at any rate, that she couldn’t possibly do battle with both women at once, and so she might as well pit one against the other, even if that meant a sudden truce with Elinor—and even if that truce fostered the inaccurate impression that Elinor had been forgiven for her marriage to Oscar.

  “Elinor,” said Mary-Love after a few moments, “you are going to be cramped upstairs, I’m afraid.”

  “Mama, you want us here? I thought—”

  “Where else would you go?” Mary-Love demanded. “Is there someplace else in this town where you could stay except the Osceola? Have you thought of Elinor’s memories of that hotel, Oscar? Or do you intend on moving into a house that doesn’t have all its walls yet?”

  “No, but—”

  “No buts,” said Mary-Love. “Elinor, you’ll be happy to know that Oscar’s room looks out on the river. You love that old Perdido!”

  . . .

  Genevieve Caskey was neither as unpleasant nor as dangerous as Mary-Love’s talk suggested. She was scarcely more than a shrew, and at times she wasn’t even that. She had married James Caskey because of his money and because by nature he was easily dominated. She made her husband unhappy principally because James had no business being married in the first place. He had the heart and the mind of the perennial bachelor, and the acquisition of a wife had done nothing to erase the stamp of femininity with which he was so firmly branded. Perhaps Genevieve’s offensive reputation in Perdido was due to no more than the fact that Mary-Love had taken a preliminary dislike to her, and carefully fostered that dislike until it had grown into loathing—and dread. And perhaps Mary-Love’s friends had adopted that attitude—in each of its progressively virulent stages—out of politeness to Mary-Love. And perhaps the entire town had grown so used to hearing of Genevieve Caskey as a monster of selfishness, ill humor, and drunkenness that it could no longer look upon James Caskey’s wife in any other light, even when Genevieve’s behavior—which actually was relatively mild—did nothing to support those widely held opinions.

  Genevieve had spent three years in Perdido immediately after her marriage, and there was not a person introduced to her who didn’t find out within five minutes that Genevieve Caskey thought that Perdido, Alabama, was the slowest, dullest, smallest, most insignificant town in the entire South. “I could have more fun in thirty minutes in New Orleans or Nashville just standing on a corner than I could spending the rest of my life in Perdido. The most exciting thing to do in Perdido is sit on the bank of the river and count the dead possums floating by!”

  Thus, concretely, it might have been said against Genevieve that she wasn’t a woman who was at pains to accommodate to her husband. The same might have been said about a number of other wives in Perdido. Genevieve’s other indisputable flaw was that she drank. Manda Turk maintained that Genevieve Caskey would have walked through the front door of a saloon if ladies had been allowed in—or if Perdido had had one. Everybody knew she drank, even though Roxie tied the bottles up in croker sacks, wrapped in rags so they wouldn’t rattle. When her boy Escue drove his goat cart to the dump with the croker sacks in the back, people looked and said, “Oh, Lord, there goes James Caskey’s curse!” Genevieve would drink anything she could get. She’d buy from the Indians out in the piney woods, and the two little girls on the swayback mule would bring it to the door. She’d send Bray over the Florida state line, where liquor sales were legal, and have him cart it back by the case. She’d sit right in the front window, in the daytime, with a bottle and a glass sitting on the table in front of her.

  Yet she was beautiful and her dresses came from New York. She was also smart as a whip, and could rattle off all three names of every president the men of the United States had ever voted into office. When she stayed away, which was most of the time, James Caskey sent her seven hundred dollars a month and paid the bills that she had directed to Perdido. When she came to Perdido, he cowered in her presence and gave her anything else she asked for.

  Grace Caskey dreamed of her mother every night, but rarely pleasantly. When Genevieve was away, Grace wanted her home and when she was home she wanted her to go away. The child regarded her mother with an awe that had very little in it of affection. On her rare trips home, Genevieve Caskey would look her daughter up and down, and first thing—before she would even kiss the child—she would sit down on the porch, dig a hard-bristled brush out of her purse, and brush the child’s hair and scalp until Grace wept from the pain. As she brushed and Grace wept, Genevieve Caskey would cry, “Oh, one of these days, honey, I’m taking you away from your daddy. I’m taking you away from this town. I’m gone show you Nashville! You and I are gone walk down those streets like nobody’s business. We are gone get your daddy to buy us a brand-new automobile and I’m gone drive you around and show you off as the prettiest seven-year-old in the entire state of Tennessee!” Grace didn’t dare protest that she didn’t want to leave either her father or Perdido, and she lived in mortal fear that when Genevieve went away again, as Genevieve always did, suddenly and without warning, she would be locked in one of her mother’s suitcases and spirited off to Nashville.

  James Caskey heard these promises—or threats—but he knew that his wife had no real thought of encumbering herself with their daughter. He didn’t know and didn’t want to know what sort of life Genevieve led in Nashville, but he knew that whatever it was like, a seven-year-old child was likely to interfere with its pleasures.

  . . .

  Oscar and Elinor hadn’t even had the chance to take their bags inside the house that Monday afternoon before they heard the back door of James Caskey’s house slam. Sister stood up and peered over the camellias.

  “Oh, Lord, Mama, here comes Genevieve! And I don’t believe it, she’s carrying a pound cake on a round platter.”

  Mary-Love stood up and so did Oscar. Elinor remained in the swing.

  “Hey, Genevieve!” Oscar called out.

  “Is she sober? Does she look sober to you, Sister?” Mary-Love hissed.

  “Hey, Oscar!” Genevieve called back. “I heard you got married. I heard I missed the wedding by thirty-six hours and I was sick at my heart to hear it! I am bringing your new wife a pound cake.” She marched across the yard, obliterating a number of Zaddie’s painstaking swirls.

  She mounted the steps of the side porch. “Mary-Love, Sister,” she said in greeting. This was a very mild greeting indeed, for the fact was, since she had arrived Genevieve had not set eyes upon Mary-Love and had seen Sister only once. Genevieve looked in Elinor’s direction and smiled. “You’re Miss Elinor. Ooooh, my little girl is just in love with you! You have taken such good care of her! This time it looks like I’m not gone have to burn all her dresses. Miss Elinor, I brought this cake for you. I made Roxie sit in the corner while I made it myself.”

  “Thank you, Miz Caskey.”
r />   “You call me Genevieve. I put two pounds of white sugar in that cake. I am paying you back for making my husband fat in my protracted absence,” Genevieve said with a smile.

  Elinor smiled back. “James was very good to me, and took me in when I didn’t have anywhere else to go.”

  “Oh, James is like that. That’s just what James is like. Where do you come from, Miss Elinor? Who are your people?”

  . . .

  Later, when Genevieve had gone back home, Sister and Oscar declared that they had never seen the woman so friendly. Mary-Love said, “I cain’t believe my own children would be taken in like that! Elinor, did you think she was friendly?”

  “I think she wanted to get a good look at me. That is what I think,” replied Elinor.

  “I think you are right,” said Mary-Love, though she wasn’t pleased to find herself on Elinor’s side against her own flesh and blood, even if the point was minor and made to the disparagement of Genevieve. “And, Elinor, I bet you think we have been doing Genevieve a disservice, talking about her like we have. I bet you think she’s not as bad as we’ve painted her. I bet you think maybe she doesn’t have a case of bourbon in the back of James’s closet.”

  “I think,” said Elinor, “that Genevieve heard about as much about me as I’ve heard about her and she wanted to see what was true and what wasn’t.”

  “Genevieve was being polite,” protested Oscar. “Mama, cain’t you and Elinor give her some credit?”

  “She walked right by me,” said Sister. “If she had had liquor on her breath, I would have smelled it. And she didn’t.”

  “Sister,” said Elinor, “the thing Genevieve Caskey would like most in this entire world would be to throw me headfirst in the Perdido River.”

  “And are you gone give her a chance to do it?” asked Oscar.

  “I am not,” replied Elinor, and everybody believed her.