Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga
Zaddie looked up into the sky again. The cloud had passed over them and gone on ahead.
Then the girl noticed something else strange: the feathery branches of the cypresses in the swamp were not being stirred at all by breezes. They drooped in the heat and were perfectly still; no wind blew the rank grass at the side of the road. Yet just above, that roiling black cloud had fairly flown across the sky.
Not far ahead, the cloud seemed to pause, and as Zaddie watched it began suddenly to pour out rain, as if it were a sponge and God had wrung it. Even Genevieve’s head lifted up at this. From the distance—no more than a quarter of a mile—they could see that the rainwater was falling directly onto the road on which they were traveling. Zaddie had never seen anything like it. The sun shone down all around them, and the tops of the trees in the swamp were illuminated in its yellow-white light, yet there was that black solitary cloud spilling pails of rain right onto the highway.
“The devil is beating his wife!” cried Zaddie aloud, as Ivey invariably exclaimed when it rained as the sun was shining.
“Hush, Zaddie!” said Bray. “We got to go right through that.”
Just up ahead the road curved a little to the right. It was possible for Bray and Zaddie to see that for a distance of perhaps a hundred yards in front of the truck water from the dark gray cloud was splashing against the macadam of the road.
“That truck don’t go faster, we’re not gone get you there in time, Miss Genevieve.”
Genevieve didn’t reply.
The truck ahead, as if in answer to Bray’s need for haste, suddenly picked up speed. Zaddie conjectured the driver didn’t want to spend any more time than was necessary driving through that peculiar downfall of rainwater.
Bray didn’t either. He kept exact pace.
The logging truck drove into the shadow of the cloud. The water poured down and beat on the felled trees, and in the space of two or three seconds the red kerchief on the end of the longest log was soaked and limp. Great waves of water shot up on either side of the truck.
“Bray!” cried Genevieve suddenly, “Don’t!” She meant don’t drive the automobile through that uncanny veil of rainwater.
But it was too late to stop. The Packard itself had now driven into the cloud’s stormy venue. Never had the passengers of the car seen so great a downpour in so small an area. The water beat against the roof so loudly that they were deafened. Rain gushed through the windows in sheets and instantly soaked Bray and Zaddie and Genevieve to the skin. It poured so heavily against the windscreen that their vision of the road ahead was completely obscured. In an instant all their senses had been occluded by rain: they saw, heard, tasted, felt, and smelled nothing else.
The Packard skidded to the left, and Bray speeded up a little, trying to regain control. He got control again, but the extra speed was taking the car too close to the truck ahead. The long pine trunk with the red kerchief attached to it was suddenly right there. It dropped onto the front of the Packard, skidded up the hood, and smashed through the windscreen.
Genevieve Caskey had no time even to cry out. She saw a flash of red on the other side of the windscreen, but by the time that fugitive color had registered in her mind, the pine trunk had smashed through, and its jagged, resinous tip—sharp as a pointed spear—had been run through her right eye and out the back of her skull. The impact in fact was so great that her entire head was ripped from her body and thrust into the air over the back seat.
Zaddie looked up and saw Genevieve’s impaled head bobbing above her, with rain-diluted blood dripping off the still-attached veil.
The pine trunk that had beheaded Genevieve Caskey had also caught against the interior of the automobile’s roof, and so, although Bray had lost control of the car again, the Packard was pulled right along behind the logging truck. When they were out from beneath the cloud and onto dry road, Bray put on the brakes and at the same time reached up to pull the pine trunk free of the roof.
Unmindful of the accident behind, the driver of the logging truck did not halt his vehicle. While Genevieve Caskey’s trunk and body quivered convulsively on the front seat of the Packard, the speared head was drawn right back out through the hole in the shattered windscreen. There it remained impaled all the way to Atmore where it was discovered by two workers who had been sent around to unload the great logs. Neither of them would touch it, but with a stick they worked it off its spear until it dropped into an old orange crate they had placed on the ground underneath.
“See,” said Elinor placidly, when they all learned of it, “I said there wasn’t any need to talk about James’s divorce.”
Chapter 10
The Caskey Jewels
Everybody in Perdido came to Genevieve’s funeral. You couldn’t have kept them away if James Caskey himself had stood at the church door with a stack of crisp two-dollar bills and given one out to anyone who would turn right around and go back home without trying to sneak a look at the damaged corpse. People didn’t see much, however, even after they got inside, because the nature of Genevieve’s death demanded a closed coffin.
All the Caskeys sat in the front pew on the left. The women were dressed in black with thick veils. Heavy mourning had gone rather out of fashion in the past couple of years. However, the Caskeys were high people in town, and they all had their funeral dresses ready at the back of a closet. Even Grace had a little crushed hat with a heavy veil attached. Many in town thought this affectation, but the veil in fact was to hide the bruises and welts visible on her face, inflicted by the dead woman two days before.
Genevieve’s husband wept. His were the only Caskey tears that morning. Mary-Love and Sister and Elinor didn’t even affect sorrow.
In the pew behind Mary-Love sat a man and a woman whom no one had ever seen before. The man, who was tall and ill-favored, coughed a great deal. The woman, who was short and dimpled, wheezed and cooed at a child at her side—a boy about four years old who complained of boredom in an incessant whisper and whistle. No one had to be told that this was Genevieve’s family. What little polish Genevieve had exhibited—her clothes, her knowledge of the presidents’ middle names—was shown up for the sham it had been once you saw this family. They turned out to be Queenie and Carl Strickland and their son Malcolm. It was with the Stricklands that Genevieve had lived when she was in Nashville.
They had arrived only an hour before the service and they drove away directly from the cemetery. Mary-Love had nodded when she was introduced and Oscar had shaken hands all around. Elinor and Sister had smiled. Everyone had been immensely glad that the Stricklands evaporated before anyone had been driven to the extremity of saying something nice to them about the dead woman.
Genevieve was buried in the town cemetery, which was situated on a piece of high sandy ground west of the workers’ houses. This place had fortunately been little affected by the flood. It might be pointed out that the graveyard next to the Bethel Rest Baptist Church in Baptist Bottom had not been so lucky. There, bones and coffin fragments had floated right up to the surface of the earth and were found scattered over several blocks when the waters had receded. Colored women, before they had even stepped inside their own ruined homes, gathered up those bones in croker sacks, and colored men dug a deep grave into which the unidentifiable remains of their parents, wives, children, and friends were once again laid to rest until the next flood should bring them up again.
There were now five graves in the Caskey plot: Elvennia and Roland, James’s parents; Randolph, James’s brother and Mary-Love’s husband; the little girl who had been born Randolph’s and James’s sister; and now the deep rectangular hole in whose depths Genevieve’s severed head and body were casually reunited.
. . .
That afternoon, Mary-Love, Elinor, and Sister changed out of their black and went next door to go through Genevieve’s things. Her clothing would be portioned out among the three of them—according to fit, principally. What would fit none of them would be given to Roxie and Ivey. (If Que
enie Strickland had remained in Perdido, as everyone had feared she might, she would have received a portion of this wardrobe, though as Mary-Love remarked, referring to Queenie’s height, “She’d have to take up all the hems about two feet.”) All Genevieve’s bags had been removed from the wrecked Packard and brought back to the house. While Elinor and Sister began taking things out of the suitcases, Mary-Love opened the smaller bags. Two contained cosmetics, but Mary-Love couldn’t find the one in which Genevieve had kept her jewels.
“They were Elvennia’s things,” said Mary-Love. “They should have come to me. But Elvennia left them to James—I don’t know what she supposed he was going to do with them.” The truth was, and Sister at least knew it, that Mary-Love hadn’t got along with her mother-in-law and Elvennia had left the jewels to her son out of pure spite. “I just hope,” said Mary-Love earnestly, “that no one came along and took the bag out of the automobile while it was sitting there on the highway.”
“What sort of jewelry did Genevieve have?” Elinor asked, holding up a fine linen skirt to her waist.
“Diamonds, mostly. Not big ones, but lots of them. In good settings, too. Ruby earrings. Emerald earrings. Bracelets. She didn’t wear them a lot, but she always took them with her.”
“Mama, you know why, too,” said Sister. “She was afraid you’d come over and steal ’em!”
“I would have!” cried Mary-Love. “Who do you think took care of Elvennia Caskey when she was so sick? James didn’t know what to do with her. And then that old woman had the nerve to go and leave James every damn one of those things!”
Elinor looked up: she had never before heard Mary-Love swear.
“After Elvennia’s funeral,” Mary-Love went on, “I said to James, ‘James, you ought to give those things to me—I have earned them.’ James wouldn’t do it, though. He said it was his mama’s wish that he should get them and he kept ’em. I still haven’t forgiven him. Not for that. I said, ‘James, just let me have the pearls.’ And he wouldn’t even do that.”
“There were pearls?” said Elinor with interest.
“Black pearls,” said Mary-Love. “Most beautiful things you ever saw. Three sets of double strands, fixed so you could wear them all at once. Genevieve could have kept all the diamonds and rubies and sapphires—people around here, after all, don’t wear much but their wedding rings—but I could have worn those pearls anytime, anywhere. At least the smallest strand, I could have worn that one to church. And the thing was, Genevieve didn’t like ’em. She wouldn’t wear ’em ’cause they were black! She carried ’em everywhere, and I was dying for those pearls.”
“I like pearls best,” said Elinor quietly.
“Sapphires are my favorite,” said Sister. “But I’ve only got this little baby ring, which I got for being the first grandchild. Mama, maybe you ought to ask James if he knows where that case is.”
Mary-Love had been counting undergarments and dividing them according to quality. She draped five silk underskirts over the back of a chair and said, “I’m gone do just that. We ought to find out what happened to those things—that jewelry is valuable.”
Elinor and Sister continued to unpack the dead woman’s things. Mary-Love returned in about ten minutes. She stood in the door with a dumbfounded expression on her face, one hand behind her back.
“Mama,” said Sister without looking up, “did James know where that case was?”
Mary-Love drew her hand around in front of her; she was holding Genevieve’s jewelry case by a handle on its side. The other two women turned to look at Mary-Love. She unfastened the latch and the top fell open. An empty velvet-lined tray dropped to the floor, but absolutely nothing else was in it.
“Mama?” cried Sister. “Where is the jewelry?”
Mary-Love looked at her daughter, then at her daughter-in-law. She deliberately allowed the case to fall to the floor. The jolt unhinged the lid.
“James buried it,” she said after a moment. “He put it all in Genevieve’s coffin.”
. . .
James Caskey had been more disturbed by his wife’s death than anyone knew. He blamed himself for having sent her away—away to her death, as it turned out. He blamed himself for not having driven the Packard to Atmore himself—for then he might have perished in her place.
Oscar pointed out that, following this general line of reasoning, James might more logically blame Elinor and Bray for Genevieve’s death. Elinor had sent Genevieve away; Bray’s driving had, perhaps, caused the accident. But James didn’t see it that way and took the guilt upon himself. It was for this reason, in partial expiation of his unintentional but fatal sin, that he buried with Genevieve all the jewelry he had inherited from his mother.
He looked surprised, in fact, when Mary-Love confronted him in her vast astonishment and indignation.
“But, Mary-Love,” he protested weakly, “what on earth was I going to do with that jewelry? I wasn’t gone wear it. And I have given every speck of it to Genevieve...”
Mary-Love sighed deeply. She had got James alone. They were the oldest surviving generation of Caskeys, and there were scenes and decisions to which they alone should be privy. For this she wouldn’t have her son or her daughter by her.
“James,” said Mary-Love, “who is in the next room, crying on the bed?”
“Grace,” said James. The child’s sobbing was audible through the wall.
“What is Grace?” asked Mary-Love, staring at her brother-in-law hard in the face. “Is Grace a little girl?”
“She is.”
“Well, James, Grace is going to grow up, and when Grace grows up, she could have worn that jewelry. That jewelry—which in the first place ought to have come to me—could have gone to Grace. James, you foolish man, you could have divided up that jewelry—it’s all Caskey jewelry after all. There would have been some for me and some for Sister and some for Elinor and a whole safety-deposit box full of it for Grace. You could even have sent Queenie Strickland away with a pair of earrings. Everybody could have benefited.”
James looked very troubled. “Mary-Love,” he said, “I didn’t think of it.”
“I know you didn’t. And even if you had thought about it you wouldn’t have done it! I have a good mind to give Bray a shovel and tell him to go out there and dig Genevieve right out of the ground!”
James Caskey trembled. “Oh, Mary-Love, please don’t do that!” he said. But Mary-Love would not give him the satisfaction of a promise not to do that very thing.
Genevieve’s grave was not dug up, and Mary-Love forbade the subject of family jewelry to be mentioned again—it was too painful a loss. No one could believe that James Caskey had simply thrown away a caseful of jewels that couldn’t be purchased now for any sum less than about thirty-eight thousand dollars. Mary-Love had long been in the habit of purchasing stones for investment and knew their value.
. . .
One morning in October Ivey was in the kitchen preparing the noontime meal. Since Genevieve’s death six weeks earlier James and Grace had started having all their meals with Mary-Love and there was very little for Roxie to do all day, so she had taken to sitting out her morning with Ivey and Zaddie in Mary-Love’s kitchen. “Oh, look at that!” cried Ivey, leaning over the stove.
“What you see?” asked Roxie.
“I’m looking at the ’tatoes.”
“Have they got bugs?”
“Oh, no,” said Ivey, “but I never saw the water boil away from ’tatoes so fast. That means it’s gone rain today!”
“I don’t see no clouds,” remarked Roxie, planting both feet firmly upon the floor and leaning far to the left in her straw chair in order to peer up at the sky through the kitchen window nearest her.
“I’m not never wrong,” said Ivey. “Not when it comes to reading ’tatoes.”
And Ivey wasn’t wrong. The clouds moved in at about noon, and the rain began to fall an hour later. James and Oscar, on their way back to the mill from dinner, were caught out in it, and stopp
ed at the barbershop for shelter and, as long as they were there, haircuts.
At first it hadn’t seemed that the rain was going to be heavy, but the intensity of the falling water quickly increased, churning the muddy Perdido, splashing heavy gray sand onto the trunks of the water oaks in the yard, and keeping everyone indoors who hadn’t some overwhelming necessity to be out. And since the town wasn’t the get-up-and-go kind of place that produced overwhelming necessities in its inhabitants, everyone stayed inside. Out in the pine forests the mill workers took shelter in the logging cabins or beneath a cedar (the tree which provides best shelter in such downpours). Children huddled on back porches and watched the rain with awe, for in Perdido, rain may fall very hard indeed. The grounds around the Caskey houses were awash. Grace and Zaddie sat on the back steps of James Caskey’s house and fashioned paper boats which they tossed into a large pool that had formed right in back of the kitchen. There was not a great deal of amusement in this occupation, however, since the rain immediately flattened the boats into soggy masses of pulp.
And at the cemetery, the rain beat down upon Genevieve Caskey’s grave. It overturned the pots in which flowers had been placed every day by James Caskey. It tore the petals from the flowers and beat the petals into the earth—as if to deliver James’s homage all the way down to his dead wife. In the space of only a little time the mound of earth that covered Genevieve’s grave was washed away, and the earth was as flat as it had been when Genevieve was alive and had no thought of this narrow home. But the earth over a grave is loose, and the rain tamped it down. Soon there was a depression in the earth above Genevieve’s coffin, a depression that quickly filled with water, and as the water sank down into the earth more water fell from the sky to replenish the pool. This soon sank into the earth as well, and after a time it would have been apparent to anyone who might have been around to look at Genevieve’s grave that James Caskey’s wife—jewels and all—was not only dead, but also very, very wet.