“Thank you, ma’am,” said Elinor coldly.
“Oh, thank you, Mama—” Oscar began.
“Miriam stays here,” said Mary-Love decisively.
There was a moment of terrible silence.
“Mary-Love—” began James Caskey in a choked whisper.
She cut him off. “You get the house, Elinor—that’s what you want. I get that baby—that’s what I want.”
“Mama, you cain’t—”
“Oscar, you be quiet!” said Mary-Love. “What has this got to do with you, I’d like to know!”
“Well, for one thing, Miriam is my little girl!”
“Miriam belongs to Sister and me!”
Sister brought the keys to the new house. She was still holding the baby. Miriam waved her arms about for attention. Sister buried her nose against the baby’s neck and rubbed it there until Miriam laughed aloud.
Ivey came back in and was taking away the last few glasses from the center of the table. “Ivey,” said Elinor, “as soon as you’re done, go upstairs and start packing my things, would you please?”
“Be glad to, Miss Elinor,” said Ivey in a low voice, not looking at anyone else in the room.
Mary-Love smiled triumphantly.
Oscar, shocked, turned to his wife. “Elinor, how can you—”
“Be quiet, Oscar. We are not remaining in this house another night. Not one more night.”
“But what about Miriam?”
“James,” said Elinor. “I want to know if I can borrow Roxie for a while.”
“Ohhh,” said James, “Elinor, I wish you would. Grace and I eat over here all the time anyway. I pay Roxie five dollars a week for sitting down ten hours a day at the kitchen table. She has memorized fourteen chapters of the book of Job!”
Oscar was staring stuporously at his child, cradled in Sister’s arms. Sister had backed away from the table and stood actually in the next room, though visible to all through the opened doors.
“Elinor, are we just gone leave her here, while we go next door?”
Elinor folded her napkin and rose from the table. “Oscar,” she said, “we have got a lot of packing to do, and you should change out of those clothes.”
“But our little girl...” Though no one interrupted him, Oscar broke off when a shaft of enlightenment, bright as the sun outside, suddenly pierced his brain. The entire business had been planned. Elinor had seen that the only way to get him out of Mary-Love’s house was to replace him with something that Mary-Love loved even more. And for that reason, Miriam had been born. Elinor had given birth not to a daughter so much as to a hostage. And Miriam had been left at home all day so that Mary-Love and Sister might become attached to her. And Elinor’s feint of going away with Oscar and her daughter had been only that—a feint. She had intended from the first to offer up Miriam—to toss the infant off the back of the sleigh to the ravening wolves so that he and she might escape whole.
Oscar looked around the table. No one else understood—not even Mary-Love and Sister. He caught his wife’s eye, and what he saw there made him realize that he was right—and that she understood that he understood.
“Oscar,” she said quietly, “are you ready to start packing?”
He stood from the table, and dropped his napkin upon the seat of his chair. Mary-Love and Sister stood in the doorway, both with their hands upon his daughter, rocking her back and forth, and cooing.
Within the hour he and Elinor were gone, having abandoned their daughter without another word.
II: The Levee
Chapter 13
The Engineer
“Oh, Lord, protect us from flood, fire, maddened animals, and runaway Negroes.”
That was Mary-Love Caskey’s prayer before every meal, learned from her mother who had hidden silver, slaves, and chickens from the rapacity of starving Yankee marauders. But in these days, safety from a fourth danger was silently appended both in her own mind and in Sister’s: Oh, Lord, protect us from Elinor Dammert Caskey.
Elinor, after all, was a woman to be feared. Into the well-regulated lives of the Caskeys of Perdido, Alabama, she had brought trouble and surprise. Having mysteriously appeared in the Osceola Hotel at the height of the great flood of 1919, she had cast a spell first over James Caskey—Mary-Love’s brother-in-law—and then over Oscar, Mary-Love’s son. She had married Oscar much against Mary-Love’s desire. Elinor had hair that was the muddy red color of the Perdido River, but no family connections or financial portion. And in the end, she had taken Oscar away from Mary-Love, carried him to the house next door, and left her own child in payment for the right to take departure. That, Mary-Love considered, only showed Elinor to be a woman for whom no sacrifice was too great on the field of battle. She was a formidable adversary to Mary-Love, who had never before had anyone question her sovereignty.
If Mary-Love and Sister had been protective of the infant Miriam before, how close did they hold her now! Two weeks had passed since Elinor and Oscar had moved out, and as yet Elinor had shown no sign of repenting of her bargain. Mary-Love was fifty-one and would never have another child of her own. Sister was just under thirty, and had no prospects of marriage; it was unlikely she would possess a daughter other than the one her sister-in-law had given up to her. They wouldn’t leave the child alone for an instant, for fear that Elinor—watching from behind one of the newly hung curtains of her back parlor—would rush over, swoop the child into her arms, and carry her back in sneaking triumph. Neither of these women intended to relinquish Miriam even though all the world and the law should demand it of them.
Mary-Love and Sister, in the beginning, had steeled themselves against what they imagined would be constant visits from Elinor. They were certain she would make suggestions for a better way to do this or that for the child, would burst into tears and beg to have Miriam for only an hour every morning, would moon over her daughter’s crib, and would endlessly seek opportunities to snatch her away. But Elinor did none of those things. In fact, Elinor never came to see her daughter at all. She rocked placidly on the front porch of her new house, and corrected the pronunciation of Zaddie Sapp, who sat at her feet with a sixth-grade reader. Elinor nodded politely to Sister and Mary-Love when she saw them, or at least when it was impossible to pretend that she had not seen them, but she never asked to see the child. Mary-Love and Sister—who had never before been so united upon any issue whatsoever—conferred and tried to puzzle out whether Elinor ought to be trusted or not. They decided that, for safety’s sake, her aloof attitude should be considered a tactic to put them off their guard. So their vigilance was maintained.
On Sundays, Mary-Love and Sister took turns staying home with the child during morning service. One or the other would sit in the same pew with Elinor, nod politely to her, and speak if the occasion allowed. But then Mary-Love suggested, as a taunt to Elinor, that she and Sister should both attend church. Elinor, seeing them there together, would realize that little Miriam was alone, protected only by Ivey Sapp—but she would not be able to escape the service and fetch her daughter out. Sister and Mary-Love were always careful never to leave the house on Sunday morning until they had seen Oscar and Elinor drive off to the church together, for fear that one day Elinor might remain behind and purloin her daughter before the first hymn had been sung.
One Sunday, however, Mary-Love and Sister both happened to be away from the front window when Oscar drove off. They assumed that Elinor had gone with him. At church they discovered, to their terrible dismay, that Elinor had remained at home, to tend Zaddie through the mumps. Their voices trembled through the hymns, they heard not a word of the sermon, they forgot to rise when they ought to have risen, and remained standing when they ought to have sat down again. They rushed home, and discovered Miriam sound asleep in the crib that was kept on the side porch. Ivey Sapp crooned a wordless song above her. Next door, Elinor Caskey sat on her front porch with the Mobile Register. Nothing in the world could have been easier than for Elinor to walk right acro
ss and up onto the porch, hold off Ivey with a stern word, lift Miriam out of her crib, and march straight back home with her. But Elinor had done no such thing.
Elinor, Sister and Mary-Love concluded, did not want her daughter back at all.
Convinced as they were that Elinor had in truth given up her daughter—though at a considerable loss to understand how she could have done such a thing—Sister and Mary-Love began to wonder what Oscar thought of the business. Oscar did sometimes visit his mother and sister, though he never took meals with them, and, as Sister pointed out, he never entered the house, but confined his visits to the side porch. Sometimes in the late afternoon, if he saw them on the porch, he’d come across and sit in the swing for a few minutes. He’d speak his greeting to his sister and his mother, then would lean over the crib and say, “How you, Miriam?” quite as if he expected the six-month-old child to answer him in kind. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his daughter, and would merely nod and give a little smile if Sister described some surprisingly advanced or fascinatingly comical event in Miriam’s development. And soon taking his leave with the excuse that Elinor would be wondering where he was and what he was doing, he would say, “So long, Mama. Bye-bye, Sister. See you later, Miriam.” By the repetition of this pattern, which served only to emphasize the slightness of the hold their company and proximity held over him, Sister and Mary-Love came to understand that in gaining Miriam and jettisoning Elinor, they had also lost Oscar.
. . .
In the great new house on the town line Oscar and Elinor rattled about in their sixteen rooms. In the evening, he and Elinor sat down at the breakfast room table and ate the cold remainder of that afternoon’s dinner. The kitchen door was propped open so that Zaddie, who stood at the counter and ate her own identical meal, should not feel lonely. Every other evening, when the bill changed, Oscar and Elinor went to the Ritz. Even though admission was only five cents, they always gave Zaddie a quarter to get into the colored balcony, whether she went or not. When they got home, they sat out in one of the four swings on the upstairs sleeping porch. In a bit, as Oscar desultorily rocked the swing with the toe of one shoe, Elinor would turn and lay her head in his lap. Together they would stare through the screen at the moonlit Perdido, flowing almost silently behind the house. And if Oscar talked at all, it was of his work, or of the valiant progress of the water oaks—which, after only two years of growth, were now nearly thirty feet high—or of what gossip he had heard related that morning at the barber shop.
But he never mentioned their daughter, though the window of Miriam’s room was visible from where they rocked in the swing, and that window was sometimes lighted, and Mary-Love or Sister sometimes briefly appeared moving purposefully about, tending to the daughter who was as lost to him as if she had been stolen by gypsies or drowned in the river.
Elinor was again expecting a child, but it seemed to Oscar that this pregnancy was much slower than the first. His wife’s belly seemed to swell less—and later in her term—and he urged her to visit Dr. Benquith. Elinor did so and returned with the report that all was well. However, she acceded to Oscar’s wish that she not return to teach that fall, and rather to Oscar’s surprise, Elinor seemed content to remain all day in the house. Also, for propriety’s sake and for Oscar’s ease of mind, she gave up her morning swims in the Perdido. Nevertheless, despite his wife’s precautions and Dr. Benquith’s reassurances, Oscar remained unsatisfied and uneasy.
. . .
Mary-Love Caskey would have liked Perdido to acknowledge that she had won the battle with her daughter-in-law. And how could Perdido not think so, when Mary-Love was in possession of the spoils? Even if baby Miriam had been won at the expense of her son’s affection, Oscar was bound to have gone off somewhere, with someone, sooner or later. Besides, what son ever remained permanently estranged from his mother? There was no question in Mary-Love’s mind but that Oscar would someday return to her, and then her conquest of Elinor Caskey would be sweet and complete indeed!
But Perdido, to Mary-Love’s consternation, didn’t see things that way at all. What Perdido saw was that when the smoke had cleared, Elinor Caskey was sitting at the top of the hill, waving an untattered and unbloodied flag. She had given up her only child, but from all appearances she didn’t seem to care one way or the other.
And more importantly, Elinor Caskey wasn’t acting like a defeated woman. If she never paid visits to her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law and her abandoned daughter, in public she was never anything other than pleasant and friendly to them. Nothing in her tone savored of irony or sarcasm or the heaping-on of burning coals; she was never heard to speak a word against either Mary-Love or Sister. Nor had she sought to suborn Caroline DeBordenave or Manda Turk into rebellion against Mary-Love by establishing an intimacy either with the women themselves or with their daughters.
Elinor never objected to Oscar’s visits to his mother’s house, and never made him feel guilty about having gone. She sent Zaddie over with boxes of peaches and bottles of blackberry nectar she had put up herself. But she never once set foot in Mary-Love’s house and never asked after her daughter’s health and never invited Mary-Love or Sister over to see what the new house looked like all furnished and decorated.
Thus, once convinced that there was to be no attempt to reappropriate Miriam, Mary-Love decided that Elinor had not been sufficiently humbled, and began to look about for a way to crush her daughter-in-law.
. . .
A year and a half before, on the day after Elinor had announced her first pregnancy, there had arrived in Perdido a man called Early Haskew. He was thirty years of age, with brown hair and brown eyes and a thick brown mustache. He had a sunburned complexion, strong arms and long legs, and a wardrobe that seemed to consist entirely of khaki trousers and white shirts. He had gone to school at the University of Alabama, and had been superficially wounded on the bank of the Marne. And he had learned, during his tenure in France, everything there was to know about earthworks. Earth, in fact, seemed to pervade his consciousness, and he was never really comfortable except with both his large feet firmly planted on solid ground. There seemed, moreover, always to be earth beneath his fingernails and in the creases of his sunburned skin; but no one looking at him ever thought this attributable to a relaxation of personal hygiene. The dirt seemed only to be a part of the man, and wholly unobjectionable. He was an engineer, and he had come to Perdido to see whether it might be possible to protect the town from future flooding by the construction of a series of levees along the banks of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers.
With the help of two surveying students from Auburn Polytechnic, Early Haskew plotted out the town, plumbed the depths of the rivers, measured heights above sea level, examined records at the town hall, and noted the fading high-water marks left by the flood of 1919. He talked with the foremen of the mills who used the rivers for the transport of logs, took photographs of the sections of town that lay near the banks of the rivers, dispatched letters of enquiry to engineers in Natchez and New Orleans, and drew a salary that was, unbeknownst to any but the members of the town council, paid entirely by James Caskey. At the end of eight weeks, during which he seemed to be everywhere, with his maps, instruments, notebooks, cameras, pencils, and assistants, Early Haskew disappeared. He had promised detailed plans within three months, but James Caskey received a letter a short time after his departure, announcing his inability to meet that deadline, owing to some army work required of him over at Camp Rucca. Early Haskew was still in the reserves.
But now he was finished with the reserves, and was returning to Perdido with the intention of completing his plans as quickly as possible. Who knew how soon the waters might rise again?
Early Haskew had lived with his mother in a tiny town called Pine Cone, on the edge of the Alabama Wiregrass area. She had died recently, and Early had seen no necessity of returning to Pine Cone. He sold his mother’s house, and wrote to James Caskey asking if the millowner would be so kind as to f
ind him a place to live. Early hoped not only to provide the plans but to supervise the building of the levee—if the town council were pleased to judge him fit for the work—so he might be in town for as long as two years. And two years was enough time to justify the purchase of a house.
James Caskey mentioned this news at Mary-Love’s one evening. James had thought it a piece of information of interest, but of not much importance, so he was startled by the vehemence with which Mary-Love Caskey seized upon it.
“Oh, James,” she cried, “don’t you let that man buy a house!”
“Why not?” said James mildly. “If he wants it, and he has the money?”
“Wasting his money!” said Mary-Love.
“Well, what do you want the man to do, Mama?” asked Sister, who was sitting sideways in her chair at the table and bouncing Miriam up and down on her knee while nine-year-old Grace, sitting beside her, held out a finger for the baby to hold for balance and security.
“I don’t want him to waste his money,” said Mary-Love. “I want him to come here and stay with us. We have that extra room that used to be Oscar’s. It’s got a private bathroom and a sitting room he can set up a drafting table in. I think I might go out and get one of those tables myself,” she mused, or appeared to muse. “I have always wanted one.”
“You have not,” said Sister, contradicting her mother as she might have said, “Pass the peas, please.”