Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  Elinor ignored the protest. “But, Zaddie, when I am dead—whether there’s a levee or not, this town and everybody in it will be washed off the face of the earth...”

  Chapter 15

  The Baptism

  When Zaddie went to Elinor with news of the arrival in town of Early Haskew she had not known that this man was to live in the house right next door. Mary-Love would have given much to see Elinor’s face when she learned that Early was to sleep in the bed in the room that Elinor herself had occupied not so many months before. Oscar, not anticipating his wife’s reaction, had mentioned this only in passing that evening. The following evening Oscar and his wife were walking past Mary-Love’s house on the way to the Ritz and saw Early sitting on the porch with Sister. Elinor stopped in her tracks, turned and marched home, and wouldn’t speak a single word to Oscar for the rest of the night. She strung a hammock on the upstairs porch and slept within sight of the river.

  Calmer next morning at the breakfast table, she said to Oscar, “Your mama wants me to lose this baby.”

  Oscar raised his eyes in astonishment. “Elinor, what do you mean to say!”

  “I mean to say Miss Mary-Love wants me to miscarry. She wants Miriam to be an only child so she can lord Miriam over me and you.”

  Oscar had never before heard Elinor speak of their daughter, and now that she had, he was dumbfounded by the perversity of her attitude.

  “Elinor,” he said earnestly, “that is just wrong. Why would you think a horrible thing like that?”

  “There is no other reason for her to have asked that man into her house.”

  “Mr. Haskew?”

  “That man is sleeping in your room, Oscar.”

  “I know it. And I think Mama is doing a fine thing. I think she looks on it as something she is doing for the benefit of Perdido, providing a pleasant place for Mr. Haskew to do his drawings. Did you know she bought him a table that put her back sixty-five dollars? And a chair with a swivel seat that was fifteen dollars more? Mama was looking out for Mr. Haskew’s well-being.”

  Elinor turned away and stared out the window at Mary-Love’s house. “It just makes me ill to sit here and look at that house and to know that man is sitting inside it with a pencil and a ruler, drawing up the levee.”

  Oscar thought he began to understand. “Now, I sort of remembered that you didn’t take to Mr. Haskew when he was here a year or so ago—”

  Elinor looked at her husband with a countenance that seemed to say, That is an Alabama understatement.

  “—but I thought it was just because you didn’t take to him, you know, the way I don’t take to okra. But it wasn’t, was it? It was just because he was coming here to build the levee, and you don’t like the levee.”

  “That’s right. I don’t like the levee, Oscar. This town doesn’t need it. There won’t be any more floods.”

  “Elinor, you just cain’t be sure of that. We cain’t afford to take chances. Even if I was sure nobody was gone die, I’d try to push it through. Do you know how much lumber we lost in 1919? Do you know how much money we lost? And we were lucky. Poor old Tom DeBordenave hasn’t recovered yet, and I’m not sure he ever will. That flood could come again next year, and then if any of us recovered I’d be mighty surprised.”

  “There won’t be any high water next year,” said Elinor calmly.

  Oscar regarded his wife with a baffled face. “Elinor,” he said at last, “you just cain’t let Mr. Haskew upset you. He is a very nice man and I’m sure he doesn’t want to hear that he is distressing a pregnant woman in the next house over.”

  “Miss Mary-Love did this on purpose,” Elinor repeated.

  They were back where they had begun. Oscar sighed, got up from the table, and prepared to leave for work. He knew that Elinor’s view was as distorted as the image of an object observed through ten feet of flowing river water. But that afternoon when he dropped by his mother’s house on the way home, in the middle of a discussion about how things were going at the mill, Mary-Love said, “Oscar, does Elinor know that Mr. Haskew has taken up residence here with us?”

  “She knows it,” said Oscar shortly. After the sudden introduction of a new subject into the conversation, it was best to say as little as possible in reply. A man never knew what someone wanted to get out of him.

  “Well, what did she say?”

  That river water wasn’t flowing as quickly anymore. Oscar was beginning to see what rested on the shifting bed so far below the surface.

  “She didn’t say much, Mama. Elinor doesn’t think this town needs a levee. Elinor doesn’t think there’s going to be another flood. So I suppose she thinks that Mr. Haskew is wasting his time and that we are wasting our money.”

  Mary-Love snorted in contempt. “What does Elinor know about floods and levees? What does Elinor know about people’s houses and businesses getting washed away in rising water?”

  “Well,” Oscar pointed out, “she got trapped by the water. If you recall, Bray and I found her stranded in the Osceola Hotel.”

  Mary-Love said nothing, but her face was so expressive of the delicate wish that Elinor Dammert had remained stranded until she starved or perished of damp ennui that Oscar responded as if the remark had been made aloud. “Mama, if I hadn’t rescued Elinor and then married her, you wouldn’t have Miriam.”

  “That is true,” admitted Mary-Love. “I will always be grateful to Elinor for giving me her little girl. Her first child. She didn’t have to do it. So, Elinor didn’t say anything about Mr. Haskew? Did you tell her we had given Mr. Haskew your old room? And that he is sleeping in the bed that she gave birth in?”

  Oscar was surprised into silence for a few moments. He was shocked that his mother had given herself away so easily. He could see quite clearly through the river water now, and he realized that Elinor had understood from the beginning. Mary-Love’s invitation to Early Haskew had been made precisely to aggravate Elinor, though Oscar wasn’t convinced that Mary-Love was seeking to induce a miscarriage. The acknowledgment of this meanness in his mother—there was no other word for it—turned Oscar firmly to his wife’s side on the issue. He would have had his tongue ripped out of his throat rather than say to Mary-Love that Elinor was distressed by the proximity of the engineer. In fact, he went so far as actually to mislead his mother by remarking, “Elinor is glad you’ve got somebody to keep you company. She figures you may have been lonely since we moved. That house is so big, Mama, and it takes so much time and effort just to keep it going that Elinor doesn’t get over here as much as she would like.”

  Mary-Love looked uncertainly at her son—whose face was quite blandly pleasant—as if she were trying to determine whether or not he was playing a role, or whether he spoke—as men in Perdido, and probably men everywhere, tended to speak—without any regard for the effect of his words.

  At supper that evening Oscar told Elinor exactly what he had said to his mother, and Elinor, listening to that straightforward recital, had no doubt that Oscar understood the importance of his speech. She gave him far more credit than did his mother. Elinor smiled and said, “See what I told you, Oscar?”

  “You were right about Mama, though I wouldn’t have thought it of her. But, Elinor, I have got to say…”

  “Say what?”

  “That I am gone be supporting Mr. Haskew in his work. I think there’s gone be another flood sooner or later, and I think the levees are gone have to be built. I know you don’t like it, but I have got to do all I can to protect this town and the mills.”

  “All right, Oscar,” said Elinor with surprising calmness. “You have started to see some things correctly, but you don’t see everything right yet. The time will come when you will learn the error of your ways…”

  . . .

  Mary-Love had at first considered Early Haskew merely a goad to her daughter-in-law, but he quickly came to be more than that. He was a pleasant man, kind and gentle, and she soon grew used to his loud voice and his habit of eating peas with a kn
ife. His countrified roughness wasn’t totally unpleasant in a man so young and handsome, even though Mary-Love was certain that passing years would coarsen Early. Sister, too—or rather Sister, especially—liked him, for she had never spent any time at all around a man who wasn’t close family.

  Early sat in his sitting room all day working at the drafting table. Sister supplied him with cups of coffee and her own cookies. When the day was hot she got him iced tea, and when there wasn’t anything more that she could get for him she went quietly into his room with a book and sat in a chair turned toward his profile.

  “You worry him!” cried Mary-Love.

  “I do not!” protested Sister. And if she did, he showed no sign of it. He must have said thank you to Sister eighty times a day, and that thank you was always cordial and sincere. When Mary-Love insisted that Sister leave the engineer alone and sit with her on the side porch with another quilt that they were piecing together, Sister fidgeted until Mary-Love gave reluctant consent for her to return to her place beside Early’s drafting board.

  Occasionally, when he said his eyes were weary, he’d come down and sit on the porch with Sister and Mary-Love and rock in the swing with his eyes closed and talk in a moderate voice. He went for long walks about town, particularly along the banks of the rivers, looking at soil and formations of clay. Other times Bray drove him out deep into Baldwin and Escambia counties to look over quarries of various sorts. He’d come back covered with mud. After he’d bathed and changed clothes, bits of red Alabama clay were still wedged in the creases of his face and beneath the nails of his large hands. Miriam loved him, and in the evening he’d bounce her up and down on his knee to her delight for as long as she wanted it.

  Because of him, commerce between Mary-Love’s and Oscar’s houses very nearly ceased altogether. There were no more small gifts of fruits or preserves sent over with Zaddie; Oscar did not come as frequently as formerly. Even the sisters Zaddie and Ivey seemed to have dissolved their kinship. Mary-Love satisfied herself with the thought that she had embedded a large thorn in the side of her daughter-in-law. One day, seeking to probe that wound, Mary-Love remarked to her son, “Oscar, we don’t see much of Elinor anymore. Is she doing all right? We have been worried.”

  Oscar replied, “Well, Mama, it’s getting ’long about that time, you know, and it wouldn’t do for Elinor to tire herself out with constant visiting. In fact,” he joked, “I keep her locked in her room all the time now. I have Zaddie standing outside the door, reading to her through the keyhole.”

  Oscar said this in order to deprive his mother of the satisfaction of any information about just how upset Elinor continued to be. But what he said regarding his wife’s pregnancy was quite true; it was getting along about that time. In fact, by Oscar’s casual calculation, the baby—Elinor still hadn’t told him whether it was to be a boy or a girl—was already overdue.

  But overdue or not, the baby held off for another four weeks. Oscar became truly worried. Elinor was not feeling very well and she took to her bed. Dr. Benquith came to examine her and afterward he told Oscar, “She’s in discomfort.”

  “Yes, but is the baby all right?”

  “It’s kicking. I felt it.”

  “Well, tell me, is it gone be a boy or a girl?”

  Leo Benquith looked strangely at Oscar, and didn’t reply for a moment.

  “I bet this one’s gone be a boy,” said Oscar. “Am I right?”

  “Oscar,” said Dr. Benquith slowly, “you know, don’t you, that there’s no way in the world to tell if it’s gone be a boy or a girl?”

  Oscar looked puzzled for a moment, then replied, “Well, you know, that’s what I used to think. I mean, that’s what I had always heard. But Elinor knows—I know she knows—she just won’t tell me.”

  “Your wife has been manipulating one of your lower extremities, Oscar.”

  Oscar’s curiosity was soon satisfied, for on the nineteenth of May, 1922, Elinor gave birth to a five-pound girl.

  . . .

  The doctor had left, and Roxie was downstairs washing the bloody linen, when Oscar said to Elinor, “Did you know it was gone be a girl?”

  “Of course I did.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I didn’t want you to be disappointed.” She held out the baby for Oscar’s inspection. “You probably wanted a boy, Oscar, but I knew once you had seen this little girl you would love her to death! That’s why I didn’t tell you.”

  “I do love her to death! I would have loved her anyway!”

  “Well, then,” said Elinor softly, putting the infant to her breast, “I was wrong about it. Next time I will tell you.”

  There was a sort of state visit that afternoon by Mary-Love and Sister. Sister carried Miriam in her arms, and Oscar reflected somewhat uncomfortably that this was the first time his firstborn daughter had ever been inside her parents’ house. After having peered curiously into all the rooms on the way up, exclaiming softly and disparagingly on what they saw, Sister and Mary-Love entered Elinor’s bedroom and stood on opposite sides of the bed. As if at a prearranged signal, they bent down together and kissed Elinor on either cheek. Elinor pulled back the corner of the blanket that was wrapped about her new daughter, and said, “See? Now I’ve got one of my own.” She looked at her first daughter, still in Sister’s arms, and said, “Miriam, this is your sister Frances.”

  “Is that what we are calling her?” said Oscar.

  “Yes,” replied Elinor, then added after a moment, “it was my mother’s name.”

  “It’s a real pretty name,” said Mary-Love. “Elinor, Sister and I don’t want to tire you out, so listen, if there’s anything you need, you just send Zaddie over, and we will drop everything and go out and get it.”

  “I thank you, Miss Mary-Love. Thank you, Sister.”

  “Mama, we ought to go. Early’s gone wonder what became of us.”

  At the mention of the engineer’s name, Elinor’s polite smile froze. She didn’t say another word to Sister or Mary-Love.

  That night, while Elinor—remarkably recovered—was walking around and around the nursery with Frances, singing to the baby and holding it out to stare at it and make faces at it and grin at it and drawing it back in again to kiss and fondle, Oscar performed calculations on the birth of his daughter that weren’t so casual. He worked back nine months from this date of Frances’s birth—Leo Benquith had told him that the delivery and the pregnancy had been normal in every respect—and came up with August 19, 1921.

  That was the date they had moved into the new house. He certainly remembered that he and Elinor had made love that night, for it had been the first time in their own home—but what he also remembered, with not a little uneasiness, was that that was also the date on which, earlier in the evening, Elinor had announced her pregnancy.

  . . .

  The night of the birth of Frances Caskey, Elinor declared her intention of remaining in the nursery with her new daughter. Pleased that his wife was showing such interest and delight in her new child, in such sharp contrast to her treatment of Miriam, Oscar eagerly acquiesced. He lay in bed a long while, unable to fall asleep, thinking of Elinor, the pregnancy, and the peculiar coincidence of dates.

  Next door, in Mary-Love’s house, Early Haskew snored louder than he talked. Mary-Love tossed in her bed, pondering what effect the birth of Frances might have on things, fearing that the child might be the means by which Elinor gained an ascendancy acknowledged all over Perdido. And in her room, Sister thought alternately of Miriam, whom she loved very dearly, and of the man snoring in the room at the end of the hall, to whom she was not indifferent. Beside Sister in the bed, little Miriam Caskey dreamed her formless dreams of nameless things to eat and nameless things to pick up and nameless things to hide in the little box that Mary-Love had given her.

  And in the next house, Grace Caskey tossed and turned and didn’t even want to go to sleep, so excited was she by the birth of Frances. Grace envisioned a trio of
cousins—herself, Miriam, and Frances—loyal and loving. James Caskey thought—or did he dream?—of the earth above his wife’s grave, and wondered whether it ought not to be planted over in verbena or phlox. Eventually all the Caskeys fell asleep, and all dreamed of whatever concerned them most.

  That night while the Caskeys slept and dreamed, fog roiled up out of the Perdido River and spilled across the dry Caskey property.

  Fogs were not uncommon in this part of Alabama, but they came only at night and were seen by few. This fog, thicker and darker than usual, rose up out of the river as a beast of prey rises up in the night after a long diurnal sleep, keen to slake its hunger. It wrapped itself around the Caskey houses, enveloping them in a silent, thick, unmoving mist. What before had been only dark was now black. It was so silent, so subtle, that its arrival waked no one at all. The river moisture pervaded the houses and surrounded the sleepers with a suffocating dampness. Even Early Haskew’s snoring was muffled. Yet still none of the Caskeys woke, and if they struggled against it, they did so only in their dreams, dreams in which the oppressive fog had arms and legs that were slick and damp, and a mouth that exhaled mist and night.

  Zaddie Sapp was the only one to know of it. She dreamed of the fog, dreamed that its moist fingers pulled back the sheet from her cot so that she grew chill, and dreamed that the fog awakened her and beckoned her to come out from the protection of her tiny closet behind the kitchen. The dream was so convincing that Zaddie opened her eyes to prove to herself that the fog was not there. But when she did so, and looked straight up at the ceiling, Zaddie saw thick wisps of the mist floating in her window. At the same time, very soft and muffled, she heard the sodden creak of the hinges of the lattice-door at the back of the house. At first she disbelieved her ears, the sound seemed so distant. Then she heard a step upon the stairs that led down to the back yard.

  She sat up suddenly, and wisps of fog swirled into sudden turbulence before her eyes. Zaddie wasn’t afraid of thieves, because nothing had been stolen in Perdido since “Railroad” Bill held up the Turk’s mill in 1883, but with trepidation she peered out the window. Little could be seen through the fog, but when she squinted she could just make out a dark form moving carefully down those steps.