Behind him he heard a little hiss of wetness, as when the belly of a large and still-living fish is slit open with a knife. One of John Robert’s arms was raised out from his body and he continued to weep.
There was a wrench and a tear, and a jab of pain so violent and strong that John Robert couldn’t even identify it as pain. Then the child saw—but did not know what he saw—his own arm tumbling through the moonlight. It landed with a thump on the red clay at the very edge of the Caskey property. The moon shone down upon it, and ten feet away John Robert DeBordenave saw the fingers of his own disembodied hand grasp and squeeze the clods of clay that lay beneath it.
His other arm was raised and wrenched out of its socket. It, too, sailed through the air and landed across the other; this time the palm lay upward so that the clawing fingers clutched nothing but air.
John Robert now felt his body engulfed with warm liquid, and did not know that it was blood. Coherent thought had never come easily to John Robert, and now it had entirely forsaken him. He slumped to the ground, and one of those webby appendages that were not hands at all was pressed against his chest. With a splintering of bone, a stripping of tendon, and a tearing of flesh, first one leg and then the other was twisted all the way around in its socket. John Robert saw them arch through the air and fall twitching on top of his detached, crossed arms.
The last thing that John Robert DeBordenave perceived was the slight whistle of wind in his ears and a light breath of wind across his face as all that was left of him, his trunk and head, were picked up and hurled through the air. He turned and twisted, and saw his own blood streaming from the holes in his body, gleaming in thousands of black droplets in the moonlight. He jerked once when he fell atop the pile of his own limbs, and was conscious for one second more as he saw a sheet of clay and gravel from the top of the levee come sliding down on top of him. A small stone struck his right eye, bursting it open like a spoon plunged into the yolk of an egg. John Robert DeBordenave, his twisting head at last stilled beneath the small avalanche of pebbles and clay, knew no more.
Chapter 26
The Dedication
Caroline DeBordenave was frantic for days after her son’s disappearance. The noise of the levee-men, which had never bothered her before, seemed to drive directly through her skull now, and she demanded that her husband halt all the work until their boy had been returned to them.
No one had any idea where to begin to look for John Robert. The unlatched screen told how he had got out of the house. His missing pajamas told what he had been wearing, but of his disappearance no one could say more. Teenaged boys bearing stout sticks for defense against rattlesnakes walked through the woods and called his name. People in Baptist Bottom looked under broken-down wagons to see if the white boy had taken shelter there. The mayor of Perdido made a tour of inspection of the marble-floored room beneath the town hall clocks, but John Robert wasn’t among the bats and bird-nests up there. Zaddie wriggled around in the crawl spaces beneath the millowners’ mansions, but found nothing but rodent nests and spider webs.
After ten days, Caroline DeBordenave had to accept what everyone else in Perdido had known from the beginning: John Robert had drowned in the Perdido. Children in town didn’t get bitten by mad dogs or fall down empty well shafts or suffer fatal accidents while playing at “barbershop” or discharge loaded pistols into their throats. In Perdido, unlucky children drowned in the river, and that was that. Except for the junction, the young members of Perdido’s population led a charmed life. But the river took its sacrifices frequently, and sometimes the bodies were recovered by a fisherman far downstream. Most of the time, even when the dying throes of the girl or boy were witnessed by a dozen little friends, the body was never found. The child was dragged down to the bed of the river and buried there beneath a coverlet of red mud, to sleep undisturbed until the Resurrection should rouse those tiny bare bones to partake in Glory.
The search for John Robert went on longer than any had before. The boy’s dim intelligence might have led him someplace other than the Perdido, and Caroline DeBordenave cried out that her son would no more go near that river, having been warned against it all his life, than he would have driven a heated spike through his own hand. The DeBordenaves, too, were millowners, and their son, feeble in mind and body though he might be, was a personage of importance. And his feebleness made John Robert an object of greater pity than if he had been a ruffian white boy whose father was a drunk or some untraceable black girl who was only number three of her parents’ eight children and had shown not the least aptitude for cooking or laundry.
Despite the intensity of the search and despite Caroline’s complaining, work on the levee did not halt. In fact, it hastened. Whatever it was that had held back work on the upper Perdido stopped on the day of John Robert’s disappearance. Thereafter, the curtain of earth flew up, rod by rod, and before the Caskeys knew it, the view of the river from each of the three houses was blotted out. Even when Oscar stood on tiptoe on the sleeping porch he couldn’t peer over the top of the levee to see the water on the other side. He could scarcely see the tops of the live oaks on the far bank of the Perdido.
Oscar had dreaded this moment, for he knew with what baleful foreboding Elinor had spoken of the time when the river should be obscured from their windows. Elinor surprised him; she hadn’t complained, even of the noise and the litter of the workmen. In fact, she sent Zaddie and Roxie out with pitchers of iced tea and lemonade at noon. She hadn’t been out of sorts at all. When she wasn’t visiting with Queenie and her new little baby, Elinor sat on the porch and rocked in the swing and read magazines and only made little grimaces when occasionally some workman’s blasphemy or obscenity sounded clear upon the breeze.
One Sunday afternoon when Oscar and Elinor were together on the upstairs porch, Oscar stood up, went over to the screen, and with a broad gesture pointed far to his left. “They gone take the levee about a hundred yards beyond the town line, just to make sure everything’s all right. You never know, the town might grow in that direction and somebody’ll want to build out there. But the way they going now, they gone be finished in another two or three weeks.” He paused, turned, and looked at his wife, wondering if he had perhaps gone too far. But Elinor continued to rock with perfect placidity. Oscar ventured to remark, “You know, I really used to have the idea that you were gone be upset when the workman got up this way.”
“I thought I was, too,” replied Elinor. “But it doesn’t do any good to get upset, does it? I couldn’t stop the levee all by myself, could I? And didn’t you say that you would never get any money from the bank unless the levee was built?”
“That’s right. We’re all set now,” replied Oscar.
Elinor said, with a small embarrassed smile, “I guess I feel a little better about that old levee now.”
“What made you change your mind?” Oscar asked curiously.
“I don’t know. I guess I thought Early and Mr. Avant were going to cut down all my water oaks, but Early told Zaddie this morning that he would be able to leave every one of my trees standing.”
“I don’t suppose, though, I’ll be able to persuade you to go to the dedication ceremony?”
“Oh, Lord, no!” Elinor laughed gaily. “Oscar, I’ve already had a little party for the levee.”
. . .
The levee was finished, and the levee-men were paid off. They dispersed with such rapidity that the five colored women who worked in the kitchens were left with four hundred pounds of beef, and three hundred pounds of pork, and one thousand pounds of potatoes. Eventually, through the largess of the town council, that surplus found its way into the skillets and pots of Baptist Bottom. The dormitories in which the levee-men had lived for nearly two years were swept out, boarded over, and locked tight until some use could be found for the buildings. The last bits of work on the curtains of clay that now protected every square foot of built-up Perdido could easily be accomplished by the twenty black men who remained in Early
Haskew’s employ.
The two white women who lived in Baptist Bottom returned to Pensacola when their red-light custom evaporated. Lummie Purifoy’s gambling hall closed, and his daughter Ruel took up candy-making. The Indians out on Little Turkey Creek closed down two of their five stills. And Perdido, in general, breathed a little easier.
The dedication ceremony, arranged by James Caskey, was held in the field behind the town hall; a triangular podium had been built in the corner where the upper Perdido levee met the lower Perdido levee. James Caskey made the introductory speech, and the town of Perdido cheered him and the levee. Morris Avant rose and promised that he would sit down at a table and eat the Methodist Church steeple if one drop of riverwater ever appeared on the town side of the levee. Early Haskew got up and claimed that there wasn’t a finer town or friendlier people to be found in all of Alabama, and just to prove it he had gone and married Sister Caskey and they were already happier than pigs in sunshine. Tom DeBordenave and Henry Turk and Oscar Caskey then each in turn stood and proclaimed an era of unmitigated prosperity for Perdido on account of the levee. As the audience bowed its head, and the preachers prayed their prayers of dedication to the God of the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians, the downspout in the center of the junction, directly behind the speaker’s stand, but invisible to all because of the curtain of clay, swirled the red water of the Perdido and the blacker water of the Blackwater faster than ever, dragging down to the bed of the rivers more detritus, living and inanimate, than it usually did, as if it wished it might draw in the whole town of Perdido—industry and houses and inhabitants and all. But the combined power of those two rivers and the desperate strength of the maelstrom at their junction had no effect on the levees, and the waters flowed and plunged and swirled and eddied and glided on, seen only by those brave and mischievous children who played atop the levees and by those who glanced curiously down into the water from the safety of the bridge spanning the river below the Osceola Hotel.
. . .
Perdido was no longer the same town, so much of Elinor Caskey’s prediction had proved true. Perdido no longer saw the rivers that had given the town much of its character, except when it promenaded along the levee or crossed from downtown over into Baptist Bottom. Now Perdido saw the levee, the newer parts of it still red, but the first-built parts now covered over with the dusty deep green of the kudzu vine.
During those speeches on the day of dedication, Perdido looked around at what had been built, and now, quite suddenly, Perdido seemed to see the levee with strange eyes: it looked as if some unimaginably vast snake had slithered out of the pine forest and curled itself around the town, and now lay sleeping, an unwitting protector of those whose habitation was within its shadow.
Perdido looked around at the levee that lay coiled on every side, and at the end of James Caskey’s ceremony, the applause perhaps wasn’t as enthusiastic as it had been at the beginning.
. . .
One warm evening in September of 1924, about a week after the dedication of the levee, Tom DeBordenave knocked on the door of Oscar Caskey’s house. Zaddie let him in and showed him up to the screened porch on the second floor where Oscar and Elinor sat in the swing. Tom admired the baby in Elinor’s arms; he admired the house he had walked through; he admired the view of the levee from the second floor of Oscar’s house. Probably he would have gone on forever in admiration of something or other had not Elinor discreetly taken her leave and left him alone with Oscar.
“Oscar,” Tom began, breaking off in the middle of an encomium upon the generous dimensions of the sleeping porch the moment it seemed Elinor was out of earshot, “we are in trouble.” Not yet knowing whom “we” was intended to signify, Oscar said nothing. “The flood hurt us—real bad.”
“It hurt everybody,” agreed Oscar with cautious sympathy.
“It hurt us worst of all. I lost my records, I lost my inventory. If it could float, then it got washed away. If it could spoil, then it rotted away to nothing. If it could sink, then it sank, and I never saw it again.”
“Tom, you’ve recovered,” said Oscar kindly, confident that by “we,” Tom referred only to the DeBordenave mill. “You’ve got everything going again. Of course it takes time—”
“It takes money, Oscar. Money I haven’t got.”
“Well, now that the levee’s built, you can borrow it from the Pensacola banks. Or the Mobile banks.”
“Oscar, cain’t you understand? I don’t want to straighten things out. I want to get out of the business.” He sighed. “I want to get out of Perdido.”
Quietly, Oscar said, “Are you talking about John Robert?”
“Caroline won’t even pick up the telephone when it rings. She thinks it’s gone be some old fisherman saying he has caught John Robert on his hook and could we please come and pick him up. And I’m about as bad as she is. Poor old John Robert, I just know he drowned in the Perdido, but, Lord God! I wish we could find his poor old body so we could know for sure. It sure would be a comfort to put him in a decent grave. Oscar, Caroline is about to go out of her mind. Elizabeth Ann is away at school and I’m at the mill, and she’s alone in that house all day. I just don’t know what we’re gone do. Except I do know we’re gone get out of Perdido. Caroline has people up near Raleigh, and we’re going there. Her brother has a tobacco concern, and I’m sure he’ll find me something to do. We sure are gone miss this place, but, Lord God! we got get away and stop thinking about poor old John Robert. So that’s why I’m here, on account of John Robert. I came to see if you wanted to buy the mill.”
Oscar whistled for a few moments, leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. Then he said, “Tom, listen, I’m not the man you should be coming to. You know that James and Mama are the only ones around here with money.”
“I know that. I also know that you make the decisions. You know, Oscar, you may think Henry and I don’t know what’s going on, but I tell you we do. We know what’s going on because Caroline and Manda have told us what is going on.”
Oscar’s brow was furrowed. “Elinor has been saying something?”
“Not much,” said Tom. “But enough so that Caroline and Manda figured it out. Elinor thinks you don’t have enough on your own. And Henry and I think that, too. That’s why I am offering you the mill and that’s why I am not offering it to James and Mary-Love.”
The two men remained another couple of hours on the darkened porch. Their business, the most momentous deal that had ever been considered in the history of the town of Perdido, might have been about the price of a load of kindling, their voices were so soft and conversational. Real business in Alabama wasn’t conducted in offices or in mill-yards or across store counters. It went on on porches, in swings, in the moonlight, or perhaps in the corner of the barbershop on the shoe-shining perches or in the grassy plot behind the Methodist Church between Sunday school and morning service or in the quarter-hour that preceded Oscar’s Wednesday night domino game.
“’Course,” said Tom DeBordenave, “the real question is, have you got the money?”
“Mama and James do. Or they could get it. I haven’t got a penny except my salary and a little bit of stock.”
“Borrow it from the bank. James will cosign even if Mary-Love won’t. And I tell you what, you pay me half tomorrow, you can pay the rest over five years, ten years, that doesn’t matter much. I’d like to be rid of it, and I’d like it to go to you.”
“Tom, something worries me.”
“What?”
“Henry Turk worries me. Henry’s not gone be happy if I suddenly buy you out and he’s left sitting there in the Caskey shadow.”
“Henry’s in a little trouble, too,” said Tom. “You know that. Henry couldn’t afford to buy me out. There’d be no point in my even speaking to him.”
“I don’t like making Henry feel bad,” said Oscar, shaking his head.
“I don’t either, but what can I do? I want to sell my place.”
“Sell H
enry part of it,” Oscar suggested.
“What part?”
“Anything he wants—your customers, your inventory, your notes outstanding, your equipment, your mill-yard—whatever he wants except the land. I want all your land. You make sure I get every acre.”
“You’re asking me to go to more trouble.”
“You’ll get more money out of it if you sell to two instead of one. And I want old Henry to feel good about this. If he buys up your mill over there it’ll look to him like he beat me out, and he’ll feel fine. All Henry wants is a bigger yard to walk around in, and all I really want is the land.”
“Oscar, let me tell you something. I think you’re foolish buying up all this land. You don’t even cut what you’ve got now. You haven’t got the mill capacity to do it.”
“Oh, Tom, you’re right, you came to the right man when you wanted to sell, ’cause I know I’m no good at this sort of thing. But the fact is, Mama and James and I decided that we wanted land, so whenever we see it coming down the road we flag it down and hop on.”
The men talked at greater length, though to no altered purpose. In the way of Southern business, any agreement of this complexity must be talked over until every point has been argued out and agreed upon at least three times, by way of fixing it not only in the minds of the parties involved, but in their hearts as well. At Elinor’s direction, Zaddie brought up a tray with two small glasses and a bottle of pre-Prohibition whiskey on it, and the third reiteration of the agreement was worked through rather more quickly with the help of the liquor.
. . .
The next morning, Oscar led James Caskey out into a remote corner of the pine forest and told him of Tom’s offer. James thought it an excellent opportunity for Oscar, and by Oscar’s decision to take only the land, the whole thing might be kept more or less a secret from Mary-Love. She would otherwise object to any plan by which her son achieved any semblance of financial independence, even if that semblance were no more than a debt for a quarter of a million dollars.