Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  Within the week, a kind of treaty had been worked out among the three millowners for the division of the DeBordenave holdings. Henry Turk, as Oscar had predicted, took over the physical plant along the Blackwater River—all the land there, the buildings, the inventory, and the machinery. This cost him three hundred thousand dollars, which he was to pay in eight installments without interest. This excellent bargain Tom DeBordenave was able to accede to because Oscar was paying him an equal amount, in cash borrowed from the Pensacola bank, for the thirty-seven thousand acres of timber he owned in Baldwin, Escambia, and Monroe counties.

  Two lawyers came down from Montgomery, put up at the Osceola Hotel, and worked for a week straight on the business of deeds and transfers. Only when everything had been signed was the announcement made of the partition of the DeBordenave property. This was a vast shock in Perdido, and all the townspeople walked about in a daze, wondering how the change would affect them personally.

  Tom and Caroline, bereft of their son, their property, and their position, quickly packed and left for North Carolina. Mary-Love and Manda Turk had time to do no more than take Caroline to lunch one day in Mobile and present her tearfully with a diamond-and-ruby brooch in the shape of a peacock. At this meal Mary-Love learned that it was Oscar, not herself and James, who possessed the former DeBordenave acreage. She was so humiliated and angered by James and Oscar’s high-handedness in the matter that the next day without a word to anybody she took Sister and Miriam and Early on a two-week’s trip to Cincinnati and Washington, D.C.

  “They’ll be back,” said Elinor, without concern. “Mary-Love and Sister will take good care of Miriam. I’m not worried.”

  Nothing, in fact, could have disrupted Elinor’s equanimity at this time. The big money of Perdido, which formerly had been partitioned equally among three families, was now divided between only two. Oscar, who had had no share of the wealth before, was now a man rich in timber-bearing land spread over three counties. Although Elinor might no longer be able to see the river from where she rocked in the swing, she continued to spend her afternoons on the upstairs porch, where she bounced Frances up and down on her knee and cooed, “Oh, my precious baby! One day your daddy is going to own all the mills along the river. And one day we are going to have a whole shoebox full of land deeds, and every acre of land we own will have a river or a creek or a branch or a run on it for my precious baby to play in. And Frances and her mama will have more dresses and more pearls and more pretty things than everybody in the rest of Perdido put together!”

  . . .

  John Robert DeBordenave lay immolated in the levee, the town’s right and savory sacrifice to the river whose name it bore. John Robert’s death had permitted the levee to be completed and had given Oscar Caskey ownership of the land that would make the Caskey fortune even greater than Elinor herself dreamed. John Robert’s parents had gone away from Perdido and gravel had stopped his mouth from calling out to them. Red clay had prevented his detached arms from waving them to return. Black dirt had held down his severed legs from running after them. But, torn, pinned, and buried though he lay, John Robert DeBordenave wasn’t finished with Perdido, or the Caskeys, or the woman responsible for his death.

  Chapter 27

  The Closet

  In the years following, Perdido grew considerably. The levee had been the primary cause for this increase in population, wealth, and prominence. Not all the men who had worked on it went away when it was finished. Some were offered jobs at the mills, took them, and settled down. The banks in Pensacola and Mobile, seeing that the future of the mills was protected by the embankments of earth, were now willing to lend money to the millowners for the expansion of their businesses. Both the Caskey and the Turk mills took advantage of this, bought more land, ordered more equipment, and together helped to finance a spur of railroad track from the mills up to the L&N line in Atmore. With this useful track and the larger trucks being produced by Detroit, the rivers were employed less and less for the transportation of felled trees and lumber. No longer were the Perdido and Blackwater rivers of overwhelming economic importance to the town.

  Except for the business of the mutually advantageous construction of the railroad spur, the two lumber mills drew apart. Henry Turk’s only idea was to do what he had always done, only much more of it. Oscar and James Caskey, on the other hand, realized that demand for lumber might not always be what it was today, and so decided to diversify. Accordingly, in 1927, James and Oscar purchased the dormitories on the other side of Baptist Bottom, and converted the buildings to a sash-door and window plant. Perdido’s unemployment plummeted to nothing at all. The following year, a small veneer plant was added next to it, thus making it possible to utilize the bottomland hardwoods that did not otherwise provide profitable cutting.

  Henry Turk laughed up his sleeve at the Caskeys, for these operations were patently not as profitable as the mere production of building lumber. The Caskeys were in debt for the capital they had needed to start up their new business, they had vastly larger payrolls, the demand for window sashes and hardwood veneers was troublesomely erratic and likely to remain so. The Caskeys ignored Henry Turk’s laughter, and waited only for these new operations to become solvent before they established a plant to produce fence posts and utility poles.

  It was Oscar’s intention to appoint within the Caskey dominion a use for every part of a tree. Nothing should go to waste; everything should be turned to productiveness and value. Early Haskew was redesigning the town’s steam plant so that it would run on the bark and dust that were a by-product of the cutting operations. Already the burning of waste was heating the kilns that dried the lumber and the pulp.

  Of equal importance to Oscar was the maintenance of the forests. He hired men from the Auburn forestry department to come down and talk to him. Under their guidance, he instituted a system of selective cutting and intensive replanting. It was Oscar’s goal—quickly achieved—to plant more trees than he cut down. He set up an experimental station near the ruins of Fort Mims, in hope of creating a more vigorous strain of yellow pine. He corresponded with agriculture departments all over the South, and at least once a year made inspection trips to other lumberyards from Texas to North Carolina.

  Oscar’s energy was surprising. He had certainly never done so much before. It was his work that had kept the mill going so well for the past decade, but all this extra business was something new. Perdido wasn’t used to such quick expansion, such explosive innovation. Perdido tended to agree with Henry Turk, and considered that Oscar was spreading the mill and its resources too thin. Mary-Love occasionally complained to James that her son was running the mill into the ground, but James refused to interfere. Mary-Love wouldn’t speak to her son directly about the family business because she knew that he would not heed her advice. She didn’t want to put herself in the position of having any request refused.

  As the years passed, it became gradually known that Elinor Caskey was actually the force behind her husband’s spirited plans. If she didn’t actually make the suggestions herself, then she at least kept him firmly spurred in those general paths of diversification and innovation. It was Elinor who sent him off to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to look at the big mills there, and over to Little Rock to see the new wire-box factory. Why Elinor would cause her husband to expend so much energy in a concern by which he would personally gain so little was unknown. If the mill made a great deal of money, then all the profit would be divided between Oscar’s mother and uncle. He still would get only his salary. Mary-Love was a hearty, strong woman, not likely to die soon, and at that, no one put it past her to leave all of her money to Sister and Early Haskew, in order to spite Elinor even from the grave.

  Oscar was still very much in debt from the purchase of the DeBordenave land in 1924. He received money from the mill for trees harvested on his land, and this was used to pay the interest on the loan, but very little of the principal had yet been repaid, and what was left over from the lumber rec
eipts kept his wife and daughter in decent clothes, but didn’t pay for much else. He and Elinor were still very much in straitened circumstances.

  “I sure do wish I could afford to take you to New York for a week or two,” Oscar said to Elinor with a grimace.

  “Don’t even think about it, Oscar!” Elinor replied with unfeigned indifference. “You know we can’t afford it, and besides, the Perdido River doesn’t flow through New York, so why on earth would I want to go there?”

  So long as she seemed assured of her husband’s working hard and attempting to turn everything to advantage, Elinor was content. Mary-Love was always traveling to Mobile and Montgomery and New Orleans, buying dresses and lace tablecloths, when Elinor scarcely had an extra dime to replace the brown thread she had run out of. But Elinor did not complain. She sat in her house all day on the upstairs porch, rocking and sewing. She taught Frances, now five years old, to read and to write, so that she wouldn’t have any difficulty when she began school. On most days, Elinor climbed up to the top of the levee, grasping the trunks of water oak saplings she had planted in its clayey sides, and strolled along the top, gazing in absorption into the red swirling water of the Perdido.

  . . .

  Frances could not remember a time when the sandy yard in back of the house led directly down to the river. She had known only the levee there, that thick sloping bank of red earth and clay, slowly covering itself in a mantle of water oak and kudzu. She wasn’t allowed to climb it, unless her mother carried her up, and she wasn’t allowed to stick her hand beneath the broad flat leaves of the rampaging kudzu, for snakes bred there in profusion. “And other things, too,” Ivey Sapp claimed, “things just waiting to bite off a little white girl’s hand.” Frances was jealous of the children who were allowed to play on the levee, like Malcolm Strickland, who was constantly riding his bike back and forth its entire length whenever he wasn’t in school.

  Elinor took her daughter boating in Bray Sugarwhite’s little green boat. Frances couldn’t hear often enough about how her mother had been rescued out of the Osceola Hotel by Oscar and Bray and taken to safety in this very same boat with Bray plying these very same paddles. Frances was frightened whenever they approached the junction and always held on tight to the sides of the boat. She tried her best not to show her fear, for that was disrespectful of her mother, who Frances thought was capable of just about anything. Elinor was certainly capable of shooting past the junction without Bray’s little green boat being sucked down to the bottom of the riverbed, and proved it to Frances many times.

  There was something otherworldly about floating down the river between those manmade hills of red clay. Frances knew that the houses and shops and sidewalks of Perdido lay just on the other side, but gliding along, she wasn’t able even to see the clock tower of the town hall, and got no sense of human life being so close. She and her mother were in a solemn wilderness as deep and sublime as if they had been a thousand miles away from anyone but each other. “Oh,” Elinor sighed once, and Frances didn’t know whether her mother spoke to her or mused only to herself, “I used to hate the levee, hate the very idea of it, but days like this I row down the river and I remember what it was like before there was a Perdido and sawmills and bridges and cars.”

  “You remember, Mama?”

  Elinor laughed, and seemed drawn back. “No, darling, I just imagine it…”

  The town intruded upon the peace of the river between the levees only at the bridge that crossed the Perdido below the Osceola Hotel. Cars passed over the bridge now and then, and children on their bicycles, and there was almost always an old black woman, with a cane fishing pole and a cage of chirping crickets for bait, leaning on her elbows on the cement railing trying to save her husband the price of a slab of pork for supper.

  Frances would have enjoyed these excursions except for a vague feeling she had that her mother expected her to say something or feel something that she neither said nor felt. Gazing into that swift-flowing water that was so muddy one couldn’t even see a foot beneath the surface, Frances would have to shake her head no when her mother would say, “Don’t you want to just dive right in?” Frances had learned to swim at Lake Pinchona, had taken readily to the clear artesian well water that filled the pool there, could dive and swim beneath the water and hold her breath longer than any of her friends. Her mother promised that if Frances ever wanted to swim in the Perdido she would protect her from the whirlpool at the junction, from the leeches along the banks, from the water moccasins, and from whatever else hid itself in the muddy current. “But you wouldn’t even have to worry about those things,” Elinor assured her daughter, “because you’re my little girl. This river is like home to me. One of these days it’ll be like home to you, too.”

  Elinor never pressured Frances to swim in the river, and Frances never told her mother that it wasn’t fear that kept her from making the attempt, but rather the unsettling familiarity she felt with the Perdido. Not understanding that familiarity, she didn’t want to pursue it. Frances may have been only five, but was already possessed of vague memories of a time that seemed impossibly earlier. The Perdido belonged to that time, as did a child—a little boy her cousin Grace’s age—whom she sometimes remembered having played with in the linen passage between the front room and her own. But so far as she knew, she had never swum in the Perdido, and the little boy ranged in her memory without a name.

  Frances was a tender child, and not much given to complaining. She never compared her lot to others’, never said to another little girl, “I hate doing this, don’t you?” or “It makes me so mad when Mama says that to me.” She imagined that every emotion that overtook her was peculiar to herself, could never be shared with anyone else, and certainly was never experienced by anyone else in Perdido. Thinking her own feelings of very little consequence, Frances never spoke them aloud, never sought to be praised or reassured or disabused or confirmed in anything she thought or felt.

  Foremost among these rigidly maintained silences were Frances’s thoughts concerning the house she lived in. She knew a little of its story: her grandmother had built it as a wedding gift for her mother and her father, but had refused to let them have possession of it for a long while. Then Miriam had been born, and Mary-Love had said, “Give me Miriam and you can move into the house.” That was why Miriam lived with her grandmother, and that was why Frances was all alone.

  In this story Frances saw nothing unusual, nothing cruel, nothing unfair. What concerned Frances was not the story of the bartering of Miriam for her parents’ freedom, but rather what had happened in the house itself during the time that it lay empty. This concern was prompted by Ivey Sapp, Mary-Love’s cook, who had told Frances the story in the first place one day while Frances was sitting in the kitchen of her grandmother’s house.

  Frances had been entranced by the idea of sheets placed over all the furniture.

  “You mean,” Frances had asked, “that my house just sat there all locked up and empty? That’s funny.”

  “No, it ain’t,” returned Ivey. “Not funny one bit. Ain’t no house that’s empty. Something always moving in. You just got to make sure it’s people that gets in there first.”

  “What you talking about, Ivey?”

  “Nothing,” replied Ivey. “What I’m saying is, child, is you cain’t have a big house like that just sitting there with nobody in it, and all the furniture covered up in sheets and them little stickers still on the windowpanes and all the keys in the doors, and not have somebody move in it. And when I say somebody I don’t necessarily mean white folks and I don’t necessarily mean black folks.”

  “Indians?”

  “Not Indians neither.”

  “Then what?”

  Ivey paused, then said, “If you ain’t seen ’em, then it don’t matter, do it, child?”

  “I haven’t seen anybody there but Mama and Daddy and Zaddie and me. Who else lives there?”

  They were interrupted by Frances’s grandmother, who came i
n just then and remarked, “Does your mama let you gallivant all day long without supervision, child?”

  Frances was sent home before she could discover who else might inhabit the house in which she lived.

  . . .

  Frances recalled that conversation for a long time, though she forgot completely why she had been in Mary-Love’s kitchen when she was so rarely at her grandmother’s house and almost never there alone. Sometimes she even thought it had been only a dream, it seemed so disconnected from any other memory. But she never could figure out whether Ivey’s pronouncements affected her attitude toward her home or whether it only confirmed something she had already begun to feel.

  Frances thought she ought to love the house. It was big—the biggest in town—and had many rooms. She had a room of her own and her own bath and her own closet. The hallways were wide and long. There was stained glass in all the outside doors and on the parlor windows, so that in the afternoon the sun painted all the floors in brilliant colors. If Frances sat in that colored light and held a mirror out in front of her, she herself was painted vermilion and cobalt and sea green. The house had more porches than any house in town. On the first floor there was an open porch in front, narrow and long, with green wicker rocking chairs and ferns. Above it was another porch, opening from the second-floor hallway, the same size, with more rocking chairs and a table with magazines. In back on the first floor was the kitchen porch, latticed over so that it remained cool in the summer. On the second floor in the back was the biggest of all, the sleeping porch, screened, looking out at the levee and Miss Mary-Love’s house, with swings and hammocks, ferns, hooked rugs, gliders, fringed standing lamps, and little tables. Frances’s own bedroom had one window that looked out over her grandmother’s house, and one that opened directly onto this screened porch. It was the most delicious feeling, Frances thought, to go to the window of her room and look out and see what was essentially another room. At night, when she went to sleep, she could turn in her bed and look out that window through soft gauze curtains and see the silhouettes of her mother and father, rocking slowly in the swing and speaking in soft voices so as not to disturb her. Sometimes Frances stood on the sleeping porch and looked through the window into her own room and was always astounded at how different it appeared from that perspective.