Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  She ran down the stairs and paused on the landing. Behind the great window the night was still black. The water oaks were only massive amorphous shadows. She couldn’t see the levee. She turned once more to look back. The front room door had been thrown wide open, and the light poured out into the corridor, bleaching the colors there. The panes of colored glass in the porch door reflected the light in sickly hues.

  Frances closed her eyes and convulsively grasped the bannister, momentarily frozen to the spot, when with the sound of a great explosion, the staircase window behind her shattered. Thousands of shards of glass and splinters of wood showered down upon her, and Frances no longer held back her screams.

  Chapter 33

  The Croker Sack

  Elinor and Oscar were wakened immediately by the noise of the explosion and the screams of both Frances and Queenie. As Elinor rose in her bed, there was the sound of a gunshot, and the window of their bedroom shattered and a picture on the opposite wall crashed to the floor. The house seemed to be under fire from the direction of the levee.

  “For God’s sake Elinor, get down!” cried Oscar.

  Elinor paid no attention. She leaped from the bed and ran out of the room, calling “Frances! Frances!”

  There were more shots. Elinor heard windows breaking on the first floor. There were dull thumps as the bullets struck the side of the house. A window seemed to break somewhere inside the house, and Elinor heard Zaddie’s scream.

  Queenie stood in the doorway of her room, holding herself up weakly by the doorjamb. She had her thumb on the switch to turn on the hall light.

  “No!” cried Elinor. “Don’t! They’ll be able to see inside the house!”

  “It must be Carl!” cried Queenie wildly.

  A shot, aimed through the broken staircase window, whizzed down the corridor and smashed three panes of stained glass in the door at the opposite end.

  “Mama?” said Malcolm tentatively. He and Lucille stood in the open doorway of the children’s room, staring at the broken glass at their feet.

  “Go back inside your room,” said Elinor quickly. “Sit down on the floor and don’t move.”

  The children hesitated.

  “Now!”

  Lucille and Malcolm retreated inside and slammed the door after them.

  “Queenie, go back in and sit down in that chair in the corner. Don’t get up no matter what.”

  “It’s Carl,” cried Queenie in desperation, “trying to kill us all!”

  The shots, which had briefly stopped, resumed. Elinor stood upright against the doorway of her room. With resounding thumps, two bullets embedded themselves in the ceiling of the hallway.

  “Frances!” she called.

  “Mama?” The terrified voice came weakly from below.

  “Where are you?”

  “I’m on the stairs! I’m cut! The glass cut me!”

  “Frances, don’t turn on any lights. And don’t try to come back upstairs.”

  “Miss El’nor!”

  “Zaddie?”

  “Yes, ma’am!” Zaddie called up.

  “Zaddie, don’t turn on any lights. Can you see Frances?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Zaddie, come get me,” whispered Frances.

  “Walk up the stairs and get her,” said Elinor, “then carry her down to the front hallway. Don’t go near any windows.”

  “You want me to call the police, Miss El’nor?”

  “No,” replied Elinor, “Oscar’s calling them now.”

  Oscar reached out from behind and put his hand on Elinor’s shoulder. “I cain’t get Mr. Key on the line. Are we sure it’s Carl?”

  “Who else is going to be firing bullets into the house, Oscar?”

  “Nobody else, I guess. Is everybody standing away from the windows, Elinor?” He whispered, as if by his voice, at such a distance, Carl Strickland would find them out.

  “Lucille and Malcolm are in the children’s room. They’re safe—at least for now—because that’s at the front of the house. Queenie’s sitting in the corner chair in Frances’s room. Some of the shots went through the screens, and that inside window is broken, but if Queenie sits still, she’ll be all right.”

  “Where’s Frances?”

  “Downstairs with Zaddie. I told them to sit in the hallway. Frances got cut when the staircase window broke.”

  “Is she cut bad?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let me go call Dr. Benquith.”

  Oscar went back into the sitting room, which had no window open to the back of the house and the madman firing there, and telephoned Leo Benquith. He returned to the door, saying, “He’s coming right over, but I told him to be careful, he should—”

  Elinor was no longer there.

  He called for her frantically.

  “Hush!” she cried from the landing.

  She was on her knees, inching her way across the glass-littered floor. Once past the danger of the exposed staircase window, Elinor got to her feet and descended the stairs. Broken glass crackled beneath her feet. “I’m going to see to Frances, Oscar! You stay up there. Make sure Queenie and the children stay where they are!”

  “Elinor, you shouldn’t have left me!”

  “Mama!” cried Frances. Regardless of the splinters and shards of glass, Elinor seated herself on the bottom step. She held out her arms to her daughter, and the child leaped into them.

  “Frances, did anything get in your eyes? Can you see me?”

  They heard more shots and the splintering of wood. “He’s aiming for the lattice,” said Zaddie quietly.

  “Mama, I’m bleeding!”

  “Yes, but can you still see all right? Out of both eyes?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “All right, then,” said Elinor, pushing her away with a kiss. “You hold on to Zaddie now, you hear? Don’t let go of Zaddie. And Zaddie, you stay down low. Whoever it is is still on the levee, but he’s broken every window in the back of the house and he may start to come around to one side or the other. If he does that, I want you and Frances to crawl into the pantry and shut the door, you hear?”

  There was another shot, but this time from inside the house.

  “Mama!”

  “Shhh! That’s your daddy, shooting out the window back at Carl. Trouble is, I don’t think Daddy could hit anybody if he were standing right in front of him, holding up the barrel.”

  Elinor stood and moved quickly to the front door. As she put her hand on the knob Frances called out in an agony, “Mama, where are you going?”

  “Shhh!” said Zaddie, grabbing Frances around the waist to prevent her from going after her mother. “Miss El’nor, you gone take care of things?”

  “Zaddie,” said Elinor, as she eased herself out the door, “I’m going to try.”

  The door closed behind Elinor, and Zaddie and Frances were left hugging each other in the midst of debris, darkness, confusion, and fear.

  . . .

  Carl Strickland sat comfortably on the path atop the levee behind Oscar Caskey’s house. He had two rifles, a double-barreled shotgun, a crate of .22 ammunition, and a box of shotgun shells. He had been startled by a bluish-white light suffusing the upstairs hallways of the Caskey house, but by that same light he had been able to smash the large staircase window in the back. That light had immediately winked out, and it was a disappointment to Carl that no other had come on. The screams he had heard had satisfied him that he had at least frightened the household, even if he had not been so lucky as to kill anyone. Carl had been expecting the sheriff to drive up, but no one had come. He had not anticipated being so much at his leisure in this matter, and had begun wondering, since the inhabitants of the house appeared so passive in their defense, whether he ought not move down and around to the side of the house and fire into the windows there. He knew from his wife’s distinctive scream which room Queenie was in. For good measure he had fired another shot through the second-floor screened porch and grinned when
he heard more glass break in the interior. That was Queenie’s room. He imagined the bullet burying itself in the folds of his wife’s ample flesh.

  He had seen the burst of fire from another window of the second floor, but the bullet came nowhere near him. That must be Oscar Caskey, Carl thought, and returned the fire with far greater accuracy.

  If they’re armed too, Carl considered, then maybe it was time to get out of here. He’d have other opportunities.

  He fired two more shots at the house, emptying the loaded guns. Then shoving the weapons into a croker sack with the ammunition, he stood up, brushed himself off, and scuttled down the river side of the levee, using the heavy sack as a drag and a balance.

  He heard a car in the distance. That is the police, he said to himself, and he heaved the sack into the boat in which he had crossed from the opposite bank. He pushed the boat farther into the water until it floated free, then climbed in himself, taking care to keep the craft steady.

  Just as he was lifting the paddles, he was startled by a subdued splash upstream, but that might have been anything at all. He peered up into the darkness, but saw nothing. He paddled swiftly across the river, but all his energy couldn’t prevent the current from propelling the boat at a sharp downstream angle. The northern shore of the Perdido, which was not banked by a levee, was soft and marshy. Beyond was a vast grove of ancient live oaks, and hidden among these was the automobile he had received from James Caskey in exchange for his younger son.

  There was no moon, and the sky was overcast. The Perdido ran silently, smoothly, quickly, and relentlessly in the direction of the whirlpool at the junction a few hundred yards downstream.

  Carefully, Carl climbed out of the boat. His foot sank deep into the soft mud of the riverbank, closing over the top of his left shoe. He drew it up with an expression of disgust, and advanced to firmer ground, dragging the boat behind him. The live oaks in this grove were some of the largest trees in all of Alabama, and very likely the oldest. In an area of three or four acres several score of the trees, which retained their leathery leaves all winter, stood as black domes, their lower branches so massive that their extremities dragged the ground. Every tree thus formed a closed canopy, and underneath these living umbrellas festooned with Spanish moss, no grass would grow, no animals took shelter, and even a moonlit night was black. Children who had no fear or scruples about riding their bicycles over Indian burial mounds refused to play here. The trees and the grove were majestic, but unpleasantly so, as if they had been conceived as a monument to someone who had been here long before the Indians, the Spanish, the French, the English, and the Americans, all of whom had laid claim, in succession, to the grove.

  Carl intended to hide the boat beneath one of these great canopies, for he could be reasonably confident that it would not be disturbed. He wasn’t yet finished with the Caskeys or his wife.

  He took out the croker sack and laid it carefully on the ground in a sort of clearing between two of the trees close to the bank of the river. Then he dragged the boat to the nearest of the live oaks, backed through the drooping curtain of branches and into the interior of the shrouded space. He could see nothing. He cried out softly when a strand of moss suddenly draped itself across his face. He unceremoniously dropped the boat near the vast trunk of the live oak and then, with groping arms outstretched before him, carefully retraced his steps. The wind sighed through the branches, and again a piece of moss fell across his face, as a net might be thrown over a creeping animal. When he reached up to brush it away, his fingers became entangled, and he tore the moss impatiently from its branch.

  His exploring hands struck against a drooping branch that he had not seen. Once he emerged from the umbrella, the black night would seem light in comparison to this impenetrability.

  He was pushing carefully ahead, hoping not to strike his head or become entangled in the smaller branches, when his step was arrested by a clatter outside the perimeter of the tree. He instantly knew it for the sound of his guns being tossed together. The sound of splitting wood, and another, more prolonged clatter told him that his crate of ammunition had been split open, its contents scattered.

  “Hey!” he called, but his voice was neither as loud nor as belligerent as he had intended. He pressed quickly through the curtain of branches, and again stood beneath the open sky.

  In the clearing where he had left the croker sack stood a woman, dressed in a white nightdress that gleamed from the river water with which it was soaked. Her back was to Carl as she picked up one of the rifles and effortlessly tossed it into the river. Carl ran forward. The woman, without hurrying, picked up the other two guns and flung them into the water as well. She turned then and faced Carl.

  It was Elinor Caskey.

  “Queenie said it was you firing from the levee.”

  He rushed at her, with one hand raised to strike her. With an inconsequential motion of her own arm, she batted him away.

  The force of the casual blow knocked him to the ground.

  He stared up at her incredulously. He could scarcely make out the features of her face in the darkness, but the clinging nightdress continued to gleam.

  “My guns...” Carl began hesitantly.

  “I needed the croker sack,” Elinor said.

  He got quickly to his feet. He circled around her, unsure. Had she really hit him hard enough to knock him to the earth, or had he only lost his balance and fallen? He was behind her. “What for?” he asked.

  In her fleeting profile as she turned, he caught a small smile.

  “Oh,” Elinor returned, “for you, Carl.”

  He punched her in the belly with all his strength. But it wasn’t flesh there, it was something more giving and resilient. Elinor seemed to stand even straighter after the blow; she raised one arm. Something—not a hand—was clamped on Carl’s shoulder.

  With one sudden, sure application of pressure Carl was driven to the earth. Because it was applied to only one shoulder, one side of Carl’s body was instantly compressed. The clavicle gave way first, and then the ribs were jammed together and cracked. His lung was pierced with bone fragments and an artery was severed. The thigh bone was jammed up through the pelvis, the kneecap shattered against the ground. The shin and foot were crushed beneath the force.

  Carl cried out, but the cry was strangled as his lung filled with blood.

  One side of him remained whole but the other was squeezed into a third of its former space.

  With a similar motion, Elinor brought the appendage that was not a hand down on Carl’s other shoulder. She pressed it swiftly toward the earth.

  Carl’s face gaped up at her. His whole body was mangled, nearly all the bones dislocated, ligaments torn, organs displaced. The backbone remained intact, but it served only to curve him into the shape of a ball. He was half as tall as before. Instinctively he attempted to straighten himself, to stand up, but his body of course could not obey. Only his neck stretched upward a bit and his battered chin lifted into the night air.

  Suddenly, Elinor dropped down before him, but the motion was not that of a woman squatting, or falling to her knees. It was the movement of some other sort of creature entirely. Carl heard Elinor’s dress tear in a dozen places, as if it no longer fit the body that it encased. Her face was only a foot from his, and in the darkness he could see that her countenance had become wide and flat and round; the eyes bulged, and were huge; her mouth was monstrous, lipless, and it hissed wetly in a grin that had nothing human about it.

  Her arms were once more lifted on either side of him. He gasped and winced against the blow that he was certain would kill him. But the blow did not come, only darkness, and the overpowering odor of burlap.

  She was drawing the croker sack over his body.

  Carl prayed for death, but death did not come. Neither did unconsciousness. Though his body below the neck seemed a continuing explosion of pain, his head maintained an unmerciful clarity through it all.

  The pain, he considered, could not be
worse, not in a thousand deaths, not in a thousand years of hell.

  But Carl was wrong; the pain did become worse, for he was suddenly jerked up into the air inside the croker sack, and carried along upside down. The sack didn’t drag the earth, or strike against Elinor’s knees, so she must have been carrying him in one hand, and at arm’s length. But what woman—what man—was as strong as that? Carl’s brain filled with blood. His broken limbs dropped down around his head inside the croker sack until he was stifled with them. The fragments of his left arm were smothering him. Carl Strickland had been a big man, and now he was being carried along in a sack that wouldn’t have properly held his daughter.

  The confusion of broken limbs that pressed against his face didn’t smother him quickly enough, for his consciousness lasted long enough for him to realize that he was being carefully carried into the river. Elinor waded slowly into the water. At the top of his head, he perceived the river water permeating the burlap. Then more strongly, pressing the fabric against his ear, he felt the current of the river. Its ever stronger odor invaded the close confines of the sack, and he tasted the mud of the Perdido as water began to fill the bag and pour into his mouth.

  It wasn’t the torn arteries, the punctured lungs, the ruptured organs, or the shattered bones that killed Queenie’s husband. Carl Strickland drowned in Perdido water.

  Chapter 34

  The Caskey Conscience

  On the night that Carl Strickland fired wantonly into Oscar Caskey’s house, the sheriff of Perdido was having a drink with friends across the state line in Florida. By the time that Charley Key returned to Perdido and heard about Carl Strickland’s rampage, the Caskeys were surveying the damage. Key entered the house, gave a low whistle, looked at Oscar and said, “Mr. Strickland did this? You positive?”

  “Yes,” replied Oscar grimly.

  “Is he still out there?”

  “No, he’s gone.”

  “How you know that for sure?”

  Zaddie was on the stairs, sweeping glass and splinters down, step by step. Elinor came out of the kitchen, holding her bandaged daughter in her arms. Frances, pale and distracted, clung tightly to her mother’s neck.