Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  “I know it for sure,” said Oscar, “because Elinor went out the front and sneaked around to the levee.”

  “I saw him take his guns and climb over the levee, and get in a boat,” Elinor added with no particular friendliness toward the sheriff. “But he must have been drunk because the boat turned over in the water.”

  “Miz Caskey, you were foolish to go out there! Look at what he did in here. You might have got yourself shot!” cried Sheriff Key.

  “I had a gun,” Elinor said coldly. “And the fact was, we didn’t see the law crawling all over the house trying to protect us. Oscar was firing at Carl from our window, and I went out to get him from behind.”

  “Did you shoot?”

  “I didn’t have to. The river got him. Sheriff,” Elinor went on, laying ironic stress upon the title, “Oscar and I appreciate your dropping by—and we’re glad you waited till most of the excitement was over, earlier we wouldn’t have had much of a chance to speak—but could you excuse us now, please? I’ve got to finish bandaging my little girl.”

  “We’re gone drag that river,” said Charley Key importantly. “We’re gone take care of Carl Strickland!”

  “Charley,” Oscar reminded him, “that’s exactly what I asked you to do a few weeks ago, but you couldn’t be bothered. You didn’t want to do me any favors. Well, right now, Queenie Strickland, still black and blue, is upstairs crying in the bedroom. My little girl here is all cut up with glass. Our house has every damn window in it broken. And Carl Strickland is spinning round and round in the junction. Why don’t you just go home and get some sleep?”

  Zaddie swept a large pile of splintered wood and shattered glass between the balusters, and it fell to the hallway below with a musical crash and a cloud of dust.

  . . .

  Frances refused to return to the front room that night. Elinor was about to insist, but Zaddie interceded for the child. “Miss El’nor, she still scairt. Let her sleep with me.”

  “You don’t have more than a three-quarter bed, Zaddie!”

  “I don’t care, Mama!” cried Frances desperately, and was reluctantly allowed to sleep in the room behind the kitchen. It was made clear to her, however, that this indulgence was solely on account of Carl Strickland’s attack.

  Toward dawn, when the house was quiet again, and the children were asleep, Elinor and Oscar lay awake in their bed. A breeze off the river—smelling of both the water and the red clay of the levee—blew through the windows that had been shattered by Carl Strickland’s gunfire.

  “Can’t sleep, Oscar?”

  “No, I cain’t.”

  “Because of the excitement?”

  “Yes, partly. I was thinking, Elinor.”

  “Thinking what?”

  “Thinking that what you told old Charley Key was a lie.”

  “Course it was a lie,” returned Elinor quickly. “You think I’m going to waste the truth on that nincompoop?”

  “What happened out there with you and Carl?”

  Elinor didn’t immediately reply. She turned over in the bed and put her arm across Oscar’s chest.

  “What do you think happened, Oscar?”

  Oscar lay still a few moments. The dawn dimly lighted the room now.

  “I don’t know,” said Oscar. “What you told Charley Key was a lie—you didn’t have a gun. When you came back into the house, your nightgown was dripping river water. Your bare feet had Perdido mud on ’em. I knew you had been in the water, because when you walked back into the house, you brought the smell of that river back here with you. How you’re ever gone be able to wear that gown again, I don’t know.”

  Elinor snuggled closer to Oscar’s side in the bed. She wound her arm around him and pressed her foot against his feet.

  “Carl is dead,” she said in a low voice. “I saw him drowned.”

  “I believe you,” said Oscar. He lay staring at the ceiling. His arms were crossed behind his head on the pillow. “I wish,” he went on, “that when I was shooting out the window here, that I had blown Carl’s head off. That’s what I wish. He was firing at this house! He could have hit Frances or you or Queenie or any of us. I would have walloped his head off if I could have gotten close enough. Elinor?”

  “What?”

  “Did you cause Carl Strickland to die?”

  She rubbed her thumb against his neck. “Yes.”

  “I thought so,” said Oscar in a low sad voice. “How’d you do it? How’d you get close enough to him without him shooting you?”

  Elinor drew her leg across Oscar’s legs and pressed her foot beneath his ankles. She was wound tightly around him.

  “What if I tell you?” she said. “Will you be mad?”

  “Lord, no,” he said softly. “I just said that I would have done it if I could have.”

  “It was dark,” said Elinor. Her head was next to his on the pillow, and she spoke softly in his ear. “He couldn’t see me. I swam under the water and overturned his boat as he was going across.”

  “Did he fight you?”

  “No, he didn’t even know I had done it,” said Elinor.

  “Were you trying to kill him?”

  “Not really,” said Elinor. “I just wanted to get those guns of his wet so it would ruin them. But he panicked once he was in the water. I saw him struggling, then I saw him drown.”

  “Did you try to save him then?”

  “No,” said Elinor. “I can’t say that I did. Are you upset? Do you think I should have tried?”

  “No, no,” sighed Oscar. “I think you did just right. I just wish you hadn’t had to do it. Is this gone be on your conscience?”

  “I don’t think so,” said Elinor.

  “Good,” said Oscar, “’cause it shouldn’t be. Carl Strickland brought this on himself. If you hadn’t done it, it would only be a matter of time before he came back and killed one of us—Queenie, probably. She was the one he was really aiming for, I guess. It beats hell out of me how some people can get matched up so badly. Poor old Queenie. She’ll probably be glad to know Carl’s gone. I don’t think we should tell her that you killed him, though.”

  “Oscar, do you think badly of me? You know, some husbands might object to their wives going out in the night and killing people.”

  Oscar gave a short little laugh. “Not me. At least not until you start making a habit of it.”

  “You seem a little upset, though.”

  “I am,” said Oscar. “It should have been me that went out and killed him, not you. I should have it on my conscience.”

  “How would you have done it?” laughed Elinor. “Oscar, you know you couldn’t hit the levee with the rifle if you were standing twenty feet away. And you know you wouldn’t go swimming in the Perdido in the middle of the night. It had to be me.”

  “I suppose. But listen, Elinor, if there’s got to be any more killing in this family, you let me handle it from now on, hear? Now, are you ready to try to get some sleep?”

  “Not yet,” she whispered.

  Elinor had bathed, and her nightgown was fresh, but in that dawn following the death of Carl Strickland, Oscar found that the smell of the river was still caught in his wife’s hair and in her limbs twined around his body.

  . . .

  Early the next morning, Bray and Oscar carried Queenie Strickland in a folding chair up to the top of the levee. Elinor brought her an umbrella against the sun, and then, joined by Zaddie, Frances, and Queenie’s children, the entire household settled in to watch the dragging operation.

  Within half an hour the state police came up with Carl’s three rifles, which were identified by Queenie and Malcolm. Nothing could be found of Carl.

  “Queenie,” said James, who had joined the group on the levee, and now stood sympathetically at Queenie’s side, “I’m so sorry.”

  “What for? What for, James?” cried Queenie. “Do you see what that man did to me? Do you know I may limp for the rest of my life? Do you know that I may be blind in one eye? Carl Strickland
broke every single window in the back of Elinor and Oscar’s house! It was a miracle nobody was killed. Have you seen the cuts on Frances’s face?” Queenie held the umbrella above her head, twirling it in her agitation.

  In the course of the morning, most of the rest of Perdido climbed the levee and walked along it to where Queenie sat watching the highway patrol and Sheriff Key in their boats below. Everyone knew that it was probably a pointless operation to drag the river. The current was swift, and the junction an inexorable maelstrom from which bodies were almost never recovered. Carl Strickland, though, had been a criminal, and it had been thought a good idea to attempt to prove his death.

  Mary-Love made a brief appearance, hand-in-hand with Miriam. “Queenie,” she said, “why’d you bring that man to town? Why didn’t you leave him in Nashville? He was shooting off those guns at night! He could have got his aim wrong and shot my precious little Miriam in her room next door!”

  “Those guns woke me up!” added Miriam in a petulant parenthesis.

  “Mary-Love, I tell you, I didn’t do it on purpose…”

  “I sure hope they find him down there. Then we could be sure he’ll never be coming back here again. I don’t think Miriam and I got one wink of sleep after your husband started firing those guns! Just the echoes were hurting my ears!”

  “I hope they find him too,” said Queenie. She reached into the pocket of her dress and clacked together the two silver coins there. “Mary-Love, I want to see that man laid out on the bank of the river, and when I do, I’m gone slide right down this levee. See, I got these two quarters for Carl Strickland’s eyes…”

  Carl Strickland’s body never was found, and there was no doubt in anyone’s mind that he had drowned. His automobile was found parked in the live oak grove, his guns lay on the bed of the river, fragments of his boat washed up against the side of the levee down below the junction. At school Malcolm told prideful stories of his father’s attempt to murder them all: “He was aiming right at my head, but I ducked! I wasn’t gone let him shoot me!” Lucille pretended grief in order to be excused from participating in unwanted class activities.

  The third day’s dragging was desultory; only one policeman with a metal hook was being slowly propelled about by Bray in his boat. Queenie, watching from the levee, said to Ivey Sapp, who had brought up a pitcher of iced tea: “What do you think I ought to do about these quarters, Ivey? You think I should hold on to ’em?”

  “Mr. Carl ain’t gone be coming back, Miss Queenie.”

  “You sure?”

  “They not never gone find him.”

  “I wish I could be sure!”

  “Miss Queenie, you stand up here, and you throw those quarters in the river. That’ll keep down his bones.”

  With Ivey’s assistance, Queenie stood from her chair and flung the coins into the muddy red water.

  Chapter 35

  The Test

  Carl Strickland’s two attempts to murder his wife had overshadowed, in Perdido’s view, Wall Street’s accumulating disasters. The stock market had crashed, but who in Perdido besides the mill owners had had much anyway? So no one paid much attention to the stock market business, but everyone in town breathlessly waited to see what would become of Queenie Strickland. She returned to her job at the mill. She flung open the doors of her house and never locked them at all now. She took her Malcolm and Lucille to the Ritz Theater every time there was a change in the bill and seemed to have as much fun as if she were a child herself, released from school a week early in May.

  Queenie’s recovery was rapid. The day after she certified her husband’s death by flinging the two coins into the water, she returned to her own home. This evacuation was fortunate, for when Frances waked in Zaddie’s bed the day after Carl had shot at the house, she had developed a sort of palsy of the hands and feet—uncommon in a seven-year-old—that Dr. Benquith diagnosed as incipient arthritis. Frances was out of school for a month. During that time her mother nursed her constantly without complaint. Queenie was certain that it had been brought on by Carl’s attack on the house. Most of Perdido agreed with this, ignoring Dr. Benquith’s assertion that arthritis was not brought on merely by an unpleasant experience.

  More than a year passed, and Queenie’s happiness became as conspicuous to the residents of Perdido as her troubles had been before. Now, however, that crisis of paper and faith in New York was beginning to have repercussions in Perdido. No one, not even the foresighted Caskeys, had anticipated how great and unsettling those effects were to prove.

  The bank closed during Christmas week of 1930. Every white man and woman in town lost money.

  Despite the fact that demand for wood and wood products was down, the mills continued to operate. There were no layoffs, though some days there wasn’t enough work to be parceled out to the yard hands at the mills, and often the lumber business seemed no more than a charitable exercise on the parts of the Turks and the Caskeys.

  Perdido seemed to suffer less than many parts of the country. Or perhaps it just seemed that way; Perdido was, after all, accustomed to hardship. The prosperity of the twenties had made only mincing steps toward rural Alabama, and when she whirled about and fled with a flash of skirts from the rest of the country, Perdido had enjoyed so little of her company that it scarcely missed her. The privations of the Civil War seemed recent, and there were old black men and women in Baptist Bottom who had been born slaves. Mary-Love Caskey and Manda Turk both had been born during the humiliating privations of Reconstruction. But, certainly there was less to go around now. Grady Henderson’s “fancy goods store” dwindled to a simple grocery, and Leo Benquith bartered chickens, pork loins, and quarts of shelled peas for his services as a physician. At the school there was a greater incidence of ringworm and rickets. Ample and decent food soared beyond the means of poorer families. Several downtown shops closed, and the Osceola Hotel would have shut its doors had not Henry and Oscar lent the Moyes enough money to keep it going. The Osceola was needed by the mills for the housing of the few buyers who came in from the hard-hit North. Collections in the churches were sparser than in previous years, though attendance was up. Perhaps for the same reason, the Ritz Theater—including the colored folks’ balcony—was filled nearly every night.

  Yet the Caskeys remained solvent. Oscar’s diversification of the operations of the mill insured that some portion of the enterprise remained profitable. Mary-Love’s money had fortuitously been invested in things that were not so much affected by the Depression. There were, however, no more jaunts to Mobile and Birmingham for the purchase of new tablecloths and dresses. Mary-Love wore her old outfits, or commissioned straitened Miz Daughtry to make her new ones. Oscar hung about the mill all day with very little to do.

  James Caskey suffered more than Mary-Love. Most of his stocks had lost much or all of their value, and the company yielded almost no return at all. Despite the unaccustomed financial ills, he was happy again. At sixty, he actually enjoyed the slower pace of the mill, which rolled along with very little help from him. He and Queenie were fast friends now. They lunched together every day at his house and spent the afternoon talking in the office. He quietly spent his evenings at home, listening to the radio. Danjo often sat on the sofa next to him, looking through books and asking his uncle’s help with difficult words. James’s wants were few, and it was his delight to take care of those who needed taking care of. When Roxie went for groceries, he made certain she bought enough to feed not only himself and Danjo, but her husband and her four children as well. Queenie received a raise almost every month and was always paid in cash out of James’s pocket. Every week at Vanderbilt, Grace’s female chums gasped in astonishment as another sheaf of five-dollar bills arrived in a plain envelope. James did almost nothing for himself, and scarcely could be persuaded to buy himself a new suit at Easter. He made no more purchases of porcelain figures or sterling silver cake-servers, saying—reasonably enough—that his house was full of such stuff anyway.

  Only Osca
r and Elinor encountered real difficulties. Oscar was still in debt on the land he had purchased from Tom DeBordenave, and because there was so little cutting, his income from the land was severely reduced. His meager return went to the bank in Pensacola. Oscar and Elinor still lived on Oscar’s salary alone.

  In the spring of 1931, the bank called in Oscar’s loan. That afternoon, without saying a word to anyone, Oscar drove to Pensacola and obtained an interview with the president of the bank. Oscar was told that the bank itself was in difficulties. The loan had been called in as a measure against an involuntary closing. However, the Caskeys had done a great deal of business with the institution over the years, so it was therefore agreed—after a hurried meeting of the trustees—that only half of Oscar’s outstanding debt need be brought in.

  That evening Oscar visited his mother. Closeted in her room with the door closed, he asked her to lend him one hundred and eleven thousand dollars to preserve his investment, his financial well-being, the honor of the Caskey name, and the future of the mill. She wouldn’t do it.

  “Oscar, I told you not to buy that land.”

  “You didn’t, Mama,” replied Oscar calmly. “You didn’t even find out about it until later.”

  “If you had had the courtesy to speak to me about it beforehand, I would have told you not to buy it. I’m glad that the bank is doing this. You have no business being saddled with all that land.”

  “Mama, it’s got trees on it. Every single acre has been planted with yellow pine.”

  “Oscar,” she said, “James and I own two hundred thousand acres of land in Escambia County, Monroe County, and this county. Every one of those two hundred thousand acres is planted with yellow pine, and longleaf pine, and slash pine. And when was the last time we had an order for ten board feet of lumber? Was it day before yesterday, or was it three weeks ago? Lord, Oscar, we cain’t even begin to harvest what we’ve got now!”