The summers of Grace’s college years were particularly pleasant for James Caskey, for Grace returned at the beginning of June, and didn’t leave again until the beginning of September. He always told her to go off and have a good time and not think about him, but Grace would only reply, “Daddy, I miss you so much up there, sometimes I think I ought to pack you in my trunk and keep you with me. You don’t think I’m gone do anything in my summers but sit on your front porch and rock, do you?”
“Won’t you be lonely?”
But Grace was hardly lonely during these summers, for she sent out invitations to all her friends to come and visit her in the pokiest town on earth, Perdido, Alabama. Evidently Grace herself was sufficient draw, because the girls came and stayed for days or weeks. James’s house was filled with young women and young women’s clothing and young women’s hearty voices and heartier laughter. When there wasn’t any more room at James’s, the girls stayed at Elinor’s, or even at Queenie’s. They never stayed at Mary-Love’s, who disapproved of any member of the Caskey family maintaining a friendship. The girls rowed on the Perdido, took cooking lessons from Roxie, went in a bevy to the Ritz Theater, played boisterous tag among the water oaks, and visited Lake Pinchona relentlessly to swim, feed the alligator, and annoy the monkey. They made impromptu excursions to Mobile or down to the Pensacola beaches or up to Brewton to pick scuppernongs. They would travel over to Fort Mims to play hide-and-seek among the ruins of Alabama’s first capital, have picnics in the green fields along the Alabama river, or make daring raft excursions down the turbulent Styx. Danjo was often picked up squealing and flung into the back of Grace’s Pontiac with a cry of, “Danjo, we’re kidnapping you and you’re never gone see Mr. Caskey again.”
“Grace’s girls,” as they came quickly to be known around town, were a formidable bunch, certainly too much for the few college men that Perdido produced to handle. Young Perdido manhood found companionship with the girls occasionally on the dance floor at the lake, but was otherwise contemptuously ignored. The girls made much of James Caskey and Danjo Strickland, so that the boy and his uncle—accustomed to the winter quietness of Perdido and only each other for company—were always quite bewildered by the energy, the lightheartedness, and the noise of it all.
In the spring of 1933, Grace Caskey graduated from Vanderbilt with a degree in history, and five letters in women’s athletics. Her father had never asked her what she intended to do after graduation, but once he had said, “Grace, if you ever decide on anything, let me know, will you?” With a particularly good friend, Grace applied for a position at a girls’ school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and was overjoyed that they were both offered jobs. Her friend was to teach English literature, and Grace was in charge of the gymnasium. Grace’s girls came down to Perdido that summer as in the past, but the time was tinged with melancholy. Already some of the girls were engaged, and it was obvious to them all that these happy months of laughter and company could never be repeated. This summer, Grace’s girls paid particular attention to Frances, who seemed frailer than ever, after her bout with arthritis two years before. The activity and the attention seemed to do much to lift the eleven-year-old’s spirits. Miriam tried to be contemptuous of the intimacy that Frances enjoyed with the co-eds; mostly, however, she was angry that she was so rarely asked to take part in their frequent excursions.
Melancholy seasons end quicker than happy ones, and Grace’s girls broke up, never again to be joined together. Grace remained alone with her family another week before James would drive her up to Spartanburg and see her installed there.
On the second of September, 1933, the weather in Perdido was still brutally hot, but James Caskey was already pining beneath the weight of autumn when his daughter would leave him for good.
Grace said, “Daddy, why don’t just you and I go out in the boat this afternoon? Let me take you for a ride up the Perdido.”
“Who’ll take care of Danjo?”
“Roxie’s here.”
“I mean, who’ll take care of Danjo when you and I and that little green boat all get washed down to the junction?”
Grace laughed merrily. “Daddy, don’t you realize that I’m strong enough to avoid the junction? Just like Elinor can. Besides, we won’t even go that way, we’ll go upstream.”
“Darling, I tell you what—why don’t you take Frances? She’s gone miss you so much, and this way you can get to talk to her alone for a while.”
Grace thought this a fine idea. Without a moment’s hesitation she went over and stood underneath the screened porch and called up to Elinor.
“Mama’s not here,” said Frances, leaning on the rail and looking down.
“Where’d she go?”
“She went swimming, it was so hot.”
“In the Perdido?” asked Grace.
“Uh-hunh.”
“I didn’t really want your mama anyway, Frances. I wanted to ask you if you wanted to take a little ride in the boat. You think your mother would mind if I took you out on the water?”
“Not one bit! She’s always wanting me to go out on the river!”
“Then come on down, and we’ll see if we cain’t sneak up on her and surprise her in the water.”
Grace’s boat was tied to a tree where the levee ended in a steep slope a hundred yards or so upstream. Grace shoved the boat halfway into the water and let Frances climb in so that she wouldn’t have to wet her feet. Then she pushed the boat farther out and jumped in herself. The current immediately began dragging the boat downstream, and Frances nervously called out, “Whoooa!”
Grace paddled hard against the current, and after only a few moments they were headed upstream. The Perdido was fed by many hundreds of tiny branches of water, most of which were so insubstantial and ephemeral they hadn’t even the strength to dig channels for themselves across the floor of the forest. Along the course of the uninhabited upper river, these freshets slipped rapidly over beds of decaying pine needles and oak leaves and poured into the Perdido with low, furtive gurglings. As Grace and Frances ascended the river, this was the only sound to be heard. They might have been the water voices of small gilled creatures, stationed sentrylike along the banks of the ever-narrowing river, announcing the upstream progress of the young woman and the young girl in their boat.
“I don’t see Mama,” said Frances. “Maybe she went the other direction.”
As they proceeded up the river, far past any point that was familiar to either Grace or Frances, the Perdido grew shallow and quiet. The freshets, like sentinels whose commander has been apprised of the approach of strangers, had now fallen silent. Once Grace raised her paddle high and brought it down swiftly on a water moccasin gliding past them. It was not because they were in danger, but she followed the general philosophy that poisonous things, like gentlemen who made proposals of marriage, ought to be beaten over the head.
“I’ve never been this far up,” Frances remarked with wonder at the wildness of the country through which they were traveling. They seemed far from Perdido.
“Look,” said Grace pointing upward, “those are wild orchids on the branches of those oaks. It’s so lonely up here...”
“Have you ever been all the way up to the source?”
“No, I haven’t. I’ve never even heard of anybody going all that way—I guess somebody must have, but nobody’s ever told me. Frances, shall we try to find it?”
“What if it’s twenty miles or something?”
“It’s not. ’Cause if it were, Highway 31 would cross it and I know it doesn’t, so the source cain’t be more than five or six miles away.”
“But if this old river starts winding around...”
“I don’t mind paddling. Only thing is, at some point we may have to get out and walk.”
“I don’t mind that,” said Frances. So Grace continued to ply her paddle. The river narrowed until it was no more than a creek, then only a branch. It never, however, lost its muddy red color. Even with Grace’s paddle of
ten gouging pebbles and mud from the bed, they were never able to see to the bottom. The trees that overhung the little stream, shading it from the sun, were mostly hardwoods, not pine at all. The forest was thick here, its floor spongy with fallen trees and rotting leaves.
“Frances, you know what? I don’t think this land has ever been cut.”
“Really? Who does it belong to?”
“I’ve been trying to figure, and you know what I think?”
“What?”
“I think this used to be Tom DeBordenave’s property, and it’s some of the land that he sold to your daddy. That’s about what I make out.”
As Grace made this observation, she engineered a sharp turn around a massive fallen oak that had at one point rerouted the stream. Ahead of them was a small muddy pool of reddish water, its surface quivering and suffused with ripples. All around it was a stand of tall, gray, massive water oaks—far taller than those Elinor had years ago planted in the sandy Caskey yards. The slender trunks gravely swayed in the slight breeze and masses of leathery leaves quaked in their hundred-foot crowns. The ground was a thicket of rotting fallen limbs with no vegetation except the scaly green fungus that seemed the parasite peculiar to the species.
“This is it,” murmured Grace. “This is where the Perdido starts.”
There was something solemn in the place. The tall, sentinel-like trees seemed almost ominous; and the little red pool that was the source of the Perdido looked threatening with its nervous, rippling activity. Even the birds seemed to have abandoned the place. The sun fell behind the water oaks as Grace placed her paddle in the crotch of two branches of the fallen tree, and held the boat stationary. It seemed to Frances that she feared to advance into the pool that was the river’s source.
“Grace,” said Frances after a few moments, “don’t you think we ought to turn back? Mama wouldn’t want us to be on the river after dark.”
“It won’t take us any time at all to get home. I won’t have to paddle at all, except to steer us clear of sandbars. You know,” she said in a lower voice, “it’s a little scary up here. I used to think Perdido was out of the way, but Perdido is nothing compared to this place...”
Grace and Frances continued to stare in silence. The spot seemed divorced from the countryside they knew well. It seemed absurd to speak of Oscar’s owning such a place, or to think that this glade and pool and stand of water oak might even appear on a map. The source of the Perdido seemed outside all that; seemed to be part of something that rose above lumber leases and land sales and geological surveys. It seemed impossible that a state road or a county bridge or some tenant farmer’s shack or some Cherokee’s liquor still might be anywhere close by, yet both Grace and Frances knew that all of these were situated no more than a mile or two away. All civilization seemed separated from this strange spot by space and time. Suddenly, Grace gave a little shudder. The atmosphere was abruptly altered. With the paddle, she pushed away from the tree and set the boat back into the current of the river. As she did so, the commotion on the surface of the water of the pool seemed to grow as if a greater amount of water, or of a very different kind had been released from below.
Grace glanced at Frances. She saw that terror had spread over her cousin’s face. Frances’s body was trembling feverishly, and she convulsively grasped the sides of the boat. “Hurry,” she whispered. “Please Grace, hurry.”
Grace paddled energetically and in another moment they were around the sharp bend around the fallen tree. With that, Frances felt a bit calmer, and she could not resist a glance back at the muddy red pool that was the source of the Perdido. In a moment, it was beyond her sight, obscured by another bend of the river. But in that moment, slowly breaking the surface of the water, Frances Caskey saw a face, wide and pale green, with bulging eyes and no nose at all. Something about it—despite the horror of it—was familiar to her.
“Mama,” she whispered, but Grace did not hear.
Chapter 37
Upstairs
Grace was silent on the journey back down the Perdido. As they were carried along by the current of the ever-widening river, Frances sat rigidly in the front of the boat, facing away from her cousin.
“Frances, are you all right?” Grace asked anxiously more than once.
Frances nodded weakly, but did not turn around.
After Grace had tied the boat to the tree near the end of the levee she discovered that Frances was unable to walk. Grace had to carry her all the way back to the house.
Elinor still had not returned, but Zaddie took one look at the child in Grace’s arms, and said, with ominous significance, “That’s the arthritis again.”
Frances was taken upstairs and put into bed. Grace sat at her side until Elinor returned, a half hour later.
Grace was nearly in tears. “Elinor, it’s my fault!”
“Don’t be silly,” said Elinor sternly. “Dr. Benquith said it could come back at any time.”
The child lay in a feverish doze. When she woke late that night, the palsy in her legs had got no better.
In her last days in Perdido, Grace Caskey was convinced that the excursion to the source of the Perdido was solely responsible for the recurrence of Frances’s crippling ailment. Elinor, Oscar, James, and Frances herself did what they could to assure Grace that it was not so.
Grace left for Spartanburg, and when she returned at Christmas, Frances still had not got up from her bed. Dr. Benquith had wanted to send the child to Sacred Heart in Pensacola, or even to one of the big hospitals in Cincinnati, but Elinor would not hear of this. “I’m going to continue to nurse my child until she’s better.”
Nothing seemed to ease Frances’s pain but warm baths. For two hours every morning, two hours every afternoon, and for an hour in the evening after supper, Elinor sat at the side of the bathtub, sponging water over Frances’s helpless limbs. The child seemed always weary. Sometimes her eyelids twitched with some pain that had registered in her brain, but she never complained. Elinor gave up playing bridge; she no longer went to church. She didn’t like to leave her daughter. There was never the air of the martyr about her, never the sense that she was sacrificing anything for Frances. On her good days, the girl was carried out onto the screened porch and laid in a little cot-bed.
But Frances’s good days were infrequent. At times she appeared to have no mind whatsoever. She lay uncomplaining in her bed, twitching violently when overtaken by the palsy, perfectly still at all other times. Looking at her clenched hands, Oscar was certain that Frances was tense and bitter. Elinor said that contraction of her fingers into uncontrolled claws was only the arthritis, as were her in-turning, twisted feet. Occasionally the girl made an effort to reply when she was spoken to directly, but more often she did not. Nothing held her interest. Nothing could bring emotion into her face, not a Christmas stocking nailed to the hearth in her room, not a cake with lighted candles on her birthday, not Malcolm’s Fourth of July firecrackers. When it was time for her bath, Elinor lifted her daughter from the bed. Oscar hated to see this more than anything else about the sickness. He saw that Frances wanted desperately to clasp her arms about her mother’s neck, but all those muscles seemed atrophied or recalcitrant, and the thin pathetic limbs hung limply down Elinor’s back.
Frances missed the sixth and seventh grades. Elinor borrowed books from the school and kept up with her daughter’s lessons, but how much of her mother’s reading Frances comprehended, no one could be certain. Oscar and Elinor’s household was completely altered during Frances’s enfeeblement. Elinor withdrew from Perdido society. She became a voluntary drudge to her daughter’s meager comfort. Oscar ventured to object: “Let Zaddie do some of the work, Elinor. You act like it was your fault that Frances got sick again. It wasn’t anybody’s fault.”
Elinor paid no attention to her husband. She rose at five and on winter mornings built a coal fire for Frances. She kept it going all day. When she wasn’t bathing Frances, she was reading to her, or feeding her, or simply sit
ting at the side of the bed rubbing alcohol onto Frances’s wasting limbs. Before each bath, Elinor took two pails and walked through the pine forest to the west of the house and around the end of the levee. She filled the pails with water from the river and brought them back to the house. They were warmed in a great pot on the stove and carried upstairs. One of these pails was added directly to Frances’s bath; the other was sponged over Frances’s twitching limbs. Oscar and Dr. Benquith couldn’t understand this worthless treatment, but there was no talking Elinor out of it. When Mary-Love heard of it, she declared that Frances must be red as an Indian by now with all that Perdido water poured over her.
This for Frances was a blurry time of confusion and weakness. Her brain seemed to have taken on the same palsy as her limbs. She slept and woke and ate and heard her mother read all in a state of only partial awareness. She sat in the bathtub with equal lassitude and low consciousness. She seemed always feverish, always dreaming. She was never certain whether she had fully awakened after that trip up to the source of the river with Grace. The only time total consciousness approached was when Elinor lifted her out of the bath. She felt the muddy Perdido water wash off her and drip back into the bathtub. This was the only thing in Frances’s life that was sharp, except for the pain that racked her limbs. Hours faded, days drifted by, season slipped into season, and she did not know whether Thanksgiving had just passed, or whether it was already summer. Everything she felt was dreamlike and vague, except for the pain in her legs and arms—and the water of the Perdido slipping from her body.