Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  No one ever brought this up to Sister Haskew directly. No one had the right. It was Sister’s prerogative to throw her marriage away for Miriam’s sake, as surely as it had been her right to marry against her mother’s wishes.

  Sister actually remained in Perdido, however, not for Miriam’s sake but for her own. Sister hid behind the sacrificial theory of her conduct, rather than to admit—even to the members of her own family—that she had made a mistake in her choice of husbands.

  In thirteen years of marriage, Early Haskew had coarsened. During their courtship, Early had been a resident in Mary-Love’s house, and in those prosperous surroundings, he had been on his best behavior. After he and Sister were married, left Perdido, and began living on Early’s meager and uncertain earnings, his country ways reasserted themselves. He chewed tobacco, a habit that Sister despised as much as did Miriam, though she would never have admitted it. And she never had grown accustomed to his eating peas off a knife. His habitual clumsiness deteriorated into slovenliness. His body grew fat and shapeless. He would take a biscuit, punch a hole in it with his forefinger, fill the hole with molasses, and then swallow the whole thing in one gulp. Pillowcases smelled of the rancid oil he used on his hair.

  Early’s friends were even coarser than he, so coarse that Sister wouldn’t even allow them inside the house, but made them, on visits, remain on the front porch. They lived in a run-down section of Chattanooga, and Sister couldn’t afford more than a woman who boiled linen. She had to do the ironing herself. One day she came home from the grocery and discovered Early and two of his cronies lifting a Coca-Cola vending machine onto their front porch.

  Early bred pit bull terriers for fighting, and seemed to care about nothing but those damned dogs—Sister never thought of them except in those words. He insisted on her rising twice each night to feed new litters out of a baby bottle. When the dogs weren’t feeding they were yelping, and Sister got no sleep between-times. Early’s coarseness finally wore her down. Now in Perdido, she was getting worn down by having constantly to defend her husband against that charge.

  When Sister came into her inheritance, she at first had a vision of herself returning to Tennessee and buying a decent house, purchasing a new wardrobe for Early, encouraging him to drop his ne’er-do-well friends and his reprehensible pastimes, and raising him to a level of gentility commensurate with her own. This she thought was possible, yet it was a task she did not look forward to with relish. Early seemed too set in his ways, too far along the path in which he had been born. The real Early Haskew, Sister thought, was the Early Haskew who went about the house without a shirt and trained puppies to viciousness with slaps and red meat, the one who chewed tobacco and snored loud enough to wake all creation. The man she had met and married in 1922 had been a man caught then in a brief and deceptive stage of development, like one of his own handsome pups that would soon grow into a snarling vicious brute.

  Mary-Love, Sister remembered, had known the change would come, and she had warned her. Sister herself might have foretold it, for there were many similar men around Perdido. Sister’s marriage had been as much an act of defiance toward her mother as it had been an attraction toward Early. Early’s attraction faded quickly for Sister, while her need to defy her mother continued strong and unabated till the day of Mary-Love’s death—when it suddenly evaporated. With it went any good reason Sister had to return to the white frame house in the run-down section of Chattanooga, the pit bull pups, or Early Haskew.

  She seized upon Miriam’s desire to remain in Mary-Love’s house as an excuse not to return to Tennessee. In using this as a disguise for her real motive, she was being craftier than her mother had ever been. Everyone thought that Sister’s remaining in Perdido was a great sacrifice; no one for one moment suspected that she dreaded the day when Miriam would go off to college or marry. Then Sister would have to announce her total disgust with Early Haskew.

  . . .

  Though she was only a few months liberated from her bed and wheelchair, the three years of crippling illness Frances had suffered were a misty time—garbled, drowsy, and leaden. She had grown in those missing years—not much, it was true—but enough to now make her unfamiliar with her body. Prior to that terrible time she had been a child, with a child’s fears. Now she was nearly an adult; the childish fears were put behind her.

  On the night of her return from the journey to Chicago, when Mary-Love lay in the casket in the front parlor, Frances slept in her own room. Elinor and Oscar had considered that their daughter might be terrified of sleeping in a house in which her grandmother’s body lay, but Frances told them that there was no need for her to bother James or Queenie with her presence that night. She said this not because she no longer was afraid, but so that she might test the extent to which those fears remained with her. It had been no surprise to Frances that her grandmother had died in the front room.

  After the funeral, as Zaddie helped her unpack her traveling clothes and all the new little treasures that James and Queenie had purchased for her, Frances could perceive no alteration in the atmosphere of the house because of the death in the front room. She even thought to herself, Grandmama died in the next room, but she didn’t shake. She smelled the air and detected no odor of death or of her own fear. She stood in the hallway and looked down at the door of the front room. Still the fear didn’t come. She approached the door and touched the handle gingerly—no electricity, no fear.

  She turned the knob and pushed the door open. It swung wide and Frances stood on the threshold of the room, feeling nothing.

  She looked into the room. She smelled nothing but the dried lavender that had been placed in a bowl on a table beside the bed.

  Daringly, she stepped far enough into the room to be able to push the door shut behind her.

  She looked at the closet door, and she said to herself, Mama says Grandmama died of a fever. Sister says Grandmama would have lived if only Daddy had put her in the hospital. But I know that Grandmama was killed by whatever it is that lives in that closet.

  The closet door didn’t open. Frances didn’t die. “I am fifteen years old,” she said aloud, “and I’m not afraid of closets that are filled with feathers and leather and fur.”

  Months passed, and Frances turned sixteen. She had never been close to her grandmother and had not seen her at all during her illness. She did not often think of her dead, and sometimes she actually forgot, when she looked out her bedroom window at Mary-Love’s house, that Mary-Love had died the previous summer. Frances checked—as she had as a child—to see if her grandmother were sitting in her rocker by her bedroom window.

  An Italian stone cutter in Mobile carved Mary-Love’s monument in Georgia marble. It was raised seven months after her death. All the Caskeys attended the brief, informal ceremony. Miriam, Queenie, and Frances laid flowers. Frances once again thought, Grandmama died in the front room.

  That night she fell asleep immediately and did not dream. And a short time later she was just as immediately awakened; not by any sound, but by a sense that something was horribly wrong.

  Her room was suffused with a weak, bluish-white light. It shone through the window, as definite as though a streetlamp had been raised in the vicinity of her dead grandmother’s house. She had no idea what the source of that strange illumination might be, but she stared with terror at the white sheer curtains over the window. She dared not rise to look out. She turned to the other window, that opened onto the screened sleeping porch. The porch, too, was illuminated by the glow, though it wasn’t as strong as in her own room.

  Then quite suddenly and with alarm, she remembered the light which had filled the front closet, and afterwards the entire front room, on the night that Carl Strickland had fired on them from the levee. Frances had been very young then, and all incidents that occurred prior to her long bout with illness were vague and dreamlike. But this light she recognized and remembered. It had been no dream then; it was no dream now.

  It wasn’t that un
natural light that raised fear in Frances’s soul. Without her willing it, her head turned to look at the door that opened onto the narrow linen corridor that separated her room from the front room. She knew something had found its way into that narrow closed hallway. It was there, and she knew it wasn’t a person. It wasn’t her mother. It wasn’t her father. It wasn’t Zaddie. Whatever lived and hid in the front room closet had gotten out of the closet, roamed over the front room, opened the door of the linen corridor, and had slunk down it. Now it waited on the other side of the door.

  It wasn’t her grandmother’s ghost, but Frances knew that it was somehow connected with the raising of the marble stone over her grandmother’s grave.

  She lay terrified in her bed. The crippling arthritis seemed to have returned to her hands and feet. She tried to imagine what the thing on the other side of the door was like, but couldn’t. She knew it was the color of the light outside, and that if she looked to the door again, she would see the light pouring through the crack beneath it. That was where the outside light was coming from. The front room was so bright that the light shone out of the windows, and that’s what she was seeing through the curtains. The passage to the front room was filled with even brighter light, because whatever it was, was there, just behind her door. It had no outline that Frances’s unwilling imagination could pin down because that outline shifted. She thought of a little boy wearing overalls with bulging pockets. She thought of a hunchbacked man crouching with his mouth open wide. She thought of a handsome, smiling woman with a rope of black pearls about her neck, holding a pound cake on a platter. Images faded into others and between them were shapeless things or shapes she couldn’t recognize: fishy things, froggy things, snaky things, things with bulging eyes and webbed hands and shining rubbery skin. The images changed as quickly as shadows that passed across the windows of a train traveling through a sunlit forest. Frances lay with her eyes tightly closed for she knew not how long.

  Hoping that her fear had its basis only in her mind, she tried to think of something else. If she wasn’t close to sleep, she nevertheless seemed close to dreaming. In that half-dream she began to remember the years of her illness. It hadn’t been all that long before, but the memories of that buried period of time were like those of earliest childhood, or the fugitive memories of a former existence. As Frances lay in her bed with her eyes tightly shut, trying to will out of existence the thing in the linen closet, she suddenly remembered two things about her illness, one of them impossible, the other improbable.

  The first—the impossible—memory was of the thrice-daily baths she had received. At other, more conscious times, she had been able to recall vividly the moment that she was lifted out of the bathtub by her mother. But now—and the sensate memory was sharp despite the impossibility of the thing—her conviction was that during those baths she had always been fully immersed, so that she had spent five or six hours a day with her entire body—including her head—beneath the water’s surface.

  The second memory—impossible too—was of a child, a little boy, who kept her company at night while her mother was asleep. He was younger than Malcolm, but older than Danjo. He was pale and unhappy, and used to pull on Frances’s arm, wanting her to play games with him. She never remembered how he came to be in the room with her, but she knew that when he left, he always disappeared into the short passage that led to the front room.

  That’s who’s in the passage now.

  She opened her eyes suddenly, and stared at the door. Then audible words were on her lips, and she spoke them automatically, without realizing that she spoke: “Come on in, John Robert.”

  She didn’t know any John Robert.

  There was a sudden change behind the door, a kind of quiver or shudder.

  The thing in the corridor had up to now been still. Frances knew the fluidity of its images and aspects had all been in her mind. The thing itself had sat immobile on the other side of the door.

  Now its arm reached out toward the knob.

  Frances leaped out of bed, flew past the blowing curtains shining bluish-white, and threw herself against the door to the linen corridor.

  “No!” she cried, “I don’t want you!”

  Her feet glowed in the light that poured from beneath the door. She turned the key in the lock and immediately stumbled back, her eyes closed.

  When she opened her eyes, she could no longer see the light. The room was dark. She went to the window and looked out. All was still and black. The curtain sheers blew against her face.

  She returned to her bed. Nothing was in the corridor. She fell asleep without even wondering if she could do so.

  . . .

  When she woke in the morning, she knew that all she had felt and seen and known had not been a dream brought on by the melancholy excitement of the day. Frances Caskey knew for certain that whatever it was that previously had been confined to the misshapen closet had somehow been allowed to range freely. What was worse was Frances’s conviction that some time she would again say, “Come on in, John Robert,” and not reach the door in time to lock it.

  IV: The War

  Chapter 43

  At the Beach

  Mary-Love had been dead for two years. In the months following the funeral, the Caskeys were watchful for shifts and transformations that were bound to happen in the makeup of the family. Alterations were slow and subtle. Elinor and Oscar and Frances were little changed, although Elinor’s demeanor seemed easier now that her chief rival and enemy had finally been defeated in death. Frances was sixteen, a sophomore in high school, and the three years that she had spent in a bed of arthritic pain were distant and dim and only occasionally disquieting.

  Next door, Sister Haskew had not gone back to her husband, who dutifully turned up each Christmas, and perhaps once or twice in between. With every visit he and his wife seemed more distant. This break between them had never been acknowledged. Sister would say, “Early travels so doggone much. How am I supposed to keep up with him? I’d much rather stay here in Perdido with Miriam, who needs me.” The last part of this statement wasn’t quite true, for Miriam—at eighteen—considered that she needed no one. She saw herself as her grandmother’s true heir. More important than her grandmother’s money and bonds and stock, which had been divided equally between Sister and Oscar, Miriam had inherited Mary-Love’s house and—filial considerations notwithstanding—she had been endowed with Mary-Love’s enmity toward Elinor Caskey. Miriam would not speak to her mother when they passed on the street, or wave when they saw each other out of the windows of their houses. Miriam would nod grudgingly to her father Oscar, and never lacked a cruel word for her sister Frances, whom she encountered frequently at school.

  Sister and her strong-willed niece Miriam formed an unhappy household, always on edge, cringing beneath the lowering cloud of their individual secrets. Sister would not admit, even to Miriam, that she no longer loved her husband—that indeed she dreaded even his infrequent brief visits. Miriam would not declare open hostility toward her mother for fear that she would somehow be crushed by Elinor’s superior knowledge of strategy and experience in combat.

  In the house next door in the other direction, James Caskey had turned into an old man. Yet he was supremely happy in raising his nephew Danjo, now fourteen. Danjo loved James and never did anything that angered or disappointed his uncle. On the other hand, Danjo’s older brother and sister—Malcolm and Lucille—were problems to Danjo’s mother, Queenie Strickland. Malcolm was twenty and didn’t seem able to do much of anything. He had once got a job in Cantonement, but had lost it after only a week. Another job down in Pensacola lasted even less time. When he returned to his mother in Perdido, Malcolm begged Queenie to find him a place at the lumber mill. Now Malcolm was in charge of a chipper, but due to his inattention was in constant danger of losing one arm or both in the claws of that great, explosive machine. At eighteen, Lucille still simpered and whined, but had grown pretty in a pasty sort of way. She exhibited her modest charms
behind the candy counter in the Ben Franklin store and came home every day smelling of rancid popcorn oil. Both Lucille and Malcolm were concerned about the fact that they bore such menial positions. They were, after all, part of the all-powerful Caskey clan.

  By owning the only industry in town, the Caskeys might have been considered to own the town itself. They didn’t live as if this were the case, however. In delicate consideration of the straitened circumstances of those around them in Perdido, the Caskeys did not display the wealth they assuredly had accumulated. The worst part of the Depression was over, and they had come through it. To survive was to have done well, particularly in this distressed part of the country. The Turk and DeBordenave lumber mills, in operation for decades, had been shut down, and their machinery, land, and employees had been absorbed by the expanding Caskeys. After Mary-Love’s death James had turned over the entire operation of the mill to his nephew Oscar. James no longer went to his office, but simply sat out on his porch all day long with his sister-in-law Queenie.

  Oscar had played a close game with the mills in the past few years, taking careful advantage of the small opportunities that occasionally came his way. Every penny of the money he made was put back into the mills for expansion, modernization, or acquisition of forested land. By 1938, the Caskeys were rich in their holdings. Yet the mill, the window-and-sash plant, and the factory for the production of fence posts, utility poles, and railroad ties—all in peak condition and possibly the most technologically advanced in the country—were operating at perhaps no more than a quarter of their capacity. Workers frequently were sent home at noon, but received a full day’s pay. The Caskeys now owned nearly a third of a million acres of forest in five Alabama and Florida counties, but cutters never had to venture farther than five miles from town because orders were so few. Sister and James needed but little money to live on, for their lives were quiet. Yet even for that little they were forced to go to Oscar, who gave them what they needed in cash of small denominations. This arrangement seemed strange to Sister and James, for the Caskey households had never been restricted in such a manner. James finally asked Oscar if he was sure that he was pursuing the right course with their money and their mill holdings, to which Oscar replied, “Every penny is invested.”