Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

Oscar said to his wife one Saturday night as they lay in bed after the house was quiet at last, “Corporal Bronze is paying a lot of attention to our little girl.”

  “Yes, I believe he is,” replied Elinor.

  “What do you think of that?”

  “I think Billy’s a fine young man.”

  “Is he good enough for Frances?”

  “Nobody is good enough for our Frances, but she’s bound to get married sometime, and Billy wouldn’t be nearly as bad as some of the boys who have come through here. But it’s one thing to feed them at the dinner table, and it’s another to have them marry our daughter.”

  “Do you think we should say anything to Frances?” Oscar asked.

  Elinor shook her head. “Frances will have decisions to make sometime or other. She’s only twenty. Maybe she can put them off.”

  “Elinor, what sort of decisions are you talking about? You mean getting married?”

  “No...not that,” murmured Elinor vaguely. “Oscar, let’s go to sleep. With these boys around, my days are always long...”

  . . .

  The Caskeys saw the incipient romance between Frances and Billy Bronze, but they were more curious to see how Elinor would react to it than they were to watch the actual progress of this tentative courtship. They all still remembered how Mary-Love, dead for five years now, had discouraged all relationships outside the family; she would have had everyone remain unmarried and dependent upon her if she had had her way. Elinor had taken Mary-Love’s place in the family, and it seemed to them that in that role she would react just as her mother-in-law had. But Elinor did not. She made no objection. In fact, she encouraged Billy’s visits warmly, saying, “Frances enjoys having you around so much. The rest of us do, too.” Late on Saturday nights, after all the other boys had returned to Eglin and only Billy remained, Elinor took her husband off to bed and left Frances and Billy alone on the screened porch.

  On one such night, after they had been thus thoughtfully abandoned, Billy and Frances sat next to each other in the swing, rocking slowly and fanning themselves with paper fans. The hot night wind blew through the high branches of the water oaks, and the kudzu rustled on the bank of the levee. By the hundreds, moths anchored themselves to the screens, attracted to the low lights on the porch. Frances talked about Sacred Heart, and Billy spoke of Eglin. That night he kissed her.

  The following night he kissed her twice.

  “Who’s your family?” Frances asked.

  “I just have my father,” he said. “And he’s old and mean. Got money, though,” laughed Billy.

  “Your mama’s dead?”

  “He killed her.”

  “Killed her!”

  “Talked mean to her for twenty-five years, until it just wore her out. He started talking mean to me at the funeral—because she wasn’t around—so I joined the Air Corps. He said, ‘Don’t do it, Billy, I need me somebody to talk to.’ I said, ‘You talk to the walls and your empty bed. Goodbye.’”

  “You shouldn’t have spoken to your daddy like that,” said Frances reprovingly.

  “He killed my mother,” returned Billy simply. “It was either join the Air Corps or end up beating him over the head with a two-by-four. I would have done it, too, if he had been talking mean to me for another two minutes.”

  “I’m sorry you don’t get along.”

  “I am too. That’s why I like coming around here.”

  “Why?” asked Frances.

  “Because you’re such a happy family.”

  Frances gave a little laugh.

  . . .

  Danjo was seventeen and in his junior year in high school when war was declared. James Caskey prayed God every night that Danjo might not be influenced by Elinor’s visiting servicemen to enlist on the day that he turned eighteen. James would have been as forlorn without Danjo as Queenie was without Malcolm—who didn’t even bother to write to his mother.

  “You don’t want to leave me, do you, darling?” said James. They were having breakfast one morning before Danjo went to school. Grace had left an hour earlier for an early morning swim at Lake Pinchona.

  “’Course not,” replied Danjo. “But probably I got to, James, unless they call off the war.”

  “They’re not gone do that, I’m afraid. No, sir.”

  “I’ve been talking to Billy—”

  “Don’t you talk to those boys, Danjo, not even Billy Bronze!” cried James. “They’re gone want you to join up. Bad enough they’re always wanting to put a gun in your hands. Haven’t Queenie and I taught you better than that? You remember what happened to your daddy and how he died. You remember what your brother did to poor old Dollie Faye Crawford. You think about that next time somebody puts a gun in your hands.”

  “I hate guns!” cried Danjo vehemently.

  “You’re my precious boy!” said James, and squeezed Danjo’s hand across the table.

  “Still, I was talking to Billy...” Danjo resumed tentatively.

  “And?”

  “James, you know I got to sign up next year sometime, I just got to.”

  “It’s gone kill me if you do! I suppose you have to do it. This country has been good to us, and now I guess it’s time for us to be good to it. But I don’t want you picking up a gun unless you are planning to shoot Adolf Hitler himself.”

  “I won’t,” promised Danjo. “Let me finish, will you? Billy said if I signed up now—”

  “No!”

  “—if I signed up now,” repeated Danjo deliberately, “I could sort of have my choice. And what he said was I could join the Air Corps and he’d talk to people and try to get me stationed over at Eglin. I could get in the Radio Corps, and Billy would take care of me for as long as he could. See, that’s all I was trying to say, James, and you wouldn’t let me finish!”

  “Does Billy really think he could get you stationed over at Eglin?”

  “He says he could try.”

  James nodded slowly. “Then the next time I see him I’ll speak to him about it. Maybe if you were over at Eglin, Danjo, it wouldn’t kill me to have you gone.”

  “You’ll have Grace here,” Danjo pointed out.

  “Grace will not make up for the loss of my little boy. Danjo, I just don’t know what I’m gone do without you! I’m such an old man—I’m an old gray mare—and there’s no more children around for me to steal and bring up like they were my own.”

  “Maybe Grace’ll get married and have children, and you can take one of hers,” suggested Danjo brightly.

  “Grace is already an old bachelor,” sighed James. “She’s not gone get married. That’s fine, ’cause she’s pretty happy staying here with me, but I’m not gone get any grandchildren out of her.”

  “You want me to get married then?”

  “I most certainly do not! You are too young to even think about that! I haven’t even told you yet...”

  “Told me what?”

  James shrugged, embarrassed. “How babies get born.”

  “I know that!” laughed Danjo. “James, I’m seventeen, ’course I know that!”

  “Who told you?”

  “Grace.”

  James shook his head slowly. “She would have.”

  “Grace tells all the girls, and one day she told me, too. She’s got these pictures, James, you ought to see them—”

  “Don’t talk about this to me at the breakfast table, Danjo. I don’t want to hear it! If you know all about it already, then we don’t ever have to mention it again.”

  “No, sir!” laughed Danjo.

  . . .

  Following Billy’s suggestion, and with James’s reluctant assent, Danjo joined the Air Corps in September of 1942, though he would not be formally inducted until the following June, when he had turned eighteen and graduated from high school. Nothing could be certain in this war, but Billy provided tentative assurances that Danjo, after three months of basic training, would find his way back to Eglin. James could not be happy, however, and thought only of the sc
ant nine months that remained for Danjo to be at home with him.

  He sighed to Grace one afternoon, “Every morning I get up and I say to myself, ‘There’s one less day Danjo’s gone be around.’”

  Grace always took the forthright and practical view of any matter. “You’ve still got more than half a year of him. Enjoy that, Daddy. Don’t ruin it by always thinking of when he’s going away. And just remember, he’ll be headed back to Eglin before you know it. Two years from then he’ll be a civilian again, and he’ll come back here and things will be just like they always were.”

  “He could get killed. He could get his legs shot off. I may be dead,” protested James Caskey. “Things are never ‘just like they always were’ again.”

  Grace slapped a magazine against the arm of the glider with a crack. “Daddy,” she said, “you have got to be the silliest man I ever met in my life. I don’t know what I’m going to do with you for the rest of this war.”

  . . .

  The efforts of Billy Bronze in the cause of keeping Danjo Strickland and James Caskey together were fully appreciated by the Caskeys. They not only liked Billy, they were now indebted to him. Elinor no longer extended invitations to him, because he only had to appear to be welcomed. He was regarded as one of the family to such an extent that his presence never restrained them from talking about private family matters. He heard details of old family enmities, and new family finances that no one in Perdido knew about. Short, testy arguments exploded in his presence, and little moments of affection were exhibited before him. He became another Caskey son, brother, uncle, and cousin.

  The corporal was a favorite also of his commanding officer. He was allowed, so long as he did not abuse the privilege, of sleeping over at the Caskeys on some week nights as well as every other weekend. Oscar lent him one of their automobiles, saying that with gas rationing they had no use for it anyway. Billy Bronze came and went with ever-increasing frequency; the front room was always ready for him. Elinor, trusting both Billy and Frances implicitly, did not even bother locking the linen corridor that connected the two rooms.

  One evening in the autumn of 1942—a few hours after Billy Bronze had returned to Eglin—Frances begged a private conference with her mother. “Very private, Mama,” she said. Elinor took her daughter down the long second-floor hallway, through the door with the stained glass at the end, and out onto the narrow front porch where no one ever sat. Mother and daughter took adjoining rockers. The evening was dark. Crickets chorused in the orchard across the road. Elinor rocked steadily in her chair.

  “I bet I know what you want to ask me about,” she said.

  “You do?”

  “You want me to tell you about husbands and wives.”

  Frances blushed in the darkness.

  “No, ma’am, not that.”

  Elinor paused in her rocking. “What then?”

  “Dial Crawford.”

  Elinor laughed. “Dial Crawford? What on earth have you got to do with that old man? Poor old Dollie Faye. She told me Dial hasn’t been right in his head for twenty years, and he’s no more help to her than a three-year-old.”

  “He washes windshields.”

  “And not much else,” confirmed Elinor. “What about Dial, darling? What on earth do you want to know about him?”

  Frances began hesitantly: “I...stop out at Miss Dollie Faye’s for gas about twice a week, on my way to school, and Mr. Crawford always washes the windshield. He always speaks, but he has such a funny voice that it was always hard for me to understand what he was saying. For a long time, I had no idea what he was talking about, but in the past month or two, it seems like I got used to the way he sounds, and I can understand him. So we always speak. Some days, even when I’m not stopping, I see him sitting out in front of the store and he stands up and waves. So I wave back. I guess he knows the car, and knows what time I’m gone be coming past.”

  “Well? He probably doesn’t have much to occupy him.”

  “Mama, that’s five o’clock in the morning!”

  “Country people get up early. Anyway, go on, Frances.”

  “Yesterday morning, I had plenty of gas so I wasn’t gone stop. But there was Mr. Crawford, standing on the side of the road, waving me down. So I stopped the car, and I said, ‘Is there something wrong, Mr. Crawford?’ So, Mama, he looks at me, and he says, ‘Black water.’”

  “Black water?” echoed Elinor, with the same inflection.

  “He said, ‘Black water, that’s where you came from. Black water, that’s where you’re going back to.’” Frances glanced at her mother in the darkness, but could not determine her expression. Elinor had stopped her rocking.

  “What else did Dial say, darling?”

  “He said something else...”

  “What?” prompted Elinor with some impatience.

  “He said, ‘Your mama crawled out of the river.’ He said, ‘Tell your mama to crawl back in and leave me alone.’”

  Elinor laughed. “I didn’t know I had been upsetting Dial Crawford. Maybe I ought to stay away from there from now on, and let Queenie do all my shopping for me.”

  “Mama, what did he mean, that you crawled out of the river?”

  “Frances, Dial is a crazy old man. He doesn’t know what he’s saying, and Dollie Faye ought to teach him to keep his mouth shut.” Frances didn’t reply. “Darling, do you think I crawled out of the river?”

  “No, no,” returned Frances hastily. “Of course not. It’s just that sometimes...”

  “Sometimes what?”

  “Sometimes I think you and I are different—different from everybody else.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “I don’t know how I mean, Mama. It’s just that sometimes I feel like I’m not all here, not the way Miriam is, not the way Daddy and Sister and Queenie and everybody else is. I feel like part of me is somewhere else.”

  “Where is that somewhere else?”

  “I don’t know. I’m not sure.” Frances paused. “I do know where else. The river, the Perdido. Just like Mr. Crawford said, black water, flowing out there behind the levee. And, Mama,” Frances said very softly, “when I’m there, you’re there too.”

  For a few minutes, Elinor said nothing. Then she asked, “And does this bother you?”

  “No, not until yesterday, when Mr. Crawford sort of put his finger on it. When he said what he said, I realized what I had been feeling all these years.”

  “If you’ve been feeling it all these years, what difference does it make now?”

  Frances didn’t answer.

  Elinor took her daughter’s hand and squeezed it. “I know why,” she whispered. She raised Frances’s hand to her lips and kissed it. “It’s because of Billy, isn’t it, darling?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” replied Frances in a timid voice. “I just wanted to know if it would make a difference. If I ever wanted to get married, or anything. And the problem is, I don’t even know what ‘it’ is.”

  Elinor did not reply immediately. After a few moments’ silence, she said to her daughter, “Frances, I’m going to answer your question and I’m going to tell you the truth. But when I do that, I don’t want any more questions, you understand?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Then the truth is that someday, in your lifetime, it will make a difference. It won’t make a difference now. You go ahead and do whatever you want to. Someday, Frances, I’m going to be the proudest woman in town, ’cause I’m going to watch my little girl get married to a man who will make her happy. And someday my little girl is going to give me some grandchildren.”

  “Mama, you think so?”

  “I don’t think so, I know it.” Elinor laughed then. She still had hold of Frances’s hand, and she squeezed it again. “And you know what I’m going to do? I’m going to steal one of those children, just like Mary-Love stole Miriam from me. Then everybody in this family can rant and rave and say that I’m just as bad as Mary-Love ever was. But I’ll have me a little girl...
”

  “How do you know it’ll be a girl?”

  Elinor didn’t answer. She seemed only happy in anticipating the stealing of a grandchild. She reassured Frances: “I don’t want you to be thinking about what Dial Crawford said to you, you hear? It’s not going to make any difference for a long, long time.”

  “But someday it will?”

  “No questions, I told you! But someday...yes, it will. Darling, I promise you I’ll be there when that time comes. And when the time comes, I’ll tell you what you need to know. You believe that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You trust me, Frances?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “You are my little girl. Miriam isn’t. Even if I hadn’t given Miriam away to Mary-Love, and had kept both of you, you’d still be my daughter in a way that Miriam is not.”

  Frances was obediently silent, and asked no further questions.

  Elinor’s voice grew faraway. “I had a sister. Bet you didn’t know that...”

  “No, ma’am. You’ve never mentioned her,” said Frances cautiously. Hoping that they did not constitute forbidden questions, she asked: “Is she still alive? What was her name?”

  “My mama had two daughters. My sister was just like my mama, but I wasn’t anything like my mama. My mama said to me, ‘Elinor, you’re so different, you go off and do whatever you want. I have’”—Elinor paused as if her sister’s name had escaped her memory. In a moment she resumed—“‘I have Nerita, and Nerita is just like me in every way.’ So Mama got rid of me, the way I got rid of Miriam. And Mama and Nerita were alike the way you and I are alike, do you understand that?”

  “I think so.”

  “You see,” Elinor went on, “as soon as Miriam was born, I saw that she wasn’t anything like me. She was a Caskey baby, and that’s why I gave her up to Mary-Love and Sister—because she belonged to them anyway. But when you were born, I saw right away that you were my baby, and that’s why I will never give you up. I will always be here for you.”

  “Mama,” cried Frances, “I love you so much!”

  “You are my precious girl!”

  Frances stumbled out of her rocker and fell at her mother’s feet. She grasped her legs and squeezed them tight. Elinor leaned over and kissed her daughter’s head. “Darling,” she whispered in Frances’s ear, “crazy old men like Dial, sometimes they know more than everybody else put together. Sometimes they speak the truth.”