Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  “Don’t remember?”

  “The other times.”

  “What other times, Mama?”

  “The other times when you went out in the water.”

  “You mean,” said Frances hesitantly, “I had that change...?”

  Elinor nodded. “Of course. When you used to go down to the Gulf with Miriam, and you’d swim and swim for hours and hours—you don’t think a sixteen-year-old girl could swim out that far, do you? A sixteen-year-old girl who had spent three years of her life in that bed right over there, not even able to move her legs when she wanted to? You remember when you were little and you and I used to go swimming in the Perdido together, and we wouldn’t let anybody else go with us? Remember that?”

  “A little,” admitted Frances. “I don’t remember that anything happened, though. I just remember...”

  “What?”

  “Nothing, Mama. That’s just it. I can’t remember anything about it. Just that everything was different.”

  Elinor nodded sagely.

  “That’s it, then,” said Frances mournfully. “When I’m in the water, and I can’t remember things, that’s what happens to me?”

  “That’s right.”

  “But tonight I remembered more.”

  Elinor shrugged. “More things happened, and you were upset. And also you’re getting older.”

  “Then this is all gone happen again?”

  Elinor only went on with her brushing. She didn’t answer.

  After a moment, Frances said delicately, “Mama?”

  “Yes?”

  “Mama, not everybody is like this...”

  “No, darling, just you and me.”

  “Not Miriam?”

  Elinor shook her head. “Remember when I said that you were my real little girl? That’s what I meant.”

  Frances sat very still and stared at her visage in the mirror. She raised her arm and turned it in the light, inspecting it.

  “You won’t see anything, darling,” said Elinor.

  “What about Billy?”

  “What about him?” asked Elinor. She put aside the brush and opened a little gilt box with bobby pins inside. She pulled back a thick wave of Frances’s hair and reached for a pin. Frances held the wave in place until her mother had secured it.

  “Can I still marry him?”

  “Of course! I married your father, didn’t I?”

  Frances shrugged. “What do I tell him?”

  “Don’t tell him anything!” cried Elinor. “What do you imagine you would say to him?”

  “I don’t know!” exclaimed Frances helplessly. She spun around on the wicker seat and looked at her mother directly. “Mama, I don’t understand any of this, and you’ve got to help me! You’ve got to tell me what to do!”

  Elinor took Frances’s shoulders, squeezed them, and said, “You’re doing everything just right. If you have any problems, you come to me. That’s all. Now turn around and let me finish doing your hair. They’re waiting for us!”

  “Why fix it at all?”

  “Because when we go out on the porch, and you see Billy again, I don’t want him to remember anything of what you looked like out at the lake. I just want him to see my pretty, pretty little girl.”

  “Mama, does Daddy know?”

  “Know about what?”

  “About me?”

  “No.”

  “About you?”

  Elinor paused. “Oscar knows more than he’s willing to say. Your daddy is a good man, darling, and he’s very smart. Your daddy knows when to be quiet. Billy is just like him, don’t you think?”

  Frances didn’t answer. Another question already occupied her mind.

  “What about children?”

  “What about them?” asked Elinor, looking this way and that at Frances’s reflection, checking her hair.

  “Will they be like us?”

  Elinor smiled. “You’re all done,” she said, “and you’ve asked enough questions for one evening. Let’s go out on the porch and get this business over with.”

  Chapter 54

  Lucille and Grace

  Lucille stayed in bed a week after her rape, nursed by all the Caskey women. Townfolk were told that at Lake Pinchona, in the dark, Lucille had tripped over the root of a cedar tree, fallen, and cut herself on a nail sticking out of a post.

  The owner of the recreation facilities at Lake Pinchona and his wife had their suspicions, of course, but they had no interest in spreading news of a rape. If it had become known that a local girl had been attacked by an Air Corps man—it was bound to have been a soldier, since for the past year it was mostly soldiers who had come to the lake—there would have been hell to pay. The lake might have been put off limits by the commander at Eglin, and where would the couple’s comfortable profits have gone?

  Another waitress was hired, a girl from Bay Minette who wasn’t nearly so pretty as Lucille and had never learned to dance. After she had recovered from her “fall,” Lucille wasn’t at all interested in returning to her former position.

  No trace of Travis Gann ever turned up in the lake or on its shores. Perdido assumed that Travis, in the due course of justice, had been released from Atmore prison and had simply disappeared. Perdido was glad that he had taken up residence someplace far away.

  A couple of months later, Queenie found that the full force of her old bad luck had come upon her again. Lucille was pregnant. On Elinor’s advice, Lucille had been examined not by Dr. Benquith next door but rather by a man in Pensacola. The Caskeys hadn’t wanted their friend Leo to know what had occurred out at Lake Pinchona. “I know pregnancy when I see it,” said Queenie. “In another couple of months she’ll start to show.”

  One evening at James’s there was a conference of the Caskey women, with only Frances and Miriam excused. Lucille was brought over to the house, but relegated to Grace’s bedroom with the door closed. The question “What do we do?” was what the women had gathered to decide.

  Grace looked around with pleasure. This was her first major family conference; she was proud to have been admitted to it. Here she might give her maiden speech, and she wanted the family to remember it. “Let me take her away,” said Grace.

  “Take her where?” said Sister.

  “It doesn’t matter. Miami, maybe, or Tennessee. It doesn’t really matter where. Tell people she’s visiting relatives, or she’s keeping me company on a tour of the national parks, something like that.”

  “You can’t travel around much,” Elinor pointed out, “remember there’s a war going on.”

  “Then we’ll sit in one place,” said Grace. “A place where nobody knows us.”

  “For nine months?” said Queenie. “You’d stay with Lucille for nine months?”

  “It wouldn’t be nine, it’d be more like seven.”

  “What would you do with the baby when it’s born?” asked Sister.

  Grace shrugged. “I don’t know. She cain’t keep it, I guess. Then there’d be no reason to go away and keep it a secret. Put it up for adoption, I suppose.”

  “I wish we could keep it...” sighed Queenie. “Maybe we could give it to James.”

  “James is too old,” said Elinor, not unkindly, “to care for a baby. And if we were to keep it, everybody would know where it came from. We’ll have to give it away.”

  Grace soon understood that they had accepted the wisdom of her proposal and that she would take Lucille away for the duration of the pregnancy. She said then, “We can decide about the baby later. First we have to decide how Lucille and I are gone get out of town without anybody suspecting anything. See, first she’s gone have to quit that job at the Ben Franklin...”

  It was arranged that evening. Lucille was informed and acquiesced in everything. She was a changed girl since the rape; not dour, but distracted. She no longer lied because there didn’t seem to be anything in life worth lying for. She no longer whined to get her way. She looked at Grace and said, “Are you gone take care of me?”

&n
bsp; “Yes,” said Grace. “Where had you rather go, Nashville or Miami?”

  Lucille shrugged.

  “Nashville, then,” said Grace. “We can tell everybody we’re visiting your relatives, Queenie.”

  “They’re all dead,” said Queenie.

  “All the better,” said Grace. “Then we won’t be disturbed.”

  . . .

  Perdido heard only that Grace and Lucille, who had never been close before, were going off to Nashville for an indefinite stay. There was something mysterious in this, if only because it seemed so unlikely that Grace would leave her father completely alone in Perdido, when James was still grieving in the wake of Danjo’s absence. Perdido learned nothing except that questions were unwelcome.

  James demanded a single alteration in the plan. He would not hear of his daughter going so far away as Nashville. He wanted Grace and Lucille hidden away a little closer to home. Oscar, thinking the matter over, said, “You know what? Right after Mama died and we bought all that land over in Escambia County—y’all remember? Elinor had me buy up a little piece of property that had been foreclosed on. It’s maybe five, ten miles south of Babylon, off this little road that doesn’t go anywhere at all. You never saw anyplace so far away from anything in your life. Elinor, you and I drove over there one day, remember?”

  Elinor remembered it well. “The place is called Gavin Pond,” she said. “There’s an old farmhouse next to a fishing pond. Plenty of artesian water around there. It’s got a pasture and a pecan orchard, and five, six hundred acres of decent timber. The Perdido River is the western boundary of the property.”

  “Y’all never even mentioned this place before,” said James.

  Oscar said, “After Mama died and left us her money, Elinor and I were buying up property right and left. Well, it looks like it might come in handy now. Gavin Pond—I’d even forgot the name of it.”

  “How long does it take to get there from here?” asked Grace.

  “Half an hour, maybe,” said Elinor. “Take the road over to Babylon, and then south, that’s all.”

  “Daddy,” said Grace, “you and Queenie would be able to come see us all the time. Elinor, what shape was that old farmhouse in last time you were there?”

  “It was all right,” said Elinor. “But by now it could probably use some work. I’ll drive over tomorrow, and take Bray along and see what all needs to be done before you can move in.”

  Elinor and Bray began work the next day. In the following week, Bray killed a family of squirrels in the second-floor bedrooms and repaired a hole in the roof. He put new steps on the back, and shored up the narrow front porch. Meanwhile, early every morning, before the rest of Perdido was awake, Elinor and Sister tied furniture to the back of a small mill truck and had Bray drive it out to the place. It had been decided that the purchase of new furniture—either in Perdido or Babylon—would have excited too much local curiosity. Queenie went to the Crawford’s store, filled her car with groceries, and stocked the kitchen. The Caskeys visited the house by ones and twos and nobody in Perdido learned anything of it, or suspected the Caskeys’ scheme. Lucille quit her job at the Ben Franklin, and was not sorry to do so. She no longer had any interest in flirting with the servicemen who wandered in for a bag of peanut clusters or a Mounds bar.

  In the middle of August, when the house was finally judged ready, Queenie drove her daughter down to Pensacola to a beauty parlor. Lucille’s hair was cut short and then dyed black. They came back to Perdido only after night had fallen. From there Lucille and Grace drove off with half a dozen suitcases in the back seat. The Caskeys remained inside their houses as the car pulled away from James’s house, and Lucille crouched low in the seat as they drove through downtown Perdido, crossed the bridge over the river, and went through Baptist Bottom on the road that led eastward to Florida. Lucille wept.

  . . .

  Babylon in 1943 was a tiny place, smaller than Perdido, without a mill or any other major business to make it profitable, and nothing to distinguish it but the three young men who in the past three years had all gone on to play professional baseball. The Caskey property lay five miles south of town, out a gravel road through the colored section. Two pebbly ruts led away from that road through a hardwood forest; half a mile farther along this track they came to the clearing with the farmhouse in it. Behind the farmhouse was the cattle pasture, where only deer had grazed for twenty years, and the pecan orchard with a little stream running through it. The orderly rows had been disturbed by oak saplings growing up anarchically in their midst. Beside the house was the fishing pond, filled with fish that had fed and grown and multiplied for undisturbed generations. The pond was bordered by dark, moss-hung cypresses. All this, of course, was not apparent in the deep night of Grace and Lucille’s arrival. They saw only the ruts of the track, the trunks of trees, and the lowest clapboards of the house in the wavering lights of the headlamps.

  The modest house had two rooms up and two rooms down, with a pantry and bath on the first floor. Elinor had run up curtains for the windows. The floors were hardwood, and Zaddie and Luvadia had scrubbed them. None of this operation had been kept secret from the Sapps. They would have found out anyway, and the Caskeys considered them all family, trusting them as they trusted themselves. But despite all these small attempts to make the place seem comfortable and familiar, Lucille thought she had never been in a place so removed and lonely in her life. All the windows looked out on blackness.

  Lucille clung to Grace. “I’m scared.”

  “We’ll go upstairs,” said Grace, “and I’ll show you our bedrooms.”

  Lucille turned to Grace in terror. “I cain’t sleep by myself. Not way out here!”

  The bedrooms upstairs were square and unadorned, a bed, a dresser, a vanity, and a hooked rug in each. In the day they might be cheerful enough, with sunlight beating in through the high windows, but at night they were stuffy with the day’s heat. The single overhead bulb in each room lighted the rooms poorly, casting harsh shadows, and picking out the dead flies that littered the windowsill and the wasps’ nest in the corner of the ceiling of Grace’s room.

  “I hate it here,” said Lucille.

  “Tomorrow I’ll take you fishing,” said Grace. “We’ll have the time of our lives.”

  Lucille shook her head doubtfully. Neither that night nor the nights that followed would Lucille permit Grace to sleep in her own room. She insisted that they share the same bed. Lucille was frightened of the dark and the overwhelming quiet outside. The silence was broken only by the occasional plop of a fish in the pond, or the crackle of breaking twigs as animals roamed through the forest. When she looked out she saw only the cold moon over Babylon reflected in the water of Gavin Pond. On the other side of the pond was a tiny graveyard with a dozen tombstones under which were buried all the members of the family who had built the farmhouse, and who had slept in the room she slept in now. No, Lucille wasn’t sleeping by herself. All night long she cowered in Grace’s arms, despite the heat and the closeness of the room. She was never certain in what her fear was centered, whether it was the quiet and the dark, or the pond and the graveyard and the moonlight—or whether it was the thing that was expanding inside her belly.

  Things were better during the day. The house had cooled off somewhat during the night. The disposition of the trees kept sunlight off the roof until late afternoon, but then the place quickly heated up. Lucille listened to the radio and played records, sat in the boat and slapped at mosquitos while Grace fished, wandered in the pecan orchard with a big stick poised to beat off snakes, and sometimes did a little sewing. “I keep wanting to do something for the baby,” she confessed to Grace, “and then all of a sudden I remember I’m not gone keep him. I bet it is a him and not a her.”

  They weren’t as lonely as Lucille had anticipated on the night of their arrival. The Caskeys came out to see them, sometimes James and Queenie, sometimes Elinor and Zaddie, sometimes Sister alone. The visitors sat in chairs placed out by th
e pond, and everyone would say how pleasant it was, and it was just a wonder they hadn’t thought of fixing up this place before. It was much nicer than the beach. Twice Oscar drove out in the middle of the day, saying he had just had to get away from the mill; all that business was driving him crazy. Only Frances and Miriam did not come. Once, when they were out on the pond fishing, Lucille asked Grace why she thought her cousins stayed away. Grace at first didn’t answer. Then after a few moments she said, “They think you and I are in Nashville.”

  “You mean everybody’s keeping this a secret, even from them?”

  “They’re too young. They might let it out, without intending to,” explained Grace.

  For some reason, this depressed Lucille. She seemed to see in Frances and Miriam’s ignorance of her plight the real extent of her shame. She cried, “It’s not my fault! I didn’t ask that man to jump on top of me in the bathhouse!”

  Grace pulled a fish into the boat. She was about to give up the fishing—in such a pond as this, it was no sport at all. Besides, something in the water gave the fish a rancid taste, no matter how soon they were cooked, as if they had fed off only the dead fish that had sunk to the bottom. “Of course it’s not your fault, Lucille. Who said it was your fault?”

  “Then why am I being punished?”

  “You call a vacation like this punishment?”

  “I do, when I cain’t even go into Babylon with you.”

  “How often do I go in? Once a week, maybe. Queenie brings us food. I don’t even like to go in town.”

  “I feel like I’m in jail. Nobody asked me what I wanted to do about all this.”

  Grace looked up in surprise. “Did you want to keep this child? When you know that its father was that no-good Travis Gann? Let’s just hope Frances is right and those alligators out at Lake Pinchona did eat him up!”

  Lucille looked away. “I don’t know what I wanted to do. I wasn’t thinking straight. I’m not thinking straight now.”

  “Pull down your hat,” said Grace. “You’re getting too much sun on your face.”