Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  Their report was about what Miriam expected it would be: conditions in the swampland were consistent with the possibility of large reserves of oil below.

  With this ammunition Miriam was prepared to take on Houston.

  After Miriam had formally asked Billy to accompany her on the trip, Billy said to Frances, “Do you mind if I go with Miriam?”

  “Of course not,” said Frances. “She may need you out there. Though that’s a bit hard to imagine, knowing Miriam.”

  Miriam and Billy made appointments to visit a number of oil companies during the ten days that they were to be in Houston. Miriam planned to show them the maps and the surveyors’ and the geologists’ reports and then ask, in effect, “What next?”

  One hot August afternoon, while Miriam was sitting across from him in his office, Billy ventured to say to Miriam, “Are you sure this is the way things are usually done in the oil business?”

  “No,” returned Miriam, unperturbed, “but it’s the way I’m gone do it.”

  “What if they laugh in your face? I mean, who’s not going to laugh when you tell them that they ought to drill for oil in Florida? Whoever heard of oil in Florida before? Aren’t they going to say, ‘Watch out for the alligators!’?”

  “They might,” said Miriam. “But in two years I’ll be the one who’s laughing.”

  “How can you be so sure of yourself?” asked Billy.

  “Because,” said Miriam, thoughtfully, “when it comes down to it, I trust what Elinor says, and she says there’s oil down there.”

  Billy smiled and looked askance at this. One of his trousers’ legs was caught in the fan beneath his desk and he reached down to free it. His cuffs were always frayed from being caught so often. When he looked up, Miriam was slowly moving about the office with a rolled-up financial journal, stalking a wasp that had flown in the window.

  “How does Miz Caskey know anything about whether there’s oil under that land?” Billy asked.

  “How the hell should I know?” said Miriam as she deftly swatted the wasp. When it dropped dazed to the floor, she crushed it with her shoe and kicked the carcass beneath a bookcase. “But I’m convinced she does and that’s what matters. Elinor may have given me away when I was a baby. She may never have loved me one-tenth of how much she loves Frances. She may not even love me as much as she loves you, Billy. But Elinor doesn’t lie to me. That’s one thing I can say for her. If Elinor pulls me behind a curtain and tells me there’s oil under the swamp, then I’m gone row out there with a pump in the back of my boat.”

  “I think you’re taking a chance,” said Billy.

  “I don’t care what you think,” said Miriam off-handedly. “I just need to know if you’ll go to Houston with me.”

  “Of course, I’ll go. I’ve already told you I would.”

  Miriam sat down again and unrolled the journal she had swatted the wasp with. “I wonder if we shouldn’t pretend we’re married and that you’re the one who’s really in charge.”

  Billy laughed. “Nobody would believe that for a minute.”

  “I guess not,” said Miriam, with complacency.

  Chapter 65

  Silver

  Although Frances raised no objection to Billy’s going off to Texas, Sister was furious with Miriam for planning such a trip. She claimed she was being “deserted,” left alone to the wolves and starvation, and rendered defenseless prey to thieves, rapists, and perhaps even her husband.

  Miriam listened to Sister’s ravings from the next room as she packed. Queenie sat at the side of Sister’s bed, patiently taping Sister’s clipped recipes to file cards, even though she knew that these dishes would never be prepared.

  When Sister’s voice had finally given out and Miriam had snapped her bags shut, Miriam entered Sister’s room and said, “Queenie is gone take care of you just the same as always, Sister. And Ivey is gone sleep here at night so you won’t be alone. You have a telephone on your bedside table and you can call anybody in the world to come and help you if you think you need help.”

  “Say goodbye to me now, Miriam, ’cause I won’t be alive when you get back,” returned Sister in a doleful voice.

  Sister’s accusations and predictions did not deter Miriam one inch from her long-laid plans. “Sister,” Miriam said, “you are getting more and more like Grandmama every day.”

  “I am not!”

  “I never thought I’d see it,” mused Miriam to Queenie.

  Thereafter, Sister voiced no more objections to Miriam’s trip to Texas.

  Billy and Miriam drove off one Sunday afternoon early in September, with an appointment at the American Oil Company in Houston on Tuesday morning. The Caskeys, still in their Sunday clothes, sat on the screened porch at Elinor’s and, with the fragrance of Miriam’s soap still lingering in the air, said how lonesome they were already. Oscar stood and yelled out to Sister, dimly visible through the window of her bedroom next door, “Let Bray and Queenie bring you over here, Sister.”

  “It’d kill me, Oscar! At least have the decency to let me rot in peace!” Sister yelled back.

  In the first few days of Miriam’s absence, Sister sulked. At times she even sent Queenie away.

  One evening Sister had lain alone in her room, leafing through her magazines as usual looking for recipes, clipping them out, arranging them on the bedspread into full-fledged wedding dinners, champagne breakfasts—Sister had never tasted champagne—and country brunches. She avidly read a twenty-year-old copy of Emily Post’s Etiquette, wondering at so much silver to be used for a late breakfast, and so much other silver to be used at tea, and the number of glasses for dinner. At ten o’clock she telephoned Queenie and demanded querulously, “What happened to all James’s silver?”

  “It’s right here,” said Queenie. “Nothing’s happened to it.”

  “Bring it over here and let me see it.”

  “Lord, Sister,” cried Queenie, “you know how much of that stuff there is! You send me a couple of wheelbarrows, and I’ll send them back loaded down.”

  “Bring me a case or two over here.”

  Queenie didn’t argue. She couldn’t begin to think of a reason why Sister would want any of James’s silver, yet obediently she went to the pantry where some of it was kept and took out two heavy mahogany boxes. One contained a sterling flatware set for twelve, engraved with a “C.” In the other was a jumbled array of serving pieces of various design; many of them were antique, and many had been made for such an obscure purpose that Queenie was sometimes at a loss which end to pick up.

  Holding the two boxes in her encircling arms, Queenie kicked at the frame of the hooked screen door at Sister’s. After a few moments Ivey was roused out of the bed that had been set up for her in the corner of the dining room. She unhooked the door, stared at Queenie, and mumbled, “She sure is running you ragged.”

  “Go back to bed,” said Queenie. “Good-night.”

  She went upstairs with the silver and laid the boxes on the side of Sister’s bed.

  “There’s more over there, isn’t there?” said Sister anxiously.

  Queenie nodded. “A lot more.”

  “Good,” said Sister. “Go home now. Go to bed. Thank you.”

  Sister lay back on the pillows and listened closely to the progress of Queenie’s footsteps through the house. When she heard the screen door slam shut, she sat up and greedily spilled out the contents of the boxes over her injured leg.

  For an hour, Sister picked up the pieces of silver one by one, examined each for marks and initials and scratches, and then placed them carefully back in their boxes. In her mind’s eye, Sister feverishly saw a large country estate—a much-improved Gavin Pond Farm, actually—and the weekend parties she would herself give. She imagined well-dressed strangers and innocent flirtations and little misunderstandings that eventually came right. She pictured champagne bottles in silver coolers and four meals a day, each on a different tablecloth with different silver, different china, different crystal, and
different cut flowers. She thought of varieties of place cards and mixed drinks served by a clear blue swimming pool and children locked away under the eye of a crisp-aproned nurse. Elinor was there, looking just as she looked now, and Queenie had a little out-of-the-way corner in the second parlor. Miriam had an office that overlooked the swimming pool, and Frances and Billy lived somewhere else but they drove up every day in the biggest car anybody had ever seen. Lucille and Grace and Tommy Lee had a small cottage out on the grounds, just visible through the trees, and wore wide-brimmed sun hats and flowered dresses, and didn’t show up until five o’clock when they walked around and apologized and shook hands with everybody. Among them all stood Sister herself, cool and detached and smiling, seemingly everywhere at once, greeting her guests, checking with Ivey and Zaddie and Roxie in the kitchen, telling Bray what to do about the garden now. Then she would drop elegantly into a soft chair in the corner for a few seconds to catch her breath between so many exigencies of sociability. Early Haskew was part of the picture, too. He was out by the big iron gate, grasping the bars with white-knuckled hands and aching to get in. The big cars blew their horns at him as they approached and he had to move aside to let them pass. The gates were clanged shut before he could gain entrance.

  Now the last piece of silver had gone back into its box. Wondering whether she should empty them all out again and start over or whether she ought to turn out the light and try to sleep for a few hours, she looked up. Early Haskew stood framed in the doorway.

  “What the hell are you doing?” he asked.

  Sister closed her eyes and fell back on her pillow, praying for the barred gates to swing shut in Early’s face.

  She opened her eyes and Early stepped into the room.

  “How did you get in here?” demanded Sister tremulously.

  The lids of both boxes banged shut.

  “The door was unhooked downstairs. Anybody could have gotten in,” said Early casually as he sat down. Early was nearly fifty-five years old, vast and coarse, with skin burned many times by many suns. It was brown and creased like the leather of an old boot one finds at the back of a closet. His red, watery eyes were sunk deep into his head. The teeth he had left were chipped and blackened. He brought in with him the smell of red dust, which was visible on his trouser cuffs, and the red powder had sifted over his boots. The sleeves of his shirt were rolled up over his arms, and the undershirt beneath it was grimy with sweat.

  “Why’d you come here?”

  “I’ve been living in Mobile,” returned Early. “Didn’t you know that?”

  “No! How would I know that?”

  “You might have read the letters I wrote. You might even have answered one or two of ’em.”

  “Hard for me to write,” said Sister, “confined as I am to this bed.”

  “I came up here,” said Early, rocking contentedly, “to see if you were well yet.”

  “Do I look well? Do I look as if I have been out of this bed since the day I fell down those stairs out there?”

  “You look fine to me,” said Early.

  “I’m not fine,” snapped Sister. “I’m waited on hand and foot. I’ve got people running in and out of here all day, waiting on me and doing my bidding. I’m trapped in this bed.”

  “I bet you could walk if you tried.”

  “I could not.”

  “I spoke to your doctors in Pensacola. They all said you should be just fine by now.”

  “What do they know?”

  “They’re doctors.” Early shrugged. “They know about what doctors are supposed to know, I guess.”

  Sister glanced at the clock. “It’s one o’clock in the morning. What are you doing walking in somebody’s house at one o’clock in the morning?”

  “Got lonesome down in Mobile, Sister. Thought I’d come up to Perdido and visit with you a spell.”

  “I think you can turn around and drive right back to Mobile. I think you don’t even have to stop in Mobile, but can drive on straight through as far as I’m concerned.”

  Early continued to rock, and said nothing.

  Sister screeched out Ivey’s name, again and again.

  After a bit, Ivey in her vast nightdress appeared in the doorway.

  “Hey, Ivey, how you?” said Early.

  “Hey, Mr. Early,” replied Ivey.

  “Call the police,” said Sister. “Tell them to come get this man.”

  “Don’t do it, Ivey,” said Early quietly.

  “No, sir,” said Ivey, starting to retreat into the darkness of the hallway. “All this not none of my business.”

  “I’ll get rid of you, Ivey,” Sister threatened.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  Sister crossed her arms and squeezed them tight, staring at her husband.

  “I’m gone call the police,” said Sister calmly.

  “And tell them what?” said Early. “That your husband came to visit you and walked in a door that was wide open to the world?”

  Sister didn’t pick up the telephone.

  “Why you treat me like this?” Early asked curiously. “Why you so mean to me, Sister? You weren’t always mean. Now you acting more like your mama than anything else.”

  “I’m not like Mama,” protested Sister, “not a bit like her.” She began to weep. “Mama would never cry,” Sister maintained through her tears.

  Early made no move.

  “I get so lonesome,” he said. “I miss you. I even miss my old mama. I got me a dog, but he was run down in the road. I thought I’d get me another, but then I figured he’d get run down too, so I didn’t. I got plenty of money. Most people don’t have any idea how much money I have. I don’t spend it, though. I just put it in the bank, ’cause I don’t have anything I want to spend it on. I bought me a house, a little old house, and I got a woman to come in and cook for me. Oh, Sister, she’s a good cook. Not as good as Ivey, but she’s good. I got a little back yard and it’s overrun with day lilies. Not a blade of grass, all day lilies. You ought to have seen that place in May. You never saw so much orange and yellow in your life. I don’t even have to work if I don’t want to. I had a bridge built down at Bayou la Batre and I ate me a mess of shrimp. Went out on one of them shrimp boats one day and sat and drank beer and ate shrimp the whole damn day. Kept thinking: ‘I sure do wish that when I went back home Sister’d be there. I sure do wish I had some company in the evening.’”

  Sister wiped her eyes on the hem of the sheet and sank lower in the bed.

  “Few years from now I’m gone be sixty. Lord, that used to seem old to me. But it don’t anymore. Used to wish you and I had some children, but we never did. Sometimes I think, ‘Sister’s dead.’ And then I think, ‘No, she just don’t want to see me no more.’ So I thought I’d come up here and ask you, ‘Sister, are you ever gone come back and take care of me?’”

  “No,” said Sister, in a small, weary voice. “Not on your life.”

  “I could make you,” remarked Early.

  “You could throw me over your shoulder, if that’s what you mean,” said Sister. “You could tie me up in the back seat of your car. You could rope me to the bedposts at your house down in Mobile. You could beat me with day lilies till I was black and blue. But no matter what you did I wouldn’t raise a finger to take care of you.”

  “Why not? What have you got against me?”

  “Nothing,” said Sister quickly. “I just don’t want to be married.”

  “What changed your mind?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Something.”

  “When Mama died,” said Sister dreamily, distantly, “and you were off, I changed my mind. I said to myself, ‘Lord, why on earth did you ever get married, Sister?’ And I couldn’t think of one good reason.”

  “I know why,” said Early.

  “Why?”

  “You married me in the first place ’cause of Miss Mary-Love, so you could lord it over her that you had a husband and so you could obey me instead of her. When Miss Mary-Lo
ve was dead, you didn’t need me anymore ’cause there wasn’t anybody to lord it over.”

  Sister had no reply to this.

  “I helped you out then,” continued Early. “You ought to be willing to help me out now.”

  “Well, I’m not,” said Sister. “I’m old and crippled.”

  “You could walk if you wanted to.”

  Sister shook her head. “I’m in this bed for the rest of my life, Early.”

  “I bet when nobody’s around you get up and wander all over this house with the lights off so nobody can see in.”

  “I don’t!”

  Early rose. “Sister,” he said, “if I ever hear of you setting one foot out of this bed—if I ever read in the newspaper that your feet have touched this floor—I’m coming up here after you. You understand me? You stay here. You stay in this room and you rot, and don’t never let me hear of you putting on a pair of shoes again.”

  “Early, open that closet door.”

  “Why?”

  “Just do it.”

  Early opened the closet door. On the inside, hung in pocketed mats, were two dozen pairs of Sister’s shoes.

  “See those shoe bags?” said Sister, pointing.

  Early nodded.

  “Take ’em away,” commanded Sister. “’Cause I’m sure never gone wear ’em again.”

  Early lifted the shoe bags from their hooks and laid them out on the floor. Some of the shoes were jarred from their pockets but Early carefully replaced them. Then he rolled up the bags, shoved them under his arm, and walked out the door.

  “Ivey! Ivey!” Sister screamed. “Lock that door behind him!”

  Chapter 66

  Nerita

  “Elinor,” said Oscar, as he climbed into bed one night shortly after Miriam and Billy had left for Texas, “our baby is grieving.”

  “Frances?”

  “She is pining for her husband, I believe.”

  “Probably,” said Elinor thoughtfully.