Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  Queenie was sixty, but lively and proud of her family. She rather wondered at her good fortune. There had been a time not so long ago when it had seemed that she had lost all three of her children to distance, disaster, or disappointment. Danjo was firmly entrenched in his castle in Germany now, that was true. But she had Malcolm to take up his place at the table. And here was she, possessing more money than she had ever dreamed it possible for any one human being to be possessed of, able to give Malcolm and Lucille cars and new clothes and little trips and big trips—anything in the world, in fact, that they wanted or would make them happy. Was there ever an aging woman who was happier than Queenie Strickland?

  Malcolm was the Caskeys’ workhorse, commanded to do many tasks, which he performed with ever-increasing facility. And it was apparent to everyone that Malcolm was in love with Miriam. Once, in her office at the mill, Malcolm looked up from some figures he was totaling for her, and said, “Miriam, you want to get married?”

  “To who?” Miriam asked, not looking up.

  “To me,” said Malcolm.

  “Why you want to get married to me?”

  “I don’t know. Just ’cause, I guess.”

  “No,” said Miriam. “If we got married, where would we live? We couldn’t live with Queenie. She grates on my nerves, always has. And you couldn’t live with me, ’cause you grate on Sister’s nerves. Sister wouldn’t even let me bring you in the house. That’s why we cain’t get married.”

  This odd refusal of marriage made sense to Malcolm, and he never raised the subject again. He’d wait for Queenie—or for Sister—to die.

  Roxie, who had remained with Queenie after James’s death, died. Her fifty-year-old daughter, Reta, who remembered helping Miss Elinor scrub James’s floor after the flood of 1919, came to Queenie’s assistance. At Gavin Pond Farm, Sammy Sapp had a little brother and a little sister who could pick up pecans and put them in a sack before they could properly walk. Ivey and Zaddie had a fight in 1950—about what, no one knew—and by 1954, though they continued to work in Elinor’s kitchen together every day of the year, they still did not speak to each other. Bray’s eyes failed, and his job as chauffeur was handed over to a younger man, the husband of yet another of the Sapp daughters.

  At Gavin Pond Farm, Grace and Lucille got along as well as they ever had, and Tommy Lee was growing up in the constant company of Sammy Sapp, Luvadia’s boy. Grace put Tommy Lee on the tractor for the first time when he was four, and showed him how to steer. Because his feet wouldn’t reach the pedals, she placed a large rock on the accelerator and allowed him to till a recently cleared field. With the money coming in from the oil, Grace bought two of the best bulls in the country and opened a stud service. She built two barns, a stable, and a silo. And she doubled the size of the house with the addition of a living room, three bedrooms, two baths, and a playroom for Tommy Lee. She bought horses for herself and Lucille and a pony for Tommy Lee. She had a catfish pond scooped out of the earth and graveled the road from the Babylon highway. They began to entertain, and Thanksgiving for the Caskeys was held out at the farm instead of at Elinor’s. Grace and Lucille were hosts of a vast New Year’s Eve party. They invited everybody they knew from Perdido, Babylon, and Pensacola. Grace had a houseboat specially constructed for her in Pensacola which she moored on the bank of the Perdido and where she and Lucille went when they wanted to be alone. Grace’s great itch remained the acquisition of land, and she unmercifully badgered owners of property next to the farm. With the backup of ever-increasing oil revenues, her offers increased steadily until they were irresistible, and every year Gavin Pond Farm’s fences lengthened. By 1955 it was the largest private landholding in the Florida panhandle.

  . . .

  What was good for the Caskeys was good for the entire area. Now oil companies began to look at the area on both banks of the Perdido. Other wells were drilled, some on Caskey property. More than half struck oil; more money poured into the region.

  With the prosperity of the Caskey mills and oil enterprises the population of Perdido doubled to more than five thousand. The Caskeys bought the pecan orchard and cattle pasture across the road from their houses so that it could not be built upon. The town expanded south along both banks of the Perdido and west into the pine forest. The Caskeys relinquished some of their land near the town for building. More shops opened downtown, and their quality rivaled those in Pensacola and Mobile. Perdido society, with more money in its pocket, began to dress up. Little parties were arranged to go to Mobile for the evening. Rented railroad cars transported carousers to the Auburn-Alabama game in the fall. Beach houses were erected at Destin or Gulf Shores. Lake Pinchona became the Perdido Country Club. With money lent at low interest by Oscar, the country club added another nine holes to its golf course.

  The town seemed overrun with children. The grammar school expanded with funds donated by the Caskeys. A municipal swimming pool was installed next to the high school, and now no one in Perdido need be tempted to swim in the Perdido or the Blackwater. There was even talk of repairing the levee, which had developed visible cracks and had eroded away in a few places, although no one remembered the last time the water had been high enough to threaten the town. In recent years the rivers behind their walls of clay had been placid, and it seemed a waste of money to recondition the levees when two faces of the town hall clock didn’t keep correct time and so many streets in Baptist Bottom were not paved.

  Miriam was revered in Perdido for having brought prosperity to the area. In Babylon and other towns of Escambia County, Florida, Grace was given the credit. Whenever she went to the seed and feed store in Babylon she was besieged. Men thanked her for what she had done; men asked her for the names of the top people at Texas National Oil; men offered to sell her their land for sums that staggered her. She liked these men and wished them success; her great fortune made her want the same for others.

  One day in the store Grace ran into a farmer she had known for several years. He was a hard-working churchgoer. His wife had died of pneumonia two years back and he had always known bad luck. He said to her, “Well, Miz Caskey, you know where my place is, my boy and I have about two hundred acres right down there between Cantonement and Muscogee. We raise a little soybean, raise a little corn. Make a little money when there’s rain, lose a little money when there’s not. Well, my boy and me was standing out in the field one day, saw this machinery on the other side of the fence—not our property—talked to the men there, found out they was looking for oil. And they was finding it! So we just took down our fence there, and we said: ‘Y’all come on through!’ And they did, and they found oil. I wasn’t surprised. Somebody come up to my boy yesterday and says, ‘What’s the soybean crop gone be like this year?’ And my boy says, ‘Hell, I don’t know why you’re asking me—we don’t raise soybean no more. We got machinery on our land, and we don’t plant soybean, ’cause the roots might go down and disturb the machinery.’ You don’t hardly make money on soybean anyway. We raise oil now. Not hardly no comparison between the two, so far as money goes. We don’t even have to run that machinery. All we have to do is slit open them checks every month. We have bought us two pick-’em-up trucks. Drove up to Atmore to get ’em, and we had our choice so we bought two of ’em that look just alike. That damn oil is flowing like an artesian well...”

  The Caskeys owned one thousand times this farmer’s two hundred acres of oil-rich land.

  Chapter 71

  Legacies

  Everyone in town knew that a strangeness had grown between Frances Bronze and her husband Billy. Some said Billy was having an affair with his sister-in-law Miriam. Those who knew the Caskeys better discounted this information on three counts. First of all: “Billy wouldn’t do it.” He was upright, God-fearing, and wholly devoted to the Caskey family; he would never create a situation so destructive to family interests. The second argument was: “Miriam wouldn’t do it.” No one had ever known Miriam to be interested in anything but making money, buying jewel
ry, and speaking her mind without a moment’s thought about consequences. So far as anyone had ever seen, Miriam had no interest in men. Those trips to Texas were strictly business, and besides, didn’t Malcolm Strickland always go along? The third argument went: “Elinor wouldn’t have allowed it.” Everyone knew how deeply Elinor loved her daughter, knew how faithfully she had nursed Frances through her dreadful childhood illnesses, and knew that Elinor was fiercely protective of Frances. If Elinor had thought there was anything between Billy and Miriam she would have put a stop to it instantly.

  Frances no longer denied the feelings that had taken root in her. She was devoted to “her other daughter,” Nerita. She lived for those hours spent in the water. Recognition only increased these feelings. Oscar, though distracted with thoughts of golf and travel, noticed his daughter’s remoteness. Frances had withdrawn, not only from Billy, but from them all. “Talk to her, Elinor,” Oscar said. “Talk to her sometime when I’m not here.”

  Oscar was gone somewhere every week it seemed, at one golf course or another; and he preferred those far away, in landscapes different from those of the Alabama panhandle. Billy was absent often, too, on business. When the women were left alone, their lives were quiet and circumscribed and formal. Elinor now insisted that the family dress for dinner at her home. Their enlarged fortune and expanding importance in the region required it, she said. Even Oscar, though it chafed, put on a coat and tie before he sat down at the table. Elinor invariably wore the black pearls.

  Late in May 1956, Oscar was in Raleigh, North Carolina, visiting friends and the three excellent courses in the area. Miriam and Billy and Malcolm were in New Orleans. Queenie had accompanied Grace and Lucille to a cattle auction in Georgia. Sister took her meals alone. Elinor, Frances, and Lilah ate dinner in splendor in the dining room, waited on by Zaddie in a starched black uniform.

  Nine-year-old Lilah chatted with her grandmother, telling her about the end of the school year and the party that was planned for the country club and what she wanted to do during the summer. Frances sat by, quietly eating, not exactly ignoring her daughter, but apparently oblivious to her. After dessert, Elinor said to Lilah, “Darling, why don’t you go upstairs for a little while? Your mama and I need to do a little talking.”

  Lilah, on the condition that Elinor allow her to sit at her vanity and try on her jewelry, assented.

  “Mama?” the child asked, turning to Frances.

  Frances looked up suddenly. “What, dear?”

  “Mama,” said Lilah slowly, with the air of imparting a lesson to a backward child, “may I be excused?”

  “Yes, of course,” said Frances absently.

  After Lilah had left the room, Elinor called in Zaddie. “Bring us some more coffee, Zaddie, and then close the doors, please.” Zaddie did so.

  Elinor sat silent and erect at the head of the table, fingering the black pearls gleaming dimly in the candlelight. Frances also sat quietly, her head slightly averted, gazing through the gauze curtains at the deep blackness of the pine forest beyond the edge of the property. A wind had sprung up in the last hour, and it was laden with moisture, portending heavy rain. The curtains blew about and the candles guttered.

  “Mama?” said Frances, without concern. “What did you want to talk about?”

  “You’re unhappy,” said Elinor simply. “It hurts me to see you unhappy. It hurts me very much.”

  Frances toyed with her coffee spoon, moving it slowly around the rim of her cup with its cooling, untasted coffee. “Yes,” said Frances at last, “I am unhappy, I guess.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I don’t know who I am,” said Frances quickly, and then glanced at her mother with surprise.

  “What do you mean—who you are?”

  “I feel like I’m losing touch,” said Frances.

  “With Billy?”

  “With everything,” returned Frances solemnly. “With Billy, with Lilah, with Daddy—with this house, with Perdido and money and clothes. With just about everything.”

  “With me?” asked Elinor.

  Frances smiled, reached out and squeezed her mother’s hand on the cut-work linen tablecloth.

  “No,” whispered Frances, “not with you. Everything is—I don’t know how to put this, Mama—vague, like I’m going blind or something. Fuzzy. Pale. And I hear the same way, too—fuzzy. That’s why everything has to be said to me twice before I say anything back. At first I thought maybe I should go see the doctor...”

  Elinor waved this away.

  “I know,” said Frances. “Besides, it’s not everything that’s so vague to me. See, you’re not. I see you, and I hear you talk—except when you’re talking to Billy or Daddy or Lilah or somebody—and you’re just the way you always were.”

  “What do you think it is?” asked Elinor.

  “I know what it is,” returned Frances. “And you do, too.”

  Elinor nodded.

  “You didn’t tell me about this part,” said Frances.

  “I didn’t know about it,” said Elinor. “I didn’t know it would happen.”

  Frances smiled wanly. “But it has. All this”—she waved her hand about the dining room, as if she meant it to encompass all of her life—“is fading, Mama. And you know what’s become real?”

  “Nerita?”

  Frances nodded. “That’s my real life, the time I spend with her.” Frances looked up at the ceiling. “Lilah—she’s not my little girl. She belongs to you much more than she does to me. Poor thing, I feel so sorry for her, because her real mama doesn’t love her the way she should. Lilah’s not my real little girl. My real little girl is out there in the Perdido. I worry about her. I think about her. You know why I never go off with Billy? You know why I never go off with Daddy? Because I couldn’t stand to be away from my little girl for a single day. Mama, I live for that hour in the water every afternoon.”

  “I know you do.”

  “And you know what I’ve found out?”

  “What?” asked Elinor apprehensively.

  “That even that one hour a day is too much. It’s harder and harder for me to change back. Sometimes I have to sit out on the edge of the river covering myself up with a blanket. One time Zaddie came out there looking for me, but I couldn’t stand up because she would have seen. And soon, Mama, what’s gone happen is that I won’t be able to go out in the water for even five minutes without that change keeping on for longer and longer.”

  “And that’s why you’re unhappy.”

  Frances nodded. “What if I had to stop seeing Nerita? It would kill me. Oh, Mama, do you know how happy we are down there?”

  Elinor nodded with a smile, and pushed away her coffee cup. “I’ve seen you. You are as happy with Nerita as I was with you. Darling, I love you! I love you so much! It kills me to see you like this.”

  “Then tell me what to do, Mama.”

  “I don’t know what you can do.”

  “Then just tell me what’s going to happen.”

  There was a sudden clap of thunder. A moment later, rain began to fall. Its scent invaded the room and the candles cowered beneath the dampness.

  The rain fell so hard that Elinor had to raise her voice to be heard over it. “I don’t know what’s going to happen.”

  . . .

  The rain continued throughout that evening. Frances and Elinor eventually went upstairs. They looked in on Lilah, who sat contented at the vanity, clipping diamond earrings to her ears.

  “You should have been Miriam’s little girl,” laughed Frances, “not mine. Someday you should get Miriam to open one of her safety-deposit boxes for you.”

  “I’ve already asked her,” said Lilah, expertly clasping a gold necklace at the back of her neck. “Are y’all still talking?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Elinor. “Do you mind?”

  “Do I have to get out?”

  “No,” said Elinor. “We’ll go across the hall.”

  Frances sat at her vanity, and Elinor took
down her daughter’s hair and began to brush it. The rain blew through the open window, soaking the curtains and dripping onto the carpet.

  “Do you want me to close that?” Elinor asked.

  Frances shrugged and was silent. She seemed lost in her own thoughts as her head was tugged this way and that by Elinor’s stern movements with the brush.

  At last, Frances looked up at her mother’s reflection in the mirror. “Mama,” said Frances softly, “what if I went back?”

  “Back?” Elinor echoed. The arm holding the brush trembled and dropped to her side.

  “Went back forever,” Frances went on.

  “It wouldn’t be going back, exactly,” said Elinor cautiously. “Because you never really lived there.”

  “Yes, but I could live there, couldn’t I?”

  Elinor didn’t answer this directly. “What about Billy?”

  Frances smiled. “Would you throw him out?”

  “Of course not. We all love Billy.”

  “Then Billy will be fine. Billy didn’t want to marry me, he just wanted to marry this family. If you let him stay on, he’d be happy. Maybe Miriam would marry him,” Frances mused.

  “What about Oscar? What about Lilah?” demanded Elinor, going to the window and slamming it down in its sash.

  “Daddy will miss me,” Frances conceded. “But Lilah won’t. I’ll leave her my jewels.” Frances flipped open the top of her jewelry case and plunged her fingers in. She withdrew her hand slowly. A bracelet and a single earring slipped to the carpet, but Frances apparently didn’t notice.

  “What about me?” Elinor asked at last.

  “Mama,” laughed Frances, “you can visit.”

  Elinor looked around the room. “Wouldn’t you miss everybody? Wouldn’t you miss everything you’ve always had? What if you got down there and didn’t like it, didn’t like the Perdido for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week?”