Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga
“Mama,” said Frances, following her mother’s gaze about the room, “this has been my room for thirty-five years, but it just doesn’t feel like home. That river does.”
Elinor sat down on the edge of her daughter’s bed. “When would you go?” she asked.
Frances glanced out the window. Lightning struck nearby and illuminated the tops of the water oaks in the sandy yards.
“Tonight,” said Frances. “Why not tonight?” She rose from the vanity. “Unhook me, Mama,” she said, with obvious excitement. “Help me undress.”
“You can’t—”
“Tonight is perfect,” said Frances. “I’ll just wait till Lilah is in bed.”
“What will I tell Billy, what will—”
“Tell everybody I drowned.” Frances shrugged. “Everybody in Perdido has been expecting it for years.” She walked to the window and raised it. She thrust her head out into the stormy night. Lightning exploded and thunder shook the house. Frances withdrew her head. Her hair was soaked, and rain streamed down her face.
“That hit the levee!” she laughed. “I saw it strike!”
She pulled off her earrings and dropped them on the vanity.
“All this stuff goes to Lilah. She’ll like it. I never did. Grace is about my size. Let her go through my closet. Everything else goes to the church in Baptist Bottom.”
Frances smiled as she said all this; her eyes sparkled.
Lilah pushed open the door of the room. “It’s really coming down,” she said. “I closed all the windows up here.”
She glanced with disapproval at the open window and the puddle of water forming on the edge of the carpet.
“Mama,” she said reproachfully, “didn’t you even notice?”
Frances only laughed. She threw herself down on the bench before the vanity and called Lilah over to her. Lilah edged closer.
Frances reached out and grabbed Lilah. She hugged her and laughed.
“Mama!” protested the little girl, who had rarely been embraced by her mother.
Elinor sat glumly on the edge of the bed and stared at her daughter. Her glance was not lost on Lilah.
“Mama, are you all right?” the girl asked cautiously, drawing back from her mother.
Frances grinned, swept up the earrings she had taken off, and clipped them to Lilah’s ears.
“Ouch!” cried Lilah.
“They’re yours!”
Lilah drew in her breath sharply, and held it. Swiveling around she looked at her grandmother with an expression that said, Can I keep them?
Elinor nodded yes.
Frances laughed again, picked up the entire jewelry box and thrust it into her daughter’s hands.
“You want these, too?”
Lilah backed away.
Frances shrugged, laughed, and stood up. She waved her arms before her. “Go to bed, go to bed! It’s late!”
In mute wonder, with her hands over the emerald bobs on her ears, Lilah backed out of her mother’s bedroom. She ran across the hall to her bedroom and slammed the door shut.
. . .
The storm abated for a bit, then returned with greater force. Perdido closed its windows, pulled its curtains drawn, and turned up the volume on its television sets. An oak sapling on the Baptist Bottom levee was struck with lightning and burst into flames, burning a few seconds before the torrential rain snuffed it out like an ignited match plunged into a cistern full of water.
At eleven o’clock, Perdido went to its windows, looked out, and wondered that the storm didn’t stop. Small trenches appeared in the earth around foundations, dug by the cascade of water falling from roofs. Gutters were overwhelmed. Perdido felt the first twinges of uneasiness over the fact that, in three decades, no municipal funds had been spent on the maintenance of the levees. The rivers would no doubt rise.
Children trembled in their beds, bracing for the next burst of thunder. With flashlights their parents searched out leaks, wearily placing buckets and pans beneath them.
Elinor’s house was quiet. Lilah was asleep. Zaddie lay in bed reading old copies of Coronet and listening as the rain beat against the low sloping roof of the lattice.
At the very peak of the storm, with lightning crackling across the sky for long seconds, sharp blasts of thunder lasting for what seemed like minutes, and rain falling in heavy sheets, two figures appeared on the front porch of the Caskey mansion at the edge of the town. No one saw them.
Frances was clad in a loose dark robe. Her mother wore a long dark raincoat. Both women were barefoot.
Frances looked at her mother for a moment. Then she leaned forward and threw her arms about Elinor. She squeezed tightly and Elinor squeezed back.
Frances stepped through the veil of black water that poured thunderously from the roof of the house.
She paused at the foot of the steps and looked back up.
Elinor stepped boldly through the curtain of water, descended the steps, and grasped her daughter’s hand.
Together, they made their way around the house and into the shadow and protection of the water oaks. Neither glanced at the lighted window of Sister’s room next door, as they walked slowly toward the levee. In such darkness and heavy rain as this, they were confident they’d never be seen. They mounted the steps behind Queenie’s house, stood for a few moments on the top of the clay embankment, and gazed down into the swiftly flowing black waters of the Perdido, its surface a wide dark ribbon of turbulence.
Frances again embraced her mother. When she drew away, Elinor plucked the robe from her daughter’s shoulders and allowed it to fall in the red mud atop the levee. Frances stood naked.
Frances glanced once more at her mother, saying nothing. She did not touch her, but stepped to the side of the levee that sloped down to the river, then went sliding down past blackberry brambles, past saplings, past broken bottles and clumps of kudzu roots till she reached the bottom.
Elinor peered down. An enormous bolt of lightning illuminated the entire sky, and Elinor saw her daughter descend into the water. Before she went completely under, Frances raised one hand in brief farewell.
Elinor remained at the top of the levee for half an hour. The lightning and thunder had moved northward, but the rain was still heavy. The night was darker. Finally she walked slowly down the concrete steps and across the yard. After bathing each foot in the curtain of water falling from the roof of the house, she went inside and roused Zaddie to tell her of Frances’s drowning in the night water of the Perdido.
VI: Rain
Chapter 72
The Engagement
Perhaps they were only that: two old women gossiping, gossiping forever in a back bedroom of an old house in a remote corner of Alabama. In 1958 Sister Haskew was sixty-four-years-old, crippled, bed-ridden, querulous, weak, dependent, and demanding. Queenie Strickland was sixty-six, fat, happy, bustling, devoted, and cheerful. Both women were immensely rich, and neither one of them ever gave a second thought to the money they possessed. Queenie was Sister’s slave and spy. Queenie fetched and carried. Queenie left her own house, next door, promptly at six fifty-five in order to bring Sister’s breakfast tray to her at seven o’clock every morning, and at seven o’clock every evening, Queenie carried Sister’s supper tray down to Ivey’s darkened kitchen, and dropped the dishes on the counter with a clatter and a sigh. Sister would never have allowed Queenie away from her bedside at all had it not been for Sister’s insatiable curiosity about the goings-on of the town, the mill, and her own family. Queenie was allowed to play bridge, go shopping, drive out to her daughter Lucille’s farm, and eat dinner next door at Elinor’s, only because when she returned to Sister’s musty, close, cluttered bedroom, she would be able to relate to Sister all that had been done and everything that had been said. Sister would take these random bits of information and draw wild conclusions and predictions, and invariably Queenie said, “Sister, you are wrong, that’s not gone happen.” And indeed, Sister’s predictions never did come true, not a single o
ne of them. Sister had been so long removed from society that she had almost forgot how it worked. Queenie was a faithful reporter, but Sister’s analysis was never correct.
The house in which Sister and Miriam lived had altered its whole character in the past dozen years. When Mary-Love was alive, and during Miriam’s adolescence, the place had seemed suffused with a kind of vitality bred—some would say—of meanness, but perhaps really only of energetic purpose. It had firmly stood its ground between Elinor’s much larger residence on one side, and James Caskey’s more genteel home on the other. Now something in its aspect, with the porches and all the first-floor windows hidden behind azaleas and camellias that had been allowed to grow unchecked, suggested that the house was drawing in upon itself, that it no longer set itself up in any sort of competition with its neighbors, that it wished to retire from the fray. Inside it smelled of age. The furniture was still exactly as it had been on the day of Mary-Love Caskey’s death twenty-two years before. This was not out of reverence for the dead woman, but because for one thing Miriam didn’t care enough to want to change it, and for another, Sister liked to be reminded as often as possible—although she would never admit it, even to herself—that Mary-Love was, after all, dead. Ivey Sapp was an old woman, too, as old as Queenie, and she had buried Bray in the spring of 1957. She now had Melva, a granddaughter of James’s cook, Roxie, to help her. Ivey was fatter even than Queenie, and did nothing but sit in the kitchen all day listening to the radio and giving directions to Melva; she would bestir herself only to cook the few dishes that Sister would eat.
Sister had lain so many years in bed that the entire house smelled of her and her infirmity, a pale powdery lavender sweetness like the herbs used by the Egyptians to fill the cavity of an eviscerated corpse. A person of delicate temperament might have gone mad in that place without ever realizing why. Miriam Caskey, thirty-seven now, was of a temperament robust enough to withstand the fragility of the atmosphere in which she slept every night, though perhaps the air in her room, the door of which she made sure was kept carefully shut all day, was not so sickly.
Though Early Haskew had never returned for Sister, she declared that she could not rest comfortably at night until Miriam had double-checked the locks on all the downstairs doors and windows. “That man will climb through to get at me,” Sister constantly declaimed. “That man will raise ladders against the side of the house and peer at me through the window.” Miriam had given up arguing that Early, wherever he was, was sixty-four years old, probably very fat, and unlikely to be inclined toward feats of athletic prowess.
Sister and Miriam weren’t close. Miriam could not forget that Sister’s infirmity, though real enough now, had begun in fakery. After her fall down the stairs, occasioned by her temporary blindness, Sister had taken to bed on account of a supposed weakness in her legs. And in order to avoid her husband, she had kept to that bed, willing her legs to wither so that Early would never have the opportunity to spirit her away from her cherished home. Miriam could not bring herself to cater to a woman who had deliberately crippled herself. And Sister, for her part, felt that Miriam spent too much time with the mill and the Caskey oil business and not enough time with her. Sister said to Queenie, “I’m rich, you know that? I’ve got so much money I don’t have the first idea what to do with it. And you know who it’s going to? Every penny goes to Miriam. I’ve told her so. And how does Miriam treat me? She treats me like I’m a poor cousin.”
“I used to be a poor cousin,” Queenie pointed out.
“Exactly,” said Sister, nodding her head, “and Miriam treats me the way that Mama and everybody else in the family used to treat you. Like I was a no-class, no-account sponger.”
This speech startled Queenie, not because it was rude—which it certainly was—but rather because it sounded very much like something Mary-Love Caskey herself might have said. It set Queenie to thinking, and she told herself that she would pay more attention to Sister’s manner in the future. Queenie watched, and Queenie listened, and Queenie concluded that Sister was growing more and more like her dead mother.
One day after church, in early fall of 1958, Queenie stopped Miriam outside in the yard, and said, “Miriam, have you noticed something about Sister?”
“You mean that she gets more demanding every day?” The Alabama summer still lingered, and Miriam stripped off her gloves with relief. She unpinned her hat, and shook out her hair.
“No,” said Queenie with a little frown. “I mean the fact that she’s getting more and more like Mary-Love every day.”
Miriam smiled. “Haven’t you realized before this? Haven’t you seen the way she signs checks?”
“‘Elvennia Haskew.’ How else would she sign checks?” Queenie returned, surprised.
“No,” said Miriam. She turned and went up the steps onto the porch and sat down in a wicker rocker; Queenie did the same. “About a year ago,” Miriam continued, “I got called down to the bank because they said somebody was forging Sister’s checks. So I went down there, and looked at the checks that had come in. There was ‘Elvennia Haskew’ all right—but it was in Grandmama’s handwriting.” Miriam laughed. “My heart jumped, and I thought, ‘Lord God, she’s come back from the grave, and what are we gone do?’ The n’s were the same, and the a at the end of the word. Just like Grandmama’s. I came back here, and I said, ‘Sister, why are you playing games with your signature? You are upsetting the people down at the bank.’ And Sister didn’t even know what I was talking about. So I showed her her old signature, and then I showed her the one she had just put on that check, and she said, ‘I don’t see any difference.’ I didn’t say anything else. But you look sometime, get her to write something out for you—the handwriting is Grandmama’s, stroke for stroke.”
“You loved your grandmama,” remarked Queenie, though the spirit of Miriam’s remarks had suggested otherwise.
“I did,” said Miriam. “I loved her very, very much. I’ve never loved anybody as much as I loved her. But thank God she’s dead, and thank God she’s never coming back. She ruled the roost back then. And right now I rule the roost. So it’s just as well that she and I don’t have to fight it out.”
“If Mary-Love were alive,” said Queenie, “she wouldn’t be fighting with you. She’d still be fighting with Elinor. She’d leave you alone.”
“Nope,” said Miriam. “She’d think I was uppity, and she’d try to keep me down. Just like Sister is now. Sister thinks I’m uppity, running the mill the way I do. Never mind that I’m making money for all of us, I’m not paying enough attention to her. Not waiting on her hand and foot the way you do.”
“I don’t mind,” said Queenie.
“I know you don’t, but I would. And I’d never do it, either. Sister brought all this on herself, Queenie, you know she did. Sister fell down the stairs eleven years ago. She could have been up and around in a few weeks, but all these years later she is still making people wait on her, people that have better things to do with their lives. I love Sister. I was brought up to love Sister. I will love her until the minute she sinks down dead in those five feather mattresses and those seven damned pillows. But I’m never gone say, ‘Sister, I’m sorry you’re crippled,’ or ‘Sister, I’m sorry you’re lonely up there.’ And she knows better than to ask me.”
Just then Lilah wandered over from next door. Miriam smiled and held out her hands to her eleven-year-old niece. Lilah came up the steps.
“Grandmama says dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes and come on over when you want.”
Queenie, whose appetite had never faltered in all her gathering years, stood up immediately. “Coming?” she asked Miriam.
Lilah said quickly, “Miriam, will you take me upstairs and let me see your jewelry?”
“I’ll show you some,” said Miriam. “And I’ll let you try on a few things, too.” So Miriam and Lilah went into the house and Queenie walked across the sandy yard to Elinor’s, hoping to find something to nibble in the kitchen before they
all sat down.
. . .
“Who’s that?” cried Sister, hearing the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.
“It’s me!” called Miriam. “And Lilah!”
“Lilah, come speak to me!”
Lilah ran down the hall, leaned into Sister’s room, and impatiently cried, “Not yet! Miriam’s gone let me try on some of her jewelry.”
“You try it on and then you come down here and show it to me.”
Lilah hurried back to Miriam’s room. She feared she had missed what for her was the best part, the opening of the drawer, but she hadn’t. Miriam just stood before the dresser, smiling. “I’ll let you do it today,” she said to Lilah.
Lilah dropped to her knees and reverently pulled out the bottom drawer of the old dresser. In it were stacked nine jewelry boxes, each one of a different size, each of a different age, each of a different texture. To Lilah, they were as dissimilar as any nine persons waiting in line at the bank. And each one was filled with treasure.
“Which one do you want to look in?” asked Miriam.
Lilah pointed to the middle box in the right-hand stack. “This one,” she said.
Miriam took a small key from her pocket, and went to a peculiar little chest in the corner of the room. It was as tall as she and as narrow, and had a mirror on the door. Lilah loved this upright chest, for she had never seen one that was anything like it. Inside were a dozen narrow shelves, and on those shelves Miriam kept things no one else was allowed to see. On the top shelf were nothing but keys, hundreds and hundreds of keys that opened God and Miriam only knew what locks. Without hesitation Miriam withdrew a ring of tiny keys from the back, and unerringly inserted one into the lock of the chest that Lilah had chosen. The case opened instantly.
Inside were earrings, jumbled together: bobs in emeralds and bobs in rubies and diamonds; pearl drops in gold settings; tiny golden studs delicately fashioned in the shape of stars, and ships, and horses; fancy antique drops, the like of which Lilah had never known existed, massive with filigreed metalwork and a variety of stones; chaste modern work of single black pearls. Pressing her hands into the box, she was stung with sharp clasps and pins and facets—but she felt a thrill to such pain. It seemed impossible that each piece she picked up had its mate somewhere in the welter of gems, but Miriam assured her that it was so. “I don’t buy single pieces,” Miriam said, “and I never lose anything, so they’re all there somewhere.”