Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  The eyes, Mary-Love’s voice echoed. John Robert, the eyes.

  “Mama—” Oscar said. It was his last word. John Robert DeBordenave swung the table leg one more time, and that single nail exploded through the cataract of Oscar’s eye, burst the eyeball, tore apart the optic nerve, and plunged three inches deep into his brain.

  Chapter 81

  Footsteps

  It was Elinor who discovered Oscar’s corpse, counted the punctures in his body, extracted the nail that was lodged in his brain, and persuaded Leo Benquith, in senile retirement, to sign a death certificate without even looking at his old friend. It was Elinor who prepared the body for burial, and she and Zaddie who lifted Oscar’s stiffened form into his coffin. The town protested loudly, but Elinor said, “Oscar made me promise to do it all myself.” The other members of the family did not protest; Elinor had her reasons, doubtlessly, and it was probably best not to enquire into them too closely.

  All the furniture in that bedroom and sitting room—the furniture with which Oscar and Elinor had started out their marriage—Elinor gave to Escue Wells and Luvadia Sapp out at Gavin Pond Farm. All Oscar’s clothing and the very linen they had used in those rooms was distributed among the poor through the Methodist Church in Baptist Bottom. “These rooms smell of Oscar,” Elinor said to Zaddie. “I won’t have these rooms smelling of him when I go to sleep at night. I won’t be reminded of him like that. I think of him enough as it is.”

  A rumor got around that Oscar’s death had not been natural after all. Murder, however, seemed unlikely. Nobody was at the house that night but Zaddie, and Zaddie’s care for Oscar in his blindness was widely known and universally commended. Her life-long loyalty to the family placed her above suspicion. Since Leo Benquith would not speak, even to provide details that would have corroborated heart failure as the cause of death—as the death certificate read—the town eventually decided that Oscar, depressed because of the failure of the operation on his cataracts, had committed suicide. His last note to Elinor, it was said, was now in a safety-deposit box in Mobile. Suicide was a sufficient explanation for all the mystery surrounding the very private disposition of Oscar Caskey’s corpse.

  Oscar had withdrawn so from the family the last years of his life that his death made a difference only to Elinor, and Zaddie, and Sammy Sapp, really. Only they had had anything to do with him for the past two years. Poor Sammy Sapp wondered if he’d have to give up his uniform and move back out to the farm. Like so many Sapps before him, he really did prefer the town existence. Elinor kept Sammy on; she said it befitted her station to have a chauffeur.

  . . .

  Perdido watched Elinor closely. The behavior of a widow was always a matter of interest and comment, and Elinor Caskey was, in herself, no ordinary woman. Perdido noticed a number of things: the first was that she did not weep at the funeral. And after that ceremony, she did not wear black, nor did she in any other manner appear to change the routine of her former existence. She went on living just as she had lived when her husband was alive. For the nearly fifty years of their marriage, she had appeared devoted to him, and he to her. Perdido uncharitably concluded that the marriage, in the last years particularly, had been only a sham. Elinor and Oscar had remained together out of convenience, because a rupture would have proved financially inconvenient to the entire family. Elinor and Oscar, Perdido was certain, had grown cold to one another as they got older. Elinor had become exasperated with her husband’s blindness, Oscar had shrunk beneath Elinor’s lack of sympathy.

  In company, even within the family, Elinor never talked of Oscar. She never made a mistake, as many people do who have lost a loved one, and spoke of him as if he were still alive. Every morning, after the beds had been made, Sammy drove Elinor and Zaddie over to the cemetery and Zaddie got out of the car and placed fresh flowers on Oscar’s grave. There was something so cold and perfunctory in this ritual—Elinor never got out of the car; never even rolled down the window, for that matter—that Perdido concluded that it was as false as Elinor’s grief. In the new part of town, among the people who had lived in Perdido for only twenty or thirty years, rumor had it that old man Caskey hadn’t died a natural death, and that Elinor and her maid had done him in for the money that was to come to both of them.

  It was indicative of the changes in the Caskey family that this rumor was able to get started at all; and it was indicative of the changes in the family’s relationship to the town that the Caskeys never even got wind of it. Perdido had grown, and Perdido had got rich. The people who had bought up land after the discovery of oil were now rolling in money. And there were the owners of the new shops and other businesses who catered to and serviced this new wealth. The money that spewed up out of the earth, out of hundreds and hundreds of wells, settled over Perdido, and was spouted up again and again, until it seemed that the whole town might drown in it.

  The Caskey mill continued, and expanded even further, under Miriam’s direction, but it wasn’t the small local operation that it had been. Workers now came from all over; they drove down every morning from Brewton, over from Jay, and up from Bay Minette. Three full shifts kept the mills going twenty-four hours a day; Miriam allowed the plants to shut down only on Sundays and national holidays. Of course a great number of people from Perdido still worked at the mill, or made their livings indirectly from it, but it no longer seemed essential to the town’s well-being. Perdido now was always full of strangers, people who had no real interest in the town.

  The Caskeys, of course, were very rich—far richer than anyone in Perdido suspected, in fact, for they didn’t make an ostentatious show of their wealth. The newest house in the Caskey compound was Elinor’s, and that had been built fifty years before. All the new wealth in Perdido had put up huge houses on the outskirts of town, with triple-car garages, swimming pools, and tennis courts serving as proof of substantial means. One of the doctors in town even bought himself an airplane, and built a landing strip right beside his house on which to show it off. New wealth constructed beach houses down at Destin, and made yearly trips to Disneyland and Acapulco. New wealth ate out in Pensacola nearly every night, and sent its boys off to military schools in North Carolina and Virginia. Its girls stayed at home and got three years of braces. The Caskeys, however, lived on in their dowdy houses, with their old furniture, and did what they had always done. It was commonly recognized that the Caskeys had allowed Perdido to pass them by.

  Queenie’s death had broken up the Monday afternoon bridge club, and Elinor did not apparently care to play with the younger women who had taken it over. After Oscar’s death Elinor allowed their membership in the Lake Pinchona Country Club to lapse, but an even more drastic change was the fact that the Caskeys no longer went to church. First Elinor stopped going, and then Billy stayed home—to keep her company, he said. Miriam bluntly announced, “Well, Mama, if you can stay away, then I can too. One less time to dress up every week is fine with me. And there is plenty of work I can do.” Malcolm would never have thought of doing anything that Miriam didn’t do herself, so all the Perdido Caskeys remained away. Elinor still punctually paid a yearly pledge to the church, and, discreetly, she was never to be seen on her front porch or riding around the town during the hours of Sunday school or morning services. The Caskeys’ apparent apostasy was much discussed around town, and Perdido postulated decades of arguments between Elinor and Oscar on the subject of church attendance.

  With ever greater frequency, Miriam and Malcolm were out of town on business. In the past decade Miriam had found a series of managers who pleased her and to whom she had turned over most of the day-to-day business of the mill. She retained for herself all the more complex, personal, and exciting business of investments and large-scale bargaining. There had been a time when she had relied a great deal on Billy Bronze. When Miriam encountered executives who didn’t fancy dealing with a woman, Billy had been there to back her up. But now Miriam herself was well known, and even when she wasn’t, she had developed en
ough finesse to handle just about any situation. Also, on those occasions when she ran into an executive who just wouldn’t take her seriously because she was a woman, Miriam merely shrugged and walked out in the midst of the conversation, leaving the man to discover later what a foolish mistake he had made. She was rich enough to do that now. Miriam preferred to work alone, and Billy preferred to remain with Elinor. Billy gave up his downtown office, and converted two of the bedrooms upstairs to his own use.

  When he was young, Billy Bronze had dreamed of many types of existence, but never this. He would never have chosen Perdido as a place to live. He was certain he didn’t like small towns; he always preferred places like Houston and New Orleans. He didn’t like the smell of the river. He had no friends in Perdido.

  Yet here he was, living in an old house with an aging mother-in-law, rising at seven, sitting down to a formal breakfast in the dining room, and then retiring to his air-conditioned office on the second floor, where he looked over the morning mail and talked on the telephone to Miriam at the mill, to brokers in New York, and to oilmen in Texas. He had a secretary come in at noon to type up all his letters, and while she worked Billy had lunch with Elinor and Miriam and Malcolm. After lunch he and Elinor sat out on the screened-in porch and talked until the secretary was finished. Then Billy went back and shut himself in his office again. He most often took supper alone with Elinor in quiet contented splendor. In the evening he watched television, or listened to ball games on Oscar’s radio—the only item of Oscar’s private possessions that remained in the house. Billy went to bed early, not because the day had wearied him, but rather because there seemed nothing else to do.

  He was quite rich now, richer than he had ever imagined possible; he had inherited all of Frances’s money, all his father’s, and he had much that he had made himself—but he did nothing at all with it. He never went anywhere, he never bought anything. It was Elinor who said, “Billy, it’s about time you had a new suit.” And then Sammy Sapp would drive him and Elinor down to Mobile and Elinor would choose three or four new suits for him and pay for them herself. Billy had assumed, when he was young, that he would have a family: a wife and three children—two boys and a girl. He had married, of course, but his wife was dead, and he lived on with his widowed mother-in-law. He had had a daughter, but that daughter had been taken away from him. Lilah no longer even called him “Daddy,” and he saw her not more than once a year, and only then when it pleased her to come home for Christmas.

  All his little dreams as a young man—all those things he would get, and have and be—were merely means to the end, and the end was personal happiness. Things hadn’t turned out the way he imagined they would, not at all, but he was, nonetheless, quite happy. He worried that he was fooling himself, that he was closing his eyes and declaring loudly that the bars that constrained him were not there at all. Perhaps they were there: were this house, and Elinor, and the pecan orchard across the way, and the levee and the river flowing behind the levee, Miriam making demands on him over the telephone on one side, and the dark pine forest on the other. If they were, though, he didn’t feel them. He honestly didn’t feel constrained; or if he did, then it was constraint itself that gave him pleasure.

  Now it seemed likely that he would attend Elinor on her death-bed, for he was only forty-seven, and Elinor at this time was probably seventy-four or seventy-five. Sometimes that was his thought, and no other, when he raised his eyes from the foot of the dining room table and stared down the expanse of white linen to where his mother-in-law sat, erect and regal, with the candlelight gleaming on the ropes of black pearls about her neck.

  . . .

  Some years before, Oscar had had the house air conditioned throughout, and the two large units, located just under the window of Zaddie’s room, hummed loudly from April through October. Oscar had liked the house chilled, for he was very warm-blooded, and Elinor and Billy and Zaddie had grown so used to it that they did not raise the thermostat after Oscar’s death. As a result, Billy always slept under covers, and in the summer he always fell asleep with the noise of forced cold air in his ears. That and the hum of the cooling units themselves outside covered up all the small night noises in that large old house—or almost all. As he lay awake so many nights, Billy noticed that his hearing became acuter. He could make out noises beneath the air conditioning: the creaks, and the false footpads, the snaps in the furniture, and the slight ringing in cupboards filled with glassware.

  Yet the noises on some nights were more than that, more than the occasional creak, snap, and ringing. Sometimes Billy seemed to hear one of the outside doors swinging damply open, as if Zaddie had peered out the back door perhaps to see if the moon had yet risen, and then allowed the door to swing softly shut again. On other nights he seemed to hear footsteps on the stairs. He knew that one stair in particular creaked, on the right-hand side going up, and sometimes he heard that stair. Perhaps Zaddie was going up to the staircase window to peer out at the stars. Billy never got up to look. Once he was in bed, he stayed there. Even when he had nightmares, and lay sweating and trembling in bed, his feet remained unswervingly pointed at the bouquet of violets painted on the foot board and his hands lay palm upward atop the neatly folded covers. He often awoke chilled with the sweat of the nightmare clammy upon his brow.

  On rainy nights, the water falling against the windows of the house further masked whatever noises played in the house. Yet, as if whatever caused those sounds was emboldened by that extra masking noise, the footsteps and the creaks and the snaps became less surreptitious. Billy would gaze toward the door that opened onto the linen corridor leading to the front room. Or he would stare at the lightly curtained windows that looked onto the screened porch. He would strain to hear, and particularly on these rainy nights, he thought he detected voices in the house—whispers, low laughter, and tiny smothered squeals.

  Billy grew used to these noises, just as he had grown used to his strictured life. He did not mention them to Elinor or Zaddie. For all he knew, one of them might be sneaking friends into the house; or they might be staying up late together and talking of Oscar and all the others they had seen die. Whoever moved so softly about the house at night wished to remain unknown to Billy. And Billy delicately refused to pry.

  One morning just after dawn, one of Billy’s worst nightmares returned, and he was so frightened that he woke up rather than allowing it to continue. He immediately forgot its substance, though he knew that whatever it was, he had dreamed it before. He lay still in the bed, feeling the salty sweat drip from his forehead into his eyes. He turned his head and examined the door to the linen closet. He did this every morning, he knew not why, but he was always relieved to find that it had not been opened—though who should open it, or why he thought it might swing open of its own accord, he had no idea. Then he looked in the other direction, and saw the early morning sunlight filtering through the sheer curtains. He could make out the green furniture of the porch dimly, and that too was a comfort. He got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and quietly bathed and shaved; it was fully an hour before his usual time, and he did not wish to disturb Elinor across the hall. He dressed, and then stepped out into the hallway, intending to go downstairs and beg an early cup of coffee from Zaddie. He wondered if he’d have to wake her up.

  But Zaddie was not only up, she was kneeling on the staircase landing beneath the great window, wiping up a large puddle of water.

  Billy quietly went down the stairs.

  “Morning, Zaddie. What happened?” Billy asked.

  “I spilled a glass of water,” returned Zaddie uneasily.

  Billy said nothing, though he didn’t believe her. Zaddie didn’t like to lie, and lying showed in her face. But even if Zaddie’s face had borne the serenity of lying Sapphira’s, Billy would have known that it was not a glass of water that spilled there. As he passed Zaddie on his way downstairs, he was assailed with the smell of muddy Perdido water.

  He still said nothing, but he noticed
that the stairs were all damp. Zaddie, then, had just finished mopping up Perdido water from all the stairs.

  . . .

  In fact, Billy said nothing about the incident for so long a time that his very silence on the matter seemed to take on substance for him in that sluggish household. Elinor had never said a word about hearing noises or voices at night. Neither had Zaddie. But both Elinor and Zaddie looked at Billy every morning as if they wondered whether this morning, he would say anything. And when he never did, the women seemed to look at him in a way that suggested that they approved of his decision to say nothing. This, at least, was Billy’s interpretation of what was going on in their minds and was very likely—he thought—only more of his imagination.

  Yet as if reassured by his silence, Billy was certain that the noises grew louder, less constrained. Now, beneath the air conditioner, beneath the rain, Billy very definitely made out footsteps; steps that came up the stairs and sometimes went directly into Elinor’s room, and sometimes paused at his own door first. Billy would lie in bed, unmoving, but thinking bravely, Come in. Come in. But always the steps turned away. Occasionally there was a second set of steps, too, but these were quite different, halting and clumsy, and they never paused at his door. Then would come the voices. He could make out Elinor’s voice now—that was easy. The second voice was more difficult to identify. It wasn’t Zaddie, of that he was certain. Yet it was familiar. It sounded, in fact, like Frances’s voice. But since Frances was dead, it must be someone whose voice made him think of his drowned wife. But he could think of no one, and that bothered him. The third voice wasn’t like any that he had ever heard before, sometimes it was a hoarse bleat, and sometimes a kind of singing—singing that was neither happy, sad, reverent, patriotic, or any of the other things he had ever associated with song.