Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  Hoping their worms will sting; not man outside,

  Yet will I out of hate engender much:

  I’ll be the father of a world of ghosts

  And get the grave with carcase.

  Thomas Lovell Beddoes, “Love’s Arrow Poisoned”

  Prologue

  At dawn on Easter Sunday morning, 1919, the cloudless sky over Perdido, Alabama, was a pale translucent pink not reflected in the black waters that for the past week had entirely flooded the town. The sun, immense and reddish-orange, had risen just above the pine forest on the far side of what had been Baptist Bottom. This was the low-lying area of Perdido where all the emancipated blacks had huddled in 1865, and where their children and grandchildren huddled still. Now it was only a murky swirl of planks and tree limbs and bloated dead animals. Of downtown Perdido no more was to be seen than the town hall, with its four-faced tower clock, and the second floor of the Osceola Hotel. Only memory might tell where the courses of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers had lain scarcely a week before. All twelve hundred inhabitants of Perdido had fled to higher ground. The town rotted beneath a wide sheet of stinking, still black water, which only now was beginning to recede. The pediments and gables and chimneys of houses that had not been broken up and washed away jutted up through the black shining surface of the flood, stone and brick and wooden emblems of distress. But no assistance came to their silent summonses, and driftwood and unidentifiable detritus and scraps of clothing and household furnishings swept against them and were caught and formed reeking nests around those upraised fingers.

  Black water lapped lazily against the brick walls of the town hall and the Osceola Hotel. The water was otherwise silent and unmoving. People who have never lived through a flood may imagine that fish swim in and out of the broken windows of submerged houses, but they don’t. In the first place, the windows don’t break, for no matter how well constructed a house may have been, the water rises through the floorboards, and the windowless pantry is flooded to the same depth as the front porch. And beyond that, the fish keep to the old riverbeds, just as if they hadn’t twenty or thirty feet more of new freedom above that. Floodwater is foul, and filled with foul things, and catfish and bream, though they don’t like the unaccustomed darkness, swim in confused circles around their old rocks and their old weeds and their familiar bridge pilings.

  Someone standing in the little square room directly beneath the town hall clocks, and peering out the narrow vertical window that looked west, might have seen approaching across that flat black unreflecting surface of still rank water, as out of what remained of the night, a solitary rowboat with two men in it. Yet no one was in that room beneath the clocks, and the dust on the marble floor, and the birds’ nests among the rafters, and the gentle whirr of the last bit of machinery that hadn’t quite yet run down, remained undisturbed. There was no one to wind the clocks, for who had remained in Perdido when the waters had risen so high? The solitary rowboat plied its stately, solemn course unobserved. It came slowly from the direction of the millowners’ fine houses that lay beneath the muddy waters of the Perdido River to the northwest. The boat, which was painted green—for some reason, all such boats in Perdido were painted green—was paddled by a black man about thirty years old. Sitting before him in the prow was a white man, only a few years younger.

  Neither had spoken for some time. Each had stared about in wonder at the spectacle of Perdido—where they had been born and where they had been raised—submerged beneath eighteen feet of foul water. What Easter but that first in Jerusalem had dawned so bleakly, or stirred less hope in the breasts of those who had witnessed the rising of that morning’s sun?

  “Bray,” said the white man at last, “row up toward the town hall.”

  “Mr. Oscar,” protested the black man, “we don’t know what’s in them rooms.”

  The water had risen to the bottom of the second-floor windows.

  “I want to see what’s in the rooms, Bray. Go on over.”

  The black man reluctantly turned the boat in the direction of the town hall, and gave a hard, smooth impetus to the paddle. They sailed close. The boat actually bumped against the marble balustrade of the second-floor balcony.

  “You not going in!” cried Bray, when Oscar Caskey reached out and grasped one of the thick balusters.

  Oscar shook his head. The baluster was covered with the slime of the flood. He attempted to wipe it off on his trousers, but succeeded only in transferring some of the stink.

  “Nearer that window.”

  Bray maneuvered the boat to the first window to the right of the balcony.

  The sun hadn’t got around to that side of the building yet, and the office—that of the town registrar—was dim. The water lay in a shallow black pool over most of the floor. Chairs and tables were scattered about, and a number of file cabinets had been toppled. Others, whose thickly packed contents had become sodden with floodwater, had burst open under the pressure of expansion. Thick rotting sheaves of official county and town documents lay scattered everywhere. A rejected application for voting privileges in the 1872 election lay on the windowsill, and Oscar could even make out the name on it.

  “What you see, Mr. Oscar?”

  “Not much. I see damage. I see trouble ahead when the water goes down.”

  “This whole town’s gone have trouble when the water go down. So let’s don’t look in no more windows, Mr. Oscar. Don’t know what we gone see.”

  “What could we see?” Oscar turned around and looked at the black man. Bray had worked for the Caskeys since he was eight years old. He had been hired as a playmate to Oscar, then only four; had graduated into an errand boy, and then to the Caskeys’ principal gardener. His common-law wife, Ivey Sapp, was the Caskey cook.

  Bray Sugarwhite continued to paddle the little green boat down the middle of Palafox Street. Oscar Caskey gazed to the right and the left, and attempted to recollect whether the barbershop had a triangular pediment with a carved wooden ball atop it, or whether that ornament belonged to Berta Hamilton’s dress shop. The Osceola Hotel loomed up on the right, fifty yards farther on. Its hanging sign had been dislodged sometime on Friday, and probably by this time, was knocking upside of a shrimp boat five miles out in the Gulf of Mexico.

  “We not gone look in any more windows, are we, Mr. Oscar?” said Bray apprehensively as they got nearer the hotel. Oscar in the prow was peering this way and that around the sides of that building.

  “Bray, I thought I saw something move in one of those windows.”

  “That the sun,” said Bray quickly. “That the sun on them dirty windows.”

  “It wasn’t a reflection,” said Oscar Caskey. “You do like I tell you, and you paddle up to that corner window.”

  “I’m not gone do it.”

  “Bray, you are gone do it,” said Oscar Caskey, not even turning around, “so don’t bother telling me you’re not. Just go up to that corner window.”

  “I’m not gone look in no more windows,” said Bray, not completely under his breath. Then aloud, as he was changing course and paddling nearer the second floor of the hotel, he said, “Pro’bly rats in there. When the water ’gin to rise in Baptist Bottom, I see the rats come up out of their holes, and they run along the top of the fences. Rats know where it’s dry. Ever’body get out of Perdido last Wednesday, it was. So not nothing in that hotel but them smart rats.”

  The boat bumped against the eastern facade of the brick hotel. The sun reflected a blinding red against the glass panes. Oscar peered through the window nearest him.

  All the furniture inside the small hotel room—the bed, the dresser, the chifforobe, the washstand, and the hat rack—were jumbled together in the middle of the floor as if thrown together at the center of a maelstrom that had sunk into the first story. All of it was covered with mud. The carpet, muddy and stiff and black, was bunched together in the corner against the door. In the dimness Oscar could not make out the high-water mark on the dark wallpaper.

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nbsp; The carpet trembled, and Oscar saw two large rats rush from a fold of the rug toward the hill of furniture in the center of the room. Oscar jerked his gaze from the window.

  “Rats?” asked Bray. “See! I tell you, Mr. Oscar, nothing in this hotel but rats. Don’t need to be looking through no more windows.”

  Oscar Caskey didn’t answer Bray, but he stood up, and, grasping the frame of the tattered awning of the next window, he pulled the boat toward the corner of the hotel.

  “Bray,” said Oscar Caskey, “this is the window where I saw something move. I saw something pass in front of this window, and it wasn’t any rat ’cause rats aren’t five feet high.”

  “Rats been feeding on the flood,” said Bray, though what he meant to suggest Oscar wasn’t certain.

  Oscar leaned forward in the boat, grasping the concrete casement of the window with both hands. He peered through the dirty panes.

  The corner room appeared to have been untouched by the floodwaters. The bed, quietly made, stood where it ought, against the long corridor wall, and the rug was squarely arranged beneath it. The chifforobe and the dresser and the washstand were in their places. Nothing had fallen to the floor and broken. However, where the sun, shining through the eastern window, illuminated a large patch of the carpet, Oscar saw that it was sopping wet—so that he was forced to conclude that the water had risen through the floorboards.

  But why the furniture in this room should have remained so placidly in place while everything in the adjoining chamber had been broken apart and tossed together and—as a last indignity—sheeted in black mud, Oscar could not puzzle out.

  “Bray,” he said, “I don’t know what to make of it.”

  “Don’t you try to make nothing of it,” replied Bray. “And I don’t know what you talking about anyway, Mr. Oscar.”

  “Nothing’s disturbed in this room. The floor’s just wet.”

  Oscar had turned to speak these last words to Bray, who shook his head and again indicated his wish to be well away from this half-submerged building. He was afraid Oscar would want to circle the hotel and look in every last window.

  Oscar turned back in order to push off from the concrete casement. He glanced in the window, and then fell back into the boat with a small strangled cry of alarm.

  In that room, which five seconds before had been patently unoccupied, he had seen a woman. She sat quietly on the edge of the bed with her back to the window.

  Bray, not waiting for an explanation for Oscar’s evident fright—and wanting none—immediately began to paddle off away from the hotel.

  “Bray! Go back! Row back!” cried Oscar when he had recovered his voice.

  “No, Mr. Oscar, I ain’t gone.”

  “Bray, I’m telling you...”

  Bray reluctantly paddled back. Oscar was reaching for the casement when the window shot up in its frame.

  Bray stiffened with his paddle in the water. The boat rammed against the brick wall, and the black man and the white man rocked backward and forward with the shock.

  “I have waited and waited,” said the young woman standing in the open window.

  She was tall, thin, pale, erect, and handsome. Her hair was a kind of muddy red, thick, and wound in a loose coil. She wore a black skirt, and a white blouse. There was a rectangular gold-and-jet brooch at her throat.

  “Who are you?” said Oscar in wonder.

  “Elinor Dammert.”

  “I mean,” said Oscar, “why are you here?”

  “In the hotel?”

  “Yes.”

  “I was caught by the flood. I couldn’t get away.”

  “Ever’body got out of the hotel,” said Bray. “They got out or they took ’em out. Last Wednesday.”

  “They forgot me,” said Elinor. “I was asleep. They forgot I was here. I didn’t hear them call.”

  “Town hall bell rang for two hours,” said Bray sullenly.

  “Are you all right?” asked Oscar. “How long have you been here?”

  “As he says, since Wednesday. Four days. I’ve been sleeping most of the time. Not much else to do when there’s a flood. Have you got anything in that boat I can have?”

  “To eat?” Oscar asked.

  “Got nothing,” said Bray shortly.

  “There’s nothing,” said Oscar. “I’m sorry, we should have brought something.”

  “Why?” asked Elinor. “You didn’t expect to find anybody still in the hotel, did you?”

  “Surely did not!” said Bray in a tone of voice which suggested that the surprise had in fact been not completely agreeable.

  “Hush!” cried Oscar, annoyed by Bray’s rudeness, and wondering at it, too. “Are you all right?” he repeated. “What did you do when the water was high?”

  “Nothing,” replied Elinor. “I sat on the edge of the bed and waited for somebody to come and get me.”

  “When I first looked in the window, you weren’t there. There wasn’t anybody in the room.”

  “I was there,” said Elinor. “You just couldn’t see me through the window right. There must have been a reflection on the glass. I was just sitting there. I didn’t hear you at first.”

  There was silence a moment. Bray looked at Elinor Dammert with deep mistrust. Oscar bowed his head and tried to puzzle out what to do.

  “Is there room for me in that boat?” asked Elinor after a bit.

  “Of course!” cried Oscar. “We’ll take you away. You must be starved.”

  “Pull the boat around,” said Elinor to Bray, “right under the window, and I’ll climb out.”

  Bray did so. Holding on to the awning with one hand, Oscar stood and gave Elinor his other. She lifted her skirt and stepped gracefully out of the hotel window into the boat. Quite at her ease, and giving no indication of the terror she must have felt at being for four days the only occupant of a town that was almost completely submerged, Elinor Dammert squeezed herself in the boat between Oscar Caskey and Bray Sugarwhite.

  “Miss Elinor, my name is Oscar Caskey, and this is Bray. Bray works for us.”

  “How do you do, Bray?” said Elinor, turning to him with a smile.

  “Fine, ma’am,” said Bray in a tone and with a frown that contradicted his words.

  “We’ll get you to high ground,” said Oscar.

  “Is there room for my things?” said Elinor, as the black man pushed his paddle against the bricks of the Osceola Hotel.

  “No,” replied Oscar regretfully, “we are pretty tight in here now. I tell you what, though—soon as Bray gets us to dry land, he can come back here and pick ’em up.”

  “I cain’t go inside that place!” Bray protested.

  “Bray, you are gone do it!” said Oscar. “You realize what Miss Elinor has just been through for four days? When you and me and Mama and Sister were high and dry? And eating breakfast, dinner, and a little supper and complaining just because we brought two packs of cards away with us instead of four? You realize what Miss Elinor must have been thinking about, all alone in that hotel, with the water rising?”

  “Bray,” said Elinor Dammert, “I have just two little bags and I put ’em right beside the window on the floor. All you have to do is reach in.”

  . . .

  Bray paddled in silence, headed back the way he and Oscar had come. He stared at the back of the young woman who had had no business at all being found where she was found.

  Oscar, in the front of the boat, wanted very much to find something to say to Miss Elinor Dammert, but could think of nothing at all—certainly no remark came to mind that would justify his turning right around in the boat and awkwardly speaking to her over his shoulder. Luckily, as he thought it, the carcass of a large raccoon suddenly bobbed to the surface of the oily black water when they had just passed the town hall, and Oscar explained that pigs, attempting to swim through the floodwater, had slashed their own throats with their forefeet. It was an undetermined point whether they all had drowned or bled to death. Miss Elinor smiled and nodded and said not
hing. Oscar said nothing further, and did not turn around again until Bray was paddling past Oscar’s own house. “That’s where I live,” said Oscar, pointing out the second story of the submerged Caskey mansion. Miss Elinor nodded and smiled, and said that it looked like a very big and very pretty house and she wished she could see it sometime when it wasn’t underwater. Oscar heartily concurred in that wish; Bray did not. Only a few minutes later Bray ran the boat up between two large exposed roots of a vast live oak that marked the town line to the northwest. Oscar stood out of the boat, balancing on one of the roots, and then helped Elinor on to dry land. Elinor turned to Bray. “Thank you,” she said. “I really do ’preciate you going back. Those two bags are all I’ve got, Bray, and I’ve got to have them or I’ve got nothing. I put ’em both right inside the window, and all you have to do is reach inside.” Then she and Oscar set out together for the Zion Grace Church, which was on high ground a mile away, where the first families of Perdido had taken refuge.

  . . .

  A quarter of an hour later, Bray had maneuvered the little boat back against the side of the Osceola Hotel. The water, in even so short a time, had dropped several inches. He sat for several moments just staring at that blank open window, wondering how he would ever get the courage up to stick his arm inside and retrieve the bags. “Hungry!” he cried aloud to himself. “What’d that white woman eat?!” The sound of his own voice strengthened him—even though it had defined a portion of that unpleasant mystery he felt surrounded Elinor Dammert—and he turned the boat so that he could lean his shoulder against the brick wall of the hotel. Holding on to the concrete casement with one hand, he reached his other arm quickly into the room. His hand closed around the handle of a suitcase. He jerked it out of the window and into the boat. He took a deep breath, and thrust his arm in once more.

  His hand closed around...nothing.

  He jerked it out again. He stared at the sun a moment through squinting eyes, cocked his ear and heard nothing but the scraping of the boat against the orange bricks of the hotel, thrust his hand in again and moved it all about beneath the window inside the room. No second case was there.