Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  “You must have lost everything,” said Mary-Love, staring at Elinor’s hair. “Floodwater takes everything. I’m surprised you got away with your life.”

  “I’ve got nothing at all,” said Elinor with a smile that was neither brave resignation nor studied indifference, but a smile that seemed to mock credence.

  “Where were you coming from?” asked Annie Bell Driver. One of the children, a colored one, had awakened inside the church and now peered sleepily out the front door.

  “I graduated from Huntingdon,” said Elinor Dammert. “I came to teach in the school here.”

  “The schoolhouse is underwater,” said Oscar with a sad shaking of his head. “A school of bream have the run of it.”

  “I saw two desks floating down Palafox Street,” said Sister Caskey.

  “Only thing the teachers saved was their grade books,” said Mary-Love.

  “Have you got anything to eat?” asked Elinor. “I’ve been sitting on the side of a bed in the Osceola Hotel for four days watching the water rise. I had one tin of salmon and a box of crackers and I am fainting on my feet.”

  “Carry Miss Elinor inside!” cried Annie Bell Driver.

  Sister took Elinor’s hand and led her up to the steps of the church. “Bray got some tins out of Mr. Henderson’s store after it was already underwater,” said Sister. “The labels were all washed off so we don’t know what’s in ’em till we open ’em. Sometimes we get green beans for breakfast and English peas for supper, but you can tell the salmon cans by their shape. ’Course, you won’t have to eat any more salmon unless you want it!”

  “Thank you,” said Elinor, turning at the top of the steps, “for rescuing me, Mr. Oscar.”

  Oscar would have followed her inside, but his mother touched his arm, saying, “You cain’t go in there, Oscar. Caroline and Manda are still in their nightclothes!”

  Oscar watched Miss Elinor disappear, then said goodbye to his mother and turned his steps back onto the road in the direction of the Driver house. He tipped his hat politely to the sleeping driver.

  . . .

  Elinor was fed on salmon and crackers in the corner of the church. She sat on the end of one of the benches and stared at the little sleeping map of children in the corner opposite. All the servants had risen and were huddled in a distant corner to wash and dress as best they could under the difficult circumstances. Sister Caskey sat beside Elinor, and now and then whispered a question that was answered in a whisper.

  Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk had risen in time to see the stranger led inside by Sister Caskey. They dressed quickly and ran out of the church to question Mary-Love, who waited for them on the other side of one of the wagons. The three women fell immediately to a discussion of Elinor Dammert’s muddy red hair and the peculiar circumstance of her having been left for four days in the Osceola Hotel.

  Their only conclusion was that the circumstance was something more than just peculiar—it was downright mysterious.

  “I wish,” said Caroline DeBordenave, a large woman with a tremulous smile, “that Oscar would come back down the road so that we could ask him a question or two about Miss Elinor.”

  “Oscar wouldn’t know anything,” said even larger Manda Turk, whose habitual frown was anything but tremulous.

  “Why not?” asked Caroline. “Oscar pulled her out the window of the Osceola Hotel. Oscar rowed her back to dry land. Oscar must have spoken a word or two along the way.”

  “Men never know what questions to ask,” replied Manda. “Won’t learn anything asking Oscar about it. Isn’t that right, Mary-Love?”

  “It is,” said Mary-Love. “I’m afraid it is, even if I do have to say it about my own son. Sister’s talking to her now. Maybe Sister can get a little something out of her.”

  “Here comes Bray,” said Manda Turk, pointing down the track into the pine forest. The sun, higher now and warmer, was drawing more steam up from the sodden ground. The black man had appeared quite suddenly out of the mist, swinging a small suitcase in his right hand.

  “Is that your bag?” asked Caroline DeBordenave of Mary-Love.

  “It is not,” replied Mary-Love. “It must be hers.”

  “Is that her bag, Bray?” Manda Turk called loudly.

  “Sure is,” replied Bray, coming closer and knowing that “her” referred to the woman who had been rescued from the Osceola.

  “What’s in it?” asked Caroline.

  “Don’t know, didn’t open it,” replied Bray. He paused. “She inside the church?” he asked.

  “She’s eating her breakfast with Sister,” said Mary-Love.

  “They was two bags,” said Bray, coming up to the three ladies.

  “Where is the other?” said Caroline.

  “Did you leave it back in the boat?” said Manda.

  “Don’t know where it is,” said Bray.

  “You lost it?” cried Mary-Love. “That girl has two bags to her name in this world, and you lost one of ’em!”

  “She’s gone be mad at you, Bray,” said Manda Turk. “She’s gone bite your head off!”

  Bray shuddered, as if he feared the prediction might prove literally true. “I don’t know where that old thing is, Miz Turk. Mr. Oscar and me get that lady in the boat, and she say two bags sitting inside the window. I bring that lady and Mr. Oscar out here, and Mr. Oscar tell me, ‘Bray, row back,’ so I row back and I reach in that window, and they one bag there. Only one bag. Now, where the other one go?”

  None of the women ventured an answer to Bray’s question. The black man handed the bag to Mary-Love. “Maybe something reach up out of the water and put a hand inside the window feeling around and it feel that bag and it pull it down under the water.”

  “Nothing in that water but old dead chickens,” said Manda Turk contemptuously.

  “Wonder what’s in there,” mused Caroline, nodding at the case in Mary-Love’s hand.

  Mary-Love shook her head. To Bray she said, “Bray, you go on down to Miz Driver’s house and get you something to eat. I’ll tell Miss Elinor you did what you could.”

  “Oh, thank you, Miz Caskey, I don’t want to say nothing to her...”

  He pulled away from the tree against which he had been leaning and went hurriedly down the track. The three women looked down at Elinor Dammert’s remaining bag—a weathered black leather case with straps going all around it—and then went inside the church.

  . . .

  It didn’t matter to Elinor Dammert, evidently, that one of her bags had been lost. She didn’t blame Bray; she didn’t suggest that he had dropped the bag into the water and then lied about it; she didn’t wonder if someone else in a rowboat might have passed the hotel, reached in and filched it; she didn’t seem to upset herself over the loss of half of what little she had in the world. She said merely, “It had my books in it. And my teacher’s certificate. And my diploma from Huntingdon. And my birth certificate. I’ll have to write for duplicates. Does that take long?” she asked Sister. Sister had no idea, but supposed that it might.

  “I’d like to wash up and change my clothes,” Elinor said.

  “There’s nowhere for that,” said Sister. “We bring water up from the branch.”

  “Oh, of course,” said Miss Elinor, quite as if she knew every foot of its watery length.

  “The branch down behind the church,” said Caroline DeBordenave, as if Miss Elinor had asked What branch? —as she ought to have. “You cain’t see it ’less you know where to look.”

  “Didn’t it flood, too?” Elinor asked.

  “No, ma’am,” replied Miz Driver. “Land back of here slopes off quickly. All the water runs right down to the Perdido. That branch is clean and clear.”

  “Good,” said Elinor, “then I’ll go down and bathe.”

  She got up immediately, and Sister would have shown her the way, but Elinor assured her that she would be able to find it without assistance. Elinor stepped quietly among the still-sleeping children and walked out the back door c
arrying her weathered black bag with her.

  Manda Turk and Mary-Love and Caroline DeBordenave fell upon Sister.

  “What’d she say?” demanded Manda, speaking for all.

  “Nothing,” said Sister, realizing in a sudden moment of shame that she had failed in what these three women evidently considered to be her duty. “I told her about the school and about Perdido. She was asking about the flood, you know, and the mills, and who everybody was and so forth.”

  “Yes, but what did you ask her?” demanded Caroline.

  “I asked her if she thought she was gone drown.”

  “Drown?” said Mary-Love. “Sister, you are impossible!”

  “Drown in the Osceola,” said Sister defensively. She was sitting on the end of the bench, and the three women stood ranged before her. “She said she wasn’t scared, not a bit—that she wasn’t gone drown ever in her life.”

  “And that’s all you found out?” cried Manda.

  “That’s all,” said Sister, cringing. “What was I supposed to find out? Nobody told me—”

  “You were supposed to find out everything,” said her mother.

  Caroline DeBordenave shook her head slowly. “Don’t you see, Sister?”

  “See what?”

  “See that there’s something peculiar.”

  “See that there’s something wrong,” Manda amended.

  “I don’t!”

  “You must,” said Mary-Love. “Just look at her hair! You ever see hair that was that color? Looks like she had it dyed in the Perdido—that’s what it looks like to me!”

  . . .

  Annie Bell Driver knew what was going on. She had watched the three richest women in Perdido surround Bray and question him closely about the black bag he had carried; she had seen them turn their questions on poor meek Sister. She also knew where those questions tended. While Sister was vainly attempting to justify her failure to have found out anything of substance as a reluctance to pry, Annie Bell Driver slipped out the back door of the church, and with something in her head that wasn’t as clearly defined a motive as “curiosity,” she picked her way carefully down the slippery slope of pine needles, grabbing for balance at one resinous pine trunk after another. Steam rose here, too—in wisps from the ground, from the underbrush, from the green boughs of the pines, and almost in billows from the stream itself.

  The branch was shallow, narrow, clear, and quick—quite unlike the dark, deep waters of the Blackwater and the Perdido. It made its way through the pine forest in a course that changed markedly every year, it seemed. It tore away the carpet of pine needles and left bare the soft shale beneath, hollowing out channels in the stone, throwing up diminutive islands of sand and pebbles.

  Annie Bell Driver stood on the edge of the branch—it was too volatile a stream to have built up anything like a bank—and looked up and down what she could see of its length. There was a turn into the forest about a hundred feet up, and another turn in the opposite direction about fifty feet down. The woman with the muddy-red hair wasn’t to be seen. Annie Bell wondered whether she should walk upstream or downstream or return to the church, leaving the woman to her privacy. After all, having remained four days in the top floor of a half-submerged hotel, she would not have had an opportunity for washing except in the floodwaters—and that was an expedient which was no expedient at all, for it left one only dirtier than before, and was decidedly unhealthful.

  Annie Bell decided to walk around the downstream bend, and turned in that direction. It was only then she noticed Elinor Dammert’s black bag resting at one end of a sandbar directly across the water from where she stood. She had not noticed it before because it blended in so well with the rank vegetation on the opposite side of the branch.

  The thought passed suddenly through her mind that Elinor Dammert, having survived the flooding of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers, had drowned in this tiny unnamed branch, but then she realized that in order to drown, one must first find a spot deep enough to cover one’s head completely, and such spots were rare in the length of this shallow course. It was, in fact, so notoriously safe a stream that Annie Bell had never warned even her youngest children against using it. It wasn’t deep enough to drown them, and it was too quick-moving to breed moccasins and leeches.

  But if her bag was here, and she couldn’t possibly be drowned, then where was Elinor Dammert?

  Annie Bell Driver took two steps downstream and was reaching for a pine branch to lift her over a patch of soggy ground when she stopped suddenly. Her foot dropped to the earth and sank in until the water seeped through the holes for her laces.

  There, beneath the water in a narrow trench that seemed to have been specially carved for her body, lay Elinor Dammert, quite naked. She clutched a clump of water weeds with each hand, but was perfectly still.

  “Good Lord above!” cried Annie Bell Driver aloud. “She has gone and drowned herself!”

  She stared. Though the water was clear and only deep enough to cover the body, it had worked a kind of visual transformation: Miss Elinor’s skin seen through that rapidly running water seemed leathery, greenish, tough—and Miss Elinor’s skin, Miz Driver had noted, was of a pellucid whiteness. Moreover, even as the preacher stared, a distorting transformation seemed to come over the features of the other woman’s submerged face. While before it had been handsome and narrow and fine-featured, now it seemed wide and flat and coarse. The mouth stretched to such an extent that the lips seemed to disappear altogether. The eyes beneath their closed lids grew into large, circular domes. The lids themselves became almost transparent, and the dark slit was set directly across the bulging eyeball like a pen-drawn Equator on a child’s globe.

  She wasn’t dead.

  The thin, stretched lids over those protuberant domes drew slowly apart and two immense eyes—the size of hen’s eggs, Miz Driver thought wildly—stared up through the water and met the gaze of the Hard-Shell preacher.

  Annie Bell Driver fell back against a tree. The branch she had been holding on to above her head snapped.

  Elinor rose in the water. The transformation she had undergone beneath the running water held, and Miz Driver found herself staring at a vast, misshapen grayish-green creature with a slack body and an enormous head with cold staring eyes. The pupils were vertical and thin as pencil lines. Then, as the water poured off, back into the branch, Elinor Dammert stood before her, smiling sheepishly and blushing prettily in her modesty at being so discovered without her clothing.

  Miz Driver took a deep breath and said, very quietly, “I’m so dizzy...”

  “Miz Driver!” cried Miss Elinor. “Are you all right?” The muddiness seemed to have been washed from her hair. It was now a dark, intense red—like nothing so much as a clay bank shining in the brilliant sun that follows a July rainstorm, and nobody in Perdido knew anything that was redder than that.

  “I’m all right,” said Annie Bell Driver weakly. “But, law, you scared me! What were you doing down in that water, girl?”

  “Oh!” Elinor said in a light, smiling voice, “after going through a flood there’s just no other way to get clean—I know it for a fact, Miz Driver!”

  She took a step upward and back onto the sandbar on which her bag had been placed, and if Miz Driver hadn’t still been so dizzy she would have been more certain that when Miss Elinor lifted her other foot out of that branch, it was not white and slender as was the one already braced upon the sand, but instead looked altogether different—wide and flat and gray and webbed.

  Oh, but that was just the water! thought Annie Bell Driver, shutting her eyes tightly.

  Chapter 2

  The Waters Recede

  James Caskey, Oscar’s uncle and Mary-Love’s brother-in-law, was a quiet, sensitive, fastidious man to whom trouble came easily and left grudgingly. He was slender (“bony,” some said), mild, and quite well-off, at least by the standards of a small town in a poor county of an impoverished state. He was unhappily married, but his wife Genevieve, to Pe
rdido’s relief, spent most of her time with a married sister in Nashville. He had a six-year-old daughter called Grace, and he had—despite the possession of that wife and daughter—the reputation of being marked with “the stamp of femininity.” He lived in the house his father had built in 1865. This had been the first substantial home raised in Perdido, though by current standards it was modest: just two parlors, a dining room, and three bedrooms—all on the same floor. The kitchen, which had originally been detached, had now been annexed to the house by the construction of a long addition, containing a nursery, a sewing room, and two bathrooms. The house was old-fashioned, with high ceilings, large square rooms, brick fireplaces, and dark wainscoting, but James’s mother had had taste, and the place was well furnished. Now, James did not know what remained to him in the house which had lain seven days wholly submerged beneath the muddy water of the upper Perdido. When Bray rowed him through town, James Caskey could tell where his house was only by looking at his sister’s house next door (which was two-storied) and by the brick chimney of the kitchen, which was higher than those of the parlors.

  James, however, had given little thought to the contents of his house, though he loved every stick of his mother’s furniture, loved everything that had belonged to her. He had to think of the mill, whose loss, whether total or only temporary, meant hardship for the whole community. The Caskey mill, owned jointly by James and Mary-Love and run jointly by James and Mary-Love’s son Oscar, employed three hundred and thirty-nine men and twenty-two women, white and colored, ranging in age from seven to eighty-one—these last a great-grandson and a great-grandfather who stenciled the Caskey trefoil onto the boards of the company’s specialty woods: the pecan, oak, cypress, and cedar. Because these three hundred and sixty-one persons would suffer greatly if the mill could not be brought back quickly into operation, James Caskey had Bray row him over to the still submerged mill so he could see what, if anything, might be done.

  James Caskey’s rickety frame made him appear frail, a general impression intensified by his movements, which were habitually slow and deliberate and displayed (as far as was consonant with a body that tended to jerkiness) some amount of flaccid grace. He certainly had never spent much time in the Caskey forests, and it was suspected that he didn’t know as much about trees as a Caskey ought to know. His disinclination to tramp about forests and have his boots muddied, his trousers ripped with briars, and his way impeded with rattlesnakes was well-known, but he was a splendid worker in the office, and no one in town could compose a better resolution or draft a subtler letter. When the town proposed incorporation to the state legislature, James Caskey represented Perdido before that assembly, and after a fine speech there it was universally wondered why the man had never gone into politics.