Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  Elinor wasn’t Oscar’s only mystery, of course. There were many things Oscar didn’t understand. He didn’t understand what was going on between Mary-Love and Elinor; he only knew that he was glad he wasn’t at home all day the way Sister was. He didn’t know what Elinor saw in him; he didn’t know why she loved him, though apparently she did. He’d get up at five in the morning, and stand at his bedroom window and look out at the Perdido. There he’d see his wife, wearing her coarse cotton nightgown, swimming around and around in the swift water that would have drowned any normal person. And there’d be Zaddie, sitting on the mooring dock, dangling her feet in the current and holding her rake across her lap. The sun wouldn’t even be over the trees yet. And good Lord!—the water oaks that Elinor had planted only a little more than a year before were twenty feet high and a foot around! They were planted in clumps of two and three and four, and at the level of the ground their trunks were already starting to grow together. Water oaks, Oscar knew, were the only oak trees that would clump like birches. Zaddie would rake a vast system of concentric circles around each clump, and now the yard resembled a cypress swamp, but with slender oaks and raked sand taking the place of clumps of cypress and rippling water.

  They were narrow spindly trees with gray bark and tiny leathery dark-green leaves that grew only at the top. Lower branches quickly lost their leaves, rotted, and fell to the earth, to be gathered up by Zaddie and tossed into the river. In the winter the leaves turned an even darker green, but didn’t fall off until pushed aside by new growth in the spring. Beyond the camellia and azalea beds that grew alongside the houses the sandy yards still wouldn’t grow a single blade of grass, but those water oaks grew faster than any tree Oscar had ever seen—and the Caskeys had made their fortune through intimate and extensive knowledge of the forests and trees of Baldwin County. His bedroom view of the river would soon be obscured by the foliage of the water oaks. Sometimes he would come home in the afternoon and see that strange youthful forest that had raised itself and he would exclaim: “Mama, have you ever seen anything like the way those trees have grown!”

  And Mary-Love on the side porch would only say: “Those are Elinor’s trees.”

  And Sister, sitting beside her, would say: “Elinor loves ’em.”

  And Elinor, opening the front door for him, would say: “These yards won’t grow a blade of grass. We had to have something.”

  Chapter 9

  The Road to Atmore

  It was generally understood in Perdido that the intimacy that had formed between Genevieve Caskey and Elinor Caskey—two women who had every cause to dislike and mistrust each other—had its origin in each lady’s desire to keep an eye on the other. Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk congratulated Mary-Love on the possession of a daughter-in-law who would go to such lengths for the well-being of the family. Mary-Love did not accept the compliment, and maintained that Genevieve and Elinor were exactly suited to each other. It was no more than the fellow-feeling of moral criminals, she said, that sent them off to Mobile together shopping for shoes. However, after Genevieve’s suggestion that a levee be built to protect Perdido from high water, Elinor in a fury declared, “I won’t have anything more to do with that woman.”

  The summer went on, and like all summers in that part of the world, it was brutally hot. The thermometer outside the kitchen window of Mary-Love’s house read at least eighty degrees every morning at six-thirty when Zaddie began to rake. By the time she was finished at nine, the temperature had hit ninety. The Caskey women remained out on the side porch all morning long, sewing on their patchwork quilt, though none of them could think—in such heat—that there would be a season when a quilt would be wanted on someone’s bed.

  They also took their dinners on the side porch as soon as Oscar came home. They drank vast quantities of iced tea. In the afternoon, the weather was at its most oppressive. It accumulated in the leathery leaves of the water oaks and burned the sand of the yards until it was so hot that it could scorch a bare foot.

  The heat was quiet. On the worst afternoons there was no noise at all. Birds had fled so deeply into the forest that their calls could no longer be heard. Dogs had crept into the cool sand beneath houses and lay miserably with their heads upon their outstretched forepaws. People didn’t visit one another because they feared falling down in a faint on the sidewalk if they ventured out of the shade. And those remaining at home didn’t talk much because they were logy from having drunk too much iced tea with their dinner.

  On one particular such afternoon, at about three o’clock, nothing at all could be heard around the Caskey houses except the lapping of the river water against the pilings of the mooring dock. Sister and Elinor sat on a glider on the side porch. The edge of the quilting frame was tilted down toward them and they were slowly working on the second line of squares. Elinor had never done a quilt before, so for her benefit and instruction Sister had suggested using the simplest quilting stitch she knew. Complaining how her eyes watered in such heat, Mary-Love had abandoned her place at the frame. She now rocked in her chair across from the two women and occasionally addressed a remark to no one in particular, which no one in particular saw fit to answer. Ivey Sapp sat nearby shelling peanuts into a wide white enameled pan and discarding the shells onto sheets of newspaper unfolded at her feet.

  The quiet that had persisted for some time was suddenly broken by a scream—a tiny, convulsive scream that came, quite obviously, from James Caskey’s house. Sister and Elinor pushed their needles through the fabric and turned their heads in unison; Mary-Love stood up from her chair; Ivey leaned forward and placed her white enameled bowl on the floor of the porch.

  “Lord!” said Elinor after a moment. “That is Grace!”

  “That is Grace!” said Sister.

  They hadn’t known it immediately, because no one had ever heard Grace scream before.

  “What is that woman doing?” said Mary-Love, turning pale. “What is she doing to Grace?”

  There was another scream, choked off after a few seconds. Then the back door of James Caskey’s house suddenly slammed and the women on the porch, all standing now, saw Zaddie running across the yard toward them. She was obviously terrified.

  She clambered breathlessly up the front steps. “Miss Genevieve is beating on Grace!”

  In the brief silence that followed Zaddie’s announcement, they could hear another of Grace’s convulsive sobs, then another scream, stifled immediately.

  “What did Grace do?” cried Mary-Love.

  “She went and done knocked over a lamp by the cord!” said Zaddie breathlessly. Her speech, in moments of stress, lost the polish it had gained in her extensive reading. “Grace and me were playing in the hall, just playing, and Grace went and catched her foot on the cord and knocked over the lamp and it went and broke and Miss Genevieve come out and she done picked up that lamp and done heaved it at me but it didn’t hit me. Then she went and picked up Grace and started in to beat her!”

  “Mama, you got to stop her! Listen to that child!”

  Grace was screaming again. The sound was now coming through a different window.

  “Miss Genevieve is chasing her through the house!” said Ivey.

  Mary-Love was indecisive. It was her policy to have as little as possible to do with Genevieve Caskey, and it was not Caskey policy either to interfere with the instruction and rearing of children—and children who were reared and instructed properly did sometimes cry.

  “If no one else is going to do anything, I will,” said Elinor in disgust. With that she went right through the screen door, down the side steps, right across the yard, and through James Caskey’s front door without a single hesitation in her stride.

  Sister, Mary-Love, Ivey, and Zaddie stood all in a line, looking over the camellias, scarcely daring to breathe. Faintly, through the windows of the neighboring house, they heard Elinor’s voice, “Grace! Grace!”

  In another moment the front door of James Caskey’s house opened and Grace
Caskey came flying out. She ran directly across the yard and up the side steps. Zaddie ran to her and Grace jumped into the black girl’s arms. Zaddie hugged her tight. Mary-Love and Sister pulled the girl away and stared into her face.

  “Child,” cried Mary-Love, “you are red in the face. You are bruised!”

  “Mama hit me!” cried Grace. “Mama hit me with a belt!”

  “In the face?” said Mary-Love, unwilling to believe that even of Genevieve Caskey. “Child, she could have put out one of your eyes!”

  Zaddie was in the corner conferring in whispers with her older sister. Ivey came forward a moment later and said quietly, “Miss Mary-Love, Zaddie say Miss Genevieve been drinking...”

  Mary-Love slowly shook her head, and Sister sat down in the swing and lifted up Grace, putting the child’s head in her lap and smoothing down her hair. Holding her hands in front of her face, Grace began to weep. In that position, it could be seen that Grace’s underpants had been torn off and that her legs and bottom also bore the marks of Genevieve’s belt. Two lines of blood showed where the buckle had torn the flesh of Grace’s thigh.

  Mary-Love turned and looked across to the Caskey house. What was Elinor saying to Genevieve?

  Elinor’s head was suddenly thrust out the dining room window. “Zaddie!” she called out.

  “Yes’m?” cried out Zaddie.

  “You go to the mill and fetch Mr. James—this minute, you hear?”

  Elinor’s head disappeared. Zaddie went over to the swing and held Grace’s trembling hand for a moment.

  “Go on, child!” cried Mary-Love. “Do as Miss Elinor says!”

  . . .

  Sister took Grace up to her own room, washed her face, and after lowering the blinds and closing the curtains, put Grace onto the bed. She sat at Grace’s side, whispering words of consolation and fanning her face—for the room was stifling and dark—until the child was asleep. Then Sister seated herself in a rocker at the foot of the bed with the fan in one hand and a novel in the other. She wanted to make sure that if the child woke up she wouldn’t find herself alone.

  Mary-Love remained on the side porch with Ivey, and the two women watched the house next door with unabated and ungratified interest. They saw nothing; they heard nothing. James drove up in his automobile twenty minutes after Zaddie had left to fetch him. The black girl jumped out of the car first, and James went not to his own house but to his sister-in-law’s. He stood between two great camellias and spoke to Mary-Love.

  “James,” said Mary-Love, “did Zaddie tell you what happened?”

  He nodded. “Where is Grace?”

  “She’s in Sister’s room. And she is gone stay there until—”

  “Where is Genevieve?”

  “Genevieve and Elinor are over there”—Mary-Love pointed at James’s house—“but what they are saying to each other I have no idea. James, I don’t know if you remember it, but Genevieve once came after me with a broom!”

  James did indeed remember it, and didn’t have to be reminded of the circumstance. “What do you suppose Elinor is saying to her?”

  “I have no idea,” repeated Mary-Love impatiently, “all I know is you better get on over there.”

  James turned and walked reluctantly across the yard toward his own house. But before he got there the front door opened and Elinor came out with two suitcases. She was grim.

  “Mr. James,” she said, “put these in the car.”

  “Elinor,” he said in a whisper, “did you talk to Genevieve?”

  “There’s two more,” said Elinor, and she went back into the house.

  Zaddie and James loaded the four suitcases into the car; then came three hat boxes, a jewelry case, and two smaller cases that contained they didn’t know what. They were all in dark blue leather and bore the gold initials, GC. Genevieve herself came last of all, wearing a black dress and a black veil so thick you couldn’t have seen her face if you had walked right up to her and raised a lantern.

  “Lord,” cried Ivey in a whisper to Mary-Love, “she must be burning up in there.”

  “Who went after who with a broom is what I want to know,” remarked Mary-Love.

  Elinor came out of the house after Genevieve and stood before the front door as if guarding it.

  “Elinor,” said James, who did not dare to speak to his wife, “where are we going?”

  “Over to Atmore. Genevieve’s catching the Hummingbird to Nashville. And, James—you are not going to drive.”

  Genevieve was already climbing into the car. If ever a woman’s posture indicated defeat, Mary-Love said to Ivey, that woman’s did.

  “Then how’s she gone get there?” demanded James in perplexity. He was greatly relieved that the women were handling this very difficult situation—somehow the women always did—but he wished they had made it a little easier for him to understand the part that had been written for him in this little drama.

  “You are going to let Bray drive her, and Zaddie’s going to ride in the back,” replied Elinor.

  Hearing that, Ivey ran over to the new house to fetch Bray who was planting camellias and hawthorns in the side yard. He wasn’t even allowed to change out of his gardening clothes into his uniform, but got directly into the automobile. With Zaddie in the back and Genevieve silent and stone-still in the front, he took off toward Atmore.

  “Bray,” called Elinor, “you drive careful! It’s going to rain!”

  James Caskey looked up at the sky. The accumulated heat of a whole day of blistering sunshine poured down upon him out of a cloudless expanse of white-blue air.

  . . .

  Elinor wouldn’t tell what she had said to Genevieve Caskey that persuaded that woman to return to Nashville. And since it had been conjectured that Elinor Caskey was the very reason that Genevieve had stayed in Perdido as long as she had, the mystery seemed even deeper. Elinor would only say, “How you think I could have let her stay around here after what she did to Grace—that poor child! And she didn’t even break the lamp!”

  James and Elinor went up to Sister’s room and stood at the side of Grace’s bed. The child still slept soundly.

  “That’s her way of hiding,” said Sister in a low voice. “I do it too.”

  Back down on the porch Elinor said to James, “I am so sorry. This is my fault.”

  “Your fault!” cried James. “Not a bit in the world, I—”

  “Why you say that?” demanded Mary-Love of her daughter-in-law suspiciously.

  “I ought to have seen what Genevieve was capable of. I ought to have got her out of here before what happened today had a chance to happen.”

  “I wish you had, too,” said Mary-Love, “but I will tell you the truth, Elinor. I wouldn’t have placed any bets this afternoon when I saw you go into that house, and Sister and Ivey wouldn’t have either.”

  Elinor waved this away. “Two months ago” she said, “I should have picked her up and put her on that train myself.”

  “James,” said Mary-Love, “it is time to talk about divorce.”

  “No,” said Elinor, interrupting. “Talk about it later. No need to talk about it now.”

  “Why not now?” demanded Mary-Love. “What better time than now, when that child is lying upstairs with belt marks all over her entire body? James has witnesses right here on this porch.”

  “Wait till this evening,” said Elinor. “Wait till Bray and Zaddie get back and we hear Genevieve’s been taken care of.”

  . . .

  The road to Atmore went northeast from Perdido, past the sawmills and through a few hundred acres of pine owned by Tom DeBordenave. It skirted the cypress swamp in which the Blackwater River had its marshy source, then emerged into the vast, flat potato and cotton fields of Escambia County. Atmore was the nearest place to catch the train, though it was such a small town that the trains would stop for passengers only if alerted by a signal from the stationmaster.

  Bray drove along this road rather more quickly than was his wont. He had been warn
ed that Miss Genevieve had to be at the L & N station by five-thirty in order to get her ticket and prepare the stationmaster to stop the Hummingbird. James Caskey’s automobile was a small touring car he had purchased in 1917, a handsome Packard with a metal top and a glass windscreen that Bray drove with much pleasure.

  The waning afternoon was still very bright and oppressively warm. Genevieve Caskey sat silently, did not look at Bray or take any apparent notice of the countryside as they passed through it. Zaddie sat apprehensively in the back seat. Bray, Zaddie knew, had been sent on this errand because Elinor had not wanted to allow Genevieve the opportunity during the ride to “explain things” to James; to excuse her temper on account of the heat or the dullness of the town. And Zaddie knew that she had been sent along to prevent Bray’s giving in to any temptation offered by Genevieve not to see her onto that train to Nashville. But Genevieve might as well have been a dummy in the front window of Berta Hamilton’s dress shop, for all the explanations or bribes that she proffered.

  By the time they reached the cypress swamp the heat in the automobile had sent Zaddie nearly over into sleep. She sat with her head far back, her eyes closed against the glaring sun in the empty Alabama sky. It burned patterns on her eyelids and she forgot everything but the intense yellow and red that swirled in her brain. But suddenly that yellow and red faded out, and a coolness settled over Zaddie’s upturned face. She opened her eyes. A single dark gray cloud had blown across the sun. It wasn’t large—probably no bigger than the plot of land on which the Caskey houses were built, Zaddie thought—but it looked very much out of place. Zaddie was certain that five minutes before it hadn’t been visible anywhere. And there was another peculiar thing, she realized: solitary clouds were usually much higher in the sky and tended to be wispy, frozen, white. This one was dark, roiling, and it hung low.

  She couldn’t take her eyes from it. It seemed to be flying directly toward them. Zaddie cowered in the corner of the seat.

  Bray had reduced the Packard’s speed. Zaddie looked to the front. Not far ahead of them was a great logging truck lumbering slowly along with a full load. It was doubtless headed toward Atmore, where there were two more mills. Long trunks of pine, denuded of branches, protruded far beyond the back of the truck, bobbing up and down with the motion of the vehicle. The longest of these was tied at the end with a red kerchief so that drivers coming up behind could better judge what distance to keep.