“I’ll shoot him,” James promised complacently.
Queenie beat her heel rapidly on the floor. “Let me think about it, James.” She got up and returned to her own office. In five minutes she was back.
“Well?” asked James.
“I don’t want to give him up, I really don’t. But it just seems so selfish of me, when I’ve got three and you’ve just lost the only one you ever had.”
“That’s right, Queenie. It would be real selfish of you to keep Danjo all to yourself. So why don’t you go on and give him to me?”
“All right. If we can get him away from Carl.”
“I’ll speak to Carl.”
“You gone offer him money?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. How much you think he’d sell Danjo for? A hundred dollars a month?”
Queenie considered. “What about a new car?”
. . .
Queenie was right. In exchange for a new automobile—Carl’s choice and costing twelve hundred dollars—Danjo was given over to James Caskey for safekeeping. Ostensibly, the exchange was temporary, but no one was deceived. The boy was not consulted, but Danjo was so meek a child that he would doubtless have acquiesced to any proposition. Danjo was put in the old nursery in James’s house, which had been freshly wallpapered and given a set of furniture. The boy was bewildered to think that he wouldn’t have to share it with anyone. He cried a little when he left his mother, but he stopped his tears when she assured him that she would see him all the time. He had thought that he was being taken away from her forever, and even at that he had ventured no vehement protest.
The first weekend that Danjo spent in his new home, he would not venture out of his room, and when James would peep in, his nephew would always be sitting very still on the edge of his bed. The boy appeared so constrained and unhappy that James forewent his usual reluctance to intrude, and finally ventured into the room. Leaning against a chifforobe just inside the door, he peered down at Danjo and said, “Am I gone have to send you back to your mama and daddy, Danjo?”
Danjo looked up, his eyes full of tears.
“I want you to stay, Danjo, but you’re just not happy here, I guess.”
“I am!”
James Caskey was puzzled. “You don’t want to go home to your mama and daddy?”
Danjo considered this. “I miss Mama...” he ventured.
“But not your daddy?”
Danjo shook his head vigorously.
“Then why aren’t you happier here with me? Why don’t you run around and play? You used to play all the time. Do you miss Lucille and Malcolm?”
Danjo shook his head cautiously. “I don’t want to break anything,” he said in a low voice.
“Break anything? Break what?”
“Break your stuff.”
James stared at the boy. “You mean you’re not leaving this room ’cause you’re afraid you’re gone knock something over?”
Danjo nodded, and appeared very near tears again.
“Lord, Lord,” cried James Caskey. “Don’t you worry about that, Danjo! I don’t care if you break something. How much stuff you suppose my girl Grace broke while she was growing up? How much stuff you guess Roxie breaks while she’s cleaning this house? You think I can walk through a room without something falling to the floor and smashing? I cain’t! And I don’t expect you can, either. Danjo, I want you to be happy here. You know how much I’ve got in this house. You breaking something’s not gone make one little bit of difference. I’ve got closets full of junk, and I’m gone be going out buying more anyway. Now, I don’t want you to run out of here and start pitching things against the wall—”
Danjo’s eyes widened in horror at the suggestion.
“—but I do want you to enjoy yourself here. I want you at your ease.”
“You do?”
“I sure do. Danjo, do you know what I paid for you?”
“You bought Daddy a car?”
“I did. It cost me one thousand two hundred dollars. I’ve made a big investment in you, Danjo. And you got to help pay it back.”
“How?”
“By having a good time. By letting me watch you enjoy yourself here. By keeping me company, and making me not feel so sorry for myself because my little girl’s gone away. Will you do that?”
“I’ll try!” cried Danjo, and he ran across the room and hugged his uncle.
Perdido claimed that it had never seen a family to match the Caskeys when it came to giving children up and taking children in, switching offspring around as if they had been extra turkey platters or other household items that there might be an excess of in one house and a lack of in the next. Carl Strickland made no secret of the terms of the deal by which James Caskey got custody of his Danjo. That was a sale that had all the force of a deeded exchange of land in the eyes of Perdido. Thenceforth, Danjo belonged to James Caskey, and Perdido thought it was wonderful of James that he allowed the boy’s mother to visit her son whenever she liked.
It seemed a perfect situation. Carl Strickland had his new automobile. Queenie Strickland was assured of her boy’s moral and financial future. James Caskey had a child to take the place of the one who had grown up and gone away. And no one was happier with the situation than Danjo himself.
Rather than taking it as an affront that he had been sold off for the price of a new automobile, Danjo was comforted by the binding aspects of that transaction. He was less likely to be snatched away and carried back across town to the house in which he was assaulted, in varying degrees and in varying ways, by his brother, his sister, and his father, and where his mother had been his sole but inadequate comfort. He loved James Caskey. He never got over a sense of privilege of having a room all to himself, of living in a house that was quiet and filled with beautiful things, of being kissed and hugged rather than pinched and punched. The boy’s only agony, and he kept it a deep secret, was the fear that someday his uncle would trade him off in turn, in exchange for a diamond ring, perhaps, or a little girl. Where would Danjo end up then?
Ten years before, the Caskeys had appeared a barren family to the rest of Perdido. There had been only James’s little daughter Grace, a pale, whining thing hardly worth the attention her effeminate father paid her. Later Elinor and Queenie produced five children between them and divided them among the wanting Caskey households. It was as if Mary-Love and James had looked up and cried, Good Lord, Elinor! For goodness’ sake, Queenie! Y’all have got so many, and we don’t have any, why don’t y’all pass a couple of those children around so we can all enjoy them. It wasn’t quite like that, of course, not in the Caskey family, where a favor done was no more to be tolerated than a slap in the face—but the children were distributed nonetheless, so that each household had at least one. In consequence, the very texture of the entire family was altered, and despite individual animosities, the Caskeys seemed a younger, more vigorous and happier clan.
Chapter 31
Displacements
The stock market crashed on October 29, 1929, but no one in Perdido realized what effect that distant event—that strange crisis of faith and paper—would bring to bear upon each of them. The Caskeys, who perhaps might have had at least a crinkled brow or two of worry for what it would all mean to the family and to the town, were occupied at that time with a more immediate matter: the day the stock market crashed, Carl Strickland attempted to murder Queenie.
Unpremeditated assaults rarely occur in the morning. Violent passions are most often engendered by accumulated heat, by alcohol, by weariness of the body—elements whose effects are generally felt most strongly in the evening or late at night. But Queenie Strickland raised her husband’s ire at the breakfast table by refusing to give him fifteen dollars to visit the track. His unpredictably savage reaction only showed Perdido how close to the edge the man had always been, even when he appeared to live quite peaceably in their midst.
“Queenie, you’ve got the money!” he shouted across the kitchen table.
�
�’Course I got it, but I’m gone spend it on food! How much you suppose I make?”
“I suppose you make plenty, that old man pays you plenty!”
“He doesn’t! I make enough to feed this family, and that’s all! Do you see me in new dresses? Where are Malcolm’s new shoes? Is Lucille taking piano lessons? Do you hear a piano every afternoon when you come back from the track? If you need money so bad, why don’t you go get yourself a job?”
“Give me the money, Queenie. You got it!”
“No,” said Queenie. She got up from the table and motioned for Lucille and Malcolm to leave the room. They did so, making faces at their father’s back. With relief, a moment later, Queenie heard the front door slam as the children went out.
“The money’s mine,” said Carl, getting up from the table and pushing it away from him so that all the dishes rattled, and a cup rolled off and smashed on the linoleum. “Everything you got is mine. Where is it?”
“Carl, get away from me!”
He pushed her against the sink. He grabbed handfuls of flesh around her thick waist and squeezed until she cried out in pain. She attempted to pull away. He pressed her harder. He momentarily let go, and with his right hand ripped the pocket from the front of her dress. Nothing fell out but the two coins kept in reserve for his dead eyes.
Seeing them, Carl retreated. Queenie gasped for breath, and stared at her husband. He seemed to her suddenly crazed, as if he had lost both reason and control in a single stroke. He turned wildly, lifted the table by a corner, and toppled it onto its side. All the dishes smashed, and Queenie’s legs were splattered and burned with hot coffee. She cried out and staggered toward the back door.
Carl ran up behind her, doubled up his fist and hit her as hard as he could in the kidney. Queenie’s breath forsook her, and she fell face down in the pile of broken crockery. As she rolled over in an attempt to rise, Carl kicked her three times in the belly—short, sharp, powerful kicks. Queenie stretched out in a long moan.
Carl placed his booted foot on her head, pressed down and ground Queenie’s face into the broken fragments of a white porcelain cup. The yellow linoleum grew bloody beneath Queenie’s prostrate body.
As the pressure of the boot was withdrawn, Queenie struggled to raise her head. One eye was masked with blood. Malcolm and Lucille stood horror-struck outside the kitchen door, peering through the screen. Lucille shrieked and ran away. Malcolm followed her a moment after.
Carl picked up a chair and smashed it across his wife’s back.
. . .
Lucille’s shrieks brought Florida Benquith to her kitchen window next door. Seeing the fleeing Malcolm, she went outside and hurried over to the Stricklands’ house. She peered in at the back door, and saw Carl Strickland, like an overfed demon, sitting on his wife’s rear end, and shredding open the back of her dress with a vegetable peeler held convulsively in both hands.
“Queenie! Queenie!” Florida screamed.
Blood welled up out of the long stripes in Queenie’s back, where the potato peeler had cut through the material and flayed open her skin.
Florida ran back to her house and, not taking the time to say a word to her astonished husband, took up his loaded shotgun from its place in the corner of the dining room, and flung herself out the door once more. When she was still twenty feet from the house, and long before she could actually see through the Stricklands’ back door, she fired the gun once, blowing a hole in the screen.
“Carl Strickland, I’m gone shoot you!” she hollered as she ran up to the door and into the house.
Startled by the blast of the shotgun, Carl rose from his wife’s back, and fled through the house, out the front door, and across the front yard. Florida left Queenie in a pool of blood on the kitchen floor and followed him. As she got out onto the front porch, Carl was just flinging himself into his automobile. Florida fired again, and knocked out a side window of the car. Carl got the engine started and he barreled off.
Florida Benquith dropped the shotgun on the grass and looked all around her, astonished. Miz Daughtry across the street stood on her front steps in her nightdress. The Moye children perched open-mouthed at the end of their sidewalk.
“Call Elinor Caskey!” Florida shouted at Miz Daughtry, and ran back inside. Dr. Benquith was already there, and said only, “She’s still alive...”
. . .
No one had any idea where Carl Strickland had gone. Oscar went to the sheriff and remarked coldly, “If Carl does come back, Mr. Key, and you happen to see him, let us know, will you, so that we can get Queenie out of his way. This next time, Queenie might not be so lucky.”
Embarrassed, Charley Key asked, “How is Miz Strickland, Oscar?”
“Three broken ribs, dislocated jaw. Lost most of the vision in her right eye. Other than that, just cut up and bruised.”
“Well,” said the sheriff, “I’m sorry to hear it. I notified the state police. Over in Florida, too. Told ’em Mr. Strickland hung out a lot down at Cantonement. They’re looking for him there.”
“I don’t care where he is, as long as he’s not in Perdido.”
“I’m gone make sure he don’t hurt nobody else,” Charley said staunchly.
“You could have stopped this from happening,” Oscar pointed out, and walked out of the office.
Queenie spent ten days at Sacred Heart Hospital in Pensacola. During that time, Malcolm and Lucille stayed with Elinor, and were given the guest bedroom at the front of the house—a room so little used that it hadn’t even been given a name, though later it would be called, “the children’s room.” Elinor and Oscar had anticipated some difficulty with Malcolm and Lucille, who were not known as model children, but the brother and sister appeared subdued and genuinely concerned for their mother’s well-being. Every day Bray drove either Elinor or Mary-Love or James down to visit Queenie, and every day one or another of her children would go along. Queenie’s attitude during her recuperation was one almost of relief: “If this is what I had to go through to get rid of Carl for once and all, then I am happy to have done it. I’m just gone have to hope he doesn’t try to come back for more.”
. . .
Queenie was brought back to Perdido on the eighth of November, and installed in Elinor’s house. Until Carl was found, it was not thought safe for her to stay in her own home. He had caught her there by surprise twice before, and might possibly do so again. While she recuperated at Elinor’s, Queenie was given Frances’s room, because it had its own bath.
When she returned home from school that day, Frances ran into the house, up the stairs, and into her own bedroom. She wanted to hug Queenie, but Queenie cried, “Lord, no, child! You cain’t touch me, look at my face! You ought to see my arms and back under these bedclothes! I am a sight for men and angels. You squeeze my hand, though,” she said, holding out her fingers for the timid child to grasp.
“Queenie, I’m real glad you’re back from the hospital,” said Frances.
“No, you’re not,” said Queenie.
“What do you mean by that?” asked Elinor, peering into the room through the window that opened onto the porch.
“Hey, Mama,” said Frances. “I am glad she’s back.”
“No, you’re not,” said Queenie, “’cause I took over your room.”
“Oh, that’s all right,” said Frances. “’Cause you’re sick, and I’m not.”
“I’m not sick, I’m just so sore all over I cain’t hardly move without wanting to sit down and write out my will, that’s all.”
Frances left Queenie alone and joined her mother on the porch. “Mama,” she asked, “if Queenie’s in here, then where am I gone sleep?”
“I’m putting you in the front room, darling,” replied Elinor.
Frances was dumbstruck. Her fear of the front room and the undersized closet door to the right of the hearth was as strong as ever. She still would not remain in the house alone, even during brightest day; she still listened every night from her bed for the sound of that c
loset door in the next room being surreptitiously opened, and of whatever was inside emerging cautiously into the dark.
Crushed by the terror that her mother’s simple revelation inspired in her, Frances was unable to speak another word. She wandered off in a daze. In her worst fears, Frances had never imagined that she would ever actually have to spend a night in that front room. The thought was too horrible to imagine—that she would be forced to lie in that bed alone, at night, and stare straight across at the weird little door, waiting for whatever was inside slowly to turn the knob and squeeze out. It would not matter that Queenie would be in the next room, through the passage where the linens were stored; that Lucille and Malcolm and her parents were across the hall, that Zaddie was downstairs. The entire town of Perdido might squeeze into the house and arrange themselves along the walls, but it would make no difference if Frances had to sleep alone in the front room. She thought she would surely die.
Now she found herself standing before the door of that very room, not having realized where her distracted footsteps were taking her. She softly turned the knob and peered in. As always, the room was dim and cool. No air moved in it. It smelled old—older than a room in any house in Perdido could possibly be. To Frances it smelled as if whole generations of Caskeys had died there in that room—as if decade after decade, Caskey mothers had been delivered of stillborn infants in that bed; as if an uninterrupted line of Caskey husbands had murdered their adulterous wives and stuck them in that chifforobe; as if a hundred skeletons with rotting flesh and tatters of clothing were heaped in that little closet, jostled in among the fur and feathers. For the first time in her memory, Frances noticed that the clock on the mantel had been wound and was ticking. She was about to shut the door when the clock chiming the quarter-hour seemed to beckon her. Frances resisted its call, anxiously pulled the door shut, and fled down the hall, not daring to look behind her. She ran back onto the porch and buried her head in her mother’s lap.
“Darling, what’s wrong?” said Elinor.
Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga Page 35