Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  . . .

  Mary-Love was nursed by her daughter-in-law. Elinor sat with her in the front room all day long. All visitors were stopped at the door downstairs by an unbribable, unmovable Zaddie. Only Leo Benquith was allowed inside the house, and he came once a day, right after the noontime meal. He examined Mary-Love in Elinor’s presence, went downstairs, and always accepted a glass of iced tea from Zaddie who was waiting for him with it. He sat out on the front porch and told Oscar what he thought.

  What he thought was not very encouraging.

  “Oscar,” said Leo. “I don’t know what’s wrong with your mama. She has some sort of fever, and she cain’t seem to get rid of it. She’s gone have to lie real still up there for some time to come.”

  “Maybe we should take her to Pensacola to Sacred Heart...” Oscar suggested tentatively.

  “Well,” said Leo. “I wouldn’t recommend it. I would let her keep to her bed. I would let Elinor stay right there by her all the time. Here she can have the food and drink that she’s used to. That’s what I would do.”

  “Leo, what is it she’s got, anyway?”

  “Like I said, it’s some kind of fever. Like a swamp fever. Sort of like malaria—but of course it’s not malaria. Honest to God, Oscar, I don’t know what it is. Your mama been out fishing lately?”

  “It’s hard to imagine Mama fishing. Why you ask something like that?”

  “’Cause I remember a long time ago an old colored man—don’t even remember his name—came down with the same thing, or same thing near as I can make out. He was one of Pa’s cases, I was just itty-bitty, but I remember, ’cause I was going around with Pa in those days. That old colored man was a fisherman, used to fish on the Perdido a few miles up above here, I guess.”

  “That was before my time, ’cause I don’t remember him. But he had the same thing?”

  “I think it was. Said he fell in the water, swallowed some, and nearly drowned. Came back home and crawled into bed.”

  “Great God in the morning, Leo! If you could catch something out of Perdido water, don’t you think we’d all be dead by now? Elinor, especially. She swims in that old river all the time. Always has. And she hasn’t been sick a day since we were married in James’s living room. What happened to that old colored man anyway?”

  “Oh, Oscar, that was so long ago! That old man’s been dead twenty-five years!”

  “What’d he die of, though?” Leo Benquith looked closely at Oscar, but didn’t answer. “That old colored man died of the fever he caught in Perdido water, isn’t that right?” Oscar shook his head ruefully. “Leo, I’m sorry. It’s not that I don’t think you’re the best doctor in three counties, it’s just that lately Mama and I haven’t been getting along so well.”

  “So Florida told me.”

  “And if anything happened to her right now, I think I’d just die! Listen, Leo, you think if I went up there and apologized, Mama would hear me and understand what I was saying?”

  “She might.”

  “Would it be all right to do that?”

  “As long as you don’t badger her into answering you, ’cause I’m not so sure she can. Oscar, I tell you what. You wait awhile, let her get over the excitement of my being here this afternoon, then go up and ask Elinor if it’s all right. She’ll know.”

  “Elinor’s a good nurse for Mama!” Oscar exclaimed with pride.

  “She sure is,” agreed Leo. “I think Elinor knows as much about Mary-Love’s illness as I do.”

  Accordingly, an hour later, after he had drunk two more glasses of iced tea and walked around the house a couple of times and poked a stick into the kudzu at the base of the levee looking for stray snakes and called for Zaddie to let him in the back way, Oscar went upstairs and knocked on the door of the front room.

  Elinor opened the door softly and stepped out into the hallway.

  “How’s Mama?”

  “She’s the same.”

  “Elinor, can I speak to her?”

  “About what?”

  “About...things,” he said vaguely and uneasily.

  “Are you gone yell at her?”

  “No, of course not! I’m gone ask her to forgive me.”

  “Forgive you for what?”

  “For not coming to see her for the past five years.”

  “Oscar, that was Mary-Love’s fault. That wasn’t yours.”

  “I know, but I shouldn’t have done it anyway. Mama’s always been that way, and I knew it. Maybe if I said, ‘Mama, will you forgive me?’ it’d make her feel better. You think?”

  Elinor paused and considered. At last she stood aside and said, “All right, Oscar. Go on in. But keep your voice down. And don’t keep asking her to say yes and no and shake her head and kiss you.”

  “I won’t. But will she hear me? Will she understand what I’m saying?”

  “That I don’t know. Oscar, I’m going to speak to Zaddie for a few minutes and then I’m coming right back up and throw you out. So you’d better get to it.”

  Elinor went quietly down the hallway toward the stairs as Oscar hesitantly entered the front room.

  . . .

  The room was dark and airless, though outside the sun shone brightly and a stiff breeze from the Gulf kept the afternoon heat at bay. Across the windows the shades had been pulled, the venetian blinds closed, and the lined draperies drawn. A thin line of dim light along the baseboard below the windows was the only indication that it was not black night outside. The room was overwhelmed with the unmistakable odor of illness, as if the sickness had infected the bedclothes, the furniture, and the very walls and floor of the room. On a table laden with medicines was an oscillating fan. Its labored turning was a result of mechanical difficulty, but it almost seemed to Oscar that its problems might have been caused by the density of the air it had to reckon with. An extra carpet had been put down on the floor; cushions had been put on all the chairs, and cloths had been laid over every surface to guard against obtrusive noise. A single low-watted bulb shone dimly behind a shade of crimson silk. Oscar looked about and no longer wondered that his daughter had been afraid to sleep in this room. The walls were dark green, but they seemed no brighter than the black cast-iron chandelier suspended near the middle of the ceiling. He had rarely been in this room. With the door closed, the light shut out, and all outside sound muffled, it didn’t seem like a part of the house at all.

  In the same way, his mother, lying in the bed, seemed no longer a part of his life. She was not the woman who figured in his memory and thought. Mary-Love lay unmoving, breathing stertorously, in a thick linen nightdress, propped up on pillows. The sheets, spread, and coverlet had been impeccably arranged; they covered Mary-Love almost up to her neck. Her hands, white and frail, lay atop the folded-back sheet.

  Mary-Love’s eyes were open, but they were not focused on her son. Experimentally, he moved a few feet to the left. Her eyes did not follow him. Oscar placed himself in her line of vision.

  “Mama?” he said.

  He listened and wondered if he did not detect a slight momentary alteration of her breath. It was difficult to tell over the distracting noise of the fan.

  “Mama, I came to visit you for a minute.”

  He moved to the table and turned the fan off. For the first time he detected the unsettling raspiness in his mother’s breathing.

  Back at bedside, he assured her, “I’ll turn it back on in a minute. I just wanted to make sure you heard what I was going to say.”

  He paused, waiting for some indication that she had heard, or that she assented to his continuing. None came, but Oscar felt that he had to proceed.

  “Mama, I’m real sorry you’re sick. The only good thing about your being sick is that you’re letting Elinor and me take care of you. You know what that shows, don’t you? It shows nobody’s upset anymore. Elinor wouldn’t do everything she’s doing for you if she were still mad at you, would she? She wouldn’t spend all day up here every day. She wouldn’t sleep in here at ni
ght. Mama, I just want you to know that I’m not mad anymore either. I’m not even thinking about the things that made me mad. I just want you to get well. By the time everybody comes back from Chicago, I want you back in your own house, fussing. I want you to get mad because everybody went away and left you here by yourself. But I tell you something, I’m glad they did, because it means Elinor and I have got the chance to prove how much we really do love you. That’s what I wanted to make sure you heard me say. Just because I’m not being your nurse doesn’t mean I don’t care, because I do. I just wouldn’t know what to do in here. See, I cain’t even look at you and make sure you’re hearing what I’m saying. I wouldn’t know what medicine was what, and that’s why Elinor is doing all this and not me. Elinor is being better than I thought she could be, Mama. Now, doesn’t it make you want to cry that you two have not been getting along all these years? You know what? Elinor and I have been married sixteen years now, isn’t that something? I remember the first time—”

  At that moment, Elinor opened the door of the room, and said, “Oscar, that’s enough for right now. It’s time for your mama’s medicine. Turn the fan back on.”

  He did so. “Do you think she heard me?” he asked. “I said some things I wanted to make sure she heard.”

  Elinor turned her gaze to the woman in the bed. “I’m sure she heard every word.” From a tray beside the fan, she took up a bottle of reddish liquid, unscrewed the cap, and poured out a dose into an old silver soupspoon.

  “Can you tell for sure?” he persisted anxiously.

  “Yes. Oscar, it’s time you got back to the mill. You can speak to Mary-Love later.” She went around the bed with the medicine.

  “Is that Leo’s prescription?”

  With one hand she pressed Mary-Love’s cheeks sharply together, so that her mouth involuntarily opened. Oscar watched as Elinor poured the liquid in, then rapped upward on Mary-Love’s chin so that her mouth clapped shut with a clack of teeth.

  “No,” replied Elinor, standing up straight, “this is mine.”

  Oscar stood at the door and opened it softly. “Elinor, I’ll be back at five.” He looked once more at his mother in the bed. Mary-Love’s eyes now seemed to stare back at him. In them Oscar saw what he thought was fear. “Mama,” he said, “Elinor’s gone take good care of you.”

  He slipped out and closed the door quickly behind him. He did not see his mother’s lips struggle to form three syllables.

  “Per-di-do,” Mary-Love whispered.

  Elinor looked at her mother-in-law and turned the fan on high. Mary-Love’s rasping breath could not be heard.

  Elinor sat down in the rocker at the foot of the bed and opened a magazine on her lap.

  Mary-Love’s fingers weakly twisted the hem of the sheet. Her moving lips formed the words, “I’m drowning...”

  . . .

  Feebleness, inconsequence, immobility, dependence—things Mary-Love Caskey had never known before had suddenly crowded in upon her. She remembered getting sick in the Atmore station, and she remembered when she first opened her eyes in the front room. She knew where she was from the hand-painted flowers on the footboard of the bed; she had picked the suite out in Mobile. It was the first furniture she had purchased for her son’s house.

  Her limbs were without sensation and very cold at the same time. Her head burned. She seemed always to be waking up, though she never had to open her eyes. She could never remember falling asleep. She wished she could dream. As it was, nothing held her mind but her cold limbs, her burning brow, and the profile of Elinor Caskey, rocking in a chair at the foot of the bed. Zaddie appeared sometimes, and the young black woman’s voice seemed distant as she spoke to Elinor. It was as if Mary-Love heard it from the house next door, as if it were a voice caught in her sleep.

  Elinor’s voice, in contrast, always sounded close and clear, as if the words had been whispered directly into Mary-Love’s ear in the dark.

  She was never hungry, and she never remembered having eaten anything. The only thing she remembered was Elinor’s fingers pressing her cheeks, so that the red liquid from the unmarked medicine bottle could be poured between her opened lips. Hours later, she’d feel the grit it left behind, pressing against her gums and her teeth. She wondered at Leo Benquith’s prescribing it. Afterward, she always felt worse and weaker.

  As the days progressed—Mary-Love supposed they were days, but reckoned them only by the difference in outfits Zaddie wore when she came into the room with the trays bearing Elinor’s meals—Mary-Love lost more and more sensation in her body. Her limbs were no longer cold, but the sheets, the spread, and the coverlet were leaden upon her. Her hands rested free, but the very air of the room seemed weighted; it seemed to press down against her until she could not move at all. She felt the perspiration that gathered upon her brow, which sometimes dripped into her eyes and stung. She welcomed that sting, for it was the only sensation left to her.

  Otherwise, she was overwhelmed with the sense that she was filling up with liquid, as if her body were only some stretching skin into which day by day Elinor poured that noxious red liquid. It wasn’t sweet, but it reminded her of the blackberry nectar she had been served the day before she fell ill. Her legs and belly were already so heavy that they seemed to sink deep into the bed. She was certain that she would never be able to move them again. A soupspoon of that medicine seemed to fill her body with gallons of liquid! She grew heavier and heavier. It was filling her lungs, leaving little room for her to bring in air. Her breath grew shallow and quick, and she felt that she was beginning to drown. Her brain held an involuntary image of floating slowly down the Perdido, her body lying just below the surface, with only her mouth, eyes, and nose protruding into the air. The rest of her was submerged in the river. If she struggled, she would certainly drown in that dry, airless front bedroom of Oscar’s house. Even if the draperies were drawn back, the venetian blinds opened, and the shades lifted, Mary-Love would have seen only the levee, not the Perdido behind it, the Perdido daily spooned between her lips by her daughter-in-law.

  Mary-Love was certain that that unmarked bottle held Perdido water. She now recognized the taste. She knew the texture of the red clay granules that were left behind on her tongue when she swallowed. She could smell it whenever the bottle was unscrewed. Yet she couldn’t prevent her lips from parting when Elinor squeezed her cheeks, and couldn’t help but swallow when Elinor jarred her mouth shut again.

  Elinor was tireless. Elinor never left her.

  Mary-Love prayed to be alone; she prayed to die in peace. She prayed to be able to sleep dreamlessly forever. She prayed for some death other than that which her daughter-in-law was preparing for her. When she realized that none of these prayers was to be answered, she beseeched God only that her doom not be prolonged.

  Elinor sat at the foot of Mary-Love’s bed and rocked. She leafed quietly through stacks of magazines and took trays from Zaddie at the door. She stood by reporting to Leo Benquith, and when he was gone, she poured whole currents of Perdido river water down her mother-in-law’s throat.

  . . .

  Only once did Mary-Love Caskey come to consciousness and find her daughter-in-law absent from the room. Her eyes, as usual, were already open. The sense of waking had not come to her, only the realization that previously she had been asleep. She hadn’t the power to move her eyes in their sockets. She could only stare directly before her. Elinor was not in her chair. By some subtle means she couldn’t precisely figure out, Mary-Love knew that Elinor was not in the room—and she also knew that it was night.

  She drew an extra breath—a tiny sniff that wouldn’t have been noticed even by someone leaning over her—in order to feel to what extent her lungs had filled with water.

  Mary-Love’s heart contracted. She had only an inch of space remaining in her lungs. Only an inch of breath to sustain her. She was heavy, filled with Perdido water, and the water was rising.

  Lungs don’t work that way, some voice belonging to the o
ld Mary-Love told her sternly. Bodies don’t fill with water like cauterized skins. Women don’t drown in their beds.

  Mary-Love didn’t want to panic. If she panicked, she’d gasp for breath. If she gasped for breath, the water would move and slosh, and she’d die sputtering. She hadn’t any hope except to cling to life. She wanted to stave off that doom for which she had so recently prayed.

  She continued by force only to breathe her shallow, almost imperceptible breaths.

  The front room darkened, as if she had closed her eyes, yet Mary-Love knew her eyes were open. She could not know how long it remained so. She felt, however, that she never lost consciousness.

  Light came suddenly, but it wasn’t morning light. It wasn’t lamplight. It wasn’t light from the opened door to the corridor. It was merely a pale bluish-white glow, outlining the closet door to the right of the fireplace.

  Mary-Love made an effort to focus her eyes upon it. That was as much as she could do.

  The closet door was slowly opening.

  A little boy stood inside, and he was looking about himself in apparent confusion. Like Mary-Love, he also seemed not to have awakened, but to have found himself in a state of consciousness that had not existed before. He lifted his hand before his face and stared at it. He peered cautiously out into the darkened room. Though Mary-Love thought that she knew him, she could not think clearly enough to identify him. Was he one of hers? Was he Queenie’s boy?

  The child stepped out of the closet and into the room. The bluish-white light faded behind him. The room was dark again.

  Though the fan was off, Mary-Love heard nothing but her own shallow breathing.

  Now that she could no longer see him, the boy’s name came to her suddenly. John Robert DeBordenave.

  More than his name came into her memory.

  John Robert had disappeared twelve years before. He had drowned in the Perdido during the final stage of the levee construction, but now appearing so briefly in the light of the opened closet door, he was no older than on the last day that Mary-Love had seen him.