Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  Sister said: “I know that, Oscar, but shouldn’t we have a little in reserve?”

  “We cain’t afford to right now,” replied Oscar. “We’ve got to make sure that when this country is on its feet again, we’re right up there and ready to get going too.”

  “Oscar,” said James firmly, “this country’s been down for almost ten years. What you think’s gone get it back up again? Now, I’m not worried for my sake, ’cause I know I can always get along. I just want to make sure that everything’s gone be all right for Elinor and Frances and Sister and Miriam. What would happen to Danjo and Queenie and her children if anything happened to me?”

  “Don’t y’all trust me?” cried Oscar. “Don’t y’all know what I’m trying to do?”

  “No,” said Sister. “I don’t think James and I do know.”

  “I don’t,” agreed James.

  “I’m trying to make us rich,” Oscar announced.

  “What for?” asked Sister. “Five years ago, when things were so bad for everybody, we had all the money in the world anybody could possibly want that was in his right mind. Now you say we’re doing all right, but when I want to send Ivey out for a bottle of milk I’ve got to go over to the mill and break into petty cash.”

  “That’s just for the time being,” said Oscar. “And you know it’s not that bad, Sister.”

  “What if it all goes bust?” asked James. “What do we do then?”

  “It’s not all gone go bust. Y’all just leave me alone for a little while and let me work this thing through. Y’all don’t see it, but we’re in a very good position.”

  James and Sister didn’t see it, but with some misgivings they decided to trust Oscar. “After all,” James pointed out to Sister later, “what else can we do?”

  If James and Sister had their doubts and gave Oscar no support in matters pertaining to the running of the Caskey mill, Oscar could always count on the trust and confidence of his wife. Elinor invariably said, “Oscar, I know you, and I know you’re doing it right.”

  . . .

  All the Caskeys attended the ceremonies marking the end of Miriam’s high school career. They had discovered from the Perdido Standard that Miriam had attained valedictory status in her graduating class. She had said nothing of this, as if in an attempt to deny her family the pleasure of pride in her accomplishment. In her speech, faultlessly delivered, Miriam likened life to a nest of Chinese boxes, and mystified everyone. After the presentation of the graduation certificates, Miriam allowed herself to be kissed by everyone—even her mother, father, and sister. Miriam understood that on such an occasion she must submit to formalized indignities. The afternoon was brutally hot, and the high school seniors, in white gowns and tasseled mortarboards, wandered aimlessly over the football field with their families, as if all had been afflicted with heat fever. Oscar remarked to his daughter, as if he might have been speaking to one of Miriam’s classmates whom he had never met, “You think you might be going on to college?”

  Miriam paused before answering. “I’m thinking of it,” she said at last.

  “Where are you thinking of?” asked Elinor, taking advantage of the occasion to speak to her daughter directly and to the point.

  “I’m not sure,” replied Miriam hastily, glancing around and then running off to hug a detested classmate.

  Sister later asked Miriam the same question, but not even she got a straight answer. James said to Sister, “We’re not gone find out until the day Miriam takes off—if she does decide to do it.”

  Sister sighed and said, “Why you suppose Miriam is like that?”

  James replied in surprise: “Because of Mary-Love, of course. Haven’t you noticed, Sister? Miriam is just like your mama.”

  And so she was, laying her plans carefully and in secret.

  The hot, high summer came on, and still no one knew what was to become of Miriam in the fall. This was a question of no small moment to Sister, for if Miriam went away to school, Sister would have no ostensible reason to remain in Perdido. She would have to think up another excuse for not returning to her husband. And it was nearly inconceivable that Miriam would not go to college—a girl who was smart enough to have been valedictorian of her class, with as much social position and as assured a financial future as Miriam was blessed with, was bound for higher education. Sister grew so demoralized by the task of figuring out some way of not having to go back to Early Haskew that she self-indulgently talked herself into believing that Miriam would never go away at all.

  So everyone waited impatiently for fall, to see what Miriam would do. But Miriam had an intermediate surprise. One day toward the end of June Miriam attended a party at the casino on Santa Rosa Island, across the bay from Pensacola. From that day forth, she was obsessed with the beach. Every day she departed at five-thirty in the morning in the little roadster she had been given by Mary-Love. She returned in time for the afternoon meal. Her skin grew darker and darker.

  “Is she meeting a boy, you think?” Queenie asked James.

  “I wonder,” said James, and that night asked Sister the same question.

  “Are you seeing a boy down at Pensacola Beach?” Sister asked Miriam the following noon when Miriam walked in the house with a towel over her shoulder.

  Miriam seemed offended by the question. “Sister, I drive down there and I lie on the beach and soak up the sun.”

  “I was just wondering,” said Sister.

  That afternoon, wearing a white sundress that showed off her deep tan to startling effect, Miriam marched across the sandy yard and knocked on the door of her mother’s house. Elinor came to the door.

  “Elinor, is Frances around?” Miriam asked stiffly. She had hoped that Frances herself or perhaps Zaddie would answer the door. It irked Miriam to speak to her mother.

  “No, she’s not. She went downtown, but she ought to be back soon. You want to come in and wait?”

  “No, ma’am, but when she gets back, would you tell her to come over and see me for a minute? I want to ask her a question.” Miriam turned around and marched off before Elinor could say another word.

  . . .

  Frances was startled and alarmed by the summons from her sister, and she hurried next door to deal with the matter as quickly as possible, as a condemned criminal may urge that the time of execution be moved forward rather than put off. Miriam was reading a magazine by the window in her room upstairs.

  “Miriam, Mama said you wanted to speak to me.” Frances stood in the doorway to the room; Miriam did not encourage her to venture farther in.

  “I did. I wanted to know if you wanted to go down to Pensacola with me tomorrow.”

  With the revelation of the reason for the summons, Frances’s amazement only increased. “What…what for?” she stammered.

  “To lie down on the beach.”

  Frances stared at Miriam almost as if in a stupor.

  “Well,” said Miriam impatiently. “Do you want to go or not?”

  “Yes,” blurted Frances.

  “Can you be ready at five-thirty?”

  Frances nodded.

  “That’s when I leave. If you’re not out on your porch, I’ll leave without you. I’m not gone be going up to Elinor’s door and knocking at that hour of the morning, and I’m not gone call out to you, either. Are you gone be out on the front porch when I’m ready to leave?”

  Frances nodded again.

  “Good,” said Miriam. “Ivey’ll fix us something to take along, so don’t worry about something to eat. If you’re gone want to buy things at the concession stand, then you’d better bring a little money.”

  “All right,” returned Frances, lingering hesitantly for further instructions.

  None came. After a few moments, Miriam looked up and remarked, “Well, why don’t you go away now? I’m busy.”

  In a daze, Frances wandered home. Neither her father nor her mother could interpret the significance of the invitation. Elinor called James to see if he or Queenie had any ideas abou
t what it portended. They couldn’t figure it out, and James called Sister. Sister didn’t know for sure, but she had an idea: “Maybe Miriam wants everybody to know that she’s not going down to Pensacola every day to meet a boy. That could be why she’s taking Frances along.”

  . . .

  Miriam drove fast. The top of the roadster was down, and the wind was so loud that the sisters were unable to talk to each other. The sun was still low in the sky at that hour of the morning. Miriam and Frances wore bathing suits under their sundresses. The ride took only slightly more than an hour, and when the sisters got to the beach it was still empty. The casino hadn’t opened yet, but half a dozen fishermen had cast their lines from the end of the pier. Miriam walked a few hundred yards or so beyond the pier to a stretch of deserted sand and laid out her blanket. She silently pointed to where Frances should spread hers.

  “Did you bring any lotion?” asked Miriam abruptly.

  “No,” said Frances. “Should I have?”

  “Of course. You’re going to burn anyway because you’re not used to the sun, but without lotion you’re going to be in horrible pain by the time we get home. Here, use some of mine.”

  Frances meekly submitted to being doused with the cold lotion. Miriam brusquely rubbed it in, and when she was finished with Frances, performed the same operation on herself.

  “What do I do now?” asked Frances timidly.

  “Nothing. Just switch sides every once in a while. And don’t talk.”

  When Miriam lay on her stomach, tanning her back, she read. When she lay on her back, she closed her eyes and slept, or at least appeared to sleep.

  Frances had never been so bored in her life, not even when she had been confined to her bed with arthritis. She hadn’t brought anything to read. Her head was filled with the dull roar of the Gulf of Mexico. Sand fleas jumped onto her legs and bit them. The blindingly white sand and the washed-out sky bleached all color from the landscape, until everything seemed overwhelmingly pale and overwhelmingly bright, like the continual flash of a news camera. She could feel her skin beginning to burn. She dared not speak to her sister, who had peremptorily prohibited conversation.

  Frances sat up on the blanket and began to look longingly at the water. At last, when she felt as if her skin were frying and the blood simmering in her arteries, she turned to Miriam and said, “Can I go in?”

  “Go in where?” snapped Miriam.

  “Go in the water.”

  “Yes. Though I don’t know why you’d want to. I hate swimming. Watch out for jellyfish. Be careful of the undertow. Somebody saw a shark out there on Wednesday.”

  “I’ll be careful,” said Frances, getting up from the towel.

  She raced toward the water, and leaped into a wave just then crashing against the shore. The water was deliciously cool and she loved the motion of the waves. She even liked the taste of the salt. Frances had never been in the Gulf before. When she thought of water and bodies of water, she thought only of the muddy Perdido. The Perdido’s voice was low, secretive, and made up of a hundred smaller noises, incessant and unidentifiable. The Gulf, on the other hand, had but a single voice, regular, loud, insistent. The Perdido’s water was dark and murky, as if it purposely hid things in its depths; the Gulf water was bright and blue and white, and Frances could see her feet through it. The bed of the Perdido was a fathomless sheet of soft black mud in which dead things were concealed; underneath these crashing waves lay hard-packed white sand and millions of fragments of colored shells. Only an occasional sullen bream or catfish swam in the Perdido; here were clams gaping in the sand, bright clean seaweed, vast schools of minnows, and larger fish that sometimes flew cleanly out of the top of a wave.

  Frances swam farther out where the fish were even larger. They moved lazily away at her intrusion. She perceived the undertow Miriam warned her against, yet somehow she did not feel she was in any danger. She let herself be pulled out farther. She now saw that the pier was no more than a dark line jutting into the water, and her sister was not visible at all. She realized that she was probably too far out, but still she was undisturbed. As she lazily swam back in toward shore she realized she had never been less than fully confident of her ability to do so.

  “I thought you had drowned,” said Miriam calmly, looking up from her book as Frances once again stood by her towel on the beach, dripping wet. “I looked up and you had disappeared. You must have gone out too far.”

  “No, no...”

  “It’s time to go home.”

  Frances glanced at her sister, puzzled. “It cain’t be time to go home yet. We just got here.”

  Miriam looked up, shading her eyes. “How long do you think you were out in the water?”

  “Twenty minutes? Half an hour?”

  Miriam pointed up into the sky. “Look at the sun,” she said. “Straight overhead. It’s almost noon. You were in the water for over three hours!”

  Frances looked up into the sky, then turned and gazed once more into the warm blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

  . . .

  Miriam was silent on the drive home, but Frances didn’t mind. Miriam steered with one hand on the wheel and stared pensively at the road through her dark glasses. Frances lay with her head back, limp but not exhausted. As they neared Perdido, Frances tried to think of a way to thank her sister for the surprising invitation, an invitation that had unexpectedly provided a mysteriously important event for her. When they pulled up before Miriam’s house, however, Frances had not yet found the courage to speak.

  They got out of the car. “Thank you,” said Frances meekly, troubled by the inadequacy of her words.

  “You better go buy you some lotion this afternoon,” said Miriam. “I cain’t keep on letting you use mine.”

  Frances stopped dead in her tracks and considered this. “You mean we’re going back tomorrow?” she asked cautiously.

  “I go every day,” said Miriam, not quite answering the question.

  “And you’re inviting me to go again?”

  Miriam wouldn’t go so far as to admit that. “I leave at five-thirty every morning, and there’s room in the car. But I never wait for anybody.”

  Frances grinned and ran home. She told her astonished parents about the morning.

  “Are you going again?” her father asked.

  “Of course!” cried Frances. “I had a wonderful time!”

  “You’re burned, darling!” said Elinor. “When you’re down there, I want you to spend all your time in the water. That way the sun won’t be so bad on your skin.”

  “Oh, Mama! I love that water so much! I can hardly wait till tomorrow!”

  Elinor Caskey seemed to take particular delight in this announcement, and for weeks thereafter was not heard to speak a word against Miriam, who had provided Frances with a way that she could swim in the Gulf every day.

  . . .

  The pattern for the entire summer was set that first trip. Every sunny morning of the week Miriam and Frances drove down to Pensacola Beach. Miriam rarely spoke to her sister, other than to say, “Are you ready?” or “Did you bring money for the toll bridge?” Miriam lay on her blanket, reading, napping, her skin growing ever darker and darker. Frances swam in the Gulf, sometimes breasting the waves, sometimes swimming in the calm water yards below the surface, sometimes lazily allowing herself to be dragged along by the undertow. Once she discovered herself so far out that a school of leaping porpoises passed around her. She threw her arms about one of the smaller ones and was pulled through the water for several miles at a pace faster than any she had ever known before. Another time she dived deep into the water in order to avoid being seen by the workers on a passing shrimp boat, and she narrowly escaped being caught in their trawling nets. When the boat was gone, Frances wondered why she had deliberately and instinctively avoided being seen. Then she realized that to be discovered so far from the beach would excite suspicion. The fishermen would not believe that a sixteen-year-old girl was not in danger bobbing
in the water five miles from shore.

  Something about the hours spent in the Gulf reminded Frances of the time of her sickness, and of even more vague and distant times before that. She seemed to lose consciousness the minute she breasted the first wave of the morning—or rather she seemed to lose her identity as Frances Caskey. She became someone—or something—else. She could swim from before seven o’clock when she and Miriam arrived at the beach, until eleven, without touching bottom, without feeling fatigue or fear of undertow, sharks, jellyfish, cramps, or loss of direction. When it was time to come in, she did not say to herself, Miriam is getting ready to go. Rather, she simply found herself walking up through the waves and onto the beach. The sensation was akin to her recollection of the baths her mother had given her during the course of her illness three years earlier. Frances remembered nothing about them except the moment that her mother took her beneath the arms and lifted her from the water. In that motion her identity, temporarily lost in the water, had come back to her. Rising through the breaking surf, feeling the sand and bits of shell beneath her feet, Frances’s old identity returned to her, and she forgot all that she had felt and experienced so far from the shore.

  Miriam always made some remark to Frances that went something like: “I looked up for you once or twice, but I could never see you. Sometime I’m going to tell Oscar how far out you go. One day you’re going to drown, and everybody’s going to blame me.”