Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  Chapter 51

  The Proposal

  As Danjo prepared to go away for basic training at Camp Blanding on the Atlantic coast of Florida, James fussed about the boy relentlessly, wanting him in sight every minute. Most boys Danjo’s age would have quickly resented an old man’s worrisome solicitude, but Danjo bore with it. The last few days when he ought to have been going around town paying farewell calls, Danjo was allowed only to sit on the front porch with James and listen to the old man sigh and say things like: “I sure hope I’m alive when you get back, Danjo. I sure hope there’s somebody here to open your letters when you write home.”

  The unhappy day of departure came at last. James had wanted Bray to drive him and Danjo the four hundred miles to Camp Blanding so that he could hug his boy at the front gate, but Danjo drew the line at this. “I’m taking the bus, James, just like everybody else does. You want to do something for me, you get Elinor to make me some candy to take along and remind me of Perdido.”

  The box of candy, cookies, and cakes Elinor prepared for Danjo under James’s supervision weighed nearly as much as all the boy’s luggage.

  On the afternoon of the day before Danjo was to leave, James and his daughter sat on the front porch of their house. “Daddy,” said Grace, “why are we just sitting here moping? Why don’t we at least go on over to Elinor’s where there’s some people?”

  “Grace, you go on. This afternoon, I want you to let me mope in peace.”

  “I don’t know if I ought to point this out, Daddy, but you are making me feel real bad, going on about Danjo like this.”

  “Why, darling?”

  “Because you act like you’re left all alone. But you’re not. I’m here, and haven’t I sworn up and down the churchyard steeple that I’m never gone get married or leave you?”

  “You have.”

  “Then why do you act like you are all alone in the world?”

  The afternoon was hot, and James sat in his shirtsleeves. His chair was placed in the shadows of the porch so that no one passing by chance in front of the house should see him in such dishabille. He fanned himself with a paper fan. Grace sat beside him, full in the sunlight, with her arms turned outward for an even tan. Across the road, the cows in the orchard lay in the shade of the pecan trees, swishing their tails against flies.

  “Let me ask you, darling,” said James. “You remember how you loved all those girls who used to come and visit you here in the summers?”

  “’Course I do.”

  “You remember, though, when you went off to Spartanburg, you sort of got to love one girl special?”

  “I do, and then she up and married and I never want to hear her name spoken aloud by you or anybody else in this town!”

  “I’d never do that,” returned James calmly. “Well, that’s how I feel about Danjo, darling, that’s how much I love that boy. I love you too, of course, I always have loved you, but Danjo’s been something special to me, ’cause he was the only thing I ever had that was all my very own.”

  “What about me?”

  “You belonged to Genevieve some. Genevieve could have taken you away from me if she had wanted to. Nobody was gone take Danjo away, not after Carl died, anyway. Are you mad at me for feeling like this?”

  Grace laughed. Her eyes were closed against the sun. “Of course not, Daddy! I was just trying to get you upset, that’s all. I know how you care about Danjo, and I’m not jealous. Danjo’s the sweetest boy in the world, and there’s nothing more to be said about him! I just hope you’re not gone try to send me away.”

  “I wouldn’t send my little girl away, not for the world!”

  . . .

  Contrary to James Caskey’s doubts, Danjo Strickland was assigned to Eglin Air Base at the end of his basic training. James knew of many families who had sent their sons off with every expectation of Private X seeing two years of duty behind the information desk at the Arlington National Cemetery, only to discover that the War Department conceived that the only place for Private X was stoking the boiler of a destroyer in the western Pacific. But in Danjo’s case, things worked out as planned, and after basic training, Danjo Strickland was sent to Eglin. He was able to visit his uncle two or three times a week.

  Billy Bronze got all the credit for Danjo’s assignment so close to home. It was true that Billy had asked his commanding officer if anything might be done, but he had no way of knowing whether his request had had anything to do with the matter. Danjo trained as a radio engineer and, as such, was under Billy’s supervision. When Billy drove from Eglin over to Perdido, he often managed to bring Danjo with him, and thus his arrival in Perdido was now doubly welcome. Billy wasn’t loathe to accept the thanks of the Caskeys. He intended to ask Frances to marry him, and he didn’t think it would hurt his cause to have the family think he had done them all a great favor.

  Billy Bronze was a handsome, intelligent man, whose one desire in life was to be comfortable and to be taken care of. His father was rich, but the old man had anything but a loving disposition, and Billy had never had much comfort or care as a child. He had been packed off to military school at the age of eight. Unlike most of his young classmates, he had never allowed himself to suffer a moment of homesickness, and had never once looked forward to a holiday.

  Now, years later, he was grateful for having fallen in with the Caskeys. Men at Eglin occasionally chided him for courting an heiress, and Billy, because he himself was heir to a substantial fortune, did not bridle at the accusation. He was fascinated by the Caskeys, and by the women particularly. Billy had been around few women. His mother had been a browbeaten invalid. Billy had seen her leave her shuttered room only once, and that was when she was taken from it in her coffin. His father’s servants had all been men except for the cook in the kitchen, where he was never allowed. At military school he had met one woman, the wife of the commander, and one girl, the commander’s daughter. Billy was one of three hundred boys, and that didn’t lend itself to intimacy with those two females.

  But not only were there a great many Caskey women, the women were in control of the family. Billy had never seen anything like it, and the whole notion fascinated him. He loved being around the Caskeys, and had grown very quickly to love them all. With equal delight he attended to Queenie’s detailed gossip, Miriam’s snide remarks, Frances’s shy speech, Grace’s masculine banter, Lucille’s flirtatious coyness, and Elinor’s commanding pronouncements. Even the servants seemed to have been affected by the Caskey women’s assumption of power. Zaddie, Ivey, Roxie, and Luvadia did and said what they saw fit to do and say. In contrast, Oscar seemed rather put upon, and might have been utterly powerless if he had not enjoyed at least superficial control of the mill. James Caskey had abdicated his rights entirely, and had become a kind of woman himself. Danjo was a strong, masculine boy, but one trained nevertheless to believe that real power and real prestige lay with women and not with men. Billy, a year before he had come to Eglin, would never have believed that such a family existed. Now, he wanted never to leave them.

  He wondered what he would have done if there had been no marriageable daughter in the family; by what subterfuge he would have remained in Perdido and in the Caskey circle. As it was, there were—in theory, at any rate—three such prospects in the household: Frances, Miriam, and Lucille. Lucille was out; even his limited exposure to women had taught Billy enough to know to stay away from that type. When it came to Miriam and Frances, so unlike each other considering that they were sisters, Billy had chosen Frances. He had made this choice not because he believed that Frances would make the better wife, but because he had thought her more likely to accept an offer of marriage. His principal aim had been to join the Caskey clan; the means by which he accomplished this was a matter of secondary importance.

  So Billy wooed Frances as best he knew how—in a simple, straightforward manner. He had made it clear from the beginning that he intended sooner or later to ask her to marry him; no other method ever occurred to him. And
despite his less than romantic intentions, he discovered in the course of this courtship that he actually did love Frances. He couldn’t point to any particular physical, emotional, or mental attributes that made him fall in love with her; it had simply happened. And he could pinpoint the very moment. It was late one afternoon in the spring of 1943. He and Frances were walking around the house looking at the buds on the azaleas, and she was talking about the three years she had spent in bed with crippling arthritis. Suddenly he saw Frances with different eyes, as if a changed sun poured down a new quality of light upon her face and form. Interrupting her casual tale, he said, “Frances, you know what?”

  “What?”

  “I’m in love with you, that’s what.”

  “You are?” she laughed, blushing. “Well, you know what? I’m in love with you, and now you and me and the whole town know it.”

  “The whole town?”

  Frances nodded. “Every morning Queenie comes over here and she says, ‘Frances, when is that boy going to ask you to marry him?’” She stopped, and laughed again. “Oh, Lord! I guess I shouldn’t say that, should I? ’Cause it sounds like I’m sort of asking you to ask me.”

  They were in back of the house now, strolling among the slender trunks of the water oaks. They sat down on the plank seat between two of the trees.

  “You want me to ask you?” Billy said.

  “Well, of course I do,” said Frances. “But not if you don’t want to. I mean”—she stopped, and tried to look serious and upset—“I really shouldn’t say this. Sister would kill me. Mama would probably kill me, too. I mean, if you don’t want to marry me, then I’m embarrassing you, right? You’ll feel sort of obligated to ask, and there won’t be any way for you to get out of it. And anyway, the girl’s never supposed to mention it before the boy does. But the trouble is, I’m always thinking about it, and I’m always sort of assuming it’s going to happen, but I guess I shouldn’t, should I? I mean, if you want to turn around and drive right back to Eglin and pretend I never said—”

  “Frances, are you gone marry me or not?”

  “Of course I am!” she giggled. She looked around the yard and was quiet for a moment. Then she said, “Is that it? Does that take care of everything?” Coyness, it was evident, was not to be found in Frances’s repertoire of behavior.

  “For the time being.”

  “What else is there?” asked Frances.

  “Well, for one thing, we have to decide when we’re going to tell your family.”

  “My family already knows. I told you, they keep wanting to know if you’ve asked me yet.”

  “Then we have to decide when.”

  “When what?”

  “When we get married. I imagine your mama will want to do a little something in the way of a wedding. You’re graduating from Sacred Heart in May, and we ought to wait for that. It might even be best to wait till after the war. I could be transferred out of Eglin any day.”

  “I don’t care,” said Frances. “One way or the other, I’m just glad it’s all settled so I don’t have to think about it anymore, and everybody will shut up about it.”

  “And the most important thing...”

  “What?”

  “What we’re going to do after we are married.”

  Frances looked at him blankly.

  “I mean,” said Billy, “where we’re going to live and all that.”

  “Oh,” said Frances, as if she had not considered this before. “I don’t think Mama’s gone want me to move out. I think she’s just gone want you to move in. Mama and Daddy would want everything to be the same except that you and I would be sleeping in the same room.” A thought suddenly occurred to her. She looked at Billy earnestly, and spoke with a tremor in her voice, “Billy, promise me one thing.”

  “What?”

  “After we’re married, you sleep in my room. Promise me you won’t make me sleep in the front room.”

  He smiled. “Do you have nightmares in that room, too?”

  She nodded. Then her expression changed and she said, “But wait, where do you want to live after we’re married? I guess, if you made me, I’d go away with you.”

  “No, I’m not gone make you do anything you don’t want to do. Besides, I want to live here. I want to move in with your mama and daddy. You know,” he said, leaning over and kissing her, “that the only reason I’m marrying you is so that I can become a Caskey, too.”

  “I know that. I’m just lucky you didn’t choose Miriam...”

  They sat on the bench and stared at the levee. Suddenly, after so many weeks together in which neither had had the least difficulty with speech, both were tongue-tied.

  “Let’s go up there,” said Frances suddenly, pointing.

  “Up on the levee?”

  “Yes. Haven’t you ever been up at the top?”

  Billy shook his head. “I didn’t know you could get up there.”

  “Over behind James’s house there are steps. The kudzu’s pretty much covered them, but they’re still there.” She took his hand and led him across the yards to the base of the steps. They were hidden, but she had no difficulty in finding them. “Be careful,” she said, “Daddy always said there’re snakes living in this kudzu, even though I’ve never seen any.”

  Wading up through the kudzu as they might have maneuvered an unfamiliar staircase in the dark, they climbed to the top of the levee. In the twenty years since these clay banks had been built, the sides had been completely grown over with the rampaging vine; it had choked out everything else. But at the level top of the levee were oak and pine saplings that had taken root. Wild verbena also grew here, as well as Indian paintbrush, pale petunias, and degenerate phlox, all wind-seeded from some Perdido garden. In two decades the levee had grown almost invisible to the inhabitants of the town, even to those who lived within its very shadow. Children, to whom it was no novelty, felt no desire to play on it, and were no longer warned against its dangers. The rivers that flowed behind the levees had become even less familiar to those who lived in the town. Who ever thought of the Perdido and the Blackwater? One saw them only when crossing the bridge below the Osceola Hotel, and the new concrete sides to that bridge cut off most of that view.

  At the top, Billy Bronze was surprised by the aspect of the river on the other side. “It looks so wild!” he exclaimed. The Perdido was swift, the water swirling, muddy, red. Its movement was urgent, insistent, inexorable. “It looks dangerous. No wonder they put these levees up.”

  Frances chuckled. “I love this river! Let’s walk down toward the junction.” She took his hand and led him on. To their right were the houses that had once belonged to the DeBordenaves and the Turks. One was shut up with the windows boarded over, and the other had been taken over by the undertaker. “You know,” said Frances, “Mama loves the river even more than I do. From about March till November, she swims in it every day.”

  “In that!?”

  Frances nodded. “She’s done it for as long as I can remember. Mama’s about the best swimmer I ever met. I’m pretty good myself. Sometimes,” Frances added with pride, “I go swimming with her.”

  “But it’s so swift! How can you swim in it?”

  Frances shrugged. “I don’t know, I just do. When I was so sick,” she said, with an effort to remember, “Mama bathed me every day in Perdido water and that’s what finally made me well.”

  “How could that cure you?”

  “I don’t know. Mama says I was baptized in Perdido water and that’s why it cured me. Maybe that was it.”

  They had reached the junction. Behind them was the town hall. The bus from the Pensacola shipyards was just then letting out the women workers in the parking lot; some of their husbands waited in automobiles. In front of the newly affianced couple the swift red water of the Perdido and the black water of the smaller Blackwater spiraled together and sank in a swirling vortex down toward the muddy bottom.

  “When you go swimming, aren’t you afraid of that?” Billy as
ked, pointing down.

  Frances didn’t answer. She stared at the whirlpool, again as if trying to remember something.

  “What if you got sucked down in it? You’d be drowned for sure.”

  “No...” said Frances absently. “Not really.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I’m trying to remember...”

  “Remember what?”

  “I have been down there,” she said at last, and looked at her fiancé with a puzzled expression. “I think I remember going down in it.”

  Billy looked at it again. “You’d remember that,” he said.

  Frances shook her head. “No...it’s just vague.”

  “Then tell me what’s down there?” Billy asked, as if it were all a tease.

  “Mama...”

  “What?”

  “Mama’s down there.”

  “Frances, are you all right, you look so...”

  Frances shook herself, and closed her eyes tightly. She opened them and said, “Billy, I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

  “Nothing. Let’s go back, all right?”

  They retraced their steps along the levee, and spoke no more of Frances’s memory of the vortex at the junction of the rivers. They walked carefully down the steps through the kudzu. At the bottom, Billy said, “Oh, Frances, you never really went down that whirlpool. You couldn’t have, you’d have been drowned for sure.”

  . . .

  Frances wasted no time in telling her family of her engagement. Elinor kissed her daughter and then kissed Billy Bronze, and said, “Billy, I hope there’s not going to be any nonsense about the two of you going away anywhere once you’re married. I hope that you and Frances are going to want to stay on here just like you always have. What would Oscar and I do without our little girl? What would we do without you for that matter?”