Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

“Why are we out here?” demanded Lucille suddenly. “Why cain’t we let anybody know?”

  “For one simple reason,” returned Grace. “We don’t want anybody to know what happened to you. And the reason for that is not ’cause we’re ashamed, but because of what would happen to you if everybody did find out. Travis Gann jumping on top of you is not your fault, you’re right, but if it comes out that he did it, and you got pregnant, everybody’s gone look at you different. And they’d certainly treat that little baby different. I’d be surprised if you could ever get married after that. Perdido’s mean about things like that. People everywhere are, I guess. Men don’t want to marry damaged goods, and that’s what you’d be, if anybody found out. Damaged goods.”

  “I don’t care!” cried Lucille. “I don’t want to get married. Not ever.”

  Grace laughed. “Lucille Strickland! I have seen you flirt with every man who came within a three-mile radius of that candy counter at the Ben Franklin. I have seen you try on your mama’s wedding ring time and time again just to see what it looked like! Don’t tell me you aren’t interested in getting married.”

  “I’m not, though.” She looked around, at the pond, at the graveyard, at the house, at the sky, as if in puzzlement that such a decision had been made in her mind without her having had a single thing to say in the matter. “I’m not, though,” she repeated softly. “Maybe this place isn’t so bad after all. It’s just a little lonely out here, that’s all.”

  “You sound just like Daddy,” said Grace. “Y’all act like I wasn’t even around to keep y’all company. I think I’m gone pick this fish up and wave it in your ungrateful face!”

  As she did so, Lucille laughed and squealed, and cried, “No, don’t do it! Please don’t do it, Grace!”

  Chapter 55

  Tommy Lee Burgess

  Three times Lucille was taken to see a doctor in Pensacola, and every time was assured that the pregnancy was proceeding in perfect order. The doctor predicted that the child would be healthy and—considering the size of Lucille’s belly—large. Elinor and Sister had quietly expected that through impatience and loneliness Lucille would give up their careful charade and return to Perdido, pregnant and unmarried, leaving Queenie to bear up under the scandal. Queenie secretly expected that, too. Yet, as the family made its visits to Gavin Pond it became apparent that Lucille was settling in, that she was not the girl she had been, and that her life had altered in unforeseen ways. She was becoming content with her straitened lot in the remote farmhouse south of Babylon.

  During that autumn Lucille did not chafe at her loneliness. She did not pine for the company of young Air Corps men, or for her female chums at the Ben Franklin and Lake Pinchona. She seemed content to sit in the house all day, embroidering pillowcases and nightgowns while Grace explored the property she had come to feel was hers. Each thought the company of the other was sufficient. Queenie, Elinor, and Sister sometimes felt they were an intrusion on the cherished solitude of the cousins.

  Who had ever known Lucille to do anything so painstaking and sedate and long-lasting as embroidery? Next, wonder of wonders, she took up dressmaking. She asked her mother once if they could afford a sewing machine. The next day James and Bray brought a Singer in one of the mill trucks. The Perdido visitors always brought Lucille lengths of fabric and a new dress pattern, in her size or in Grace’s. Lucille was filling the closets of the farmhouse with homemade dresses.

  Grace said she wished she had lived in the country all her life. When her birthday came up in January, James had asked his daughter what she wanted. Grace replied, “A tractor.” He bought her one, and Grace set about restoring the pecan orchard to its former splendor. One afternoon in February, Bray drove James and Queenie out to Gavin Pond, and they sat in the living room of the farmhouse talking with their respective daughters. Grace had constructed her cousin an adjustable embroidery frame. In the advanced months of her pregnancy, Lucille had found it difficult to sit up for long periods of time. She lay on one of the sofas in the room, with the frame tilted at just the right angle over her extended belly, so that she could continue her work without strain. To Queenie and James’s astonishment, Grace talked of the time—after the arrival of the baby—when she and Lucille would drive over to Georgia and buy a few head of cattle. Grace was certain that within a year she could turn Gavin Pond—as the entire tract of land was, imprecisely, called—into a paying proposition.

  “Grace,” cried Queenie, “you mean you are thinking of living out here!”

  “We love it here,” said Grace. “And after all this work...”

  “James,” put in Lucille, “do you have an old rug you don’t want? Something for this room. I was thinking...”

  “Blue,” said James. “It’d have to be blue.”

  “Wait a minute,” said Queenie. “James, don’t start putting rugs in here until we get all this straight.”

  “Get what straight, Mama?” Lucille asked.

  “Do you like it here, darling?”

  “Mama,” said Lucille contentedly, slipping her needle into the fabric she was working on, “we just love it.”

  “Don’t you miss the town?”

  Lucille shook her head. “We’ve got the radio, and that’s all there is to do in Perdido anyway. After the baby comes, Grace said she’d take me over to DeFuniak Springs to the movies any time we wanted to go. If I went back to Perdido I’d have to go back to work at the Ben Franklin. I’ve got lazy. I don’t want to work. James, next time somebody comes out here, can you send that rug with them?”

  “Lucille is dying for that rug, Daddy.”

  “What else would you like to have?” asked James. “I guess you want to fix this place up nice, don’t you?”

  This abrupt change in Lucille Strickland was only a two-hours’ wonder in the Caskey family. No one thought it strange that Grace and Lucille should take up housekeeping together, and each be perfectly happy in the sole company of the other. It was only thought peculiar that they should want to keep house at Gavin Pond. No Caskey had ever lived in the country.

  “My little girl,” said James, “wants to be a farmer. More power to her.”

  “And my little girl,” said Queenie, “wants to be a farmer’s wife. Who would have thought it?”

  “I guess,” said Sister, “that when the baby comes, and they give it away, then we can just tell everybody that Grace has bought a farm out in the country and that Lucille is out there keeping her from getting lonesome.”

  “And everybody will think they’re both out of their minds,” sighed Elinor.

  No one in the family dissuaded Grace and Lucille from their course. Every time someone went over to visit, he took some household object with him: a lamp, or small table, or a box of books. “First thing we are gone do is fix up the guest room,” said Lucille once when her mother had come for a visit, “so that anytime any of you wants to stay overnight you can.”

  Queenie looked up, surprised, and said, “But there are only two bedrooms in this house, one for you and one for Grace. Where is the guest room?”

  “Oh, Mama,” laughed Lucille. “Grace and I sleep together! You don’t think I’d sleep all by myself way out here in the country, do you? You know how scared I get.”

  The Caskeys absorbed this somewhat startling information too. Everyone remembered that as a child, Lucille had suffered from recurrent nightmares.

  Perhaps with all these small surprises along the way, the Caskeys should have been prepared for the bombshell that appeared at the end, but they were not.

  When the time approached for Lucille to give birth, Ivey Sapp came to stay at Gavin Pond, sleeping on a cot in the kitchen. To maintain secrecy regarding the pregnancy, no doctor was to be called in. Without complication, and in the bed she shared with Grace Caskey, Lucille Strickland delivered a perfect male baby, who weighed about as much as a five-pound sack of flour, according to Ivey’s trustworthy estimate.

  Queenie, James, Elinor, and Sister arrived an hour later,
and looked at the child.

  “We’re calling him Thomas Lee,” said Grace proudly, standing by Lucille at the head of the bed. “Hey there, Tommy Lee!”

  “There is no point in naming the child,” said Queenie. “You ought to let his new parents give him a name. They may already have a boy called Tommy.”

  “New parents?” cried Lucille. “Who said anything about new parents?” She held the infant protectively against her breast.

  Queenie, James, Elinor, and Sister all stared at one another.

  “You...mean,” said Elinor slowly, “that you intend on...keeping this child?”

  “He is a pretty boy!” said James. “I’d keep him.”

  “James,” said Sister, “you would keep any child that came your way. I am surprised you haven’t been taken up for kidnapping.”

  Elinor looked at the two young women. She sighed. “Let’s get it straight, then,” she said. “First of all, you want to stay out here in this godforsaken place...”

  “Yes, ma’am,” said Grace staunchly.

  Lucille nodded diffidently.

  “And you want to keep the baby.”

  “He’s ours!” cried Lucille.

  “Darling,” said Queenie, “we’re only thinking of what’s best for you.”

  The four elder Caskeys, like a tribunal, glanced at one another once and then twice, looked at Grace, Lucille, and Tommy Lee, and glanced at one another again. As head of the family, Elinor spoke. “Of course you can keep the child, and of course you can stay on out here. You’re both over twenty-one and you can both do whatever you want to do. We just want you both to be happy. Now are you sure this is what is going to make you happy?”

  “Yes,” both answered as one voice.

  “Then tell us,” said Elinor, “what we’re supposed to say in Perdido.”

  “What do you mean?” asked Grace.

  “I am surprised,” said Elinor, “that we have been able to keep all this secret for as long as we have, what with long-distance telephone calls, and Bray driving truckloads of furniture out here all the time and buying up all the material in downtown Perdido so Lucille can sew dresses. We can’t keep it secret forever, and besides we wouldn’t want to. We’d want the two of you and Tommy Lee to come see us, too. So what are we supposed to say when people come up to us and say, ‘That’s a precious little baby boy! What cloud did he drop out of?’”

  “I don’t suppose you’d want to say you were raped at Lake Pinchona,” said Queenie.

  “Shhhh!” said Grace. “Of course not.”

  “We could say she got married, and that’s why she went off,” suggested James. “And we could say her husband got killed in the war. And then she found out she was pregnant and this is her little boy. We could say that.”

  “That’s a good story,” said Lucille. “People would believe that.”

  And so they did.

  Eventually, Frances and Miriam were admitted to the family confidence and told the truth. Frances was taken completely by surprise, but know-it-all Miriam said, “I would have had to be blind, deaf, and stupid not to have figured the whole thing out.”

  “Why didn’t you say you knew, then?” said Sister, dubious.

  “It wasn’t any of my business,” returned Miriam. “I just hope nobody expects me to go out there and see them, that’s all.”

  “Why not?” said James.

  “Because my idea of a good time is not a stagnant pond that breeds mosquitoes and a house that’s filled with bugs and a baby crying in the next room, that’s why.”

  “It’s real pleasant out at the pond,” said James in mild reproof, “and Tommy Lee is the sweetest baby I have ever laid eyes on. I’m gone make Bray drive me out there every day.”

  “You cain’t do that, James,” said Queenie peremptorily. “Those two girls want to be alone with their baby. I never saw two people happier together. They don’t want you and me bouncing in on ’em every morning, noon, and night.”

  Learning about the situation, Billy Bronze was able to help. He surreptitiously went through some files at Eglin and found the name of a boy who had been at the base at the time of the rape, and who had subsequently died in the South Pacific. His name was LeRoy Burgess, and he had no next-of-kin. LeRoy Burgess became the posthumous husband of Lucille and the father of Tommy Lee.

  On the first of July, 1944, Lucille’s child was christened Tommy Lee Burgess in the First Methodist Church of Perdido, with the boy’s mother and Grace standing together at the baptismal font. There was a little reception at Elinor’s afterward, and if Perdido didn’t believe the story the Caskeys told, Perdido at least had the courtesy not to say so. Grace said to everyone, “Soon as Tommy Lee is old enough, Lucille and I are gone toss him in the back seat and drive out to Oklahoma and buy us some Black Angus heifers. Nothing takes to a pecan pasture like a Black Angus...”

  Chapter 56

  Lazarus

  Even though Germany hadn’t surrendered to the Allies, the war seemed to be winding down. Perdido felt it because the nearby air base felt it. Teenage boys were still being trained and sent off to Europe and to the Pacific, but one could sense that things had changed; unmistakably, the war was coming to an end. Orders for lumber, posts, and window sashes continued to pour in, however, and the Caskeys’ prosperity gave no sign of slackening. Miriam worked ever more closely with her father at the mill; the workers had long before grown accustomed to seeing her there. She was no longer simply Mr. Oscar’s girl, she was Miss Miriam, and respected in her own right.

  The operation of the Caskey Mill was in two parts. The exterior portion included the mill-yard with all its machinery, workers, and storage facilities as well as the forests and the vehicles and other means by which lumber was transported. The interior portion consisted of the offices in the center of the mill-yard, the workers in the office, the files, the paperwork, the hired accountants and lawyers, and the dealings with customers. That the sole customer at this time continued to be the United States War Department made the running of the concern no easier.

  In her three years there, Miriam had nearly taken over the entire internal operation of the mill. Even Elinor, who somehow managed to keep close tabs on the mill without ever setting foot within its boundaries, knew that Miriam had accomplished this not through subtle maneuverings against her father and over the heads of the employees, but completely through her own competence and energy. Because Oscar was so often off somewhere in the forest, or attending to some piece of business out of town, employees had gone to Miriam with their problems instead of to Oscar. Miriam’s sensible and sound replies, commands, and advice were always seconded by her father upon his return. Miriam soon became more than simply Oscar’s representative; he came more and more to rely upon his daughter in the routine matters of the running of the mill. He built her an office next to his, and he gave her her own secretary and telephone line. Calls from the outside were routed automatically to her now. She was as decisive in all her dealings as any man in Perdido might have been in her place. She worked longer hours than her father, but it was in fact her dedication to the mill that allowed Oscar to take a little ease after so many years of unrelieved toil.

  Considering the early hostilities that had separated Miriam from her parents for so many years, Oscar and Miriam were more intimate than anyone in Perdido would ever have thought possible. Theirs was not the intimacy of a father with his daughter, but that of a proud businessman with his promising young partner. After breakfast in the morning, Oscar went next door for a second cup of coffee with Miriam before Bray drove them to the mill together. Sister left the room, knowing that they would talk only business. Bray brought them home at noon, and for a brief time they were part of the larger Caskey family, and refrained from speaking of the mill, except in general terms. After lunch, Miriam returned to the mill while her father lingered at home or drove out into the Caskey forests or went on business to Eglin, Pensacola, or Mobile. After supper, Oscar and Miriam sometimes went off together
, sitting on Miriam’s side porch or walking together out behind the houses, talking of the mill and the infinite minutiae of the business.

  Though she became accustomed to spending a great deal of time with her father, Miriam had no more to do with her mother than she’d had all her life. A great distance remained between them; Miriam was close only to her father. When younger, this distance had shown itself in silence, in her solitude, in her constant cold-shouldering. Now, when she was so often thrown in with her family, such methods would not do. She instead relied on an abruptness of manner, a curtness of speech, an aloof expression, and a general lack of interest in the family good unless it was consistent with the good of the Caskey mills. This harshness was accepted by Miriam’s family, just as every other aberration was accepted by the Caskeys. No one sought to change her, no one considered that she would be better off if she softened her ways. Elinor once said, “That’s the way Miriam is. Everybody ought to be grateful that she’ll sit at the same table with us.” There had been some sotto voce complaints in the town and among the mill workers—among those who did not really know Miriam—about a young woman’s being given so much power and responsibility, but Oscar Caskey never considered reining in his daughter’s ambition. All in the family were proud of her for what she was doing. It was no more peculiar for Miriam to want to work ten hours a day at a desk in the dusty mill-yard, with nothing to see out her window but stacks of lumber and nothing to hear but the chippers and the saws, than for Grace and Lucille to want to live out at Gavin Pond and sleep in the same narrow bed with a one-year-old boy and two smelly bird dogs.

  Miriam appeared hard and peremptory to those who worked in the office of the mill, but to her family she had definitely softened. She had grown up a child indulged in every conceivable way by her grandmother Mary-Love, and after Mary-Love’s death Sister had done nothing to keep Miriam from pursuing that same aimless, self-indulgent way of life. Working at the mill, being compelled to deal with customers and subordinates, and maintaining a relationship with her father—a relationship that did have at least a casual intimacy—had smoothed some of Miriam’s rougher edges. She was compelled to think of others, to figure out motives for behavior, determine prejudices, and try to understand nuances of behavior. Her churlishness now was a choice, not a deficiency of her basic personality.