Billy looked at Miriam perplexed.
“I cain’t run this thing single-handed,” said Miriam. The liquor was loosening her tongue, too. She shook her head. “Oscar’s no good. He’s backing out. He doesn’t do anything anymore. He leaves everything to me. He’s got one man out in the yard and another man out in the forests, and those two make all the decisions. Oscar just wanders around talking to people. He goes down to the barbershop and listens to all the gossip. They’ve got a back room down there that nobody’s supposed to know about, and those old men sit back there and play dominoes all afternoon, a penny a point. And Oscar thinks I don’t know about it. So what would I do without you, Billy? How could I handle all this on my own?”
“I’d help you, Miriam,” put in Malcolm. “I’d be glad to help.”
“You’re no help,” returned Miriam. “I have to watch you every minute. I need Billy, working away downtown in his little office. I’ve got to have somebody to talk all this business over with. This is business I cain’t think through all by myself. So, Billy, if Frances divorces you, I’ll marry you myself. We aren’t gone be letting you go, so you might as well get that out of your mind right now.”
The first course was brought, and there was no more talk of Frances. In a low voice Miriam instructed Malcolm in the intricacies of eating Clams Casino and what to do with the shells.
. . .
Billy’s great fear had been that he would be banished from the Caskeys if Frances declared their marriage finished. He had seen what Sister had done to Early. Billy had always considered himself married to the clan, as if the Caskeys were one great bride and Frances were only the ring-bearing representative. Miriam had reassured him that if worse came to worst and Frances removed that ring, Miriam would pick it up and place it on her own finger.
Armed with this thought, he returned to Perdido. Malcolm parked in front of Miriam’s house and began unloading the bags. Billy went immediately to his own home and called out his wife’s name.
Zaddie pushed open the screen door for him and held a finger to her lips.
“Is the baby asleep?” he asked.
“No,” said Zaddie, “Miss Frances sick in the bed.”
This did not tally with how he had imagined his homecoming; Billy hurried up the stairs. The door of his and Frances’s bedroom was closed but he went in without knocking. The shades were drawn and the curtains closed; the room was nearly dark.
“Close the door!” cried Elinor. She was sitting in the mahogany rocker at the side of the bed. Billy pushed the door shut behind him.
In the darkness, he could scarcely make out his wife in the bed. Despite the warmth of the evening, she lay under thick covers. She shifted and slid on the sheets.
“Hey, Billy,” Frances murmured.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “Zaddie said you were sick.”
“Oh, I’m all right,” she replied in a weak voice. “I’m just not feeling well right now.”
“Elinor, what’s wrong with her?”
“My baby’s just not up to par,” replied Elinor. “She’ll be all right. She missed you. Did you and Miriam get everything done all right?”
“Yes, ma’am,” replied Billy absently. “What does the doctor say?”
“Nothing,” replied Frances. “I don’t need any doctor, I just need a little rest. I got tired out while you were gone, Billy. I need to stay in bed for a while, that’s all. Listen, I hope you don’t mind, but we moved some of your things into the front room. It’s hard for me to sleep right now, and I cain’t have anybody else in the bed with me. I’ll be all right in a couple of days. Then we’ll move everything right back in. I missed you a lot.”
There was, in Frances’s voice, something soft and loving. It had been so long since Billy had heard her speak so, that he nearly wept from the surprise and tenderness of it.
“Sure, sure, and I missed you.”
“Billy,” said Elinor, “why don’t you go unpack? Frances is going to try to go to sleep now.”
“Bye, Billy,” said Frances weakly. “I sure am glad you’re back.”
“I’m just gone be in the next room, honey,” Billy assured her. “You call and I’ll hear you.”
Elinor rose from her chair and saw Billy out into the hallway.
“Is she really all right?” he whispered.
Elinor smiled and nodded. “She’ll be fine in a day or two.”
. . .
Elinor walked back into the bedroom.
“Is he gone?” Frances asked in a whisper.
“Well, he’s not gone,” replied Elinor. “He’s just in the next room. And I am still mad at you, darling.”
“Mama, I told you, I couldn’t help it!”
“You could have. You know better than to stay in that water as long as you did. You worried me to death. Now see what happened?”
“I didn’t know it would happen.”
“I told you, darling, over and over again, you can’t stay in the Perdido for more than a few hours.”
“I am stifling, Mama,” said Frances, pushing back the covers. Her powerful gray legs slipped wetly around on the sheets, and her webbed gray feet stretched and waggled now that they were no longer confined beneath the heavy blankets. Frances turned a little, and her powerful gray tail slipped over the side of the bed and dangled toward the floor.
Chapter 70
The Fortune
Billy assumed that Elinor had had a long talk with his wife, for after this brief illness when she was confined for two days to her bed and he was wholly excluded from the room and her presence, Frances was suddenly better—and much more like the Frances he married. She evidently was making an effort to pay more attention to him and Lilah. Her manner was no longer distracted. Her old shy smile returned sometimes. Billy returned to his wife’s bed.
Her daily swims in the Perdido continued, but they only lasted about an hour. And she—and Elinor and Zaddie—no longer made a secret of them. One day Oscar said to Billy, “When Elinor and I were first married, Elinor swam in the Perdido every day. Mama didn’t take to that. In fact, no one in town took to that. But Elinor went ahead and did it, and I didn’t say a word except, ‘Elinor, did you have a good swim today?’ And Billy, maybe that’s what you should say to Frances. ’Cause whether you like it or not, that’s what Frances is gone do.”
Billy did not oppose the daily swims. It gradually became known in the town that Frances Bronze swam in that dangerous current just as her mother had many years before. People shook their heads and wondered at it, but the Caskeys were rich. They could do whatever they wanted.
Billy told himself that he should be satisfied now; every couple goes through a period of adjustment in marriage. His and Frances’s adjustment hadn’t been as wracking or as protracted as some he knew of. Yet Billy was pricked with the uneasy feeling that this Frances Caskey now sharing his bed wasn’t the Frances Caskey he had married. It seemed to him that she was acting the part of a wife and mother. Her care of Lilah appeared to come only with conscious thought, as if she were consulting a spiral notebook with lists of things to be done in the proper raising of a child. Her timidly amorous advances to him in bed at night might have been approved by a printed calendar distributed by pharmacists. It was as if her very conversation and moods were calculated to provide the verisimilitude of normality.
There were times that Billy felt he did see the true Frances. Once when he returned home in the middle of the day to get some papers from Elinor he met his wife in the lower hallway. The day was chilly, but she was barefooted, bareheaded, and naked beneath her loosely gathered robe, having just come in from her swim. When he first saw her, she was smiling and radiant. But the smile faded the moment she glimpsed him in the dimness of the corridor.
On some evenings, when Billy and Oscar and other members of the family sat talking on the upstairs screened-in porch, he’d look through the window of his and Frances’s room and see Frances seated before the vanity with Elinor behind
her, softly brushing and arranging her daughter’s hair. Their voices were low and musical, but Billy never learned of their conversations.
Billy became so accustomed to the new Frances that he began to forget the old one. Though he was working constantly with Miriam, they never said anything further about their conversation in Houston during which Miriam had told Billy she would marry him if Frances divorced him. Billy seemed to have two wives, the two Caskey sisters: Frances, who remained at home, raised his child, and saw to his clothes and lay in bed beside him at night, and Miriam, who talked to him on the telephone half a dozen times a day and made business trips with him, shared his work, and his financial interests. Neither woman was jealous of the prerogatives of the other. Billy wondered if this didn’t represent perfection in a man’s life, and concluded, as the months passed, that it did.
. . .
Late in October 1948, oil rig machinery was brought from Texas to Pensacola by boat, and taken by barge up the Perdido River. South of Gavin Pond Farm, as Elinor had showed Miriam more than a year ago, the swampland owned by the Caskeys was separated from the river by only a thin line of marsh grass and cypress. During times of heavy rainfall, these hammocks were overwhelmed and the swamp poured its excess water directly into the river. With great difficulty and the assistance of more than a hundred cursing, mosquito-bitten roustabouts imported from Louisiana, the machinery was taken into the interior of the swamp to an island that Miriam guaranteed—with Elinor’s assurance—was never inundated. Drilling on the first well was begun in January 1949. Oil was struck within the week.
A second well, sunk a quarter of a mile away and nearer to Gavin Pond Farm, struck oil on the third day.
The oil industry was astonished. Miriam was not a geologist. Miriam was not even experienced in the business. But her drilling maps were uncannily accurate. When questioned, Miriam only smiled and said, “I always know what I’m doing.” She never told that her directions came from Elinor.
Grace and Lucille were proud of the flares of burning gas that illuminated their nighttime sky to the south, visible out their bedroom window and from their bed. Not mincing words, Grace said, “You know what that means, Lucille? That means money, money, money, money, money.”
A channel was cleared through the swamp to allow access for small barges that collected the oil that was pumped out. This was easier, it was thought, than building a causeway through the swamp and taking the oil out by truck. A third and then a fourth well were drilled from platforms built in the middle of the swamp. There was now no doubt in anyone’s mind that these would strike oil as well.
Perdido watched all these events with astonishment. Oil lay under Texas and Oklahoma and Louisiana. It did not lie under Alabama and Florida. It was one thing for Grace and Lucille to set up a windmill on Gavin Pond Farm, but another thing altogether for them to sink an oil well on their property.
When the machinery-laden barges, the roustabouts, the engineers and foremen, the dredgers, the mechanics, the cooks, and all the other assorted hangers-on began to arrive in Escambia County, Florida, it was big news throughout the Alabama and Florida panhandles. Oil had been discovered here. And oil, everyone knew, was more valuable than cattle, pecans, and long-leaf yellow pine. Oil could make a man rich, if he happened to own land on which it was found. One didn’t have to wait thirty years for a pecan tree to grow to maturity. One didn’t have to buy feed for cattle. One didn’t have to plant seedlings in careful rows and worry about insects and forest fires. One simply signed a piece of paper, and then deposited checks drawn on Texas banks. Oil was the preferred wealth of the lazy man. A man with oil money was respected by his neighbors in a way that a man with hard-earned and hard-kept money was not.
In two weeks, the small amount of available property along either side of the Perdido River from the town of Perdido itself all the way south to the Gulf of Mexico quintupled in price. The federal government owned much of the land on the eastern bank of the river. The western bank was forest land, and over half was owned by the Caskeys. Some farmers fortunate enough to own little homesteads of fifty or sixty acres sold them for forty or fifty thousand dollars, and immediately moved into Bay Minette or Foley and basked in their liberation from the obstinate Baldwin County soil. Other farmers decided to hold on to their farms. If the price of land had quintupled in two weeks, what might it not do in six weeks or a year?
. . .
Miriam was well regarded by her family. What pleased the Caskeys was not that she had persuaded Texas National Oil to bring their men and their machinery to that godforsaken swamp twenty miles from nowhere and to give the Caskeys money for what would have been no good to anybody anyhow, but rather that she had taken care—before any of this other came about—to make sure that the proceeds would be evenly distributed among the members of the family. The swampland was held in common by the Caskeys: that was why so many signatures were required and why so many power-of-attorney cards were on file with the bank and lawyers. When the oil started flowing, Billy distributed checks. Everyone in the family—Billy and Miriam included—was astonished by the size of those drafts. By the autumn of 1949, when the wells had been pumped only nine months, the Caskeys’ income was greater from leasing royalties than it was from the entire profit of the mills.
“I don’t know why we’re working at all,” Oscar said, staring at an enormous check. “We could close down the mill and sit back and relax.”
“And put six hundred people out of work,” Miriam pointed out. “And make us all lazy and fat.”
“I’m lazy and fat already,” her father argued.
Miriam made no reply.
After receiving the checks from Billy, the Caskeys always just endorsed them and handed them back. “What are we supposed to do with money like that?” Queenie demanded. “I couldn’t spend all that money if I was to work seven days a week at it. Billy, you go on and invest it somewhere.”
Billy laughed. “Queenie, if I invest it, you’re just going to make more.”
“All right,” said Queenie, “so don’t tell me about it. Just go ahead and do it.”
As the oil wells in the swamp continued to pump, and as other wells were sunk, the Caskeys grew accustomed to the new wealth, though they never quite grasped the meaning of such overweening prosperity. Queenie, for instance, judged all sums as fractions or multiples of twenty-nine dollars, which had been the cost, in 1943, of a new dress. A check for one hundred sixteen thousand dollars would purchase four thousand new dresses, and Queenie couldn’t even begin to imagine closets to hold such a wardrobe as that. The limit of her imagination was a new car every year; anything beyond that exhausted her mind.
Miriam continued to run the mill, and Miriam and Billy together guided the Caskeys through the machinations of the oil companies and the exploitation of the swamp. There were trips now not only to Houston, but to New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York as well—sometimes by airplane. The Caskeys were rich, and their investments became more complicated. In whatever city Miriam visited, she always picked up some bijou made of diamonds, pearls, or colored gems to put in one of her safety-deposit boxes—she now had seven altogether. But even when she and Billy went out to a nightclub together on one of their trips, she never wore any jewels except the diamond bobs that had belonged to Mary-Love.
In the first years of this new financial grandeur, the Caskeys did not change the way Perdido thought they might. The greatest difference was in Oscar Caskey, who gave up his work at the mill. He ceased to take any interest whatsoever in the business except for the maintenance of the forests themselves. He still loved the smell of growing pine, he said. When Lake Pinchona opened a nine-hole golf course, Oscar took up the game, and played eighteen, twenty seven, or even thirty-six holes every afternoon. He soon lost the fat he had gained in the past few years. He slept later in the mornings, and after his shave in the barbershop, he sometimes lingered around the back room of the establishment in hope of getting up a domino game. Miriam did not even preten
d that he was needed at the mill. When she wanted his advice or opinion, she asked for it, but said otherwise, “Go on Oscar, do what you like, we’ll get along here just fine.”
Oscar heard of a fine golf course over near Tallahassee and had Bray drive him over early one morning. He made up a foursome in the clubhouse and played all afternoon. The following week he returned and stayed for three days, playing morning and afternoon, this time taking Malcolm along for company. In time Oscar heard of other courses, some even farther away than Tallahassee, but he visited them anyway. Bray always drove him, and always in the back seat was the folded-up feather mattress he had so much missed the night he had been forced to spend out at Gavin Pond Farm. Oscar was rich and set in his ways. He loved to travel; he never went without his bed.
Elinor refused to go with him. She didn’t like to be away from Perdido, she said. She couldn’t bear leaving Frances and Lilah alone. Elinor and Frances were always in each other’s company—except during Frances’s daily swim in the Perdido.
Increased wealth did nothing to improve Sister’s temper. She still kept to her bed. While originally the bed had been an excuse to get away from Early, Early had now become an excuse to remain in the bed. It no longer mattered that at first her contention that she could not walk had been a mere falsehood to keep her safe from Early Haskew; Sister’s legs had withered. Now she most definitely could not walk, and she smugly considered her husband’s loneliness in Mobile with all the day lilies in the back yard.
Also, at the same time, for lack of anything better to occupy herself with, Sister picked a fight with Ivey Sapp. She accused Ivey of crippling her with the contents of the blue bottle she had swallowed on the night that Early Haskew had come to take her away. Ivey said in reply, “You know what was in that bottle, Sister. You know it made you blind—that’s all. You couldn’t see and you fell down the stairs. And next morning you could see fine again. Don’t try and tell me I had anything to do with your legs!” But Sister maintained her stance, and Ivey no more went upstairs. Queenie was needed all the more then.
Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga Page 74