Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  He reached forward and grasped Sister’s hands atop the coverlet, but they were already cold and stiff.

  Chapter 75

  Queenie Alone

  Versie at last found Queenie in the crush of the reception and told her that Mr. Oscar wanted her upstairs in Sister’s room. Queenie didn’t pause even to try to figure out why the black girl was trembling so, but hurried into Miriam’s house and up the stairs, past women who complained to her of Oscar’s rudeness to them. Queenie tried the door of the room but discovered it locked. She pounded on the door.

  “Oscar!” she called. “Is that you in there with Sister?”

  In a moment, she heard Oscar’s low voice on the other side. “Go away, Queenie,” he said. “Sister and I are talking.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “We’re fine,” returned Oscar. He unlocked the door, and opened it a crack. Queenie thrust her head inside and peered beyond Oscar to the bed. There lay Sister, still and silent.

  “Well,” whispered Queenie, “I am glad you are up here to keep her company. I know all this noise must be driving her right out of her head.”

  “Queenie, listen to me. I’m gone stay up here and talk to Sister, but you got to do a couple of things for me.” There was an urgent tone in Oscar’s voice that puzzled Queenie, but she only nodded acquiescence and asked no questions. “See if you can get hold of Ivey or Zaddie or Luvadia and get one of them up here. Then tell Elinor to come up. But most important, tell Malcolm that he and Miriam are not to take off for New Orleans till they’ve seen me. And they are not to go till the last damn guest has gone home.”

  Oscar started to shut the door, but Queenie jammed her foot into the crack and pushed the door back a bit. She peered around the door again at Sister on the bed, shifted her gaze back at Oscar, and then said, “All right, Oscar.”

  . . .

  Zaddie and Ivey arrived at Sister’s room and were ensconced on chairs on either side of Sister’s door for the rest of that evening; none of the ladies of Perdido got near enough even to knock. Elinor arrived, went into the room, and came out again a few minutes later. After that, Grace and Lucille did the same. Billy Bronze entered the room and remained with Oscar. A rumor began circulating around the party that Sister Haskew was fuming and uncontrollable, and that the Caskeys were desperately attempting to dissuade her from calling in a lawyer and disinheriting Miriam. People glanced sidewise at Miriam and wondered that she herself didn’t go upstairs and try to pacify her aunt with outpourings of undiminished affection.

  The reception began to wind down; by half past one the last few guests had wandered off to try to find their automobiles. The orchestra and the caterers packed up and headed back to Mobile and Pensacola, and the striped canvas tents drooped in the late night air. The old pungent smell of the Perdido returned and washed over the Caskey landscape, and the detritus of the party—the grandest celebration that Perdido had ever seen—seemed sad and bleak.

  Miriam and Malcolm were led upstairs by Queenie, through the wreckage wrought by the ladies of Perdido; past Lucille and Grace and Tommy Lee, sitting next to one another on the edge of Miriam’s bed and staring morosely out into the hallway; past Billy Bronze with his arm around Lilah, standing in the door of the guest room. As they went by, Billy grabbed Malcolm’s hand and pulled him aside. Queenie and Miriam went on alone. They passed between Ivey and Zaddie—a black Gog and Magog—and into Sister’s room. Oscar and Elinor sat on opposite sides of the bed, and Sister, propped against her palisade of pillows and with her hands curled and upturned on the neatly turned-down coverlet, lay cold and starkly dead.

  . . .

  Miriam and Malcolm didn’t go on their honeymoon to New Orleans. It was announced the next day that Sister Haskew had died late in the night. Perdido was told that the anticipation of Miriam’s wedding, and the splendid reception, had served to keep Sister alive for no one knew how many months. Sister had died a happy woman, with all her family at her side. She was buried on the twenty-ninth of December in the Caskey plot in the Perdido cemetery between James and Mary-Love.

  Arriving home from the funeral, even before she had removed her veiled hat, Miriam marched down the hallway. Without even glancing inside, she pulled shut the door of Sister’s room. Taking a key from her pocket she locked the door. Then she dropped the key to the floor, and kicked it through the crack under the door.

  . . .

  On the second of January, 1959, Miriam went to New Orleans. It was a business trip, but so that it would not appear that she and Malcolm were actually honeymooning so soon after Sister’s death, Malcolm remained in Perdido. Billy went with her instead.

  . . .

  Ivey Sapp retired from service. She had stayed on, she said, only because Sister couldn’t do without her. But her feet hurt her, and she forgot things. Besides, she was lonesome without Bray, and all she wanted to do was sit at home and listen to the radio. Ivey had no money at all, but she was so confident that the Caskeys would provide for her, that she did not even bother to mention her needs when she spoke to Miriam. And she was right, for Miriam dropped by her humble home in Baptist Bottom the following week, ostensibly to fetch a recipe for fried corn for Melva, but actually to slip a substantial check under the corner of the tablecloth.

  Miriam and Malcolm, tended by Melva, stayed on in the house, which was now considerably diminished in spirit by the departure of Sister and Ivey, who together had inhabited the place for more than a century. Miriam gave Malcolm the room directly across the hall from hers, also at the front of the house; but this was only where Malcolm kept his clothes and a few personal things. He slept with Miriam. After a week, Miriam declared that she didn’t know why she hadn’t got married before; sleeping with a man certainly was a great deal more fun than sleeping alone. “I don’t know what it’s gone be like in the summer, though. I guess we’re gone have to get an air conditioner in here.”

  When Sister’s will was probated late in the spring of 1959, it was found that with the exception of a substantial bequest to Ivey Sapp, all of Sister’s property, holdings, stocks, and cash, went to Miriam. Miriam and Malcolm were now richer than ever. That appeared to make not one whit of difference to Miriam, and Malcolm had no conception of money beyond what Miriam had made plain to him: “Malcolm, you and I have got more than we would be able to spend in a thousand years.”

  . . .

  It was Queenie who seemed most affected by Sister’s death. This wasn’t surprising, for Queenie’s whole life had been wrapped up in Sister for the past ten years. When not actually nursing her, she had kept her company, operating as Sister’s eyes and ears, bearing the brunt of Sister’s displeasures, developing her patience and humility to an extraordinary degree.

  All deaths are sudden, no matter how gradual the dying may be. For over eleven years Sister had lain in that bed—on those five mattresses and those ten pillows—and the pattern of her days and years had been inexorable and unchanging. Gradually, the oscillations of that pendulum had grown weaker and weaker, but Queenie had hardly noticed the diminution of Sister’s strength. And to have the pendulum stop was a great wrench indeed. Queenie had walked away from the funeral wondering what on earth she was to do with herself.

  And Malcolm had now left her also. He had been with her for quite a while, and had served to fill out her meager household. Now he was at Miriam’s, and had precious little to do with her anymore. Every time Queenie stepped out of her house, her feet seemed to turn to Miriam’s; on the rare occasions that she was in Miriam’s house she turned toward those stairs she had climbed so many times; the one time she found herself upstairs in that house, she couldn’t resist going down to the end of the hall and trying the door to Sister’s room. It was locked, and Miriam professed to have lost the key.

  So Queenie was left alone in James’s house. Because she had always taken her meals either at Elinor’s or at Sister’s, she didn’t even have a cook. She had a girl come in three days a week to clean, and another girl ca
me in twice a week to do laundry, but these weren’t Sapps, and Queenie had never grown close to them. Elinor invited her to come and live with them, but Queenie declined: four people in one house was enough, she said. Lucille and Grace offered the permanent hospitality of Gavin Pond Farm, but Queenie turned this down as well: she had never lived in the country, and she was too old to change her ways now. She would have moved next door to Sister’s in a minute, but Miriam and Malcolm did not invite her. Queenie even went so far as to suggest such an invitation to her son, but Malcolm replied, “Mama, I have already asked Miriam to ask you, ’cause I miss you, but Miriam says no.”

  “Why does Miriam say no?”

  “She says that you being around the house reminds her too much of Sister. That’s why she never even invites you to visit us. Miriam doesn’t say much, Mama, but I think she misses Sister pretty bad.” With this, Queenie did not argue.

  When she was home, which was much of the time, Queenie sat either in her room or on the front porch, waiting for some member of the family to walk by so that she might harness him into inviting her to go elsewhere, or at least into a few minutes’ conversation.

  Her movements around the house were very circumscribed; she used only her bedroom, the bathroom attached to it, and the front porch. She had established narrow, unvarying routes through the other rooms—it was necessary to go through them to get out the front door, or out the back door—and they were like familiar paths through a forest. One could walk those paths three or four times a day, calm and confident of safety, and never venture off into the dark and dangerous groves that loomed on either side of the needle-strewn track. The kitchen was empty; Queenie had cleared it of all food because she detested roaches. James’s rooms, filled with the furniture of James’s mother, and all James’s things, remained as they were on the night that James died. Queenie had never moved a thing. The extra bedrooms were filling up with boxes of the Caskeys’ castoff clothing, now that the closets at Elinor’s and at Miriam’s had been filled up. Queenie never had guests; when she occasionally did entertain, she did so at Elinor’s, receiving her friends there. Queenie never realized that her patterns were becoming as entrenched as Sister’s had been. Because Queenie could get around—though she never went far—those patterns were not so apparent to the casual observer—or to her.

  At night, Queenie was frightened. She had never slept in a house alone before, and James’s house seemed particularly lonely. The rooms were shadowy, filled with curious shapes and noises. Some small animal had got into the attic and there it scrabbled about all night long. Boards creaked beneath the weight of stacked boxes, and every now and then James’s delicate china would rattle in the cupboards as if being moved by an unseen hand. When Queenie had undressed she would look out of her window; she saw nothing but the levee quivering in a shroud of black kudzu, and a corner of the DeBordenave house next door, still boarded over. The wind sometimes picked up sand from the yard and flung it against the house, so that she was awakened with what sounded like infinitesimal raindrops.

  Sister had once told her, “Old women don’t sleep well.” Not having experienced this, Queenie had not then believed it, but now she found that Sister’s insomnia had come to her. She would lay long hours awake, seeming never to fall asleep at all. That she did so was proved only by the fact that she awoke in the morning. But how long she had slept, Queenie could never say.

  She would lie rigid in her bed, catching every noise in the house and noting it down on a little mental pad, the dimensions of which grew with each succeeding night. Some nights she was troubled with the blowing sand, other nights by the creaking boards, other nights by the rattling crockery. Queenie lay awake and trembling.

  Occasionally, new noises came. Something in the house would seem to shake that she had never heard disturbed before. The crystal drops on the candelabra on the dining room table would now and then chime together, as if someone were in that closed-off room, moving restlessly but quietly around and around the table, gently agitating the table and the candelabra with his tread. Or one of the windows opening onto the front porch would shake in its sash as if someone were surreptitiously pacing the porch. Sometimes Queenie thought she could hear the doorknob rattle. One night she heard the window in its sash, and thought, It’s the wind. A few minutes later, she heard the rattle of the doorknob, and thought, It must be a change in the temperature.

  Then she was certain she heard footsteps, light and secretive at first, up and down the length of the porch, then heavier, as if in mockery, as if to say, And what is the explanation for this, Queenie Strickland?

  She quickly picked up the telephone, but just as she lifted the receiver, the sound of the footsteps stopped.

  But the footsteps returned the following night, and again when Queenie lifted the telephone, they stopped. This time, however, as soon as Queenie put down the receiver, the knob of the front door rattled frantically. Then the front door was kicked in its frame, kicked, kicked, and kicked hard, and then the steps, up and down the length of the porch, resumed, loud and angry, strides in boots. Queenie followed the sound from one end of the porch to the other. They shook the house. The glass in the windows shook; the candelabra tinkled together; the crockery shook in all the cabinets; the boxes in the bedrooms surrounding Queenie’s slid about; and the small animal raced frenziedly about in the attic.

  All at once the noise left off. With a rattle, and the echo of a rattle, the house was still. Queenie huddled in her bed, waiting for the sound of the boots to begin again. All remained quiet.

  Then Queenie, still staring in the dark, slowly reached for the telephone. Just as she did so, the closed door into the hallway was suddenly framed with a white soft light, as if a lamp in the front parlor had been turned on. Then the light grew stronger, as if perhaps the chandelier in the dining room had been lighted. Another intensification, this one much greater, led Queenie to believe that the hallway light itself had been flicked on.

  Other lights came on in the house, until the doorway was framed in a blinding illumination.

  Yet all was quiet.

  Queenie, not even thinking, rose from the bed, went to the door into the hallway and opened it. She quickly closed her eyes against the glare. Every light in the house had been turned on. She moved to the switch plate in the hallway, and tried to press the off button—but it was already depressed. She pressed the on button, and the overhead light continued to shine. She pressed the off; still it remained. She went into the living room. Every lamp burned, as did the small cast-iron chandelier overhead. Queenie turned the switch on the nearest lamp, but that made no difference. She hurried to each lamp in the room, frantically turning switches. She jerked a cord from the wall, but all the bulbs shone on.

  Queenie ran down the hall and into the kitchen. There too the lights burned, even the bulbs in the closets and the flashlights in the drawers. The bathroom lights, the lights in the bedrooms, the ones in the bedroom closets, in the linen cupboards, on the back porch, in the breakfast room, above the portrait of Grace and Genevieve, behind the closed oven door. The tube of the television set glowed brightly white, but there was no image.

  Now the light seemed to grow more intense. Every one of the thousands of objects in that house, illuminated from a dozen directions at once, cast a phantasmagoria of shadows on the walls. The light beat about Queenie and was as suffocating as if she were being rolled in cotton. The light grew so bright and white and harsh that the color seemed to drain from everything around her.

  Yet all remained silent.

  Queenie stood in the doorway of the dining room, just in the spot where James Caskey had fallen dead, and stared around her in a daze. Her eyes were pained with the brightness.

  And the lights grew brighter still.

  In the living room, there was a small explosion of glass. Queenie instinctively turned toward the sound.

  Then there was a smaller burst from behind her, and then another. She turned and saw the flame-shaped bulbs of the
chandelier, each burning with an intensity she had never known before, exploding one by one in tiny showers of glass. The light over the portrait of Grace and Genevieve popped with a kind of wet sizzle, and liquid fragments of melting glass poured down over the painted faces of Queenie’s sister and niece.

  More explosions began at either end of the hallway, in the parlors at one end and in the kitchen at the other. For a moment the television shone with the brightness of the sun, then suddenly burned as intensely black, and collapsed in on itself with a crash.

  Queenie ran back toward her room. The overhead light in the hallway burned more brightly as she drew nearer to it. It began to hum, and Queenie barely managed to get inside her room before the fixture exploded. Shining fragments of glass and metal flew into the room along the plane of the closing door.

  In Queenie’s room, all remained dark. She leaned against the door, allowing her eyes to adjust to the darkness. She listened to the explosions, less violent now, more widely spaced, but still continuing. The intensity of light appearing beneath the door was less each time Queenie looked down between her feet.

  After a while, the explosions halted altogether. No light came beneath the door into the hallway.

  Queenie, not knowing what else to do, returned to her bed.

  An electrical storm, she said to herself.

  She moved to the window and looked out, hoping desperately to see storm clouds overhead. She saw only stars.

  The window was open and the night was still, so Queenie was able to hear the footsteps—heavy booted footsteps crossing the sandy Caskey yards.