Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (16 page)

“Mama,” pleaded Oscar, “there’s not a person in this town who’s gone say that.”

“They’ll
think
it,” Mary-Love insisted, and the upshot was that Oscar and Elinor remained under Mary-Love’s roof while their finished home sat empty.

Mary-Love kept up a careful pretense of furnishing the house. She was driven to Mobile once a week to select drapery fabric and dining room suites and carpets and crystal. Mary-Love shopped with all the apparent pleasure of a condemned criminal picking out the rope with which he is to be hanged. She never returned to Perdido with more than one item, and sometimes that solitary purchase was laughably small. Women had gotten the vote. Women might elect a president of their own sex by the time that Mary-Love had filled that house to her satisfaction.

Sister sometimes went along on these excursions, but never with complete willingness. She was requisitioned by her mother not for the assistance she might lend in the matter of purchases, but rather in her capacity as listening post. Outside of Perdido, and away from Oscar and the servants, Mary-Love could rave about Elinor without stint. It was Mary-Love’s custom to go down on a Friday morning, shop Friday afternoon, visit friends in the evening—she had been born in Mobile, and still had people there—put up at the Government House, do more shopping on Saturday, and return home by suppertime Saturday night. Oscar particularly looked forward to these days when his mother was absent, for Mary-Love so much paraded the air of the martyr, with a dour face and words, that the atmosphere of the house was brightened every time she walked out the door.

It had not been lost on Oscar that Elinor had not said a word when Mary-Love had denied them permission to move into their own home. He remembered his conversation with Sister and understood now that Elinor was waiting for him to act properly in the matter. But how to act properly was exactly the difficulty. When he attempted to explain to his wife why he was giving in to his mother in this matter—saying that, after all, the house
was
Mary-Love’s gift and she ought to be able to fix it up exactly the way she wanted it—Elinor wouldn’t listen.

“Oscar, this is between you and Miss Mary-Love. When you make a decision, you tell me what it is—that’s all I need to know about it.”

Oscar sighed. He loved Elinor and he was very happy being married to her. But sometimes he looked at her closely and he wondered to himself,
Who is she?
That was a question he couldn’t begin to answer.

What he
did
know was that Elinor was very much like his mother: strong-willed and dominant, wielding power in a fashion he could never hope to emulate. That was the great misconception about men: because they dealt with money, because they could hire someone on and later fire him, because they alone filled state assemblies and were elected congressional representatives, everyone thought they had power. Yet all the hiring and firing, the land deals and the lumber contracts, the complicated process for putting through a constitutional amendment—these were only bluster. They were blinds to disguise the fact of men’s real powerlessness in life. Men controlled the legislatures, but when it came down to it, they didn’t control
themselves.
Men had failed to study their own minds sufficiently, and because of this failure they were at the mercy of fleeting passions; men, much more than women, were moved by petty jealousies and the desire for petty revenges. Because they enjoyed their enormous but superficial power, men had never been forced to know themselves the way that women, in their adversity and superficial subservience, had been forced to learn about the workings of their brains and their emotions.

Oscar knew that Mary-Love and Elinor could think and scheme rings around him. They got what they wanted. In fact, every female on the census rolls of Perdido, Alabama, got what she wanted. Of course, no man admitted that he was railroaded by his mother, his sister, his wife, his daughter, his cook, or by any female who happened to walk along the street toward him—most of them, in fact, didn’t even know it. But Oscar did; yet even knowing of his inferiority, his real powerlessness, he was helpless to throw off any of the fetters that bound him.

Who was Elinor Caskey? And where did she come from? She didn’t talk about her people. They had lived in Wade, in Fayette County, and now they were all dead. Her father had once run a ferry across the Tombigbee River. Elinor had gone to Huntingdon College, but Oscar didn’t even know who had paid for her schooling. She never talked about her girlfriends in Montgomery, never got letters from them, never wrote herself. Elinor had appeared one day in a corner room of the Osceola Hotel and Oscar had married her. That’s all there was to it.

Elinor wasn’t Oscar’s only mystery, of course. There were many things Oscar didn’t understand. He didn’t understand what was going on between Mary-Love and Elinor; he only knew that he was glad he wasn’t at home all day the way Sister was. He didn’t know what Elinor saw in him; he didn’t know why she loved him, though apparently she did. He’d get up at five in the morning, and stand at his bedroom window and look out at the Perdido. There he’d see his wife, wearing her coarse cotton nightgown, swimming around and around in the swift water that would have drowned any normal person. And there’d be Zaddie, sitting on the mooring dock, dangling her feet in the current and holding her rake across her lap. The sun wouldn’t even be over the trees yet. And good Lord!—the water oaks that Elinor had planted only a little more than a year before were twenty feet high and a foot around! They were planted in clumps of two and three and four, and at the level of the ground their trunks were already starting to grow together. Water oaks, Oscar knew, were the only oak trees that would clump like birches. Zaddie would rake a vast system of concentric circles around each clump, and now the yard resembled a cypress swamp, but with slender oaks and raked sand taking the place of clumps of cypress and rippling water.

They were narrow spindly trees with gray bark and tiny leathery dark-green leaves that grew only at the top. Lower branches quickly lost their leaves, rotted, and fell to the earth, to be gathered up by Zaddie and tossed into the river. In the winter the leaves turned an even darker green, but didn’t fall off until pushed aside by new growth in the spring. Beyond the camellia and azalea beds that grew alongside the houses the sandy yards still wouldn’t grow a single blade of grass, but those water oaks grew faster than any tree Oscar had ever seen—and the Caskeys had made their fortune through intimate and extensive knowledge of the forests and trees of Baldwin County. His bedroom view of the river would soon be obscured by the foliage of the water oaks. Sometimes he would come home in the afternoon and see that strange youthful forest that had raised itself and he would exclaim: “Mama, have you ever seen anything like the way those trees have grown!”

And Mary-Love on the side porch would only say: “Those are Elinor’s trees.”

And Sister, sitting beside her, would say: “Elinor loves ’em.”

And Elinor, opening the front door for him, would say: “These yards won’t grow a blade of grass. We had to have
something.”

It was generally understood in Perdido that the intimacy that had formed between Genevieve Caskey and Elinor Caskey—two women who had every cause to dislike and mistrust each other—had its origin in each lady’s desire to keep an eye on the other. Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk congratulated Mary-Love on the possession of a daughter-in-law who would go to such lengths for the well-being of the family. Mary-Love did not accept the compliment, and maintained that Genevieve and Elinor were exactly suited to each other. It was no more than the fellow-feeling of moral criminals, she said, that sent them off to Mobile together shopping for shoes. However, after Genevieve’s suggestion that a levee be built to protect Perdido from high water, Elinor in a fury declared, “I won’t have anything more to do with that woman.”

The summer went on, and like all summers in that part of the world, it was brutally hot. The thermometer outside the kitchen window of Mary-Love’s house read at least eighty degrees every morning at six-thirty when Zaddie began to rake. By the time she was finished at nine, the temperature had hit ninety. The Caskey women remained out on the side porch all morning long, sewing on their patchwork quilt, though none of them could think—in such heat—that there would be a season when a quilt would be wanted on someone’s bed.

They also took their dinners on the side porch as soon as Oscar came home. They drank vast quantities of iced tea. In the afternoon, the weather was at its most oppressive. It accumulated in the leathery leaves of the water oaks and burned the sand of the yards until it was so hot that it could scorch a bare foot.

The heat was quiet. On the worst afternoons there was no noise at all. Birds had fled so deeply into the forest that their calls could no longer be heard. Dogs had crept into the cool sand beneath houses and lay miserably with their heads upon their outstretched forepaws. People didn’t visit one another because they feared falling down in a faint on the sidewalk if they ventured out of the shade. And those remaining at home didn’t talk much because they were logy from having drunk too much iced tea with their dinner.

On one particular such afternoon, at about three o’clock, nothing at all could be heard around the Caskey houses except the lapping of the river water against the pilings of the mooring dock. Sister and Elinor sat on a glider on the side porch. The edge of the quilting frame was tilted down toward them and they were slowly working on the second line of squares. Elinor had never done a quilt before, so for her benefit and instruction Sister had suggested using the simplest quilting stitch she knew. Complaining how her eyes watered in such heat, Mary-Love had abandoned her place at the frame. She now rocked in her chair across from the two women and occasionally addressed a remark to no one in particular, which no one in particular saw fit to answer. Ivey Sapp sat nearby shelling peanuts into a wide white enameled pan and discarding the shells onto sheets of newspaper unfolded at her feet.

The quiet that had persisted for some time was suddenly broken by a scream—a tiny, convulsive scream that came, quite obviously, from James Caskey’s house. Sister and Elinor pushed their needles through the fabric and turned their heads in unison; Mary-Love stood up from her chair; Ivey leaned forward and placed her white enameled bowl on the floor of the porch.

“Lord!” said Elinor after a moment. “That is Grace!”

“That
is
Grace!” said Sister.

They hadn’t known it immediately, because no one had ever heard Grace scream before.

“What is that woman doing?” said Mary-Love, turning pale. “What is she doing to Grace?”

There was another scream, choked off after a few seconds. Then the back door of James Caskey’s house suddenly slammed and the women on the porch, all standing now, saw Zaddie running across the yard toward them. She was obviously terrified.

She clambered breathlessly up the front steps. “Miss Genevieve is
beating
on Grace!”

In the brief silence that followed Zaddie’s announcement, they could hear another of Grace’s convulsive sobs, then another scream, stifled immediately.

“What did Grace do?” cried Mary-Love.

“She went and done knocked over a lamp by the cord!” said Zaddie breathlessly. Her speech, in moments of stress, lost the polish it had gained in her extensive reading. “Grace and me were playing in the hall, just playing, and Grace went and catched her foot on the cord and knocked over the lamp and it went and broke and Miss Genevieve come out and she done picked up that lamp and done heaved it at me but it didn’t hit me. Then she went and picked up Grace and started in to
beat
her!”

“Mama, you got to stop her! Listen to that child!”

Grace was screaming again. The sound was now coming through a different window.

“Miss Genevieve is chasing her through the house!” said Ivey.

Mary-Love was indecisive. It was her policy to have as little as possible to do with Genevieve Caskey, and it was not Caskey policy either to interfere with the instruction and rearing of children—and children who were reared and instructed properly
did
sometimes cry.

“If no one else is going to do anything, I will,” said Elinor in disgust. With that she went right through the screen door, down the side steps, right across the yard, and through James Caskey’s front door without a single hesitation in her stride.

Sister, Mary-Love, Ivey, and Zaddie stood all in a line, looking over the camellias, scarcely daring to breathe. Faintly, through the windows of the neighboring house, they heard Elinor’s voice, “Grace! Grace!”

In another moment the front door of James Caskey’s house opened and Grace Caskey came flying out. She ran directly across the yard and up the side steps. Zaddie ran to her and Grace jumped into the black girl’s arms. Zaddie hugged her tight. Mary-Love and Sister pulled the girl away and stared into her face.

“Child,” cried Mary-Love, “you are red in the face. You are bruised!”

“Mama hit me!” cried Grace. “Mama hit me with a belt!”

“In the face?” said Mary-Love, unwilling to believe that even of Genevieve Caskey. “Child, she could have put out one of your eyes!”

Zaddie was in the corner conferring in whispers with her older sister. Ivey came forward a moment later and said quietly, “Miss Mary-Love, Zaddie say Miss Genevieve been drinking...”

Mary-Love slowly shook her head, and Sister sat down in the swing and lifted up Grace, putting the child’s head in her lap and smoothing down her hair. Holding her hands in front of her face, Grace began to weep. In that position, it could be seen that Grace’s underpants had been torn off and that her legs and bottom also bore the marks of Genevieve’s belt. Two lines of blood showed where the buckle had torn the flesh of Grace’s thigh.

Mary-Love turned and looked across to the Caskey house. What was Elinor saying to Genevieve?

Elinor’s head was suddenly thrust out the dining room window. “Zaddie!” she called out.