Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (18 page)

All the Caskeys sat in the front pew on the left. The women were dressed in black with thick veils. Heavy mourning had gone rather out of fashion in the past couple of years. However, the Caskeys were high people in town, and they all had their funeral dresses ready at the back of a closet. Even Grace had a little crushed hat with a heavy veil attached. Many in town thought this affectation, but the veil in fact was to hide the bruises and welts visible on her face, inflicted by the dead woman two days before.

Genevieve’s husband wept. His were the only Caskey tears that morning. Mary-Love and Sister and Elinor didn’t even affect sorrow.

In the pew behind Mary-Love sat a man and a woman whom no one had ever seen before. The man, who was tall and ill-favored, coughed a great deal. The woman, who was short and dimpled, wheezed and cooed at a child at her side—a boy about four years old who complained of boredom in an incessant whisper and whistle. No one had to be told that this was Genevieve’s family. What little polish Genevieve had exhibited—her clothes, her knowledge of the presidents’ middle names—was shown up for the sham it had been once you saw this family. They turned out to be Queenie and Carl Strickland and their son Malcolm. It was with the Stricklands that Genevieve had lived when she was in Nashville.

They had arrived only an hour before the service and they drove away directly from the cemetery. Mary-Love had nodded when she was introduced and Oscar had shaken hands all around. Elinor and Sister had smiled. Everyone had been immensely glad that the Stricklands evaporated before anyone had been driven to the extremity of saying something nice to them about the dead woman.

Genevieve was buried in the town cemetery, which was situated on a piece of high sandy ground west of the workers’ houses. This place had fortunately been little affected by the flood. It might be pointed out that the graveyard next to the Bethel Rest Baptist Church in Baptist Bottom had not been so lucky. There, bones and coffin fragments had floated right up to the surface of the earth and were found scattered over several blocks when the waters had receded. Colored women, before they had even stepped inside their own ruined homes, gathered up those bones in croker sacks, and colored men dug a deep grave into which the unidentifiable remains of their parents, wives, children, and friends were once again laid to rest until the next flood should bring them up again.

There were now five graves in the Caskey plot: Elvennia and Roland, James’s parents; Randolph, James’s brother and Mary-Love’s husband; the little girl who had been born Randolph’s and James’s sister; and now the deep rectangular hole in whose depths Genevieve’s severed head and body were casually reunited.

. . .

That afternoon, Mary-Love, Elinor, and Sister changed out of their black and went next door to go through Genevieve’s things. Her clothing would be portioned out among the three of them—according to fit, principally. What would fit none of them would be given to Roxie and Ivey. (If Queenie Strickland had remained in Perdido, as everyone had feared she might, she would have received a portion of this wardrobe, though as Mary-Love remarked, referring to Queenie’s height, “She’d have to take up all the hems about two feet.”) All Genevieve’s bags had been removed from the wrecked Packard and brought back to the house. While Elinor and Sister began taking things out of the suitcases, Mary-Love opened the smaller bags. Two contained cosmetics, but Mary-Love couldn’t find the one in which Genevieve had kept her jewels.

“They were Elvennia’s things,” said Mary-Love. “They should have come to me. But Elvennia left them to James—I don’t know what she supposed
he
was going to do with them.” The truth was, and Sister at least knew it, that Mary-Love hadn’t got along with her mother-in-law and Elvennia had left the jewels to her son out of pure spite. “I just hope,” said Mary-Love earnestly, “that no one came along and took the bag out of the automobile while it was sitting there on the highway.”

“What sort of jewelry did Genevieve have?” Elinor asked, holding up a fine linen skirt to her waist.

“Diamonds, mostly. Not big ones, but lots of them. In good settings, too. Ruby earrings. Emerald earrings. Bracelets. She didn’t wear them a lot, but she always took them with her.”

“Mama, you know why, too,” said Sister. “She was afraid you’d come over and steal ’em!”

“I would have!” cried Mary-Love. “Who do you think took care of Elvennia Caskey when she was so sick?
James
didn’t know what to do with her. And then that old woman had the nerve to go and leave James every damn one of those things!”

Elinor looked up: she had never before heard Mary-Love swear.

“After Elvennia’s funeral,” Mary-Love went on, “I said to James, ‘James, you ought to give those things to me—I have earned them.’ James wouldn’t do it, though. He said it was his mama’s wish that he should get them and he kept ’em. I still haven’t forgiven him. Not for that. I said, ‘James, just let me have the pearls.’ And he wouldn’t even do that.”

“There were pearls?” said Elinor with interest.

“Black pearls,” said Mary-Love. “Most beautiful things you ever saw. Three sets of double strands, fixed so you could wear them all at once. Genevieve could have kept all the diamonds and rubies and sapphires—people around here, after all, don’t wear much but their wedding rings—but I could have worn those pearls anytime, anywhere. At least the smallest strand, I could have worn that one to church. And the thing was, Genevieve didn’t like ’em. She wouldn’t wear ’em ’cause they were black! She carried ’em everywhere, and I was
dying
for those pearls.”

“I like pearls best,” said Elinor quietly.

“Sapphires are my favorite,” said Sister. “But I’ve only got this little baby ring, which I got for being the first grandchild. Mama, maybe you ought to ask James if he knows where that case is.”

Mary-Love had been counting undergarments and dividing them according to quality. She draped five silk underskirts over the back of a chair and said, “I’m gone do just that. We ought to find out what happened to those things—that jewelry is
valuable.”

Elinor and Sister continued to unpack the dead woman’s things. Mary-Love returned in about ten minutes. She stood in the door with a dumbfounded expression on her face, one hand behind her back.

“Mama,” said Sister without looking up, “did James know where that case was?”

Mary-Love drew her hand around in front of her; she was holding Genevieve’s jewelry case by a handle on its side. The other two women turned to look at Mary-Love. She unfastened the latch and the top fell open. An empty velvet-lined tray dropped to the floor, but absolutely nothing else was in it.

“Mama?” cried Sister. “Where is the jewelry?”

Mary-Love looked at her daughter, then at her daughter-in-law. She deliberately allowed the case to fall to the floor. The jolt unhinged the lid.

“James buried it,” she said after a moment. “He put it all in Genevieve’s coffin.”

. . .

James Caskey had been more disturbed by his wife’s death than anyone knew. He blamed himself for having sent her away—away to her death, as it turned out. He blamed himself for not having driven the Packard to Atmore himself—for then he might have perished in her place.

Oscar pointed out that, following this general line of reasoning, James might more logically blame Elinor and Bray for Genevieve’s death.
Elinor
had sent Genevieve away;
Bray’s
driving had, perhaps, caused the accident. But James didn’t see it that way and took the guilt upon himself. It was for this reason, in partial expiation of his unintentional but fatal sin, that he buried with Genevieve all the jewelry he had inherited from his mother.

He looked surprised, in fact, when Mary-Love confronted him in her vast astonishment and indignation.

“But, Mary-Love,” he protested weakly, “what on earth was
I
going to do with that jewelry?
I
wasn’t gone wear it. And I have given every
speck
of it to Genevieve...”

Mary-Love sighed deeply. She had got James alone. They were the oldest surviving generation of Caskeys, and there were scenes and decisions to which they alone should be privy. For this she wouldn’t have her son or her daughter by her.

“James,” said Mary-Love, “who is in the next room, crying on the bed?”

“Grace,” said James. The child’s sobbing was audible through the wall.

“What is Grace?” asked Mary-Love, staring at her brother-in-law hard in the face. “Is Grace a little girl?”

“She is.”

“Well, James, Grace is going to grow up, and when Grace grows up,
she
could have worn that jewelry. That jewelry—which in the first place ought to have come to me—could have gone to Grace. James, you foolish man, you could have divided up that jewelry—it’s all Caskey jewelry after all. There would have been some for me and some for Sister and some for Elinor and a whole safety-deposit box full of it for Grace. You could even have sent Queenie Strickland away with a pair of earrings.
Every
body could have benefited.”

James looked very troubled. “Mary-Love,” he said, “I didn’t think of it.”

“I know you didn’t. And even if you had thought about it you wouldn’t have done it! I have a good mind to give Bray a shovel and tell him to go out there and dig Genevieve right out of the ground!”

James Caskey trembled. “Oh, Mary-Love, please don’t do that!” he said. But Mary-Love would not give him the satisfaction of a promise not to do that very thing.

Genevieve’s grave was not dug up, and Mary-Love forbade the subject of family jewelry to be mentioned again—it was too painful a loss. No one could believe that James Caskey had simply thrown away a caseful of jewels that couldn’t be purchased now for any sum less than about thirty-eight thousand dollars. Mary-Love had long been in the habit of purchasing stones for investment and knew their value.

. . .

One morning in October Ivey was in the kitchen preparing the noontime meal. Since Genevieve’s death six weeks earlier James and Grace had started having all their meals with Mary-Love and there was very little for Roxie to do all day, so she had taken to sitting out her morning with Ivey and Zaddie in Mary-Love’s kitchen. “Oh, look at that!” cried Ivey, leaning over the stove.

“What you see?” asked Roxie.

“I’m looking at the ’tatoes.”

“Have they got bugs?”

“Oh, no,” said Ivey, “but I never saw the water boil away from ’tatoes so fast. That means it’s gone rain today!”

“I don’t see no clouds,” remarked Roxie, planting both feet firmly upon the floor and leaning far to the left in her straw chair in order to peer up at the sky through the kitchen window nearest her.

“I’m not never wrong,” said Ivey. “Not when it comes to reading ’tatoes.”

And Ivey wasn’t wrong. The clouds moved in at about noon, and the rain began to fall an hour later. James and Oscar, on their way back to the mill from dinner, were caught out in it, and stopped at the barbershop for shelter and, as long as they were there, haircuts.

At first it hadn’t seemed that the rain was going to be heavy, but the intensity of the falling water quickly increased, churning the muddy Perdido, splashing heavy gray sand onto the trunks of the water oaks in the yard, and keeping everyone indoors who hadn’t some overwhelming necessity to be out. And since the town wasn’t the get-up-and-go kind of place that produced overwhelming necessities in its inhabitants, everyone stayed inside. Out in the pine forests the mill workers took shelter in the logging cabins or beneath a cedar (the tree which provides best shelter in such downpours). Children huddled on back porches and watched the rain with awe, for in Perdido, rain may fall very hard indeed. The grounds around the Caskey houses were awash. Grace and Zaddie sat on the back steps of James Caskey’s house and fashioned paper boats which they tossed into a large pool that had formed right in back of the kitchen. There was not a great deal of amusement in this occupation, however, since the rain immediately flattened the boats into soggy masses of pulp.

And at the cemetery, the rain beat down upon Genevieve Caskey’s grave. It overturned the pots in which flowers had been placed every day by James Caskey. It tore the petals from the flowers and beat the petals into the earth—as if to deliver James’s homage all the way down to his dead wife. In the space of only a little time the mound of earth that covered Genevieve’s grave was washed away, and the earth was as flat as it had been when Genevieve was alive and had no thought of this narrow home. But the earth over a grave is loose, and the rain tamped it down. Soon there was a depression in the earth above Genevieve’s coffin, a depression that quickly filled with water, and as the water sank down into the earth more water fell from the sky to replenish the pool. This soon sank into the earth as well, and after a time it would have been apparent to anyone who might have been around to look at Genevieve’s grave that James Caskey’s wife—jewels and all—was not only dead, but also very, very wet.

. . .

Mary-Love and Sister were caught over at the new house where they were measuring the back parlor windows for curtains. Since the house had been completed, Mary-Love’s strategy had changed. She had no intention of allowing Oscar to leave her of his own volition, even when that meant continuing to share a house with Elinor. Now that Genevieve was dead, all Mary-Love’s antagonism was turned toward her daughter-in-law. The fact that she was able to keep Oscar by her when it was inconvenient and onerous for Oscar to remain, and when there was a large house next door empty and waiting, only showed Elinor that Mary-Love’s hold over Oscar was much stronger than her own. Mary-Love had declared that she
could
not allow them to take possession until she was herself satisfied. And satisfaction, Mary-Love contentedly mused to herself, was a thing that might be put off indefinitely. The principal rooms had long been furnished, and now sheets protected these pieces from dust. The place was dark and silent, for the water and electricity had not yet been turned on.

On all four sides of the house, rainwater dropped in a heavy curtain from the high roof, digging neat troughs next to the new flower beds Bray had put in.