Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (22 page)

Elinor, Sister and Mary-Love concluded, did not want her daughter back at all.

Convinced as they were that Elinor had in truth given up her daughter—though at a considerable loss to understand how she could have done such a thing—Sister and Mary-Love began to wonder what Oscar thought of the business. Oscar
did
sometimes visit his mother and sister, though he never took meals with them, and, as Sister pointed out, he never entered the house, but confined his visits to the side porch. Sometimes in the late afternoon, if he saw them on the porch, he’d come across and sit in the swing for a few minutes. He’d speak his greeting to his sister and his mother, then would lean over the crib and say, “How you, Miriam?” quite as if he expected the six-month-old child to answer him in kind. He didn’t seem particularly interested in his daughter, and would merely nod and give a little smile if Sister described some surprisingly advanced or fascinatingly comical event in Miriam’s development. And soon taking his leave with the excuse that Elinor would be wondering where he was and what he was doing, he would say, “So long, Mama. Bye-bye, Sister. See you later, Miriam.” By the repetition of this pattern, which served only to emphasize the slightness of the hold their company and proximity held over him, Sister and Mary-Love came to understand that in gaining Miriam and jettisoning Elinor, they had also lost Oscar.

. . .

In the great new house on the town line Oscar and Elinor rattled about in their sixteen rooms. In the evening, he and Elinor sat down at the breakfast room table and ate the cold remainder of that afternoon’s dinner. The kitchen door was propped open so that Zaddie, who stood at the counter and ate her own identical meal, should not feel lonely. Every other evening, when the bill changed, Oscar and Elinor went to the Ritz. Even though admission was only five cents, they always gave Zaddie a quarter to get into the colored balcony, whether she went or not. When they got home, they sat out in one of the four swings on the upstairs sleeping porch. In a bit, as Oscar desultorily rocked the swing with the toe of one shoe, Elinor would turn and lay her head in his lap. Together they would stare through the screen at the moonlit Perdido, flowing almost silently behind the house. And if Oscar talked at all, it was of his work, or of the valiant progress of the water oaks—which, after only two years of growth, were now nearly thirty feet high—or of what gossip he had heard related that morning at the barber shop.

But he never mentioned their daughter, though the window of Miriam’s room was visible from where they rocked in the swing, and that window was sometimes lighted, and Mary-Love or Sister sometimes briefly appeared moving purposefully about, tending to the daughter who was as lost to him as if she had been stolen by gypsies or drowned in the river.

Elinor was again expecting a child, but it seemed to Oscar that this pregnancy was much slower than the first. His wife’s belly seemed to swell less—and later in her term—and he urged her to visit Dr. Benquith. Elinor did so and returned with the report that all was well. However, she acceded to Oscar’s wish that she not return to teach that fall, and rather to Oscar’s surprise, Elinor seemed content to remain all day in the house. Also, for propriety’s sake and for Oscar’s ease of mind, she gave up her morning swims in the Perdido. Nevertheless, despite his wife’s precautions and Dr. Benquith’s reassurances, Oscar remained unsatisfied and uneasy.

. . .

Mary-Love Caskey would have liked Perdido to acknowledge that she had won the battle with her daughter-in-law. And how could Perdido
not
think so, when Mary-Love was in possession of the spoils? Even if baby Miriam had been won at the expense of her son’s affection, Oscar was bound to have gone off somewhere, with someone, sooner or later. Besides, what son ever remained permanently estranged from his mother? There was no question in Mary-Love’s mind but that Oscar would someday return to her, and then her conquest of Elinor Caskey would be sweet and complete indeed!

But Perdido, to Mary-Love’s consternation, didn’t see things that way at all. What Perdido saw was that when the smoke had cleared, Elinor Caskey was sitting at the top of the hill, waving an untattered and unbloodied flag. She had given up her only child, but from all appearances she didn’t seem to care one way or the other.

And more importantly, Elinor Caskey wasn’t acting like a defeated woman. If she never paid visits to her mother-in-law and her sister-in-law and her abandoned daughter, in public she was never anything other than pleasant and friendly to them. Nothing in her tone savored of irony or sarcasm or the heaping-on of burning coals; she was never heard to speak a word against either Mary-Love or Sister. Nor had she sought to suborn Caroline DeBordenave or Manda Turk into rebellion against Mary-Love by establishing an intimacy either with the women themselves or with their daughters.

Elinor never objected to Oscar’s visits to his mother’s house, and never made him feel guilty about having gone. She sent Zaddie over with boxes of peaches and bottles of blackberry nectar she had put up herself. But she never once set foot in Mary-Love’s house and never asked after her daughter’s health and never invited Mary-Love or Sister over to see what the new house looked like all furnished and decorated.

Thus, once convinced that there was to be no attempt to reappropriate Miriam, Mary-Love decided that Elinor had not been sufficiently humbled, and began to look about for a way to crush her daughter-in-law.

. . .

A year and a half before, on the day after Elinor had announced her first pregnancy, there had arrived in Perdido a man called Early Haskew. He was thirty years of age, with brown hair and brown eyes and a thick brown mustache. He had a sunburned complexion, strong arms and long legs, and a wardrobe that seemed to consist entirely of khaki trousers and white shirts. He had gone to school at the University of Alabama, and had been superficially wounded on the bank of the Marne. And he had learned, during his tenure in France, everything there was to know about earthworks. Earth, in fact, seemed to pervade his consciousness, and he was never really comfortable except with both his large feet firmly planted on solid ground. There seemed, moreover, always to be earth beneath his fingernails and in the creases of his sunburned skin; but no one looking at him ever thought this attributable to a relaxation of personal hygiene. The dirt seemed only to be a part of the man, and wholly unobjectionable. He was an engineer, and he had come to Perdido to see whether it might be possible to protect the town from future flooding by the construction of a series of levees along the banks of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers.

With the help of two surveying students from Auburn Polytechnic, Early Haskew plotted out the town, plumbed the depths of the rivers, measured heights above sea level, examined records at the town hall, and noted the fading high-water marks left by the flood of 1919. He talked with the foremen of the mills who used the rivers for the transport of logs, took photographs of the sections of town that lay near the banks of the rivers, dispatched letters of enquiry to engineers in Natchez and New Orleans, and drew a salary that was, unbeknownst to any but the members of the town council, paid entirely by James Caskey. At the end of eight weeks, during which he seemed to be everywhere, with his maps, instruments, notebooks, cameras, pencils, and assistants, Early Haskew disappeared. He had promised detailed plans within three months, but James Caskey received a letter a short time after his departure, announcing his inability to meet that deadline, owing to some army work required of him over at Camp Rucca. Early Haskew was still in the reserves.

But now he was finished with the reserves, and was returning to Perdido with the intention of completing his plans as quickly as possible. Who knew how soon the waters might rise again?

Early Haskew had lived with his mother in a tiny town called Pine Cone, on the edge of the Alabama Wiregrass area. She had died recently, and Early had seen no necessity of returning to Pine Cone. He sold his mother’s house, and wrote to James Caskey asking if the millowner would be so kind as to find him a place to live. Early hoped not only to provide the plans but to supervise the building of the levee—if the town council were pleased to judge him fit for the work—so he might be in town for as long as two years. And two years was enough time to justify the purchase of a house.

James Caskey mentioned this news at Mary-Love’s one evening. James had thought it a piece of information of interest, but of not much importance, so he was startled by the vehemence with which Mary-Love Caskey seized upon it.

“Oh, James,” she cried, “don’t you let that man buy a house!”

“Why not?” said James mildly. “If he wants it, and he has the money?”

“Wasting his money!” said Mary-Love.

“Well, what do you want the man to do, Mama?” asked Sister, who was sitting sideways in her chair at the table and bouncing Miriam up and down on her knee while nine-year-old Grace, sitting beside her, held out a finger for the baby to hold for balance and security.

“I don’t want him to waste his money,” said Mary-Love. “I want him to come here and stay with us. We have that extra room that used to be Oscar’s. It’s got a private bathroom and a sitting room he can set up a drafting table in. I think I might go out and get one of those tables myself,” she mused, or appeared to muse. “I have always wanted one.”

“You have not,” said Sister, contradicting her mother as she might have said, “Pass the peas, please.”

“I have!”

“Mary-Love, why do you want Mr. Haskew staying here?” asked James.

“Because Sister and I are lonely, and Mr. Haskew needs a place to stay. He doesn’t want to live all by himself. Who’d cook for him? Who’d wash his clothes? He’s a nice man. We had him over to dinner one day when he was here before, remember? James, write to that man and tell him he can stay here in this nice big house with us.”

“He ate his peas on a knife,” added Sister. “Mama, you said you had never seen a decent man do that in public. You wondered what kind of home he came from. I was the only one in this house who was nice to him. One evening Mr. Haskew came by to speak to Oscar, and Elinor got right up out of the chair and walked away and wouldn’t even let herself be introduced to him. Never saw anything so rude in my life.”

“Why do you suppose she did that?” asked James, who now suddenly had an inkling what Mary-Love’s energetic and unexpected proposal was all about.

“I don’t know,” said Mary-Love quickly. “What I
do
want to know is, are you gone write that letter, James, or am I?”

James shrugged, though he didn’t know what was to come of it. “I’ll write it tomorrow at the office—”

“Why not tonight?”

“Mary-Love, how do you know that that man’s gone say yes? He may not
want
to live here.”

“Why wouldn’t he?” demanded Mary-Love.

“Well,” said James after a moment, “maybe he wouldn’t want to be in the house with a tiny baby, that cries.”

“Miriam doesn’t cry,” said Sister indignantly.

“I know she doesn’t,” returned James, “but babies tend to, and you cain’t expect Early Haskew to realize he’s dealing with a special case here.”

“Well, you tell him he is,” said Mary-Love, and James agreed to write the letter that very night.

“And James,” said Mary-Love in a whisper as she saw her brother-in-law out the door that evening, “one more thing. Not a word to Oscar about this and not a word to Elinor, either. I want it all set up before we say anything—I want it all to be such a surprise!”

Early Haskew received letters from both Mary-Love Caskey and her brother-in-law, James, offering the hospitality of Mary-Love’s home and Mary-Love’s table for the duration of the engineer’s stay in Perdido. Early wrote back a roughly worded but polite refusal, stating that he did not wish to take advantage of the town and the one family in particular that was to provide him lucrative employment for an extended period of time. Two more letters were fired off; James stating that Mary-Love’s offer was made wholly without prejudice or prompting and that—since no house was available to purchase—it would be a solution that seemed best all around, and Mary-Love complaining that she had just purchased a drafting table and what on earth was she to do with
that
if Early Haskew took up residence in the Osceola Hotel. Weakened by this second volley, Early Haskew made a polite capitulation. The surrendered man, however, insisted upon paying ten dollars a week for his room and board.

The engineer came to Perdido in March 1922. Bray Sugarwhite fetched him in Mary-Love’s automobile from the Atmore station, and he arrived at Mary-Love’s house in time for dinner that Wednesday afternoon.

Sister was immediately shy about the man, who was large and handsome and unselfconscious in a way that was not at all characteristic of the male population of Perdido. Early Haskew was certainly different from Oscar, who was quiet and—in his way—subtle. And the man seemed nothing at all like James, whose quietness and greater subtlety were distinctly tinged by femininity. There was nothing quiet or subtle or feminine about Early Haskew. At dinner that night, his plate was several times nearly upset onto the tablecloth, he rattled his silverware, tea sloshed out of his glass, his napkin was in use constantly. Three times Ivey was called to replace his fork that had dropped, again, to the floor. When he mentioned in the course of conversation that his mother had been almost stone-deaf, his habit of speaking loudly and of overenunciating his words seemed satisfactorily accounted for. He also explained that he had come by his unusual Christian name from the fact that his mother had been born an Early, in Fairfax County, Virginia. With all his large gestures, and the little accidents that befell him at the table, he made the room seem a little small for comfort, as if the giant in a circus sideshow had been compelled to take up residence in the little people’s caravan.

In Sister’s memory, such a man had never before been found at Mary-Love’s table. Mary-Love Caskey was genteel to the points of her teeth. Sister wondered at her mother’s forbearance of Early’s gaucheries, and at Mary-Love’s sincere hospitality toward the engineer. “I hope, Mr. Haskew,” said Mary-Love with a smile that might have been described only as gleeful, “that you intend to save me and my family from the floodwaters.”