Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (26 page)

. . .

“So what am I supposed to do?” said Sister, having with some embarrassment confessed to Ivey that she wanted to marry none other than Early Haskew.

Ivey sat down at the kitchen table and appeared to lose herself in thought and incomprehensible murmurings as she began mechanically to snap the ends off a basinful of beans. Sister impatiently sat by, but dared not interrupt Ivey’s reverie. Sister declared to herself that she put no faith in superstition or in Ivey’s charms and rituals, but it was difficult to maintain that skepticism while Ivey sat before her in the midst of her incantatory monologue. After several minutes, Ivey’s eyes fell closed; her hands dropped into her lap. She remained perfectly still for such a long time that Sister began to worry. Quite suddenly, Ivey’s eyes snapped open, and she asked, “What’s today?”

“Wednesday,” replied Sister, quite as alarmed as if Ivey had said,
I have seen the Lord of the Evil Angels.

“On Friday,” said Ivey, “go out and buy me a live chicken.”

Sister sat back, confused. “Ivey—”

“Don’t buy it from a woman, make sure you buy it from a man. A chicken bought from a woman won’t do us no good at all.”

. . .

On Friday, Sister went downtown and loitered around Grady Henderson’s store until Thelma Henderson left the counter to go into the back for something. Then Sister sprang out from behind a barrel, and cried, “Grady, can you get me a chicken, please? I’m in a real hurry.”

“Thelma’ll be right back out, Miz Caskey. She’ll take care of you.”

“Oh, Lord, Grady, I just looked at my watch”—she wasn’t wearing one, and the grocer could see that too—“and I am supposed to have been back at the house half an hour ago. You know what Mama’s gone say to me?”

Grady Henderson knew Mary-Love and could just about imagine. “Which one you want?” he asked, going over to the glass case where the chickens lay in porcelain trays.

“I need a live one, can you get me one out back? I got to have a spring chicken—that hasn’t laid an egg yet,” she added anxiously and with some embarrassment. “You’ve probably got one, haven’t you?”

Grady Henderson looked at Sister closely, shrugged, and went out through a door in the rear. Sister followed him outside into a small dark shed that housed coops for fowl. “This one here,” said Grady, pointing into a coop that contained half a dozen dirty white chickens of various sizes and ages.

Sister nodded. “She looks young.” Mr. Henderson opened the coop, drew the chicken out by its neck, and threw it into a scales that was hanging from the ceiling. “Two and a half pounds, that’s about forty-five cents. Here, I’ll put her in a bag and you go on inside and give Thelma the money.”

“No,” cried Sister in alarm, pulling a dollar bill from her pocket. “I’ll just give this to you, Grady. You keep the change— I
got
to get on back home!”

“Miz Caskey, there is something wrong with you today. You gave me a whole dollar. Let me give you another chicken.”

“No, I just want this one!” she cried. She drew back her shoulders and, more quietly, assured him, “I’ll be all right.”

Then, holding out before her the croker sack with the chicken inside, Sister ran home, sneaking in the back way so her mother wouldn’t see her.

“Your Mama’s gone out,” said Ivey, peering into the sack. “She say she be back for supper, so we gone do this thing right now.”

“Don’t we have to wait till it’s dark?”

“What for? Who you been talking to, Miz Caskey? I know what I’m doing.” Then, with no mystic passes or murmured incantations and with Sister still holding on to the sack, Ivey reached in and twisted off the head of the spring chicken. She pressed Sister’s hands together and the top of the jerking sack closed. Sister held it at arm’s length and watched with horror as spots of blood soaked through the burlap. When no motion could be detected, Ivey reached in and withdrew the body of the chicken. Its feathers were splattered with the blood that had poured out of its wrung neck. Holding the wretched fowl by the feet, Ivey slit open the breast of the chicken with a small knife, then pressed her pudgy fingers inside the carcass, groped around for a moment and then brought out its bloody heart. This she dropped unceremoniously onto a saucer on the kitchen table.

Leaving Sister to clean the kitchen of blood, Ivey buried the chicken and its head in a hole she had dug in the sand beside the kitchen steps. She folded the burlap and hid it beneath a stack of old newspapers on the back porch. Sister watched all this without daring to question what portion of this complex procedure was legitimate and necessary, and what part was only to keep the business secret from Mary-Love. Ivey motioned Sister to follow her back into the kitchen.

From a drawer of kitchen implements, Ivey took five skewers and laid them in a neat row on the kitchen table. She then seated herself before them, picked up the saucer that held the chicken’s heart, and offered it to Sister. Sister gingerly plucked the heart off the plate.

Ivey smashed the saucer on the floor of the kitchen and motioned for Sister to walk around the table. 

Sister, half-embarrassed, half-fearful, did so.

“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,”
said Ivey.

“Father, Son, and Holy Ghost,”
repeated Sister. Following Ivey’s silent directions, she paced around the table thrice, each time repeating that same incantation, the very familiarity of which was of comfort to Sister.

Sister ended her movement around the table standing beside Ivey’s chair. The black woman then took up one of the skewers, handed it to Sister, and indicated a spot at the right side of the chicken heart that lay in Sister’s outstretched hand. Sister had already understood that Ivey’s directions were to be silent, except for the formulas, which Sister was to repeat
verbatim
. As Sister pierced the heart with the skewer and pressed it through, Ivey intoned,
“As I am piercing the heart of this innocent hen, so will Early Haskew’s heart be thrust through with love of me.”
Sister, with widened eyes, held the end of the skewer and repeated the words.

With the second skewer Ivey pointed to a spot on the front of the chicken heart, and said,
“This thrust will pierce Early’s heart until the day he asks me to be his wife.”
Sister repeated these words as she pressed the skewer through.

The third skewer went from the back to the front, and Sister said, after Ivey,
“For life and for death, Early Haskew, I belong to you.”

The fourth skewer went from side to side, starting from the left.
“What’s mine is yours, what’s yours is mine.”

Ivey took up the last skewer and pressed a point at the bottom of the heart. Sister pierced the heart from there, and the point of the skewer came out the top with a drop of blood on it.
“Five wounds had Jesus, and by them will you be stricken unto death, Early Haskew, if we are not man and wife within the year. In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Ghost. Amen.”

Sister was about to speak, protesting that she had no wish that the alternative to her marriage should be Early’s death, but Ivey shook her head emphatically to enjoin silence. Ivey rose from the table, then went over to the stove and opened the grate. Sister noticed for the first time that Ivey had kept the stove hot all afternoon.

Sister tossed the skewered heart inside, where it fell upon a bed of glowing embers and began to sizzle. Sister and Ivey peered in and watched as it glowed red, and then burned with a crimson flame. Soon nothing was left but the five glowing skewers, which finally dropped down onto the coals, still interwoven into a pentagon.

Ivey slammed the stove door shut. The two women stood up straight, and in unison repeated the incantation that no longer seemed so familiar and comforting to Sister.
“In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.”

The first sawmill in Perdido had been built by Roland Caskey in 1875. The old man subsequently gained cutting control of eighteen thousand acres of timberland in Baldwin and Escambia counties. By 1895, when he died, the Caskey mill was producing twenty-five thousand feet of lumber a day. The cut-down trees that his Perdido mill couldn’t handle were branded with a trefoil and sent down the Perdido to his backup mill at Seminole. Roland Caskey remained illiterate to his death, but he could look at a two-acre stand of timber and tell, within twenty board feet, how much lumber it would produce. He had had, moreover, the sense to marry a smart woman. Elvennia Caskey bore him two sons and a daughter. The daughter died, bitten by a water moccasin that one day slithered up the lawn out of the Perdido, but the two sons grew up strong and fine. Because of their mother’s efforts they were well-educated, well-mannered, and emotionally sensitive. Indeed, Roland complained of “the stamp of femininity” placed on his elder son James, which would render him soft and womanly.

When Roland Caskey had settled in the area, Baldwin and Escambia counties were wildernesses of pine, and it seemed inconceivable that the forests could ever be depleted, yet only three mills working at capacity began to accomplish this depletion. Expanding uses for resin and turpentine only made matters worse, for thousands of trees were “bled” by impoverished poachers. Once bled, a tree wasn’t worth cutting. The forest retreated around Perdido and the barrens farther out grew less dense, as bled trees died and toppled in the first spring storm. Roland Caskey complained bitterly when the Secretary of the Interior proposed strict laws for the preservation of the forests and demanded rigid enforcement of earlier legislation.

Roland Caskey’s will divided his holdings equally between his wife and his younger son Randolph, leaving only a small annual maintenance income to the other son James. He had dictated in the preamble of the document that he would not be able to sleep in his grave knowing that he had turned over the operation of his woodland empire to a man “with the stamp of femininity upon him.” The day after the will was probated, however, Elvennia Caskey signed over her half to the disinherited son. But it was not for this generosity alone that James Caskey remained with his mother until her death, nursing her with unwavering filial affection through years of senility and physical helplessness. The idea of marriage never occurred to him without a concomitant sensation of having put something nasty into his mouth.

When James and Randolph, in concert rarely found among brothers, took over the operation of the Caskey mill, they began buying up all the land they could around Perdido. Their father and the other millowners had thought that the purchase of timberland was a wasteful expenditure of capital; it was much cheaper to pay landowners for the right to cut the timber. James and Randolph’s policy was universally wondered at and ridiculed, but they persisted. Having bought the land, they systematically began to cut what was on it, and replanted immediately. Within five years the wisdom of their course was acknowledged and imitated by the Turks and the DeBordenaves. The old Puckett mill in Perdido was eventually forced out of business altogether, for there was no more standing timber for Mr. Puckett to buy.

The DeBordenave and Turk mills for twenty years ranked second and third to the Caskeys’. Sometimes the DeBordenaves had a better year than the Turks, and vice versa, but only the millowners themselves really knew which company was worth more. The Caskeys owned the most land, however, and had never ceased buying it up whenever the opportunity presented itself. Randolph Caskey died when his son Oscar was away at the University of Alabama. James ran the mill ineffectually for two years before Oscar returned to Perdido to accede to his father’s place. Oscar and James, prodded by Mary-Love, would not hesitate to purchase two acres of slash-pine surrounded by Turk forest. The smaller mills now worked the second and third growths of their land, but the Caskeys had some virgin forest, a rare thing in those parts.

Mary-Love and James Caskey owned the mill and the land, but Oscar ran the operation. James went to his office every day and occupied himself one way or another, principally in correspondence, but much of that effort was dispensable; the work could have been done by a man hired at two thousand dollars a year. But the company could not have functioned without Oscar. For all his effort and long hours, though, he had no more money than poor old Sister, and as everybody knew, Sister had nothing at all.

People in town who didn’t know anything about the family’s situation looked at the three Caskey houses and drew their own conclusions from the fact that Elinor and Oscar lived in the biggest and the newest. Since it was also thought that without Oscar the mill would slip into insolvency within a few weeks, everyone naturally imagined that Oscar possessed a substantial portion of the Caskey treasure. That was not so. Oscar and Elinor didn’t even own the house they lived in. It had been Mary-Love’s gift, but Mary-Love had never put herself to the trouble of actually signing over the deed. Once when Elinor prodded Oscar to remind his mother of that omission, Mary-Love grew huffy and said, “Oscar, do you and Elinor imagine that you are in danger of being thrown out onto the street? Who do you think I am going to put in there instead of you? When you two were living right down the hall from me, and I didn’t want you to leave
then
, do you think I am gone let you go farther away from me than right next door?” Oscar returned to Elinor and told her what his mother had said, but Elinor was not to be put off quite so easily. She sent Oscar back, and this time he got an even angrier reply from his mother: “Oscar, you and Elinor are gone
get
that house when I die! Do you want me to show you the
will?
Cain’t you even wait till I am dead?” Oscar refused to broach the matter again, but Elinor was not satisfied.

Perdido residents would have been surprised at the modest size of Oscar’s salary. Oscar once ventured to complain to James, who pleaded the case to his sister-in-law. Mary-Love said, “What do they need? Tell me, James, and I will go out and buy it. I will have Bray put it right on their front doorstep.”