Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (40 page)

Elinor never pressured Frances to swim in the river, and Frances never told her mother that it wasn’t fear that kept her from making the attempt, but rather the unsettling familiarity she felt with the Perdido. Not understanding that familiarity, she didn’t want to pursue it. Frances may have been only five, but was already possessed of vague memories of a time that seemed impossibly earlier. The Perdido belonged to that time, as did a child—a little boy her cousin Grace’s age—whom she sometimes remembered having played with in the linen passage between the front room and her own. But so far as she knew, she had never swum in the Perdido, and the little boy ranged in her memory without a name.

Frances was a tender child, and not much given to complaining. She never compared her lot to others’, never said to another little girl, “I hate doing this, don’t you?” or “It makes me so mad when Mama says that to me.” She imagined that every emotion that overtook her was peculiar to herself, could never be shared with anyone else, and certainly was never experienced by anyone else in Perdido. Thinking her own feelings of very little consequence, Frances never spoke them aloud, never sought to be praised or reassured or disabused or confirmed in anything she thought or felt.

Foremost among these rigidly maintained silences were Frances’s thoughts concerning the house she lived in. She knew a little of its story: her grandmother had built it as a wedding gift for her mother and her father, but had refused to let them have possession of it for a long while. Then Miriam had been born, and Mary-Love had said, “Give me Miriam and you can move into the house.” That was why Miriam lived with her grandmother, and that was why Frances was all alone.

In this story Frances saw nothing unusual, nothing cruel, nothing unfair. What concerned Frances was not the story of the bartering of Miriam for her parents’ freedom, but rather what had happened in the house itself during the time that it lay empty. This concern was prompted by Ivey Sapp, Mary-Love’s cook, who had told Frances the story in the first place one day while Frances was sitting in the kitchen of her grandmother’s house.

Frances had been entranced by the idea of sheets placed over all the furniture.

“You mean,” Frances had asked, “that my house just sat there all locked up and empty? That’s funny.”

“No, it ain’t,” returned Ivey. “Not funny one bit. Ain’t no house that’s empty. Something always moving in. You just got to make sure it’s
people
that gets in there first.”

“What you talking about, Ivey?”

“Nothing,” replied Ivey. “What I’m saying is, child, is you cain’t have a big house like that just sitting there with nobody in it, and all the furniture covered up in sheets and them little stickers still on the windowpanes and all the keys in the doors, and not have somebody move in it. And when I say
somebody
I don’t necessarily mean white folks and I don’t necessarily mean black folks.”

“Indians?”

“Not Indians neither.”

“Then what?”

Ivey paused, then said, “If you ain’t seen ’em, then it don’t matter, do it, child?”

“I haven’t seen anybody there but Mama and Daddy and Zaddie and me. Who else lives there?”

They were interrupted by Frances’s grandmother, who came in just then and remarked, “Does your mama let you gallivant all day long without supervision, child?”

Frances was sent home before she could discover who else might inhabit the house in which she lived.

. . .

Frances recalled that conversation for a long time, though she forgot completely why she had been in Mary-Love’s kitchen when she was so rarely at her grandmother’s house and almost never there alone. Sometimes she even thought it had been only a dream, it seemed so disconnected from any other memory. But she never could figure out whether Ivey’s pronouncements affected her attitude toward her home or whether it only confirmed something she had already begun to feel.

Frances thought she ought to love the house. It was big—the biggest in town—and had many rooms. She had a room of her own and her own bath and her own closet. The hallways were wide and long. There was stained glass in all the outside doors and on the parlor windows, so that in the afternoon the sun painted all the floors in brilliant colors. If Frances sat in that colored light and held a mirror out in front of her, she herself was painted vermilion and cobalt and sea green. The house had more porches than any house in town. On the first floor there was an open porch in front, narrow and long, with green wicker rocking chairs and ferns. Above it was another porch, opening from the second-floor hallway, the same size, with more rocking chairs and a table with magazines. In back on the first floor was the kitchen porch, latticed over so that it remained cool in the summer. On the second floor in the back was the biggest of all, the sleeping porch, screened, looking out at the levee and Miss Mary-Love’s house, with swings and hammocks, ferns, hooked rugs, gliders, fringed standing lamps, and little tables. Frances’s own bedroom had one window that looked out over her grandmother’s house, and one that opened directly onto this screened porch. It was the most delicious feeling, Frances thought, to go to the window of her room and look out and see what was essentially another room. At night, when she went to sleep, she could turn in her bed and look out that window through soft gauze curtains and see the silhouettes of her mother and father, rocking slowly in the swing and speaking in soft voices so as not to disturb her. Sometimes Frances stood on the sleeping porch and looked through the window into her own room and was always astounded at how different it appeared from that perspective.

Outside, the house was painted a bright white, as were nearly all the houses in Perdido, but the interior was dim and dusky. The sunlight never penetrated far into the rooms. The paper on the walls was all in dark subtle patterns. On all the windows were amber canvas shades, venetian blinds, gauze curtains, and then lined draperies. In the summer, all these were kept tightly drawn against the heat, and opened only at dusk. Moonlit nights frequently brought more natural light into the house than the brightest summer afternoons.

The house also had an odor that was peculiar to it, a mixture of the sun-bleached sand that surrounded the house, of the red clay of the levee, of the Perdido that flowed on the other side of the levee, of the mustiness of the dark walls and wide dark rooms, of Zaddie’s cooking in the kitchen, and of something that had come with the emptiness of the house and never quite gone away. Even in months of drought, when the farmers’ crops shriveled in the fields and the forests were so dry that a stroke of heat lightning could ignite whole acres within five minutes, the house had a slight odor of river water, so that the papered walls seemed damp to the touch and new envelopes stuck down and pie pastry didn’t come out right. It could seem that the entire house was enveloped in an invisible mist that had risen from the Perdido.

These were Frances’s principal perceptions of the house in which she lived, but there were impressions that were more obscure, less tangible, felt immediately upon waking and immediately lost, or fashioned in the last moment before sleep and never recalled, or sensed so fleetingly as never to be recovered whole. But a hundred of these impressions, added up and tied together with the string of Ivey’s words and hints, left Frances with the distinct impression that she and her parents and Zaddie were not alone in the house.

Frances’s fear of the house was confined to the front room—the bedroom at the front of the second floor. One window of this room overlooked her grandmother’s house, and a second opened onto the narrow front porch. The room had been set aside for guests, but Frances’s parents never had visitors who remained overnight. Between this room and Frances’s was a small passage with a door on either side fitted with cedar shelving for the storing of linens. It seemed to Frances that whatever was in the front room could come right through that passage and open the door of hers without her parents—across the wide corridor—knowing anything of it. Every night before Frances would get into bed, she’d make certain that the door of that passage was locked.

When Zaddie was cleaning the front room, Frances sometimes ventured in, despite her ravening fear. She’d hang about and in great dread search for evidence to confirm her fear that the room was inhabited. Even as she did this, Frances knew in her heart of hearts that whatever lived there lived not in the room proper, but in the closet of that room.

In the center of the back wall of the front room was a fireplace with black and cream tiles and a coal-burning grate. To the left of this was the door to the passage that led to Frances’s room and to the right of it was a small closet. Here were agglomerated Frances’s first fears of the house. The door of that closet was the most frightening thing Frances could imagine existing anywhere. It was misshapen, smaller than any other door in the house, only about four and a half feet high, when all the others were at least seven. To Frances’s emotional reasoning, it seemed that anything that hid in that closet must be smaller than anything that might wait for her beyond any other door, and she feared dreadfully that aberration of size. In this closet, Frances’s mother kept the clothes she wore least, but still wanted to preserve: out-of-season dresses, overcoats, shoes, handbags, oversized hats. It smelled of naphtha, feathers, and fur. Opened, the closet presented one flat expanse of leather and cloth and dark spangles. Because there was no light in it, Frances had no idea how far it extended either to the sides or to the back. To her imagination, it had no firm dimensions at all, but expanded or contracted according to the whim of whatever creature took its shelter within.

Any house built on pilings, as all the Caskey houses were, is bound to shake a little under stray footfalls and other movements. Glass rattled in the dining room cabinets. Doors slipped on their latches. This Frances understood logically, but it still seemed to her that that closet was the echo point for all the vibrations in the house. That closet shook with every step that was taken. It treasured up stray noises. When it thought no one was paying attention, it instituted the noises and the vibrations and the shakings itself.

All this Frances knew, and of all this Frances would say nothing to anyone.

However, when it appeared that she was to be left alone in the house, as sometimes happened in the afternoon, Frances made some excuse to visit Grace two houses down, or begged permission to walk over to the Stricklands. If permission was denied, or no excuse could be found to go away, Frances did not remain alone inside. She waited patiently on the front steps until someone returned. If it was raining, she sat on the front porch in the chair nearest the steps, so that if she heard something moving inside, she would have a clear exit out into the yard. At these unhappy times, Frances did not even turn and peer through the stained glass into the parlor windows, fearful of what might peer back at her. To the little girl the house seemed a gigantic head, and she only a morsel of meat conveniently positioned in its gaping mouth. The front porch was that grinning mouth, the white porch railing its lower teeth, the ornamental wooden frieze above its upper teeth, the painted wicker chair on which she perched its green wagging tongue. Frances sat and rocked and wondered when the jaws would clamp shut.

As soon as anyone returned, the house seemed for a time to lose all its threatening malevolence. Frances skipped blithely in behind Zaddie or behind her mother, and wondered at her own foolishness. In that first flush of bravery, Frances would run upstairs, fly to the door of the front room, peer in, and grin at the fact that there was nothing there at all. Sometimes she’d pull open a drawer of the dresser, and other times she’d drop to her knees and check under the bed—but she’d never go so far as to touch the knob of the closet door.

Frances and Miriam Caskey were sisters born scarcely a year apart. They lived next door to each other in houses that were no more than a few dozen yards distant. Yet, so little commerce was maintained between their respective households that when they did meet—on the rare occasions of Caskey state—the sisters were shy and mistrustful.

While Miriam was the elder by only about twelve months, in maturity she seemed to outdistance her sister by years. Reared in the house with her grandmother Mary-Love Caskey and her aunt Sister Haskew, until Sister and her husband moved away, Miriam had been fondled and coddled and pampered for every waking moment of her seven years. This indulgence had become more marked since 1926, when Sister, at last disgusted beyond endurance by her mother’s interferences and meddlesomeness, persuaded her husband to move to Mississippi. Mary-Love and Miriam had been left alone in their rambling house, and were one another’s company and solace. It was a common remark in Perdido that Miriam was just like Mary-Love, and not a bit like her own mother, who lived right next door and saw Miriam less often than she saw the hairdresser.

Miriam, like all the Caskeys, was slender and tall, and Mary-Love saw to it that she was always dressed in the best of childhood fashion. Miriam was a neat, fastidious child; she talked nearly constantly, but never loudly. Her conversation turned mostly on what things she had seen in the possession of others, what things she had recently acquired, what things she still coveted. Miriam had her own room, with furniture specially bought for it. She herself had picked out the miniature rolltop desk from the showroom of a furniture store in Mobile. She loved its multitude of tiny drawers. Now every one of those tiny drawers was filled with things: buttons, lace, pieces of cheap jewelry, pencils, small porcelain figurines of dogs, spangles, ribbons, scraps of colored paper, and other such pretty detritus that could be gathered up in a household rich in worldly goods. Miriam occupied herself for hours on end quietly looking through these items, rearranging them, stacking them, counting them, making records of them in a neat ledger, and scheming to get more.