Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (41 page)

The possessions, however, that afforded Miriam Caskey greatest pleasure were those she was not allowed to keep in her room. These were the diamonds and emeralds and pearls that her grandmother presented to her on Christmas, on her birthday, and on a few otherwise run-of-the-mill days in between, and then hid away in a safety-deposit box in Mobile. “You are too young to keep this jewelry yourself,” Mary-Love said to her beloved granddaughter, “but you should always remember that it’s yours.”

Miriam had a confused view of adulthood and wasn’t sure that she would ever reach that exalted state. While she couldn’t be certain that the jewels would ever be given over to her direct possession, this didn’t matter in the least to her. Thoughts of those jewels, in the distant, locked, silent safety-deposit box in Mobile always entered her mind before going to sleep every night and seemed almost to make up for the lullaby her real mother would never sing to her.

Frances Caskey was very different. While Miriam was energetic and robust and strung together with a wiry nervous tension, Frances seemed to have a tenuous hold on her body and her health. Frances caught colds and fevers with dismaying ease; she developed allergies and brief undiagnosed illnesses with the frequency with which other children scraped their knees. She was timid in general, and would no more have thought it her prerogative to be jealous of her sister or her sister’s possessions than she would have thought it her right to declare herself Queen of All the Americas.

Frances spent every day with Zaddie Sapp, shyly carrying and fetching in the kitchen, or following Zaddie about the house, sitting quietly in a corner with her feet carefully raised off the floor while Zaddie swept and dusted and polished. Frances was well behaved, never out of sorts, patient in sickness, willing—even eager—to perform any act or task delegated to her. Her self-effacement was so pronounced that her grandmother—on those rare occasions when Mary-Love saw her—would shake her by the shoulders, and cry, “Perk up, child! Where’s your gumption? You act like there’s somebody waiting to jump out from behind the door and grab you!”

Every weekday morning, Frances would slip out onto the front porch on the second floor of the house and surreptitiously watch for her sister to leave for school. Miriam, always in a freshly starched dress and nicely polished shoes, would come out with her books and seat herself carefully in the back of the Packard. Miss Mary-Love would come out onto the porch, and call out, “Bray, come drive Miriam to school!” Bray would stand up from his gardening, brush off his hands, and drive away with Miriam, who always sat as still and composed and stately as if she were on her way to be presented to the Queen of England. In the afternoon, when Frances saw Bray driving off again, she would station herself to witness the return of her sister, as starched and polished and unruffled as when she had departed in the morning.

Frances wasn’t jealous of her sister, but she was in awe of her, and she treasured memories of the few occasions when Miriam had spoken a kind word to her. Clasped around her neck, Frances wore the thin gold chain and locket that Miriam had given her the previous Christmas. It didn’t matter one bit that afterward, Miriam had whispered to her, “Grandmama picked it out. Ivey found a box. They put my name on it, but I never even saw it. I wouldn’t have spent all that money on you.”

. . .

In the autumn of 1928, Frances was eager to enter the first grade. She occupied herself relentlessly with the question of whether she would be allowed to ride with Miriam and Bray to school every morning. She dared not put the question to her parents directly for fear the answer would be no. The thought of being allowed to sit beside Miriam in the back seat of the Packard made Frances quiver in expectation. She daydreamed of intimacy with Miriam.

When the first day of school finally arrived, Zaddie put Frances into her best dress. Oscar kissed his daughter, and Elinor told her to be very good and very smart. Frances went expectantly out the front door alone—it seemed for the very first time in her whole life—only to see her grandmother’s Packard roll off down the street with Bray behind the wheel. Starched and polished Miriam sat all alone in the back.

Frances dropped onto the steps and wept.

Oscar marched across to his mother’s house, entered without knocking, and angrily said to Mary-Love, “Mama, how in creation could you let Bray drive off and leave poor little Frances sitting on the front steps?”

“Oh,” said Mary-Love, with the appearance of surprise, “was Frances intending on riding with Miriam?”

“Well, you know she was, Mama. It’s her first day at school. Miriam could have shown her where to go.”

“Miriam couldn’t have done that,” returned Mary-Love hastily. “She might have been late. I cain’t let Miriam be late on her first day at school.”

Oscar sighed. “Miriam wouldn’t have been late, Mama. Poor Frances is just sitting on the steps, weeping bitter tears.”

“I cain’t help that,” replied Mary-Love, unperturbed.

“Well, tell me this, Mama,” Oscar went on, “are you gone let my little girl ride with Bray and Miriam from now on?”

Mary-Love pondered this a moment, then replied at last, grudgingly: “If she insists on it, Oscar. But only if she’s out there waiting in the car when Miriam comes out of this house. I’m not gone have black marks against Miriam because Frances cain’t get herself dressed on time.”

“Mama,” said Oscar, “are you forgetting that I pay half of Bray’s salary?”

“Are you forgetting it’s
my
automobile?”

Oscar was furious. On this first day of his daughter’s scholastic career, he drove Frances to school himself, showed her to the proper room, and introduced her to her teacher. At dinnertime, he told his wife what Mary-Love had said.

“Oscar,” said Elinor, “your mama treats Frances like the dirt under her feet. I hate to think how many diamonds she has bought for Miriam. I hate to think what that child is worth in rubies and pearls alone. That locket they sent over here at Christmas must have cost all of seventy-five cents. I’m not going to have Miss Mary-Love do us any favors. We are not going to allow Frances to ride in that car—not once. People in town will
see
how Miss Mary-Love treats her own granddaughter!”

Frances, who had enjoyed such high hopes for closeness with her sister, knew no intimacy at all. Every morning, Zaddie took Frances’s hand and walked her all the way to school—in fact, all the way to the door of the schoolroom—and left her there. Sometimes Bray and Miriam would pass them in the road, but Miriam wouldn’t even wave or nod to her sister. On the playground, Miriam would not play in any game in which her sister took part. “I’m in the second grade,” said Miriam to her sister on a rare occasion that she suffered herself to speak to her, “and I know
this
much more than you!” As Miriam spread her arms to their widest extent, Frances was crushed by the sense of her own inferiority.

Mary-Love’s neglect of her second grandchild was not lost on Miriam, who had grown actively to despise her sister. She was embarrassed by Frances’s shyness, her inferior wardrobe, her dependence on Zaddie Sapp for companionship and affection, her lack of knowledge concerning real jewels, real crystal, and good china.

Miriam’s feelings about Frances were intensified during the first weeks of December, when the first and second grades of the Perdido Elementary School began their Christmas Seal campaigns. Miriam thought that selling door-to-door like a man with vacuum cleaners was an activity beneath her. She decided only to repeat her previous year’s performance and sell a few dollar’s worth of the seals to Mary-Love and to Queenie, so as not simply to have a zero placed next to her name on the special chalkboards set up in the school hallway.

Frances, however, took the business very seriously—in her small way—and set out to sell as many of the seals as she could; her teacher had told her it was a worthy cause. With Oscar’s permission, Frances paid a visit to the mill and went through the offices approaching all the workers. Frances was so diffident, so slight, and so charming in her own way that everyone bought a large quantity. Her great-uncle James Caskey and his daughter Grace then purchased more seals than all the millworkers combined. Before she knew it, Frances had sold more than anyone else on the first grade board.

Miriam was astonished and humiliated by Frances’s success. Suddenly nothing in the world was more important than beating her sister at selling Christmas Seals. Mary-Love, not understanding the importance of the matter to her granddaughter, resisted buying any more than she could use. So Miriam went next door to James and to Grace, who claimed that they would like to oblige her, but were all bought out. Miriam went to the mill, under James’s aegis, but everyone there had already opened his purse to Frances. Miriam even swallowed enough pride to knock upon a few doors, but since it was late in the campaign, everyone who might have been persuaded to buy had already bought his seals.

In despair, she went to her grandmother and explained her dilemma. Contrary to Miriam’s expectations, Mary-Love was by no means angry with her. “You mean to tell me, Miriam darling, that that little girl next door is gone beat you out—and you’re in the second grade and she’s in the first?”

“James and Grace bought so many, Grandmama. And they wouldn’t buy a single seal from me!”

“They wouldn’t? And they bought from Frances?”

Miriam nodded glumly. “I hate Frances!”

“I am
not
gone let Elinor Caskey’s child beat you out. How much has she sold so far? Do you know?”

“Thirty-five dollars and thirty-five cents.”

“And how much have
you
sold?”

“Three dollars and ten cents.”

“And when is the contest over?”

“Day after tomorrow.”

“All right, then,” said Mary-Love, lowering her voice. “I tell you what, Miriam. After school tomorrow, you go find out if Frances has sold any more. Then you bring me her total, you understand?”

And on the final day of the sale of the Christmas Seals, Miriam Caskey brought in forty-two dollars, an astounding sum considering that everybody in Perdido had drawersful of the things by now, and that up to that point Miriam had brought in no more than three dollars. When her teacher asked her who in the world had bought so many, Miriam replied, “I knocked on every door in town. I near ’bout walked my legs off.”

The Caskey sisters came in first and second in the contest, but Miriam beat her sister by almost seven dollars. Miriam won a Bible with six illustrations in color and all of Jesus’s words printed in red. Frances got a box of Whitman’s candy.

After the presentation of the awards, Frances opened her box of candy and offered it to her sister, telling her to take as much of it as she wanted. But as Miriam bit into the largest piece she could find, liquid cherry squirted out over the front of her starched dress. “Ugh!” she cried, “it’s your fault, Frances! Look at me now!” And with a fling of her hand she knocked the box out of Frances’s grasp, spilling all the chocolates into the dirt of the schoolyard.

. . .

The rivalry that appeared to exist between the estranged sisters was emblematic of the much greater rivalry that had risen between Elinor Caskey and her mother-in-law, Mary-Love. Through those two little girls was played out, in distorting miniature, the passion that characterized the relationship of their mother and grandmother. Mary-Love was the undisputed head of the Caskey family, having acceded to that position upon the death of her husband many years before. No one had challenged her authority before the arrival in Perdido of Elinor Dammert. With single-minded energy that had matched Mary-Love’s own best weapons, Elinor had arranged to be courted by and married to Mary-Love’s only son, Oscar.

The two women had quite different styles. Elinor didn’t have Mary-Love’s bluster; her ways were more insidious. Elinor bided her time; her strokes were quick, clean, and always unexpected. Mary-Love knew this, and in the last few years she had grown restive, as if waiting for the blow that would topple her. Mary-Love’s antipathy toward her daughter-in-law had grown strident and unbecoming. Perdido talked, and the talk was always against Mary-Love. It was one thing to disapprove of a son’s wife; it was another to make that dislike so widely known. Mary-Love eventually had come to see that it simply would not do to give Elinor battle directly. Elinor remained cool, always seeming to contemplate the skirmish beyond the one that hotly occupied Mary-Love. Elinor gave way strategically, and then flashed her sword just at the moment that Mary-Love was raising her arm to claim victory. Like a palsied general, Mary-Love decided to retire from the field, but did not give up the war.

In her granddaughter Miriam, Mary-Love had an eager, conscienceless, and bloodthirsty little soldier. And Frances, Elinor’s representative, was a sickly enemy—timid and weaponless. A skirmish between the sisters would incontestably give the victory to Mary-Love’s side. Daily, Mary-Love wrapped up her granddaughter in her prettiest dresses and shiniest shoes, kissed her on the cheek, and whispered, “Give no quarter...”

There was no satisfaction, however, for either Miriam or her grandmother, in these easy victories, because Frances didn’t fight at all. She looked around with puzzlement, not even realizing that she had wandered onto a field of battle. If she had seen fit, Elinor might have instructed her daughter in matters of combat and strategy, but Elinor had done nothing. Perdido talked about the two little girls, as before they had talked about Elinor and Mary-Love. Perdido’s conclusion was that Miriam was disagreeable and much too big for her britches, and that Frances was as sweet as sweet could be.
That
said something about the two households in which the children were reared.

Thus, by sending out her emissary unarmed, unprepared, and even ignorant of the fact that war had been declared, Elinor had gained the day. How long would it be, Mary-Love wondered uncomfortably, before Elinor stormed the citadel itself, and claimed supremacy over the Caskey clan? Why had she not done it yet? If she waited for a sign or portent, what was it? How might Mary-Love prepare herself against that inevitable day? And when the two women came to do battle, what casualties would be borne bloody and broken from the field of conflict?