Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (55 page)

As the days progressed—Mary-Love supposed they were days, but reckoned them only by the difference in outfits Zaddie wore when she came into the room with the trays bearing Elinor’s meals—Mary-Love lost more and more sensation in her body. Her limbs were no longer cold, but the sheets, the spread, and the coverlet were leaden upon her. Her hands rested free, but the very air of the room seemed weighted; it seemed to press down against her until she could not move at all. She felt the perspiration that gathered upon her brow, which sometimes dripped into her eyes and stung. She welcomed that sting, for it was the only sensation left to her.

Otherwise, she was overwhelmed with the sense that she was filling up with liquid, as if her body were only some stretching skin into which day by day Elinor poured that noxious red liquid. It wasn’t sweet, but it reminded her of the blackberry nectar she had been served the day before she fell ill. Her legs and belly were already so heavy that they seemed to sink deep into the bed. She was certain that she would never be able to move them again. A soupspoon of that medicine seemed to fill her body with gallons of liquid! She grew heavier and heavier. It was filling her lungs, leaving little room for her to bring in air. Her breath grew shallow and quick, and she felt that she was beginning to drown. Her brain held an involuntary image of floating slowly down the Perdido, her body lying just below the surface, with only her mouth, eyes, and nose protruding into the air. The rest of her was submerged in the river. If she struggled, she would certainly drown in that dry, airless front bedroom of Oscar’s house. Even if the draperies were drawn back, the venetian blinds opened, and the shades lifted, Mary-Love would have seen only the levee, not the Perdido behind it, the Perdido daily spooned between her lips by her daughter-in-law.

Mary-Love was certain that that unmarked bottle held Perdido water. She now recognized the taste. She knew the texture of the red clay granules that were left behind on her tongue when she swallowed. She could smell it whenever the bottle was unscrewed. Yet she couldn’t prevent her lips from parting when Elinor squeezed her cheeks, and couldn’t help but swallow when Elinor jarred her mouth shut again.

Elinor was tireless. Elinor never left her.

Mary-Love prayed to be alone; she prayed to die in peace. She prayed to be able to sleep dreamlessly forever. She prayed for some death other than that which her daughter-in-law was preparing for her. When she realized that none of these prayers was to be answered, she beseeched God only that her doom not be prolonged.

Elinor sat at the foot of Mary-Love’s bed and rocked. She leafed quietly through stacks of magazines and took trays from Zaddie at the door. She stood by reporting to Leo Benquith, and when he was gone, she poured whole currents of Perdido river water down her mother-in-law’s throat.

. . .

Only once did Mary-Love Caskey come to consciousness and find her daughter-in-law absent from the room. Her eyes, as usual, were already open. The sense of waking had not come to her, only the realization that previously she had been asleep. She hadn’t the power to move her eyes in their sockets. She could only stare directly before her. Elinor was not in her chair. By some subtle means she couldn’t precisely figure out, Mary-Love knew that Elinor was not in the room—and she also knew that it was night.

She drew an extra breath—a tiny sniff that wouldn’t have been noticed even by someone leaning over her—in order to feel to what extent her lungs had filled with water.

Mary-Love’s heart contracted. She had only an inch of space remaining in her lungs. Only an inch of breath to sustain her. She was heavy, filled with Perdido water, and the water was rising.

Lungs don’t work that way, some voice belonging to the old Mary-Love told her sternly. Bodies don’t fill with water like cauterized skins. Women don’t drown in their beds.

Mary-Love didn’t want to panic. If she panicked, she’d gasp for breath. If she gasped for breath, the water would move and slosh, and she’d die sputtering. She hadn’t any hope except to cling to life. She wanted to stave off that doom for which she had so recently prayed.

She continued by force only to breathe her shallow, almost imperceptible breaths.

The front room darkened, as if she had closed her eyes, yet Mary-Love knew her eyes were open. She could not know how long it remained so. She felt, however, that she never lost consciousness.

Light came suddenly, but it wasn’t morning light. It wasn’t lamplight. It wasn’t light from the opened door to the corridor. It was merely a pale bluish-white glow, outlining the closet door to the right of the fireplace.

Mary-Love made an effort to focus her eyes upon it. That was as much as she could do.

The closet door was slowly opening.

A little boy stood inside, and he was looking about himself in apparent confusion. Like Mary-Love, he also seemed not to have awakened, but to have found himself in a state of consciousness that had not existed before. He lifted his hand before his face and stared at it. He peered cautiously out into the darkened room. Though Mary-Love thought that she knew him, she could not think clearly enough to identify him. Was he one of hers? Was he Queenie’s boy?

The child stepped out of the closet and into the room. The bluish-white light faded behind him. The room was dark again.

Though the fan was off, Mary-Love heard nothing but her own shallow breathing.

Now that she could no longer see him, the boy’s name came to her suddenly.
John Robert DeBordenave.

More than his name came into her memory.

John Robert had disappeared twelve years before. He had drowned in the Perdido during the final stage of the levee construction, but now appearing so briefly in the light of the opened closet door, he was no older than on the last day that Mary-Love had seen him.

Has Elinor kept that boy locked up in there?

She heard a stray footfall then, though it was infinitely soft against the carpet.

Propped on her pillows, hands clasped neatly outside the regimented covers, Mary-Love might have been arranged for a visit from five governors and a member of the Cabinet. In the darkness, she could see nothing.

Then, there was a tug on the sheet, the hem of which was folded beneath her hands. Powerless to resist, her hands slipped apart.

Mary-Love saw nothing, but by a creak of springs, and a shifting of the mattress, she knew that John Robert DeBordenave was crawling beside her into the bed.

The Caskeys had a wonderful time in Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans. The adults were as full of wonder and enjoyed themselves as much as the children. Only Miriam seemed out of sorts. She missed her grandmother sorely, or rather she missed her grandmother’s never-yielding championship of her superiority to other children. Without Mary-Love, Miriam was just another little girl, with no special privileges above those accorded to Frances and Queenie’s children.

Every day, James telephoned Oscar to ask how Mary-Love was getting along. Every day, Oscar said that she was improving, though still unable to write, still unwilling to get out of bed and come to the telephone. He did not say that there was a stack of postcards from Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans sitting on the hall table downstairs, unadmired and unread. He did not say that since James had left, Mary-Love Caskey had not spoken a single intelligible word to him, or evinced the slightest interest or curiosity about anything whatsoever, and that the front room, which had first smelled of sickness, had now begun to smell of something stronger.

James Caskey may have heard some of this in Oscar’s tone and in Oscar’s evasions. But no one else in the party suspected anything except that Mary-Love would be dreadfully angry with them all when they got home. On the last leg of the journey, the five-hour ride from New Orleans to Atmore, they all sat quietly in their compartments. Most of the talk was of facing Mary-Love on their return. The consensus was that Mary-Love would never forgive them for leaving her at home and going off and having a good time on their own.

“Lord,” sighed James, “I know she’s gone come down hard. That’s why we haven’t heard a single word from her. She’s saving up.”

“She’s gone say,” said Sister, “I got well in two days flat, but y’all wouldn’t wait, y’all just went on without me.”

“She’s gone say,” said Queenie, “I paid for this trip, and I want y’all to know that I didn’t get one moment’s pleasure out of it. Don’t anybody ever ask me again, ‘Miss Mary-Love, can we go somewhere?’ ’cause I’m not paying for anybody to go anywhere ever again!”

They laughed at the predictability of her reaction at the same time that they dreaded her displeasure.

A few miles before the termination of the journey, the weary party began to gather in the train’s narrow corridor. They would have very little time to get off the train, and the group was loaded down with what they had taken with them as well as what they had picked up along the way. All the Caskeys stood in a long line with Ivey foremost, and James and Sister in the rear. Queenie and the children were in the middle. Everyone stared out the window, watching for the first exciting glimpse of a familiar landmark or person.

As the train began to slow, the children grew restive until Danjo pointed and cried out, “I see Bray!”

“There’s Miz Benquith!” cried Lucille.

“Daddy!” whispered Frances.

At the very end of the line, Sister peered through the open door of the compartment and out the window on the opposite side of the car. In the parking lot of the station she saw Oscar’s automobile, Florida Benquith’s car, and the Packard. Wired to the grille of the Packard was a black wreath.

As the train pulled into the station the children covered their ears at the shrill whistle.

But it wasn’t a whistle, it was Sister’s high-pitched wail of anguish, rising behind them, pushing them all out of the corridor, down the metal steps, and into the burning Alabama sun. As they stood bewildered on the platform before the station with Sister still wailing behind them, Bray and Oscar stepped forward with bands of mourning crape around their arms.

. . .

A black wreath had been hung on the door of each of the Caskey houses and over the gate of the Caskey mill. Mary-Love lay in a great white wicker casket, which resembled nothing so much as an oversized bassinet lined with a cushion of deep purple satin.

After Elinor had discovered the body the previous morning, Mary-Love had been taken away by the undertaker and brought back in only a few hours, clad in the dress she had worn the previous Easter. The furniture had been moved around in Elinor’s front parlor and the casket placed beneath the stained-glass windows. In the colored light, the undertaker explained, the unavoidable alterations in skin color would be less noticeable. Mounds of lilies and heavily scented gardenias in tubs covered with gold foil surrounded the casket. They masked the disagreeable odor of corruption, which came quickly to the dead in an Alabama July.

When Bray and Oscar and Florida Benquith had gone off to fetch the unsuspecting Caskeys from the Atmore station, the casual Perdido mourners were quietly ushered out of the house by Elinor, and the wreath was temporarily removed from the door to discourage others. Elinor sat in the parlor, quietly leafing through magazines, just as she had done when Mary-Love had lain, dying, in the room directly above this; Zaddie and Roxie were in the kitchen preparing food. A great deal of food had been brought by the townspeople, for nothing—everyone knew—makes one hungrier than grief.

At last Elinor heard the approach of the three automobiles. She went out onto the porch and stood silently.

Frances jumped out of the first car, and, weeping bitterly, ran toward her mother.

All the others emerged more slowly. They struggled with luggage and packages, talked in low voices, and wouldn’t look at the house. No one seemed to know what to do first.

“Leave your things there,” said Elinor in a low voice heard by everyone. “And come inside.”

The family trooped silently onto the porch. Florida Benquith, having done her part, drove slowly away, as quietly as possible.

“Where’d you put her, Elinor?” asked James.

“In the front parlor.”

Zaddie stood just inside the screen door. She pulled it open and stood back, nodding to everyone who came in. She spoke in a low voice. “How you, Miss Queenie? Hey, Danjo, you have a good time at Chicken-in-the-car-and-the-car-won’t-go-Chicago?”

At last, only Elinor and her estranged daughter Miriam were left on the porch. The sixteen-year-old looked up at her mother, and said, “Why is Grandmama over here?”

“Because we couldn’t leave her next door. There was no one to sit up with her. There was no one to receive visitors. And because she died in this house.”

“She hated it over here,” remarked Miriam as she went inside to survey the remains of her dead grandmother.

“She never looked prettier,” was the general comment, but the actual thought was that Mary-Love had never looked worse. Her face was wasted, drawn tight over the bones in some places, slack in others. Her folded hands seemed twisted in frustration. She looked anything but sleeping, anything but natural.

“Can she hear us?” Danjo whispered. James shook his head.

Miriam stood at the end of the coffin and peered into it for half a minute or so. Her eyes were dry. “Where are her rings?” she asked at last.

. . .

That night, Sister sat up with the body, joined in the first part of the night by James, then later by Oscar. In that room, under those circumstances, the Caskeys seemed all at once to have grown old. It had been a long time since any important member of the family had died. James and Mary-Love had been of an exact age, and James’s sixty-six years now made him appear an old man—to his family as well as to himself. Oscar was forty-one, and in the presence of his mother’s corpse, he looked every year of it. Sister was three years older, and that difference now appeared even greater. In the darkest hours, the brother and sister sat on the couch that faced the casket and talked about everything in the world but their mother. At last, as dawn approached and the first light glowed in through the panes of the colored glass over the casket, Sister said, “She wasn’t old. Sixty-six isn’t old.”