Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (70 page)

“I don’t care,” said Frances. “One way or the other, I’m just glad it’s all settled so I don’t have to think about it anymore, and everybody will shut up about it.”

“And the most important thing...”

“What?”

“What we’re going to do after we
are
married.”

Frances looked at him blankly.

“I mean,” said Billy, “where we’re going to live and all that.”

“Oh,” said Frances, as if she had not considered this before. “I don’t think Mama’s gone want me to move out. I think she’s just gone want you to move in. Mama and Daddy would want everything to be the same except that you and I would be sleeping in the same room.” A thought suddenly occurred to her. She looked at Billy earnestly, and spoke with a tremor in her voice, “Billy, promise me one thing.”

“What?”

“After we’re married, you sleep in my room. Promise me you won’t make me sleep in the front room.”

He smiled. “Do you have nightmares in that room, too?”

She nodded. Then her expression changed and she said, “But wait, where do
you
want to live after we’re married? I guess, if you made me, I’d go away with you.”

“No, I’m not gone make you do anything you don’t want to do. Besides, I want to live here. I want to move in with your mama and daddy. You know,” he said, leaning over and kissing her, “that the only reason I’m marrying you is so that I can become a Caskey, too.”

“I know that. I’m just lucky you didn’t choose Miriam...”

They sat on the bench and stared at the levee. Suddenly, after so many weeks together in which neither had had the least difficulty with speech, both were tongue-tied.

“Let’s go up there,” said Frances suddenly, pointing.

“Up on the levee?”

“Yes. Haven’t you ever been up at the top?”

Billy shook his head. “I didn’t know you could get up there.”

“Over behind James’s house there are steps. The kudzu’s pretty much covered them, but they’re still there.” She took his hand and led him across the yards to the base of the steps. They were hidden, but she had no difficulty in finding them. “Be careful,” she said, “Daddy always said there’re snakes living in this kudzu, even though I’ve never seen any.”

Wading up through the kudzu as they might have maneuvered an unfamiliar staircase in the dark, they climbed to the top of the levee. In the twenty years since these clay banks had been built, the sides had been completely grown over with the rampaging vine; it had choked out everything else. But at the level top of the levee were oak and pine saplings that had taken root. Wild verbena also grew here, as well as Indian paintbrush, pale petunias, and degenerate phlox, all wind-seeded from some Perdido garden. In two decades the levee had grown almost invisible to the inhabitants of the town, even to those who lived within its very shadow. Children, to whom it was no novelty, felt no desire to play on it, and were no longer warned against its dangers. The rivers that flowed behind the levees had become even less familiar to those who lived in the town. Who ever thought of the Perdido and the Blackwater? One saw them only when crossing the bridge below the Osceola Hotel, and the new concrete sides to that bridge cut off most of that view.

At the top, Billy Bronze was surprised by the aspect of the river on the other side. “It looks so wild!” he exclaimed. The Perdido was swift, the water swirling, muddy, red. Its movement was urgent, insistent, inexorable. “It looks dangerous. No wonder they put these levees up.”

Frances chuckled. “I love this river! Let’s walk down toward the junction.” She took his hand and led him on. To their right were the houses that had once belonged to the DeBordenaves and the Turks. One was shut up with the windows boarded over, and the other had been taken over by the undertaker. “You know,” said Frances, “Mama loves the river even more than I do. From about March till November, she swims in it every day.”

“In that!?”

Frances nodded. “She’s done it for as long as I can remember. Mama’s about the best swimmer I ever met. I’m pretty good myself. Sometimes,” Frances added with pride, “I go swimming with her.”

“But it’s so swift! How can you swim in it?”

Frances shrugged. “I don’t know, I just do. When I was so sick,” she said, with an effort to remember, “Mama bathed me every day in Perdido water and that’s what finally made me well.”

“How could that cure you?”

“I don’t know. Mama says I was baptized in Perdido water and that’s why it cured me. Maybe that was it.”

They had reached the junction. Behind them was the town hall. The bus from the Pensacola shipyards was just then letting out the women workers in the parking lot; some of their husbands waited in automobiles. In front of the newly affianced couple the swift red water of the Perdido and the black water of the smaller Blackwater spiraled together and sank in a swirling vortex down toward the muddy bottom.

“When you go swimming, aren’t you afraid of that?” Billy asked, pointing down.

Frances didn’t answer. She stared at the whirlpool, again as if trying to remember something.

“What if you got sucked down in it? You’d be drowned for sure.”

“No...” said Frances absently. “Not really.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m trying to remember...”

“Remember what?”

“I
have
been down there,” she said at last, and looked at her fiancé with a puzzled expression. “I think I remember going down in it.”

Billy looked at it again. “You’d remember that,” he said.

Frances shook her head. “No...it’s just vague.”

“Then tell me what’s down there?” Billy asked, as if it were all a tease.

“Mama...”

“What?”

“Mama’s down there.”

“Frances, are you all right, you look so...”

Frances shook herself, and closed her eyes tightly. She opened them and said, “Billy, I’m sorry, what were you saying?”

“Nothing. Let’s go back, all right?”

They retraced their steps along the levee, and spoke no more of Frances’s memory of the vortex at the junction of the rivers. They walked carefully down the steps through the kudzu. At the bottom, Billy said, “Oh, Frances, you never
really
went down that whirlpool. You couldn’t have, you’d have been drowned for sure.”

. . .

Frances wasted no time in telling her family of her engagement. Elinor kissed her daughter and then kissed Billy Bronze, and said, “Billy, I hope there’s not going to be any nonsense about the two of you going away anywhere once you’re married. I hope that you and Frances are going to want to stay on here just like you always have. What would Oscar and I do without our little girl? What would we do without
you
for that matter?”

“Elinor,” said her husband, “you know who you sound like? You sound just like Mama when you and I wanted to get married. She didn’t want us to go off—and you know what kind of trouble that caused.”

“Oscar, I am nothing in the world like Mary-Love, and I don’t appreciate your saying I am.”

“Miz Caskey,” said Billy, “Frances and I aren’t going anywhere. One big reason I’m marrying her in the first place is so that I can stay on here with you and Oscar.”

Elinor nodded her approval of this sentiment, and Oscar looked pleased.

They sat on the upstairs porch until suppertime, talking over plans for the couple’s future. One by one the other Caskeys wandered over and received the news with only slightly varying degrees of enthusiasm.

Sister’s congratulations were effusive for her niece, though strangely commingled with some dismal predictions for the marriage itself. “Are you sure you know what you’re getting into? I’ll bet you don’t. I’ll bet you discover on the inside of six months that it was all a big mistake.” Everyone—including Frances and Billy—understood that Sister was talking about her own marriage more than anything else, and so accepted the comments in good part.

“What about your daddy?” asked Queenie Strickland, who always found the one question no one else had thought of.

“Why, yes,” said Elinor, “you think he’ll come down for the wedding?”

Billy shook his head doubtfully. “No, ma’am, I don’t believe he will.”

“You don’t think he’d approve of your marrying our little gitchee-gumee?” asked Oscar gleefully.

“Daddy, I wish you wouldn’t call me that. I’m twenty-one years old. I’m not a baby, and you don’t read me poems out of books anymore.”

“My father,” said Billy, “is pretty much bound to object to anything I do.”

“That’s too bad,” said Sister sympathetically, recalling the similar aspects of her childhood.

“Is that going to stop you?” asked Elinor. “He could disinherit you.”

“He could, but I don’t think he’d do that. Even if he did, it wouldn’t stop me.”

Frances looked around the porch with pride, as if to say,
Look what this man would do for me...

“You want me to call him up and speak to him?” asked Elinor. “I don’t mind explaining things to him.”

Billy shook his head. “Better let me do that. He’s not going to like it—and there’s no reason for you to have to listen to what he’s going to say.”

“I don’t know why
some
people don’t just up and die,” said Queenie pointedly. “It would sure make some
other
people real happy.”

“Queenie,” said James, “you are talking about Billy’s
daddy!”

“That’s all right, Mr. James,” said Billy. “Mrs. Strickland’s not saying any worse than I’ve said once or twice in my life.”

“How children survive their parents,” sighed Sister, “is a thing I will
never
understand.”

Miriam, who through all this had sat on the glider reading the afternoon Mobile paper in the fading sunlight, folded the paper, dropped it on the floor, and said, “When is the wedding? If I’m supposed to be in it, then somebody tell me now so that I can get Sister to start thinking about getting me a dress and shoes and whatever else it takes.”

“Miriam,” cried Sister, “you’re not supposed to ask somebody if you’re going to be in their wedding, they’re supposed to ask you!”

“Miriam, would you be my maid of honor?” asked Frances timidly, glancing at her mother for approval.

Elinor nodded.

“If you want me to,” said Miriam. “If you don’t want me to, Frances, then say so and ask somebody else. It’s not going to hurt my feelings.”

“No,” said Frances. “I want you. You’re my sister.”

“All right, then,” said Miriam. “It’s settled. Sister, are you gone see about getting me a dress or something to wear?”

“Well, of course I will, darling, but it’s not as easy as that. First we’ve got to find out what the bride is going to wear. These things take a lot of time.”

Miriam appeared to take the news of her sister’s engagement with equanimity, if not actual indifference. “When is this thing going to be?” she asked.

“We don’t know,” said Billy. “At least not until after Frances finishes Sacred Heart. We may even wait till the end of the war.”

“Who knows when that’s going to be,” snorted James. “When they’ve taken away
all
our boys, I guess.”

“I guess,” said Billy.

“You better not wait till the end of the war,” said Elinor. “James is right. Who knows how long it might go on?”

Zaddie appeared in the doorway to announce supper. There was general movement as everyone got up out of swing, chair, and glider.

“Get married in the summer,” said Queenie, walking toward the door.

“Not in August,” said Sister, following along. “Everybody in the church will melt. And do you know what happens to flowers in a church in August? Only thing worse than to get married in August is to die in August. Mama died in August, and we had to do everything but pack her in ice.”

They all headed down the stairs toward the dining room. Frances hung back, and remained behind until she and Miriam were alone on the porch.

“Are you happy for me?” she asked her sister diffidently.

“Of course,” snapped Miriam. “Though why Billy would consent to stay in this house with Elinor is a thing I will never understand.”

“Billy loves Mama!”

“Then he’s a fool,” said Miriam with a decisive nod. She peered at her sister, Frances, whose looks were suddenly downcast. “But if he loves you,” said Miriam, softening, “then it doesn’t matter one little bit whether he’s a fool or not.”

Frances looked up with a smile.

“Everything’s gone be cold if we don’t go down,” said Miriam, and marched toward the door. As the sisters were going down the stairs, Miriam turned and spoke over her shoulder. “I don’t know why you two didn’t do what everybody else in this family has always done—just run off and get married. You better tell me right away what you want for a wedding present, ’cause I tell you, I am so busy at the mill I’m not gone have
any
time to go out shopping for it.”

During the war, Queenie was taken care of by the Caskeys more than ever. She didn’t have a job, and wanted no position but that of companion to James. James supplied her with money. Sister and Elinor gave her ration coupons. She never cooked because the Caskey tables were always open to her and to Lucille. Queenie was a bit of a poor relation, and she made herself useful in the ways that poor relations had always employed themselves: as fill-in companion, as runner of small errands, as listening post, and sometimes even as whipping boy. She had become, since the death of her husband Carl, a clear-sighted woman who didn’t bemoan her inferior circumstances. She did not resent the kindnesses that were done her, and she ignored the unconscious slights she occasionally perceived in the behavior of the Caskeys toward her and her children.

Queenie might have demanded more, had it not been for the problem of her offspring. Danjo belonged completely to James Caskey. No one would have interfered if she had claimed her rights as the boy’s mother, except for the fact that Carl had fairly traded Danjo to James in exchange for a new automobile. This had been almost fifteen years before, but Queenie still had that car, though it now sat in her driveway, empty of gas. In commerce with James’s house, Queenie saw her son frequently, but there was no more real parental love between them than there was between Elinor and Miriam. Queenie was like a distant aunt to Danjo. Sometimes Queenie sighed over this, not because she missed Danjo or regretted the bargain, but only because, of the three children she had borne, Danjo had turned out best. She often wished that either Malcolm or Lucille instead of Danjo had been the object of Carl and James’s transaction.