Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (85 page)

It was the heat, the worry, the mattress, the suspense, the insects, the caffeine, and the smell of the river in the air that kept them all awake.

Hearing a sudden sharp sound, Sister’s head snapped up from the magazine she was flipping through. “What was that?”

Miriam stood up and went over to the window. She peered out through the screen, and saw the single lighted window in her parents’ home.

“That was Frances,” she said. “She’s still in labor, I guess.”

“I think they ought to get Leo Benquith over there this very minute.”

“Leo’s so old,” stated Miriam impassively. “If I were having a baby, you know who’d I want to be there?”

“Who?”

“Elinor and Zaddie,” replied Miriam, sitting down again and once more turning the radio dial.

“You’ll never have a baby,” said Sister with a shrug.

. . .

A single light on the vanity burned in Frances’s room. Elinor lay next to her daughter on the bed, holding both her hands. Frances’s hair was lank and wet on the pillowcase. She stared vacantly at the ceiling. Zaddie sat in a slim mahogany rocker at the foot of the bed.

“Coming time,” remarked Zaddie.

Elinor nodded. “Is everything ready?”

Frances twitched. The sheets were damp with her perspiration. All the covers had been pulled down and lay draped over the foot of the bed. Elinor grasped her daughter’s hands more tightly. Frances began to groan, and attempted to turn over on her side. But Elinor’s hold didn’t allow that, and Frances began to squirm.

Zaddie stood up, ready to proffer assistance. Frances grew quiet again.

“Miss Elinor, is she gone be all right?” Zaddie asked. “She looks bad.”

“She’s worried.”

“Ever’body worries with their first.”

Elinor nodded and looked at her daughter. Frances’s eyes were vacant, her mouth slack.

“I ’member Miss Frances being born,” mused Zaddie.

“You remember something else?” asked Elinor pointedly.

“Ma’am?”

“You remember what I did on the night Frances was born?”

Zaddie shook her head slowly.

“Yes, you do, Zaddie,” said Elinor. “Don’t tell me you don’t.”

“Miss Elinor,” said Zaddie, “I have grown up in this house. I have never lived anywhere else. I am gone grow old here, I guess. I have never got married. I have never had anything to do with colored men, ’cause I belong to you.”

“You’re mine,” Elinor assented.

“And living in this house,” said Zaddie, “I’ve seen things and I’ve heard things. But that don’t mean I pay much attention. All I know is I belong to you, and I’m gone grow old here waiting on you and yours.”

“Good,” said Elinor. “And you know what that means?”

“Ma’am?”

“It means you’re not going to be running off tonight, no matter what happens and no matter what you see. You’re—”

Frances suddenly lurched up in the bed and screamed.

With one stroke of her arm, Elinor pressed her daughter back down on the wet sheets. She lifted up Frances’s nightdress above her enormously distended and now rumbling belly.

“That’s it!” hissed Zaddie. “Here he comes.”

“She,”
corrected Elinor, rubbing the tips of her fingers over the wet shining globe being excreted from between Frances’s legs.

Frances screamed and shook, while Zaddie held both her writhing hands.

In a minute, the baby’s shoulders were exposed. Elinor took it in her hands and gently helped it along. In only a little more time, the child was free. Elinor quickly severed the umbilical cord and cried, “Here, Zaddie, take her.”

Frances continued to thrash, and Zaddie, with fearful eyes, said, “Lord God, there’s another.”

“Take the baby,” Elinor insisted.

Zaddie let go of Frances’s hands. Her arms dropped like leaden weights on the bed. She thrashed no longer. Zaddie picked up a towel and took the child from Elinor.

“Turn out the light!” commanded Elinor.

Zaddie stood stock-still, holding the miry female infant in her arms. “You cain’t see a thing with the lights out!”

“Turn out the light!” Elinor repeated hastily. “Now!”

Zaddie turned to do so, but as she was turning she glimpsed a second head emerging smoothly from Frances’s quietly heaving body. It was greenish-gray, and it seemed to wobble. Zaddie saw two wide-open, perfectly round filmy eyes, and two round black holes where a nose ought to have been before her fingers touched the switch on the lamp and the room was plunged into darkness.

Clutching the newborn girl, Zaddie stood and listened. She heard a sound from the bed; it was like that of a man’s boot being slowly lifted up out of a pool of mire. Next Zaddie heard a scrambling sound, followed by a hard breath or two from Elinor, then the sharp clack of scissors. In a few seconds, Elinor said, “Turn on the light.”

Zaddie fumbled for the lamp, knocked it over in her haste, then righted it and turned the light on.

Frances lay limp, exhausted, but smiling. Elinor stood at the foot of the bed cradling the second child. A towel concealed it from Zaddie’s sight.

Frances reached out to Zaddie for her little girl.

“Ten fingers,” said Elinor. “Ten toes on your little girl.”

Zaddie, handing over the baby to Frances, stepped toward Elinor. Elinor withdrew.

“Is it alive?” Zaddie whispered.

The towel twitched and squirmed so violently that Elinor very nearly dropped it. She peeked under the flap, and laughed.

“Mama,” said Frances, “let me see.”

Elinor glanced at Zaddie. “Go wash the baby off,” Elinor said to the black woman. “In the bathroom—and close the door behind you.”

Zaddie took back the female infant and carried it into the bathroom. She flicked on the light and turned to close the door. She saw Elinor go around the bed and hold out the toweled bundle to Frances. As Zaddie pulled the door shut, she heard yet one more scream from Frances. This time it was not a cry of physical pain, but one of shock and dismay.

. . .

“No,” said Elinor sternly to her daughter. “Don’t turn your face away. Go on and look at her.”

“Her?” questioned Frances, shrinking back deeper into the damp pillows.

“Two little girls,” said Elinor quietly. “Twins.”

“Mama, you cain’t call that thing you’ve got—”

“Take her, darling, and hold her for a minute.”

“I cain’t!”

“Yes, you can,” said Elinor, pressing the towel-wrapped bundle on Frances. A piece of the towel fell back, and Frances saw two moist flat eyes, the size of half-dollars, staring out at her. Frances, refusing to reach out her arms, simply shook her head no.

“Lord,” laughed Elinor, “what do you think
you
looked like?”

Frances looked up in amazement. “When I was born?”

“No, but a little later. When I took you down to the river to baptize you. Before the levee was built.” Elinor hugged her second granddaughter close with the happy memory. “Zaddie followed me down there in the middle of the night because she didn’t know
what
I was going to do with you. She saw me throw you in the water—”

“You threw me in the river!”

“Of course. And then Zaddie waded right out there, and she picked you up. Except you didn’t look like Frances Caskey that got born that morning, you looked like
this.”

With that Elinor pulled the towel away, and before her daughter could protest, thrust the second child into Frances’s unwilling arms.

Frances grimaced and shivered and tried to hand it back, but Elinor stepped out of reach. “You be careful,” Elinor said, “she’s slippery.”

For a moment Frances looked as if she were about to throw the thing from her, but then it made a little swollen cry, rather like that of a kitten fallen into a pail of rainwater. Instinctively, Frances pressed it to her breast. The damp-sounding mewling continued.

“What’s wrong with her?” Frances asked. “Why is she crying like this?”

“She’s drowning,” said Elinor.

“Drowning?!”

“In the air. She needs to be in water.”

“Is she gone die?” Frances asked with a tremor in her voice.

Elinor shook her head. “All I have to do is take her down to the river and throw her in. She’ll be all right.”

“Who’ll take care of her?”

At first Elinor didn’t answer. “She’ll be all right,” is all Elinor finally said.

“Mama, are you sure?”

“I thought you didn’t want her.”

“Well,” said Frances, who still held the changeling infant against her breast so she would not have to look at it directly, “I don’t want Billy to see her, or even Zaddie—” She glanced nervously at the bathroom door, as if she had forgot that Zaddie and her first little girl were on the other side of it.

“Zaddie won’t come out till I tell her to,” said Elinor reassuringly.

“—but I certainly don’t want her to die.”

“Look at her, darling.”

A single tear formed in the corner of Frances’s eye. “Mama, I cain’t.”

“Hold her out in front of you,” said Elinor, “and see what your little girl looks like. This is the happiest moment in a mother’s life.”

Frances did so, reluctantly.

Her daughter squirmed.

“Mama,” said Frances tremorously, “it’s the ugliest thing I ever saw in my life.”

“Sweetheart!” laughed Elinor. “One of these days I’m going to walk up to the top of the levee and throw a hand mirror into the Perdido.”

“Why?”

“So you can see what
you
look like under the water.”

Frances returned her gaze to her second daughter, and it was with new eyes that she beheld the infant that writhed vigorously before her.

Zaddie sat for an hour with the newborn infant in the bathroom adjacent to Frances’s room; she knew better than to come out before she was called. Years spent with Elinor Caskey had dampened her curiosity about things she wasn’t told directly. After a long while of sitting patiently on the edge of the bathtub with the newborn infant in her lap, she at last heard a single rap on the door. She got up and opened it. Elinor, still with the towel-wrapped bundle, was moving across the room to the far side of the bed. In the middle of the bed was a large circle of gore, water, some grayish-green slime the likes of which Zaddie had never seen before, and two umbilical cords—one of them bloody and fleshy and like every other umbilical cord, and the other smooth and gray and not bloody at all.

Frances, still naked but having toweled away most of the evidence of the double birth, was seated at the vanity and brushing her hair. Her motions were weak and somewhat disjointed. She was pale and her expression was wan. But she sat straight, as if to give the impression of quickly returning strength. Zaddie carried the infant over for Frances to look at.

“See how pretty!” cried Zaddie.

Frances looked at the baby, and smiled absently.

“Zaddie,” said Elinor, “Frances and I have to go out for a few minutes.”

“Ma’am!” cried Zaddie, in acute astonishment.

Frances stood up carefully from the vanity. “Lord, I feel so
empty!”
she laughed, stepping to the closet and removing a light robe from it. “I keep looking down and wondering where all of me went.”

Zaddie, remembering another time long ago, said, “Miss Elinor, you gone be careful with this baby now?”

“That baby stays here, Zaddie.”

Zaddie appeared much relieved. She stared at the bundle in Elinor’s arms and said, “It’s a terrible thing, Miss Frances, when a baby is born dead.”

The blanket in Elinor’s arms twitched, but if Zaddie saw the motion, she made no sign. She had decided that the second child born of Frances Caskey had been born dead. And she thought, considering what she had seen of it emerging from Frances’s straining body, that that was just as well. If it was still alive, Miss Elinor and Miss Frances couldn’t do better than to throw it in the river, and Zaddie herself might just as well keep her mouth shut.

Frances slipped on a pair of sandals, and said, “Mama, I’m ready.”

“Miss Frances!” cried Zaddie. “You not thinking of going
out!”

“There’s no need for you to go, darling,” said Elinor. “You can stay here. Call Billy and Oscar if you want. I’ll be back long before they get here.”

“Mama,” said Frances, “I want to go with you. After all,” she said, glancing down at the fouled bed, “she’s my little girl. My
other
little girl.”

In an attempt to ignore this conversation, Zaddie absorbed herself with the child in her arms, caressing the infant softly and crooning a little wordless tune.

“Zaddie?” said Elinor.

“Ma’am?”

“You know what to say if anybody asks, don’t you?”

“I’m gone say Miss Frances had the prettiest little baby girl anybody ever did see in their life.”

“And that’s all,” said Elinor.

“What else is there to say?” returned Zaddie, unperturbed.

“Nothing,” said Frances, tickling her first infant under the chin. “Nothing else...”

“We’re going out for a few minutes, then,” said Elinor. “Don’t answer the telephone if it rings, and don’t turn on any other lights. I wouldn’t be surprised if Sister wasn’t watching out her window, and if she sees lights coming on all over the house, she’ll probably pick up the telephone and call Oscar.”

“I put two mattress pads under here,” said Zaddie with pride, pointing at the bed. “Not nothing got through, but if Mr. Billy comes back tonight, don’t y’all sleep in here. Y’all sleep somewhere else, and let me come in here tomorrow and scrub this place down. Smells like that old river in here, sure do. Miss Frances, you be careful out there. Don’t trip on nothing. Sure do wish you’d stay here with me. What would people think if they knew you were traipsing around outside right after you had a little baby girl?”

“I’ll be all right, Zaddie,” Frances assured her. “Mama’s gone lead me, and she’ll walk real slow. I’m gone be careful, I promise.”

. . .

It was past midnight. Leaving her first infant in Zaddie’s care, and taking the second from Elinor, Frances went slowly down the stairs of the darkened house. Elinor had gone first to open doors and make sure no furniture was in their path. “I can see perfectly fine,” said Frances.