Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (86 page)

They went quietly out the back door and ceased speaking. The lights in Sister’s room were burning, and they had no desire to draw her curiosity with their voices.

Under cover of the water oaks, Elinor and Frances walked slowly along the base of the levee until they came to the concrete steps behind Queenie’s house. They started up the steps slowly and carefully, but Frances quickly became winded and more than once almost cried out in sharp pain. She didn’t stop, however, and soon they were at the top, hidden by the thick stands of saplings that had taken root there. The Perdido flowed swiftly below; its voice and its smell in that still night were achingly familiar—and comforting—to Frances.

“Well?” said Elinor after a short time.

“Mama,” whispered Frances, peering at her daughter, whose half-dollar eyes glistened moistly, “am I supposed to just throw her in? From way up here?”

“No,” said Elinor. “I’ll take her down and put her in.”

“You sure she’ll be all right?”

“Darling,” said Elinor, caressing the infant in Frances’s arms, “do you really think I’d deliberately kill this sweet, sweet thing? See, she’s not ugly to me, not ugly one little bit!” Elinor playfully poked a finger into the lipless mouth and twisted the swollen black tongue. “Not one little bit!”

“But who’ll take care of her?”

Elinor took the child, and tossed aside the towel in which she had been wrapped.

“Are there others down there?” asked Frances. “Somebody else who’ll make sure she gets enough to eat?”

Without answering, Elinor, with the help of one sapling trunk after another, began slipping down the slope of the levee toward the river.

After a moment of indecision, Frances followed, though the pain in her groin beat with the pulse of her heart.

“What
does
she eat?” Frances whispered loudly, but still Elinor did not answer.

Frances tripped over a blackberry bush, scratching her right arm and leg.

“Frances!” cried Elinor, stopping her downward progress.

“I’m all right, Mama,” cried Frances a moment later in a strained voice. She picked herself up painfully.

When Elinor reached the base of the levee, she reached out an arm. In a moment Frances had slipped down the last few feet of levee and grabbed her mother’s hand. Elinor squeezed.

“Catch your breath,” she said.

“How am I gone get back up?” sighed Frances.

“You shouldn’t have come down here.”

“Mama, that’s my baby.”

“I’m glad you said that,” said Elinor with pride. “’Cause she
is
yours.”

They stood on a sandbar. Crickets chirped in the kudzu vine all around them. When Frances’s breath had grown even once again, Elinor took a step forward into the water. Frances, shedding her robe, held her mother’s hand and followed.

“Give her to me,” said Frances.

Elinor relinquished the infant to Frances.

Together, mother and daughter walked forward into the swiftly flowing dark water.

. . .

For two hours Zaddie Sapp sat in the mahogany rocker in Frances’s room holding the newborn infant. She rocked patiently, waiting for the return of Elinor and Frances and tried as best she could not to think of that second child, that other twin, the child who had been born deformed, and who was now dead. Zaddie trusted and loved Miss Elinor, and whatever Miss Elinor did was right and not to be questioned.

The telephone rang twice, but Zaddie did not answer it.

Sometime after three o’clock, Elinor and Frances returned. Both wore only robes, and their hair was tangled and wet.

“How is she doing?” whispered Frances, poking at the child in Zaddie’s arms.

“She’s hungry,” replied Zaddie.

“Let me have her then,” whispered Frances. She took the child from Zaddie and then lay down on the bed, opened her robe, and put the child to her breast.

“Mama,” said Frances, looking up at Elinor, who stood in the doorway brushing tangles out of her wet hair, “maybe you ought to go and call Billy and Daddy.”

Elinor nodded, and went across the hall to telephone. In a moment Frances and Zaddie heard her talking in a low voice. “Zaddie,” said Frances, “Mama and I left tracks all through the house. You better see what you can do to clean them up before Billy and Daddy get back.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Zaddie?” said Frances.

“Ma’am?”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Zaddie turned to go, but at the door she was stopped by one more word from Frances. The black woman turned back.

“Don’t worry about the other one,” said Frances. “She’s doing fine.”

. . .

Billy and Oscar were home by four that morning, but neither of them went to sleep. Billy sat in the mahogany rocker and held his daughter, and Oscar and Elinor sat on the upstairs porch talking. Frances, wholly exhausted, slept the sleep of the dead. Queenie came over at five, announcing that she couldn’t sleep and wanted to see the baby. Miriam arrived at six, saying that their voices had kept her up all night and that somebody ought to take the baby over and show her to Sister before Sister had a stroke.

Much later in the morning, Frances did take her daughter next door and exhibited her to Sister, who cooed and made much of the infant.

“I always wanted me a baby girl,” sighed Sister. “What are you calling this one?”

“We’ve decided on Lilah,” said Frances.

“I sure wish you had an extra that you could send over here to keep me company.”

At this Frances began to laugh, and Sister said, “What, may I ask, is so funny about that?”

Frances only laughed more loudly.

Lilah was duly examined by Leo Benquith, who pronounced her fine and perfect. He deprecated Frances’s decision to have the child at home—so many women were having their babies in hospitals now, and it was a good thing so far as he was concerned. Frances hadn’t even called in a midwife, and
anything
might have happened.

“Mama was there,” returned Frances. “Zaddie was there. And everything worked out fine.”

. . .

Billy Bronze noted an abrupt change in Frances after the birth of their child. In that single night—during the hours in which he had been banished from the house—she seemed to have grown up, to have come instantly into the Caskey women’s legacy of imperiousness and self-sufficiency. She wasn’t belligerent or demanding, of course; Frances could never be
that
. But now she knew what she wanted, and she wasn’t afraid to ask for it. Previously, she had demurred to any opinion or wish contrary to her own; now she considered her own desires to be equal to anyone’s. And she didn’t cling as she once did. She said to Billy, “Maybe you ought to get yourself a real secretary down at your office. It’s gone be hard for me to get away every day and leave my little girl at home with Zaddie. Zaddie’s got enough to do.”

Billy agreed with this, and hired a girl just out of high school who had got all A’s in her typing and accounting courses. She proved to be of much greater use to Billy than Frances, whose principal worth had been in her loyalty and her readiness to attempt any task rather than in her secretarial abilities.

. . .

Billy liked this improvement at the office. He really had been in need of more efficient assistance in his job of handling the Caskey personal finances. Miriam was running more and more of the mill’s business, with her father relinquishing bits of his power every day. Under Miriam’s stringent management, the mill prospered as it never had before, even during the height of the war.

Miriam sought out contracts in a way that her father never had. She hired salesmen from Pensacola and Mobile to go out and solicit lumber business. She talked with major builders in the Florida and Alabama panhandles and offered them large discounts for volume orders. She had bought new improved machinery in order to speed production. She had a man who did nothing but look around the place and see that everything was being done correctly. She hired a firm of Atlanta accountants to do taxes and to advise her on how things should be done so as to minimize the mill’s liability to the government. She drove out into the country and bargained with dying farmers and the widows of dead farmers for the purchase of their land. It was said that she went to more funerals than anybody else in the county. Miriam was tireless, and more and more money poured into the Caskey coffers.

Billy invested this newly made capital. After Miriam’s needs at the mill were taken care of, Billy worked out schemes with bonds, stocks, and personal loans that were bewildering to family members who occasionally asked such questions as: “Well, Billy, what have you been doing with our money lately?” He had a special telephone line put in to brokers in New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York. He kept a junior high school boy sitting against the wall in the hallway outside his office whose sole job was to take telegraph messages down to Mr. Jett, who operated the Western Union franchise out of the stockroom of the Ben Franklin store.

Billy prepared envelopes with crisp new notes for every member of the family every week; he wrote checks for all the bills that came in; and once a month he prepared a typewritten account showing how much everyone was worth. This single sheet was always a source of astonishment to the Caskeys. Queenie once said to Billy, “Why don’t you ever come down hard on us for spending money the way we do? I know I don’t think anything of going down to Pensacola, and
buying out
those dress shops!”

Billy laughed and replied, “Well, Queenie, you’re worth so damned much that you’d have to go down to Pensacola every day for two years and just
spend
from eight o’clock in the morning until six o’clock at night, and then maybe I’d have to say, ‘Hey, Queenie, ease up...’ But not until then.”

Queenie loved hearing this. How little, in her earlier life, had she ever imagined a day when she would actually have more money than she would know how to spend.

. . .

The Caskeys all eventually learned that Miriam intended to drill for oil on the swampland below Gavin Pond Farm. Queenie and Sister agreed that it was all foolishness, that they had enough money as it was, and that Lucille and Grace and Tommy Lee might be greatly upset at having such an operation so close to their home. Grace herself had become reconciled to the idea by Lucille’s pointing out, on every occasion the subject was brought up, that if there was oil under that swamp, then she and Lucille would become the richest farmers in Escambia County, Florida. They could buy ten bulls with unexceptionable pedigrees, they could clear a thousand more acres for soybeans and cotton and corn and peanuts. They could buy half a dozen tractors and put up new barns and dig out a second pond, and add an L to the farmhouse. Grace was so excited that she called Miriam up, and said, “When are you going to get on with this business? Lucille and I cain’t wait around forever for this money that’s gone come to us.”

Miriam hired surveyors and geologists from the University of Texas and brought them to Perdido. They were fed at Elinor’s house and then taken out to Gavin Pond Farm, where they were introduced to Grace and then let loose in the swamp with their instruments, lenses, and logbooks.

Their report was about what Miriam expected it would be: conditions in the swampland were consistent with the possibility of large reserves of oil below.

With this ammunition Miriam was prepared to take on Houston.

After Miriam had formally asked Billy to accompany her on the trip, Billy said to Frances, “Do you mind if I go with Miriam?”

“Of course not,” said Frances. “She may need you out there. Though that’s a bit hard to imagine, knowing Miriam.”

Miriam and Billy made appointments to visit a number of oil companies during the ten days that they were to be in Houston. Miriam planned to show them the maps and the surveyors’ and the geologists’ reports and then ask, in effect, “What next?”

One hot August afternoon, while Miriam was sitting across from him in his office, Billy ventured to say to Miriam, “Are you sure this is the way things are usually done in the oil business?”

“No,” returned Miriam, unperturbed, “but it’s the way I’m gone do it.”

“What if they laugh in your face? I mean, who’s
not
going to laugh when you tell them that they ought to drill for oil in Florida? Whoever heard of oil in Florida before? Aren’t they going to say, ‘Watch out for the alligators!’?”

“They might,” said Miriam. “But in two years I’ll be the one who’s laughing.”

“How can you be so sure of yourself?” asked Billy.

“Because,” said Miriam, thoughtfully, “when it comes down to it, I trust what Elinor says, and she says there’s oil down there.”

Billy smiled and looked askance at this. One of his trousers’ legs was caught in the fan beneath his desk and he reached down to free it. His cuffs were always frayed from being caught so often. When he looked up, Miriam was slowly moving about the office with a rolled-up financial journal, stalking a wasp that had flown in the window.

“How does Miz Caskey know anything about whether there’s oil under that land?” Billy asked.

“How the hell should I know?” said Miriam as she deftly swatted the wasp. When it dropped dazed to the floor, she crushed it with her shoe and kicked the carcass beneath a bookcase. “But I’m convinced she
does
and that’s what matters. Elinor may have given me away when I was a baby. She may never have loved me one-tenth of how much she loves Frances. She may not even love me as much as she loves
you
, Billy. But Elinor doesn’t lie to me. That’s one thing I can say for her. If Elinor pulls me behind a curtain and tells me there’s oil under the swamp, then I’m gone row out there with a pump in the back of my boat.”

“I think you’re taking a chance,” said Billy.

“I don’t care what you think,” said Miriam off-handedly. “I just need to know if you’ll go to Houston with me.”

“Of course, I’ll go. I’ve already told you I would.”

Miriam sat down again and unrolled the journal she had swatted the wasp with. “I wonder if we shouldn’t pretend we’re married and that you’re the one who’s really in charge.”

Billy laughed. “Nobody would believe
that
for a minute.”