Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (90 page)

All the customers in the restaurant—some thirty or more—had stopped all pretense of eating and were following the little drama at the counter.

“Strickland,” said the owner of the restaurant, “you get back to that stove. Ma’am,” he said in exasperation to Miriam, “why the hell don’t you just take off?”

Miriam flipped up the board that allowed entrance behind the counter, marched past the astounded manager, grabbed Malcolm’s greasy arm, and pulled him out past the register.

“Get the car started,” she said to Billy.

Billy, his change still on the counter, hurried out of the building. Miriam, with Malcolm in tow, headed after him.

“Leave the apron!” the restaurant owner shouted.

“Stand still,” Miriam ordered Malcolm, then she spun him around. Undoing and then removing the apron, she flung it over the back of a chair and pulled Malcolm out the door.

“Get in the back seat,” she commanded once they’d got outside.

“Miriam, where on earth—” Malcolm began.

“I am taking you back to Perdido, where you belong.”

“Lord, Miriam, I cain’t—”

He was already in the back seat.

“Are you married or something?” Miriam asked.

He shook his head.

“Have you bought a house?”

He shook his head again. “I got my clothes though,” he ventured softly.

“Queenie’ll buy you new ones,” said Miriam. “Billy, let’s go.”

The owner of the restaurant stood in the front entrance of the restaurant, shouting that Malcolm was fired and would never find work in Hinds County again.

Miriam turned around in the seat. “James is dead—died a year ago—and left Queenie money.”

Malcolm stared out the window, as if riding in an automobile were a thing completely new to him.

“Your old friend Travis Gann is gone, too. You know what he did? He went and raped your sister, that’s what he did, and she got pregnant. But that’s a secret, so not a single word, you hear, Malcolm?”

Malcolm nodded his head.

. . .

And so the journey back to Perdido continued with Malcolm in the back seat. He could hardly overcome his bewilderment at being summarily kidnapped from his job and his life of three years past. While Billy drove steadily southeast through the corn and cotton fields of Mississippi, Miriam would occasionally turn around to throw some piece of family or town news at Malcolm or to berate him for his treatment of Queenie.

It was dark by the time they crossed the Alabama line, and Miriam had dozed off. “Alabama,” Billy said, and Miriam shook herself awake. “We’ll be in Perdido in about an hour.”

Malcolm said, “Miriam, you think Ma’s gone want to see me?”

“Of course, she is,” snapped Miriam. “But she’s gone be mad to find out you’re still alive.”

“I treated her bad,” said Malcolm.

“You sure did. Are you gone sponge off her for the rest of your life now?”

“Hey, I been working three years. I was in the army for six. I ain’t been sponging off nobody.”

“You’re no-good, Malcolm,” said Miriam. “And you’re never going to amount to anything. I don’t know why I bothered to pull you out from behind that counter.”

“Neither do I,” sighed Malcolm from the darkness of the back seat.

. . .

The Caskeys were still at the table at Elinor’s when Billy, Miriam, and Malcolm pulled up before the house that night.

“I don’t want to go in,” said Malcolm.

“I wouldn’t either if I smelled like you,” said Miriam, getting out of the car. “Wait five minutes, Malcolm, and then come on inside. There’s no sense in putting off and putting off.”

Billy and Miriam staggered wearily into the house. As they stepped into the dining room everyone rose from the table to welcome them. Knowing of their probable return that evening, Lucille and Grace and Tommy Lee had come in from Gavin Pond Farm. The outcome of the trip to Texas would affect them most.

“This family has been falling apart!” exclaimed Queenie.

Frances embraced her husband.

“Did y’all bring us a million dollars in cash?” asked Grace facetiously.

“No,” returned Miriam. “What we brought back was a plugged nickel.”

“Oh,” said Queenie, “that’s too bad. We got the impression everything was going along pretty well.”

“There’s no problem about the oil,” said Miriam airily, “I imagine my phone’ll start ringing tomorrow.”

“The phone started ringing two days ago,” said Oscar, “but I told them that you were still out of town and there wasn’t anybody else they could talk to.”

Billy, still holding his wife close, looked over Frances’s shoulder, and said, “Miriam and I have got a surprise out in the car.”

“Oh,” cried Queenie excitedly. “Y’all brought us presents. I bet it’s moccasins, and Indian stuff. Y’all were in Oklahoma, weren’t you? You know I’ve got a brother in Oklahoma, I haven’t heard from Pony in—”

Queenie broke off at the sound of the front screen door banging shut.

“Who is that?” asked Elinor.

“That,” Miriam replied, “is the surprise.”

In the doorway stood Malcolm, dingy, rumpled, wan, smelling of rancid grease and barbecue sauce.

Queenie screamed and collapsed into her chair.

“Oh, Lord!” cried Lucille, and jumped behind her mother’s chair as if she needed protection.

“We thought you were dead,” said Grace in a low voice.

“Well, he’s not,” said Miriam. “Found him outside of Jackson, looking just about like he does now except he had an apron on then. Malcolm, now that everybody’s seen you, maybe you could do us all a favor and go over to Queenie’s and take a bath.”

“What’ll I wear when I get out of the tub?” said the bewildered Malcolm, glancing down at his clothes. He looked around the room at his family, and explained, “She wouldn’t stop. I guess she thought I’d run away. I wouldn’t have. I sort of missed Perdido. Miriam said James was dead. That’s too bad.” Then he turned and shuffled out into the darkness of the hallway.

Queenie screamed again and ran after him. “Malcolm! Malcolm!”

“He’s all grown up!” marveled Grace to Lucille. “I cain’t hardly believe it.”

“If y’all had told me,” said unperturbed Zaddie, coming into the dining room from the kitchen, “I would have killed the fatted calf.”

Though she was bone weary, Miriam was up late the night of her return from Texas. Sister wouldn’t let her go to bed. Sister was angry that Miriam had stayed away so long. Sister was mad that Miriam had telephoned so infrequently. Sister first wanted to hear Miriam tell one story, about her success with the oil companies for instance, but almost as quickly as Miriam had begun it, Sister interrupted with a demand for another tale altogether. “Tell me what you thought when you saw Malcolm standing at that stove in the barbecue restaurant, darling.” Sister’s mind wouldn’t stay fixed. One minute she would be demanding that Miriam walk across the room and hug her, and the next Sister would almost weep for her own unhappiness at being abandoned for such a protracted time.

“You know what happened to me when you were gone?” Sister said accusingly.

“What?” said Miriam wearily, sitting in a wicker chair next to the door, as if to make a very quick exit if Sister would ever let her go.

“You know who walked in this house right through the front screen door and nobody lifted a finger to stop him from doing it?”

“Who?”

“Early. Early walked right in the door in the middle of the night. Walked right in this room one night and said, ‘Sister, come back to Mobile with me.’ Tried to pull me out of the bed. I said, ‘Early, my legs will crumble right under me and you will have a mess on your hands.’ I told him, ‘Early, I’m a cripple.’ He said, ‘You’re not,’ and said, ‘When you get out of that bed, I’m coming to get you.’”

Miriam’s head lolled. She scarcely followed Sister’s report.

“So you know what that means?” cried Sister angrily.

“What?” murmured Miriam.

“It means
I will never leave this bed again. That’s
what it means.”

This did get Miriam’s attention, and she looked up. “You don’t mean that.”

“I do.”

“You are in that bed waiting for your leg to mend. You should have been up a month ago at the least.”

“I’m never gone leave this bed,” Sister repeated adamantly. “Not if Early Haskew is in his car parked out front looking in my windows with field glasses waiting to see me hobble down the hall so he can run in and get me.”

“Early’s not going to come and get you,” said Miriam. “He cain’t take you away if you don’t want to go.”

“We’re married!”

“Doesn’t make any difference,” said Miriam, shaking her head.

“Fix my pillows,” said Sister.

“I will not,” said Miriam, her strength returning with her anger. “If you think for one minute that you are going to lie in that bed and be waited on by all of us for the rest of your life, giving up our comfort and our free time in order to plump your pillows and empty your bed pans and bring you magazines, you are sadly mistaken, Sister.”

“My leg hurts so bad, Miriam! Why do you want to talk to me like that? Why do you want to say harsh words to an old crippled woman like me? An old crippled woman who cain’t even get out of the bed to go to the bathroom when she has to go?”

“You’re no more crippled than I am,” said Miriam, now totally revived. “If I were smart, what I’d do is drive you way out in the country, open the car door and push you out, and make you
walk
back to Perdido.”

“You’d do it too, wouldn’t you!” cried Sister. “I bet you would, for meanness’ sake.”

“I’m not the mean one anymore,” remarked Miriam. “I’m not the one who makes Queenie stay over here with me seven hours a day when she could be doing whatever she wanted to be doing in her own house. I’m not the one who makes it impossible for Ivey to get any work done because she has to run upstairs every three minutes to do something for the cripple in the bed. I’m not the one who keeps somebody up far into the night, somebody who’s just come back from a long hard trip.”

“That’s me, I suppose. I suppose you’re talking about me.”

“I am,” declared Miriam, rising.

Sister picked up a magazine of crossword puzzles from her bedside table and flung it at Miriam. It sailed through the air and struck Miriam on the inside of her elbow.

“Good-night to you, too,” said Miriam and stalked out of the room.

Sister screamed out: “Miriam, wait! Wait!”

Miriam marched down the hall and turned back only when she had reached the door of her room.

Peering down to the end of the hall and in through the open doorway of Sister’s room, she saw Sister struggle to get out of the bed. She watched as Sister pushed aside the mountain of pillows on which she had rested for so long and with a loud groan turn herself sideways on the bed and force her legs off the side.

“Miriam!” Sister called.

“I’m here.”

Sister slid carefully off the side of the bed until her feet touched the floor. Gradually she increased her weight on them until she let go of the bed, which she had been using as support.

“See!” cried Miriam. “You’re not a cripple.”

Sister took a step toward the hallway. Then another. Suddenly her left leg jackknifed and she dropped to the floor in a heap. Her pale brow hit the polished wooden floor with a resounding thud.

Miriam ran back down the hall and into the room. She gathered Sister up—it was no difficulty, as Sister was woefully thin—and lifted her back onto the bed. Then, one limb at a time, Miriam made Sister comfortable on the high mattress, arranging the covers over her and the pillows behind her. She wet a cloth in the bathroom and bathed the bump on Sister’s forehead.

“Fix my pillows,” Sister groaned. Miriam did so.

“Are you all right now?”

“No,” said Sister. “You have just turned me into a living temple of pain.”

“Do you want me to call Leo Benquith?”

“What good could he do? Call Queenie.”

“Not at this time of night with Malcolm just back!”

“I know they’re up over there, they’re bound to be, with you bringing Malcolm back and all.”

“I’m not going to ask Queenie to come over here at one o’clock in the morning,” said Miriam.

“She’ll come,” said Sister confidently. “She always does.”

Miriam said nothing. She merely turned and walked out of the room.

Sister picked up the telephone, and while waiting for the operator to come on, she called out to the retreating Miriam, “See, I told you I was a cripple.”

. . .

Despite the lateness of the hour, as Sister had predicted, everyone in Queenie’s household was still up when Sister called. Queenie had taken Malcolm home, pushed him into the bedroom, pressed him into the bathroom, received his reeking clothes through the cracked door, shoved others in, and actually sat on the edge of the bed biting her fingernails while Malcolm bathed away the smell of grease and barbecue sauce and replaced it with the fragrance of the best of James’s scented soaps.

Afterward, with Malcolm squeezed tightly into a pair of Oscar’s trousers and one of his shirts, the reunited family sat in the living room staring at one another. Grace had taken Tommy Lee back to Gavin Pond Farm, but had left Lucille at her mother’s. “I want to hear what Malcolm has got to say for himself,” said Lucille. “Four years and not one word!”

Malcolm, it turned out, had little to say. He had been in the army, which they all knew. He had trained in North Dakota, fought in Italy, and been honorably discharged in Massachusetts. He had learned two skills: bricklaying and cooking for crowds. After leaving the army, he had laid brick sidewalks in Boston, but union difficulties had relieved him of that job. He had come south and found work with a contracting firm in Little Rock. Fired from a job the company was working on in Jackson, he had picked up work at a downtown diner. The barbecue restaurant had been his fourth position as cook.

“Doesn’t sound like you were building up much of a homelife,” remarked Lucille, to whom homelife had become important.

“I was not,” said Malcolm contritely.

“This
is your home,” said Queenie.

Malcolm did not answer, but it appeared to his mother and sister that he was not denying the proposition. His silence implied he felt unworthy of his mother’s kindness.