BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (73 page)

Perhaps with all these small surprises along the way, the Caskeys should have been prepared for the bombshell that appeared at the end, but they were not.

When the time approached for Lucille to give birth, Ivey Sapp came to stay at Gavin Pond, sleeping on a cot in the kitchen. To maintain secrecy regarding the pregnancy, no doctor was to be called in. Without complication, and in the bed she shared with Grace Caskey, Lucille Strickland delivered a perfect male baby, who weighed about as much as a five-pound sack of flour, according to Ivey's trustworthy estimate.

Queenie, James, Elinor, and Sister arrived an hour later, and looked at the child.

"We're calling him Thomas Lee," said Grace proudly, standing by Lucille at the head of the bed. "Hey there, Tommy Lee!"

"There is no point in naming the child," said Queenie. "You ought to let his new parents give him a name. They may already have a boy called Tommy."

"New parents?" cried Lucille. "Who said anything about new parents?" She held the infant protectively against her breast.

Queenie, James, Elinor, and Sister all stared at one another.

"You... mean," said Elinor slowly, "that you intend on... keeping this child?"

"He is a pretty boy!" said James. "I'd keep him."

"James," said Sister, "you would keep any child that came your way. I am surprised you haven't been taken up for kidnapping."

Elinor looked at the two young women. She sighed. "Let's get it straight, then," she said. "First of all, you want to stay out here in this godforsaken place..."

"Yes, ma'am," said Grace staunchly.

Lucille nodded diffidently.

"And you want to keep the baby."

"He's ours!" cried Lucille.

"Darling," said Queenie, "we're only thinking of what's best for you."

The four elder Caskeys, like a tribunal, glanced at one another once and then twice, looked at Grace, Lucille, and Tommy Lee, and glanced at one another again. As head of the family, Elinor spoke. "Of course you can keep the child, and of course you can stay on out here. You're both over twenty-one and you can both do whatever you want to do. We just want you both to be happy. Now are you sure this is what is going to make you happy?"

"Yes," both answered as one voice.

"Then tell us," said Elinor, "what we're supposed to say in Perdido."

"What do you mean?" asked Grace.

"I am surprised," said Elinor, "that we have been able to keep all this secret for as long as we have, what with long-distance telephone calls, and Bray driving truckloads of furniture out here all the time and buying up all the material in downtown Perdido so Lucille can sew dresses. We can't keep it secret forever, and besides we wouldn't want to. We'd want the two of you and Tommy Lee to come see us, too. So what are we supposed to say when people come up to us and say, That's a precious little baby boy! What cloud did he drop out of?'"

"I don't suppose you'd want to say you were raped at Lake Pinchona," said Queenie.

"Shhhh!" said Grace. "Of course not."

"We could say she got married, and that's why she went off," suggested James. "And we could say her boyfriend got killed in the war. And then she found out she was pregnant and this is her little boy. We could say that."

"That's a good story," said Lucille. "People would believe that."

And so they did.

Eventually, Frances and Miriam were admitted to the family confidence and told the truth. Frances was taken completely by surprise, but know-it-all Miriam said, "I would have had to be blind, deaf, and stupid not to have figured the whole thing out."

"Why didn't you say you knew, then?" said Sister, dubious.

"It wasn't any of my business," returned Miriam. "I just hope nobody expects me to go out there and see them, that's all."

"Why not?" said James.

"Because my idea of a good time is not a stagnant pond that breeds mosquitoes and a house that's filled with bugs and a baby crying in the next room, that's why."

"It's real pleasant out at the pond," said James in mild reproof, "and Tommy Lee is the sweetest baby I have ever laid eyes on. I'm gone make Bray drive me out there every day."

"You cain't do that, James," said Queenie peremptorily. "Those two girls want to be alone with their baby. I never saw two people happier together. They don't want you and me bouncing in on 'em every morning, noon, and night."

Learning about the situation, Billy Bronze was able to help. He surreptitiously went through some files at Eglin and found the name of a boy who had been at the base at the time of the rape, and who had subsequently died in the South Pacific. His name was LeRoy Burgess, and he had no next-of-kin. LeRoy Burgess became the posthumous husband of Lucille and the father of Tommy Lee.

On the first of July, 1944, Lucille's child was christened Tommy Lee Burgess in the First Methodist Church of Perdido, with the boy's mother and Grace standing together at the baptismal font. There was a little reception at Elinor's afterward, and if Perdido didn't believe the story the Caskeys told, Perdido at least had the courtesy not to say so. Grace said to everyone, "Soon as Tommy Lee is old enough, Lucille and I are gone toss him in the back seat and drive out to Oklahoma and buy us some Black Angus heifers. Nothing takes to a pecan pasture like a Black Angus..."

CHAPTER 56
LAZARUS

Even though Germany hadn't surrendered to the Allies, the war seemed to be winding down. Perdido felt it because the nearby air base felt it. Teenage boys were still being trained and sent off to Europe and to the Pacific, but one could sense that things had changed; unmistakably, the war was coming to an end. Orders for lumber, posts, and window sashes continued to pour in, however, and the Caskeys' prosperity gave no sign of slackening. Miriam worked ever more closely with her father at the mill; the workers had long before grown accustomed to seeing her there. She was no longer simply Mr. Oscar's girl, she was Miss Miriam, and respected in her own right. The operation of the Caskey mill was in two parts. The exterior portion included the mill-yard with all its machinery, workers, and storage facilities as well as the forests and the vehicles and other means by which the lumber was transported. The interior portion consisted of the offices in the center of the millyard, the workers in the office, the files, the paperwork, the hired accountants and lawyers, and the dealings with customers. That the sole customer at this time continued to be the United States War Department made the running of the concern no easier.

In her three years there, Miriam had nearly taken over the entire internal operation of the mill. Even Elinor, who somehow managed to keep close tabs on the mill without ever setting foot within its boundaries, knew that Miriam had accomplished this not through subtle maneuverings against her father and over the heads of the employees, but completely through her own competence and energy. Because Oscar was so often off somewhere in the forest, or attending to some piece of business out of town, employees had gone to Miriam with their problems instead of to Oscar. Miriam's sensible and sound replies, commands, and advice were always seconded by her father upon his return. Miriam soon became more than simply Oscar's representative; he came more and more to rely upon his daughter in the routine matters of the running of the mill. He built her an office next to his, and he gave her her own secretary and telephone line. Calls from the outside were routed automatically to her now. She was as decisive in all her dealings as any man in Perdido might have been in her place. She worked longer hours than her father, but it was in fact her dedication to the mill that allowed Oscar to take a little ease after so many years of unrelieved toil.

Considering the early hostilities that had separated Miriam from her parents for so many years, Oscar and Miriam were more intimate than anyone in Perdido would ever have thought possible. Theirs was not the intimacy of a father with his daughter, but that of a proud businessman with his promising young partner. After breakfast in the morning, Oscar went next door for a second cup of coffee with Miriam before Bray drove them to the mill together. Sister left the room, knowing that they would talk only business. Bray brought them home at noon, and for a brief time they were part of the larger Caskey family, and refrained from speaking of the mill, except in general terms. After lunch, Miriam returned to the mill while her father lingered at home or drove out into the Caskey forests or went on business to Eglin, Pensacola, or Mobile. After supper, Oscar and Miriam sometimes went off together, sitting on Miriam's side porch or walking together out behind the houses, talking of the mill and the infinite minutiae of the business.

Though she became accustomed to spending a great deal of time with her father, Miriam had no more to do with her mother than she'd had all her life. A great distance remained between them; Miriam was close only to her father. When younger, this distance had shown itself in silence, in her solitude, in her constant cold-shouldering. Now, when she was so often thrown in with her family, such methods would not do. She instead relied on an abruptness of manner, a curtness of speech, an aloof expression, and a general lack of interest in the family good unless it was consistent with the good of the Caskey mills. This harshness was accepted by Miriam's family, just as every other aberration was accepted by the Caskeys. No one sought to change her, no one considered that she would be better off if she softened her ways. Elinor once said, "That's the way Miriam is. Everybody ought to be grateful that she'll sit at the same table with us." There had been some sotto voce complaints in the town and among the mill workers—among those who did not really know Miriam—about a young woman's being given so much power and responsibility, but Oscar Caskey never considered reining in his daughter's ambition. All in the family were proud of her for what she was doing. It was no more peculiar for Miriam to want to work ten hours day at a desk in the dusty mill-yard, with nothing to see out her window but stacks of lumber and nothing to hear but the chippers and the saws, than for Grace and Lucille to want to live out at Gavin Pond and sleep in the same narrow bed with a one-year-old boy and two smelly bird dogs.

Miriam appeared hard and peremptory to those who worked in the office of the mill, but to her family she had definitely softened. She had grown up a child indulged in every conceivable way by her grandmother Mary-Love, and after Mary-Love's death Sister had done nothing to keep Miriam from pursuing that same aimless, self-indulgent way of life. Working at the mill, being compelled to deal with customers and subordinates, and maintaining a relationship with her father—a relationship that did have at least a casual intimacy—had smoothed some of Miriam's rougher edges. She was compelled to think of others, to figure out motives for behavior, determine prejudices, and try to understand nuances of behavior. Her churlishness now was a choice, not a deficiency of her basic personality.

Indicative of this new sensitivity in Miriam was the way that she now treated Sister Haskew. During the war, Sister, now in her early fifties, had become what everyone had always said she would turn out to be—a spinster. She forgot, as nearly as it was possible to forget, that she ever had had a husband. Early Haskew had been in California, Michigan, Greece, England, and France. He had sent Sister postcards from each of those places, and Sister— after always glancing at the postmarks—had torn them up, unread. She shuddered as she ripped the cards in two: "I don't even want to think about that man."

"Why don't you get a divorce?" asked Miriam one morning at breakfast after Ivey had brought in one of the cards. This one had a photograph of the Roman Coliseum on it.

"Nobody in this family has ever gotten a divorce," said Sister.

"You could be the first."

Sister looked at Miriam strangely. "What would I get a divorce /or? Early's never done anything to me."

"Then why don't you ever want to see him again?"

"You shouldn't ask me that question."

"Why not?"

Sister paused. "Because I don't know the answer."

Miriam picked up the scraps of the postcard, and dropped them one by one onto her plate. She said, "The reason you married Early was to spite Grand-mama."

Sister nodded.

"But after Grandmama died, there was no reason to stay married to Early. Early chews tobacco."

"He made me feed his dogs out of a nipple-bottle. Twice a night, I had to get up and feed those puppies. It was like having six children all at once. He put a Coke machine on the front porch of our house." Sister blushed with the memory. "I came home one day and saw that, and I said, 'If Mama were to come up here and see this, I would have to lay down in the road and die of shame.'"

"And that's why, when Mama died, you stayed on here. You didn't stay to keep care of me, you stayed 'cause you didn't want to go back to Early."

"How long have you known this?"

"I just this minute figured it out," said Miriam with a little shrug.

"I loved you, darling, and I did want to take care of you."

"I know you did, Sister."

"You don't want me to go back to Early, do you?

I know you could get along fine without me, and I know this house really and truly belongs to you, but I don't want to go back to Nashville or wherever it is that man is living now. Miriam, darling, sometimes I sit up in my room at night, and I think, 'What if Miriam gets married and she moves her husband in here, is she gone throw me out?' Would you do that, would you throw me out?"

"Sister, you're rich, don't you know that? Grand-mama left all her money to you and Oscar. All I got was this house and the safety-deposit boxes. If I threw you out of here, you could go anywhere you wanted to. You could set up housekeeping in the main street of New Orleans if you wanted to. If you wanted to stay in Perdido, you could get the DeBordenave house from James and fix it all up any way you liked it."

"That's not answering my question."

Miriam grinned. "I'm not gone get married. I haven't got time. I'm working every minute of the day and half the night. And even if I did," she added in a lower voice, "I'd never throw you out."