Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  The current was so swift at that center, the whirlpool so pronounced, that there was a depression in the surface of the water more than a foot deep. Quite suddenly, Buster was there, at the top of the downspout that was the entrance to the watery hell below. He managed to get two gulps of air, and to open his eyes. The surface of the river was at a level above his eyes. He tried to scream, but at the moment that he drew in one last breath, he was sucked straight down toward the bottom.

  The thing Ivey had warned him against grabbed him. Buster’s arms were pinned to his sides with such force that the bones splintered inside them. His breath was squeezed out until none was left, and he braced for the coarse black tongue that would lick out his eyeballs. Unable to refrain, he opened his eyes, but so far beneath the surface he could see nothing at all. Then he felt a thick heavy coarseness press over his nose and mouth. As it licked up toward his eyes, Buster Sapp slipped into a blackness that was deeper and darker and more merciful than the cold Perdido.

  . . .

  No trace of Buster was ever discovered, but no one expected it to be otherwise. Elinor Dammert, unable to sleep and up early, said she had seen Buster dive off the mooring peer into the Perdido. Unquestionably he had been swept down to the junction and drowned. So many persons had been drowned at the junction and their bodies never located, either in town or much farther down the river, that no one even thought of attempting to assure the bereaved Sapps that the corpse of their little boy might be recovered. “He had no business getting in that water by the light of the moon,” said his mother, Creola, and she took comfort in the eight children who remained to her.

  After Buster’s disappearance, Mary-Love set Bray to poor Buster’s monotonous task. Bray so little liked it, thinking the job beneath his dignity, that he drove his common-law wife, Ivey, out to the Sapp cane field one day and requisitioned one of Ivey’s sisters, a ten-year-old called Zaddie. Zaddie took up residence in Baptist Bottom with her sister and brother-in-law and was presented with her unfortunate brother’s rake.

  And however it was, whether her system became suddenly accustomed to the local climate, or whether Roxie Welles began to feed her better, Miss Elinor no longer looked peaked. Her face regained the healthy color it had had when she was rescued from the flooded hotel. Miss Elinor looked as if she were settling in.

  . . .

  The school year began on September 2. On that day Miss Elinor assumed charge of the fourth grade, and tiny Grace entered the first. And when that morning, after a large celebratory breakfast, James Caskey asked Miss Elinor if she and Grace didn’t want a ride to the school in his automobile, she thanked him but declined.

  “You know how to get there, don’t you, walking?”

  “Of course, I know,” Elinor replied, “but Grace and I won’t be walking.”

  “Well,” said James Caskey, smiling at Roxie who was bringing in a plate of hot biscuits, “how do you intend to get there? Is Escue gone take you down there in the back of his wagon?”

  “Grace and I are going in the boat,” announced Miss Elinor, and she looked at Grace, who grinned and nodded her head in excitement.

  “A boat!” cried James Caskey.

  “Bray’s boat,” said Miss Elinor. “I have his permission.”

  James Caskey sat still and perplexed. “Miss Elinor,” he said at last, “you know you got to get past the junction in order to get from our mooring dock down to the school. How do you intend to do it?”

  “I intend to paddle hard,” replied Miss Elinor imperturbably.

  “Let me remind you,” said James in a tone that seemed only mildly protesting considering the danger he perceived threatening his only child, “that poor little Buster Sapp drowned at the junction last summer.”

  Miss Elinor laughed. “You are afraid for Grace, Mr. Caskey.”

  “I’m not afraid, Daddy!”

  “I know you’re not, darling, and of course I trust Miss Elinor, it’s just that the junction...well, you remember Buster, don’t you, child?”

  “Course I remember Buster,” cried Grace, putting her hands petulantly on her hips. Then she looked sideways both at her father and at Miss Elinor, and added in a low voice, “Ivey says Buster got eaten up!”

  “Ivey was trying to scare you, honey,” said James. “But what happened to Buster was that he drowned.”

  “Mr. Caskey,” said Elinor, “my daddy ran a ferry across the Tombigbee River for thirty-two years. I used to paddle up that river every noon to bring him his dinner. And that was when I wasn’t any bigger than Grace.” She smiled. “If you’re worried, I’ll tie a rope under Grace’s arms, and make Zaddie run along the bank, holding on.”

  But James Caskey wouldn’t allow Miss Elinor to take Grace with her. That morning Elinor Dammert paddled the boat alone. James and Grace, however, were standing below the junction in the field behind the town hall when Elinor came by, and they waved lustily and called. She waved back at them and shot past the junction with only a little quiver of her paddle in the water. She rowed over to the red clay bank and sank the paddle into the soft earth. James Caskey went over and lifted Grace into the boat. “You were right,” he said, “and I was wrong.”

  “Let’s go!” cried Miss Elinor, and pushed off. Grace squealed in delight and waved frantically to her father.

  . . .

  Next day a dozen early morning loafers had congregated in the field back of the town hall waiting for Miss Elinor and Grace to shoot past the junction in Bray Sugarwhite’s little green boat. On Thursday, two dozen men and women were hanging out of the town hall windows, and everybody waved. Elinor Dammert was a crazy fool to do it and James Caskey was a crazy fool to allow his daughter to ride in that boat, because one day a whirlpool was going to swallow them both up and spit up splinters and bones onto the red clay bank. Yet in a week or two it didn’t seem such a crazy sight; they still waved from the town hall windows, but no one predicted destruction for Miss Elinor and Grace anymore.

  . . .

  Zaddie Sapp was a quick child, quicker than Buster had ever been, and when she had finished raking the yards each morning she would sit in the kitchen with Roxie or with her sister Ivey and take up a morsel of sewing or a pan of unshelled peas. It didn’t matter what it was, she just wanted to be doing something. Elinor took a liking to the child and showed her how to manage simple embroidery. Mary-Love roundly condemned this when she heard of it, for colored women, in Perdido’s opinion, had no use for ornamental work. But Elinor gave Zaddie a basket of pillowcases, and Zaddie painstakingly embroidered a floral border around each and every one of them. For this effort, Elinor rewarded her fifty cents apiece.

  By this and many other such actions, Elinor won Zaddie Sapp’s heart. Every afternoon at three o’clock, Zaddie sat on the mooring pier and waited for Miss Elinor and Grace to come paddling up.

  “How are you?” Elinor asked Zaddie every day, and every day Zaddie was thrilled by the question.

  “I’m just fine,” Zaddie replied invariably, and then told her everything that had happened in both Caskey households that day.

  In these fine September and October afternoons, Elinor would sit on the front porch of James Caskey’s house, rocking in a chair and listening while Zaddie and Grace sat on the steps and read aloud out of a book. Though she was four years younger than Zaddie, Grace was much the better scholar and apt to be proud of her scholastic superiority, but Elinor always kept Grace in check. “Grace,” Elinor would say, “if Zaddie had had your opportunities, she would be much farther along than you are now. How well do you think you would be able to read if you had spent three years of your life on the back of a mule going round and round a cane-grind?” Abashed, Grace would button her lip and hand the book sheepishly to Zaddie, who quivered with the sense of privilege at being defended by so august a being as Miss Elinor. Miss Elinor, Zaddie never tired of repeating, was the only person in Perdido—man or woman—who could paddle a boat right past the junction.

  Chapter 5

 
Courtship

  By September, the three sawmills of Perdido were back in operation, and the exigencies laid upon James and Oscar Caskey lessened. When Oscar saw that Miss Elinor sat on the front porch every afternoon from three-thirty until dark, he took to coming home earlier from the mill.

  He would park his automobile on the street, get out, and start up the walk toward his own house, then turn aside after ten steps or so as if with sudden inspiration. He would walk across the yard towards James’s house, obliterating some of Zaddie’s careful work and speak first to the black girl, who with Grace beside her, was always to be found at Elinor’s feet. “So, Zaddie, how much did the water oaks grow today?”

  “Grew some, Mr. Oscar,” she invariably replied.

  Everyone in Perdido had heard of the unrelenting vigor of Elinor’s trees, had passed by the houses to see them, and had talked of them to an extent that rendered them old news indeed. No one had any explanation for the extraordinarily rapid growth, and all that remained was for Zaddie every day to ascertain that the grove of trees had gained another inch or so in the night.

  After a little exchange with Zaddie on the progress of the trees, Oscar would turn to his cousin Grace, and remark something like, “I heard at the barbershop this morning that you and your little friends tied up your teacher and threw her off the top of the school auditorium. Was this true?”

  “No!” Grace would cry indignantly.

  “How you, Miss Elinor?” Oscar asked then, turning to her as if he had come across the yard expressly to speak to Zaddie and Grace, and now that he had done so, was free to see who else was about. “How were your Indians today?”

  Oscar referred to all the students of the grammar school as “Indians.”

  “My Indians kept me hopping,” said Elinor with a smile. “It’s my boys, though. My girls would do anything for me. Take a seat, Mr. Oscar. You look tired on your feet.”

  “I am, I am,” said Oscar, taking the rocking chair next to hers, quite as if she hadn’t made the same invitation, and he accepted it, every day for the past two weeks.

  “Your mama,” said Elinor, “is peering at us through the camellia bushes.”

  Oscar stood out of his chair and called out, “Hey, Mama!”

  Mary-Love, discovered, stepped from behind the cover of camellias.

  “Oscar, I thought that was you!” she called from the porch.

  “Didn’t you see the car, Mama?” he called out. He looked down at Miss Elinor. “She saw the car,” he said, in a voice his mother couldn’t hear.

  “Tell her to come over here and sit with us,” said Elinor.

  “Mama! Miss Elinor says come over here and sit awhile!”

  “Tell Miss Elinor thank you, but I’ve got peas to shell!”

  “She doesn’t!” cried Zaddie indignantly to Grace. “I shelled ever’ one of them peas this morning!”

  “Tell your mama,” said Elinor politely, though she had certainly heard Zaddie’s contention that Mary-Love’s excuse was empty, “that if she’ll come over here, Zaddie and I will help her with her shelling.”

  “All right, Mama!” cried out Oscar, not bothering to perpetuate the deception by straining his voice. He sat down again. He smiled at Elinor. “Mama does not want me over here,” he remarked.

  “Why not?” demanded Grace, as she watched Mary-Love disappear behind the camellias again.

  “Because of me,” said Elinor.

  “Because of you?” cried Grace, not even beginning to comprehend how anyone could object to Miss Elinor.

  “Miss Mary-Love thinks Mr. Oscar should be sitting on her front porch talking to her, and not sitting on this front porch talking to you and me and Zaddie.”

  “Then why doesn’t she come over here? We invited her.”

  Oscar sighed. “Let it be, Grace.”

  “Mr. Oscar,” said Zaddie, turning around, “I shelled them peas this morning.”

  “I know it, Zaddie. Now you and Grace sit still for a while.”

  Grace and Zaddie leaned their heads together and began whispering.

  “Your boys are giving you trouble?” Oscar asked.

  “They’ll settle down next month. Right now half of them are out with the cotton harvest and the other half wish they were. I can’t get them to wear shoes, and I have to check them for ringworm every morning before recess.”

  “They listen to you, don’t they?”

  “I make them listen,” laughed Elinor. “I tell them that if they don’t listen to me, I’m going to take them out in Bray’s boat and drop them off at the junction. That makes them sit up straight. But I don’t have any trouble with my girls.”

  Miss Elinor had thirty-four students, eighteen boys and sixteen girls. Twenty lived in town and fourteen in the surrounding countryside. Of the fourteen from the country, twelve had been kept home for the past few weeks to help with the harvest. The remaining two were silent little Indian girls whose mother and father operated five stills in the piney woods over on Little Turtle Creek; they rode into school every day on the back of a decrepit mule. Elinor taught her children arithmetic, geography, spelling, grammar, and Confederate history.

  Every morning Roxie fixed Miss Elinor a lunch to take to school, but one morning Roxie was called away to help with a baby-birthing in Baptist Bottom, and nothing could be prepared. When Roxie did return, a little before noon, she packed the little wicker case and gave it to Zaddie to deliver to the teacher. To go to the school of the white children was a great adventure for Zaddie, and she approached the building with awe. The principal, Ruth Digman, showed her the way to Elinor’s classroom and knocked on the door for her.

  The child at the back of the room, whose duty it was to open the door when anyone knocked, rose and answered the summons; all the children turned around and stared at the black girl in the doorway. No one had ever seen a colored child in the white school. Trembling, Zaddie went forward with Miss Elinor’s lunch. The teacher thanked her, then introduced her to the class. “Boys and girls,” said Miss Elinor, “this is Zaddie Sapp, who is exactly your age. If she went to school she’d be in the fourth grade too, and she’d be as smart as the smartest one of you sitting here. She is saving up her money to pay the tuition at the Colored Arts and Mechanics College up in Brewton, and I will give her a quarter this very minute to put in her bank.”

  Zaddie took the quarter and rushed headlong from the room. From that moment—if, indeed, she had not already signed herself over—she was Elinor Dammert’s creature for life.

  . . .

  One day in October, home from the mill for lunch, Oscar learned quite accidentally from Ivey Sapp that his mother and his sister would be going to Pensacola on an overnight visit in order to get to a particular dressmaker early in the morning. Oscar quickly figured out that Mary-Love hadn’t mentioned her upcoming absence to him because she hadn’t wanted him to take advantage of it by spending the time in the company of Elinor Dammert. Oscar stepped out on the back porch and called Zaddie over to him. The girl, who was sitting under one of the water oaks that had kept on growing even though it was fall, came directly over.

  “Zaddie, you know where Miss Elinor teaches, don’t you?”

  “I been there,” said Zaddie.

  “Will you take her a note for me? I’ll give you a quarter to do it, Zaddie.”

  “I’ll take it, Mr. Oscar,” said the black girl eagerly. She would gladly have done it only for the chance to see the classroomful of white children again. Zaddie knew secretly that she could read better than half of them.

  Oscar went back inside and wrote out a note at the kitchen table. He folded the note, took it out to Zaddie, and then after saying goodbye to his mother and sister he returned to the mill.

  Late that afternoon, Mary-Love and Sister took off for Pensacola in the Torpedo roadster driven by Bray. Bray had been taught to drive the family’s two automobiles, and more and more his position in the Caskey household was that of chauffeur. Mary-Love left her son a note suggesting tha
t the trip had been made on the spur of the moment and telling him that supper had been left covered up for him on the kitchen table. Oscar ignored the note and the supper. He ate next door, and then took Miss Elinor and Grace to see The Ghost of Rosie Taylor at the Ritz Theater. After the flood the Ritz had reopened with scarlet upholstery and a new rosewood piano.

  Later, when Grace had been put to bed, Miss Elinor and Oscar took a little walk down to the river. They sat on the mooring dock looking at the moon and stayed there until the town hall clock tolled midnight. Oscar declared that he hadn’t been up that late since he tried to save the Caskey houses from the rising floodwater.

  After that, Zaddie had a new job—she was a messenger. Every day she delivered to Miss Elinor the note that Mr. Oscar had written on the kitchen table directly after his noontime meal. Miss Elinor would read the note and write another in reply. Zaddie would take this note to the mill and walk straight into Mr. Oscar’s office. Everybody in the school and everybody in the mill knew what Zaddie was doing, who had written the notes, and to whom they were directed.

  Zaddie began to get to know Miss Elinor’s students by name, and once, when she got there just at recess, she had even jumped rope and was able to teach the little white girls a rhyme they had never heard before.

  Elinor Trimble Toe, she’s a good fisherman

  She catches fish and puts them in a pan

  Some fry up and some fry down

  Wire and bar and limber lock

  Clock fell down and mouse ran round

  To my dying grandma’s house

  With the old dirty dishrag in her mouth

  Zaddie was proud of her daily errands, and didn’t care a bit if Miss Mary-Love wouldn’t speak to her anymore because of her services in the courtship of Miss Elinor and Mr. Oscar.

  Because their big meal of the day was at noon and supper consisted of leftovers, Mary-Love found it difficult to complain when Oscar said he was going over to eat at James’s where the food was hot. “You are bothering James,” Mary-Love ventured to object, when she could refrain from objection no longer. “You are running up his food bill.”