Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  After Caroline had gone home Elinor remained on the porch with Frances, and, against her custom, waited up for Oscar. When he came up the stairs she called him out onto the porch and said, “Oscar, Caroline was telling me Tom is having trouble borrowing from the banks.”

  “Well, yes,” replied Oscar hesitantly. “Fact is, we all are. Nobody’s gone lend us any money to build up again until the levee goes up.”

  “What would happen if the levee never got built?”

  Oscar sat down beside his wife. “Are you really interested?”

  “Of course I am!”

  “Well,” said Oscar, sitting back and folding his hands behind his head, rocking the swing lightly, “old Tom would fold up his tents, I guess.”

  “What about us?”

  “Well, we’d go along all right for a while. We’d get by, I guess.”

  “Just get by?”

  “Elinor, what we’re trying to do right now is build back up what we lost in the flood. But then if we really want to get the place going, then we’ve got to expand. We cain’t do that without borrowing the money. There’s not a bank in this state—or out of it for that matter—who’s gone lend us money till the levee’s built. That’s why we’re working so hard on this business. You see now?” Elinor nodded slowly. “I am dead on my feet,” said Oscar. “You want to come to bed?”

  “No,” said Elinor, “I’m not tired yet. You go on.”

  Oscar rose, leaned down over the crib to kiss sleeping Frances, and went inside the house.

  Long after Oscar had undressed, knelt at the side of his bed to pray, lain himself down and fallen as deeply asleep as his daughter, Elinor remained awake. She sat in the swing, rocking slowly and staring out into the darkness. In the black night, the water oaks swayed in the slightest wind. A few rotted branches, covered with a dry green fungus, dropped twigs and leaves, or sometimes fell whole, with a crack and a thump, on the sandy ground. Beyond, the Perdido flowed, muddy and black and gurgling, carrying dead things and struggling live ones inexorably toward the vortex in the center of the junction.

  Chapter 18

  Summer

  Summer came to Perdido. Elinor continued to ponder about her husband’s miniscule salary and the Caskeys’ substantial wealth. Sister pushed open the back door every morning to stare at the barely discernible mound beneath which the eviscerated chicken lay buried and wondered when Early Haskew was going to propose, or, conversely, when he was going to die. James Caskey sighed and looked about and counted off his loneliness on his ten fingers—it seemed as substantial as that! Mary-Love greedily watched the engineer’s daily progress on the plans for the levee, anticipating with great satisfaction the effect the construction would have on her daughter-in-law. And every morning Zaddie’s patient rake still made patterns in the sandy yards around the three Caskey houses.

  Only children really loved the summer, for of course there was no school. The days were long, unbroken by hours and tasks and bells. It was odd, to Grace Caskey, how each summer was different and possessed its own character. Last summer she had played with the Moye children constantly, and now this summer she saw them only once a week at Sunday school. Every day the previous summer, Bray had driven her out to Lake Pinchona, where a swimming pool with concrete sides was fed by the biggest artesian well in the entire state. A monkey in a wire cage nipped at her fingers when she stuck them through the mesh. This summer she hadn’t been out there once, even though they had begun to build a dance hall on stilts out over the muddy, shallow lake. The owners had imported alligators from the Everglades to stock Lake Pinchona, both for picturesque effect and in order to discourage bathers from swimming anyplace other than the easily policed concrete pool.

  This summer of 1922 was given over to Zaddie Sapp. Grace was entranced by Zaddie. Grace worshipped the thirteen-year-old black girl and everything about her. Grace followed Zaddie around all day, and would scarcely let the black girl out of her sight. In the morning, she would help Zaddie rake in those portions of the yard invisible to Mary-Love’s windows; Mary-Love didn’t approve of Grace’s helping servants. When Zaddie finished her work, Grace would go over to Elinor’s house and Roxie, on temporary loan from James, would fix them dinner. Grace thought it a huge privilege to be allowed to eat in the kitchen with Roxie and Zaddie, and scorned a place at the dining room table with Elinor and Oscar. After dinner, Oscar gave each of the girls a quarter and told them to go down to the Ben Franklin and pick out whatever they wanted. The girls walked downtown hand in hand and roamed the aisles of the dime store. They pointed at everything and looked at everything with such intensity that they grew more familiar with the stock than the man who owned the store. Each purchased three small items with that quarter and tumbled them together in one sack. At home they took out their purchases and examined them minutely. Trading them back and forth, they wrapped the best one in colored paper and presented it to the other, and finally laid them all away with another hundred similar fragile happinesses in a hinged wooden box on the back porch of Elinor’s house.

  This unscreened porch, which was long and high-ceilinged and always shadowy and cool even in the hottest weather, was called the lattice, because of its crisscrossed woodwork. Like the rest of the house, it was raised high above the level of the yard outside, so that the infrequent breezes blew beneath it and through it. One of the windows of Zaddie’s tiny room opened onto this lattice. The children could crawl in and out, with the aid of Zaddie’s cot on one side and an old broken chair on the other.

  On this cool lattice Zaddie and Grace invented, perfected, and played a hundred different games, the complex rules of which pertained only to themselves and to the geography and furnishings of the lattice itself. Grace took so many meals there, and spent so much time with Zaddie, that Mary-Love began to complain to James that Grace had moved in to Elinor’s, was bothering Elinor, and was always waking up Frances. How she could know this, when there was virtually no communication between the households, Mary-Love did not explain. James simply said, “Grace is still lonely with her mama dead, and I am not about to interfere in anything that makes her happy.”

  That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl—and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor’s house—was a slap in Mary-Love’s face. She decided, without saying anything more to James, to wreck Grace’s perfection of happiness. Grace would learn that she, Mary-Love, was the source of all felicity within the Caskey family.

  . . .

  Tom and Caroline DeBordenave had two children. The elder was a girl, fifteen, pretty, popular, and smart. Her name was Elizabeth Ann. The boy, four years younger, was called John Robert, and he was a problem. John Robert was thought fortunate to have been born into a family who would always be able to take care of him, for it was obvious he would never be able to take care of himself. He was a sweet, quiet child, but simple. In school, he was three grades behind, which is to say that he generally spent two years in any one grade, and even so he was always far behind his classmates. Promotions were granted not because he deserved them, but because it would have been cruel to keep him back longer. He sat at the back of the room, and was allowed to draw on tablets throughout the school day, no matter what the rest of the class did. He wasn’t called on to answer questions or to read aloud, and when the others took tests, John Robert turned over the page of his tablet, bent down over it, and pretended that he too was in the way of being examined. At recess, John Robert didn’t play organized games with the boys because he never quite managed to get the rules straight in his clouded mind, and he hadn’t the coordination to jump rope with the girls. Every morning, however, Caroline DeBordenave filled his pockets with candy, and for a few minutes at the beginning of morning recess John Robert was very popular. Boys and girls surrounded him, tickled him, called out his name, and rifled his pockets until there was not a single piece of candy left. Then all the children went away to their games, and John Robert sat sig
hing on the bench next to his teacher, or on favored days, beat erasers against the side of the building until he and the bricks were white with chalk dust.

  In school John Robert was happy, for if he didn’t participate in the activities of his bustling schoolmates, the crackling industry of study and play surrounded him constantly. If he might sometimes be lonely, he was never alone. In the summers, however, no one thought of him. His mother still filled his pockets with candy, but that weight dragged on him through the day. By suppertime, the chocolate and the peppermint had melted into one sticky and unappetizing mass. Elizabeth Ann sometimes read to him. She rocked in a chair on the front porch, while he stood beside her with his elbow on the arm so that one whole side of his body moved up and down with the motion. Elizabeth Ann’s voice was comfortingly near, but the meaning of the words she read was far away from John Robert.

  He was lonelier this summer than ever before. Elizabeth Ann had been given a bicycle for Christmas and every day rode out to Lake Pinchona and took lessons in diving from a boy who was old enough to join the army. She also fed the monkey, and sometimes leaned out the windows of the dance hall and dropped hunks of stale bread down among the blooming water lilies below, hoping to attract the notice of the alligator that swam lazily among the pilings.

  But John Robert wasn’t permitted to ride a bicycle for fear he would be run down, and he wasn’t allowed to go to Lake Pinchona for fear he would fall into the swimming pool and drown or lean too far out the dance hall window and drop down among the lily pads, where the alligator waited for choicer morsels than Elizabeth Ann’s stale bread. So John Robert sat on the front steps of his house blinking at the sun, with his pockets filled with melting candy, forever in disappointed expectation of some child running up, calling his name, tickling his ribs, and rifling his pockets.

  One day Mary-Love Caskey telephoned Caroline DeBordenave and said, “Caroline, your little boy is lonely. I see him sitting for hours and hours on your front steps, lonesome as an old country graveyard. I am gone send James’s Grace over there and keep that child company.”

  “I wish you would,” sighed Caroline. “John Robert doesn’t know what to do without school. The summer takes the heart right out of John Robert. Some people are just sensitive to heat, I suppose.” Caroline DeBordenave’s way of dealing with John Robert’s mental infirmity was not to deal with it at all, outwardly. She would attribute his silence, his vacancy, his manifold incapacities to anything but an incurably feeble intellect. But even if she always seemed to deny her son’s handicaps, there was a reason that she filled his pockets with candy every day.

  So the next morning, just as Grace and Zaddie were beginning their day’s elaborate games on Elinor’s lattice, the telephone rang in the house, and Elinor appeared a minute later and said, “Grace, Miss Mary-Love wants you over at her house right away.”

  And Grace went—in a sort of perplexed daze, for it wasn’t easy to remember the last time she had been so summoned. Mary-Love sat in the front parlor, and of all surprising things to see on the sofa beside her, there sat John Robert DeBordenave in a new yellow playsuit with half a dozen sticks of peppermint candy protruding from the breast pocket.

  “Grace,” said Mary-Love, “here is John Robert who I have invited over here to play with you.”

  “Ma’am?”

  “You and John Robert are gone have a good time for the whole summer, I know it.”

  Grace looked with some misgiving at John Robert, who was smiling timidly and alternately picking first at a button and then at a scab on his knee, about to dislodge both.

  “You don’t seem to have the little friends around this summer that you had last summer, Grace, and when I mentioned that to Caroline DeBordenave, she said to me, ‘Goodness gracious! John Robert is all alone, too.’ So Caroline and I have decided that you and John Robert are gone spend the rest of your summer together. You will have such fun!”

  Grace began to understand. “I have friends,” she protested. “I have Zaddie!”

  “Zaddie is a little colored girl,” Mary-Love pointed out. “It’s all right to play with Zaddie, but she’s not your real friend. John Robert can be your real little friend.”

  Grace thought she began to detect some small piece of injustice here, but before she could put her finger upon what it was exactly, Mary-Love went on: “Now I want you two to go and start playing together. I’ll send Ivey to get you when it’s time to eat. You and John Robert are gone have dinner with me every day.”

  It wasn’t that Grace disliked John Robert. She felt sorry for him, and always in school went out of her way to be nice to him, always asking permission before she ransacked his pockets for candy. He was a boy, though, and his mind wasn’t right. She would never love John Robert DeBordenave the way that she loved Zaddie Sapp.

  “All right, Aunt Mary-Love,” said Grace slyly, “I’ll take John-Robert over to Elinor’s and we’ll play on the lattice.”

  “No, you won’t,” said Mary-Love. “You can play in this house or you can play in John Robert’s house. You cain’t play in Elinor’s house because I don’t want you bothering Elinor and I don’t want you bothering Elinor’s baby.”

  “Well, can we play in my house?”

  “May we play,” corrected Mary-Love. “No, you may not. There is nobody to watch you over there.”

  “I don’t need to be watched!”

  Mary-Love sat silent and glanced at John Robert. Grace understood perfectly well what that silence and that glance meant, but she refused to be drawn into her aunt’s conspiracy.

  “All right, ma’am,” said Grace sullenly, “but I got to go tell Zaddie I’m not coming back this morning.”

  “No, you don’t,” said Mary-Love. “There is no reason for you to explain yourself to a little colored girl who is hired to do something else besides play on a lattice porch all summer long. So, John Robert, what do you think you and Grace would like to do this morning?”

  John Robert looked about the parlor astonished, realizing for the first time—and still dimly—that the new playsuit, this enforced visit, Grace’s presence, and the conversation between her and Miss Mary-Love, all had something to do with him.

  . . .

  Mary-Love could have broken up Zaddie and Grace’s friendship that summer if she had mounted a campaign of eternal vigilance, but she hadn’t the time or the inclination for such warfare. She chose, rather, to imagine that she had crushed the enemy in a single blow, but Mary-Love did not take into account the depth of Grace’s attachment to Zaddie. Grace found ways around Mary-Love’s prohibition against having anything to do with the black girl, and ways to make the eternal presence of John Robert DeBordenave less onerous.

  First, Grace went to Elinor and told her what had happened. Elinor said nothing at first, but by the expression on her face, her sympathies clearly lay with Grace and Zaddie. “You can come over here as much as you want this summer, Grace,” said Elinor. “And you bring the DeBordenave boy over here too. Though I must say that I think it is a mistake for Caroline DeBordenave to give a ten-year-old girl charge of her child, who is not right in the head.”

  So Grace’s afternoons with Zaddie continued, but they were no longer perfect, because of the presence of John Robert DeBordenave. Previously both girls had been good to John Robert, and on several occasions Zaddie had been called over to the DeBordenaves’ to watch him on Monday afternoons when Caroline was at bridge. Now, however, the two girls grew to resent John Robert because his company was forced upon them every day—and for so many hours. His conversational ability was limited almost entirely to pantomimic actions and an occasional word, which he always had to repeat at least three times before he could be understood. And he hadn’t the remotest notion of what Zaddie and Grace’s complex games were all about, but would blunderingly attempt to join in all the same. From resentment, there was only a short step to cruelty.

  Grace began to taunt the boy. John Robert didn’t exactly understand taunts, but he could sense t
he contempt behind them. Grace would take candy from his pockets, shove it into his mouth, and force him to swallow it whole. She deliberately spilled milk and iced tea on his new clothes, and then cried, “You are so clumsy, John Robert DeBordenave!” If he broke any of her Ben Franklin treasures—as he tended to do if he so much as picked one up—Grace would snatch the pieces away from him and then fling them in his face. She would never say, ‘It’s all right, you couldn’t help it,’ when he began to weep large silent tears. Grace ignored the infirmity that crippled the child and saw only his exasperating slowness. She took note only of his inhibiting presence, and thought of him only as the instrument by which Mary-Love sought to separate her and Zaddie. If Grace was ashamed of her cruelties at all, she laid the blame at Mary-Love’s door.

  One day when John Robert was standing in the open door of the lattice staring out at the Perdido, Grace, without a thought to the consequences, ran up from behind and shoved him down the steps.

  He tumbled over and over, banging his head on the sharp corner of the bottom step. When Grace ran down and lifted his head, blood dripped from the wound and filled a groove in the patterned sand below.

  Elinor, alerted to the accident by Grace’s hysterical screams, called Dr. Benquith. John Robert was brought back to consciousness, examined, bandaged, and carried home by Bray. Grace ran along behind Bray, explaining tearfully, “He fell. He fell down the back steps and rolled all the way to the bottom!”

  Grace was certain everyone knew that she had pushed John Robert. But her aunt said only, “How could you have let it happen? Why weren’t you watching? You know that boy doesn’t have sense enough to come in out of the rain!”