Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  “James, Genevieve wasn’t an easy woman to get along with, I know that, but you didn’t know our daddy either. James, our daddy beat Genevieve. One day he fired a gun at her, and if I hadn’t thrown a platter at his hand the bullet would have gone right through her head. Daddy got killed out in the woods—I don’t even know how, and I don’t think I want to know—and Genevieve and I were all by ourselves. Pony was already off in Oklahoma. We took care of ourselves; Genevieve went to school and I went to work, and when Genevieve needed help I helped her and when I needed help she helped me. Neither of us would ever have won any prizes for anything, but she was good to me and I was good to her. It was like cutting off my arm when I opened that telegram and found out she was dead. James Caskey, you have been so good to me—when you didn’t have to be—that I thought you should know all this. Nobody else knows it, not even Elinor. I guess I would appreciate it if you would not spread it around.”

  James was silent for several moments, though obviously greatly perturbed. Finally, he rose and paced up and down behind the sofa on which Queenie still sat, now again smoothing and ruffling up the nap of the blue upholstery. “Queenie, isn’t there something I could do for you? Isn’t there something you want I can buy for you? You know, don’t you, that I’m always gone take care of you, and I’m always gone take care of Lucille and Malcolm?”

  “Long as they don’t come in here and break things, you mean?” said Queenie, with a little giggle that was reminiscent of her old way, before the trouble had come upon her. “James Caskey, there’s nothing I want. Or wait, there is one thing, just one thing…”

  “What is it?”

  Queenie stood up and straightened her dress. She turned and faced James and she looked at him seriously. “Sometime I want you to send me a telegram. And the boy will come up to the door, and say, ‘Miz Strickland, here’s a telegram for you,’ and I’m gone give that boy a silver dollar, and I’m gone sit down on the front porch and open that telegram, and it’s gone say, Dear Queenie, I have just put Carl Strickland twenty feet under the ground in a marble casket with combination locks. That’s the one thing you can do for me. You can send me that telegram.”

  Chapter 25

  Laying the Cornerstone

  Interesting as were Queenie’s problems, the subject couldn’t hold up for long against the all-consuming fascination with the levee. The project had continued apace, and with far fewer snags than appeared in the brief lengths of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers as they flowed through the town limits. The bond issues had been approved by the legislature, the bonds sold and the money gathered in and deposited in the Perdido bank. Already the levee had been completed on both sides of the river south of the junction, and the townspeople congratulated themselves on the fact that were the water to rise tomorrow, only the two sawmills and the stately homes of the Caskeys and the Turks and the DeBordenaves would be destroyed. All the rest—the town hall, downtown, the workers’ houses, Baptist Bottom, the homes of the shopkeepers and professional people, and even the dormitories and kitchen of the levee-men themselves would be only as wet as falling rain could render them. Just before Christmas of 1923, the first wagonloads of dirt were poured out at the edge of the junction, and the second levee began to creep northeastward along the Blackwater River toward the cypress swamp, to render safe the Caskey, Turk, and DeBordenave mills, whose prosperity had made the building of the levees possible in the first place.

  The levees may have been no more than massive lengths of packed red clay, but already Perdido was growing so accustomed to their presence that they began to seem not so unattractive after all. The roses, the dogwoods, the holly, the smilax—and above all the kudzu—had taken root, and there was more green and less red to be seen every day, at least on the townsides. The narrow path atop the levee on the western side of the Perdido had become a favorite promenade for the white population after church, and mistresses waved to their maids disporting themselves on the far side of the river in their best clothes. People would look at the levees and exclaim vehemently, “Lord, I am just about to forget that the levee is there, I am getting so used to it!” Or people would remark, “It was always so flat around here, I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before!” Or they judged, “The levee is gone be worth every penny we pay for it, just to know that our children aren’t ever gone have to learn what it’s like to go through a flood.”

  Soon the levee along the Blackwater was completed. A hundred yards beyond the Turk mill it ended in a steep ramp that descended onto the low mound of an Indian burial place. This ramp became a favorite spot for the boys of Perdido—led in mischief by Malcolm Strickland—who rode their bicycles on top of the levee all the way from the workers’ dormitory, past Baptist Bottom, turning at the junction as the levee turned, past the sawmills, and out into the piney forest again. The rivers were at the left and the town below to their right. The boys wondered if they could ever get nearer the sky, and were certain that the Rocky Mountains themselves could be no higher than their town’s levees. At the end, they let go of their bikes’ handlebars, threw their arms up into the air, and sailed down the ramp across the top of the Indian burial mound. They then grasped their handlebars again and applied their brakes at the last possible moment before coming to grief in the thicket of briars and broken bottles and other detritus of construction work that lay on the other side of the mound.

  The levee along the Blackwater had been finished in very good time, and now there remained only the levee along the upper Perdido, which would protect no more than the millowners’ houses. Early Haskew and Morris Avant had worked wonders with the construction so far, and were actually under budget.

  Work continued without interruption, beginning at the thicket between the Turk house and the town hall. The levee-men went at it with a will, for the end of the project seemed in sight. But, oddly, progress here began to slow down. Early Haskew wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was an instability of the bank along this section of the Perdido, but every night half the clay that had been brought to the riverside during the day slid down into the water and washed away with nothing to show for the effort but a slightly redder tinge to the already red Perdido water. The other portions of the levee had seemed almost to build themselves, the work had gone so easily—or so it seemed now in comparison with this final recalcitrance. No headway could be made. Tons and tons of clay and gravel and plain old dirt were brought in every day and piled up and packed tight, but half of what was built up was certain to be eroded away in the night.

  Early was frustrated, and Morris Avant cursed a great deal. The levee-men became restless and anxious, acting as if there were something perhaps more supernatural than geological at work in the matter. Many of the men declared that they had heard about a lake being dredged over in Valdosta, and that the pay for unskilled workers was higher, so they left Perdido with what little money they had managed to put aside. Some of them actually did go to Valdosta, but others appeared to have wanted only to put Perdido behind them. The black men employed on the levee were suddenly overwhelmed by the necessity of putting new roofs on their Baptist Bottom homes. Others developed bad backs, or lost temporarily the use of their right or left arms. So while the work to be done had doubled in difficulty, Early’s work force decreased by half. Sometimes it looked as if the levee behind the millowners’ mansions never would be finished.

  “I don’t know,” said Oscar to his wife one evening, as he stood on the screened porch staring out at the still distant limits of the levee construction, “if they are ever gone get up this far.”

  “They won’t,” said Elinor, matter-of-factly.

  “What do you mean?”

  “The river won’t let them finish,” explained Elinor, but for Oscar, that was no explanation at all.

  “I still don’t understand what you’re trying to say, Elinor.”

  “I’m trying to say that the Perdido isn’t going to allow the levee to be finished.”

  Oscar was perplexed. “W
hy not?” he asked, as if the question were sensible.

  “Oscar, you know how I love that river—”

  “I do!”

  “Well, this town belonged to that river, and the levees are taking it away, and the Perdido isn’t getting anything in return.”

  “You think everybody should stand on the edge of the water and throw in hard cash or something?”

  “You know,” she said, “at Huntingdon I took classes about the ancient civilizations, and what they used to do whenever they built something real big—like a temple or an aqueduct or a senate house or something—they would sacrifice somebody and bury him in the corner of it. They’d tear off his arms and his legs while he was still alive and pile all the pieces together and then cover it up with stones or bricks or whatever they were building with. The blood made the mortar hold together, everybody thought. And it was their way of dedicating it to the gods.”

  “Well,” said Oscar, a little uncomfortably, “James is gone arrange the dedication ceremony when the levee finally does get finished, but I don’t think he is planning anything along those lines. Is there maybe some other way to pay the river back that you can think of?”

  Elinor shrugged. “I certainly have been wracking my brain trying to think of one.”

  . . .

  A few days later, Queenie Strickland gave birth to a boy. The baby would not have lived had Roxie—in attendance with Elinor and Mary-Love—not unwrapped the umbilical cord from around the child’s neck, where it was choking him. The night that her son was born, Queenie woke sweating from a nightmare in which her husband Carl was walking up and down on the front porch, seeking a way into the house. She swept her sleeping infant up into her arms and held him tightly against her breast, hoping to still the harsh beating there. Oscar had placed a loaded shotgun in the corner of the room, and the sheriff had promised to hang her husband on sight if he ever came to town again, but Queenie knew that one night she would hear those booted footsteps on the front porch in cold reality.

  . . .

  That same night, at the precise moment that Queenie Strickland woke from her nightmare and clutched her newborn child to her, John Robert DeBordenave awakened also. The unlighted room and the night outside were no darker perhaps than the inside of John Robert’s mind; in fact, he scarcely knew that there was any difference to be drawn between the states of waking and sleep. Poor John Robert was now thirteen, and was to be advanced this coming autumn into the fourth grade, as little prepared for that promotion as to be instantly declared Under Secretary of the Interior in charge of water projects. Grace Caskey and numberless other children had left him behind, and the farther John Robert was left behind, the gloomier he became. It was no longer enough to be tickled in the ribs once a day as his pockets were rifled for candy; not enough to watch his classmates’ mysterious games from the corner of the building where he rubbed his back ceaselessly against the rough bricks as an exercise in sensation. His sister Elizabeth Ann ignored him now, and seemed embarrassed by his presence. His mother and father smiled at him and hugged him and shook him lovingly by the shoulders. All this was no longer enough for John Robert, and though he knew he wanted something more from life, he had no idea what that something more might be.

  More candy. This thought now came from some dark corner of John Robert’s half-mind.

  More candy was not the answer, but John Robert’s stunted brain couldn’t conceive of anything better than that.

  A ray of light from the setting moon was suddenly cast onto the floor of John Robert’s room. He got up out of the bed and stood near that spot of light; he stuck his foot into it, knelt down and stuck his hand into it. Then, in that position, he gazed up and out the window at the moon itself. The moon was waning and gibbous, but John Robert had no more idea of the moon’s periodic alteration of shape than the moon had of John Robert’s vague desires for more candy. He went to the window and looked out over the lawn at the back of the house. The levee, despite all the problems, had been inexorably extended, and now the major part of the work had been done across the back of the DeBordenaves’ property, and was just now beginning at the Caskeys’, so directly before him and to the right rose its black bulk. Here and there a band of paint around the handle of a spade or perhaps the metal of the spade itself left by the workers glinted in the moonlight. And to the left of the construction he dimly saw the Perdido, with a single line of the moon’s reflection quivering on its black surface. James Caskey’s house, glowing a cool bluish-white in the moonlight, stood stolid and square in the plot of sand that began where the DeBordenaves’ grass left off abruptly. And there in that sandy yard were the oak trees that John Robert loved so much—two in particular, that he could see if he leaned out a little farther. These were about four feet apart, and grew straight up to the sky. Between these two trees, some years before, Bray Sugarwhite had nailed a board to form a little bench, and John Robert had watched with wonder as the bark of the oak trees had grown around the ends of the board, surrounding them and holding the board fast, as if the trees had laughed at Bray’s nails and had said to each other, Hey, we’re gone show Bray how to do this thing right. Sitting on that board day after day, coming inside only for meals, John Robert had watched the progress of the levee as it crept slowly toward him along the bank of the river.

  John Robert now leaned out the window, and saw, sitting on his favorite bench, Miss Elinor. She was wearing a dress that glowed the same bluish-white as James Caskey’s house. She smiled and waved to him, and held her finger to her lips for silence.

  Not knowing why, and never considering that perhaps he ought not, John Robert pushed a chair against the wall beneath his window, climbed onto it, unlatched the screen, wriggled out, and dropped into his mother’s bearded-iris bed beneath, scraping himself against the side of the house in the process. The sharp leaves of the plants ripped his pajamas in two or three places, and underneath sliced his skin, but John Robert was so accustomed to small injuries that he scarcely noticed them. He picked himself up and ran barefoot through the dewy grass to the edge of his lawn.

  Miss Elinor still sat upon the bench, though now she leaned against one of the trees and patted the seat beside her in invitation to John Robert to join her.

  John Robert hesitated, then with no more concrete reason for going on than there had been for the hesitation, he lifted his foot from the dewy grass and placed it down on the raked sand.

  The sand stuck to the soles of his feet as he made his way across the yard. He timidly seated himself by Miss Elinor and looked up into her face. He could no longer make out her expression, however, for the shadow of the tree trunk shaded it into blackness.

  John Robert said nothing, but he hummed a blurred little tune and waved his short little legs beneath the wooden plank, kicking up sand. He felt Miss Elinor’s arms comfortingly encircling his shoulders. He stared before him at the dark hulk of the levee, and continued to hum.

  The boy perceived nothing strange in Miss Elinor’s sitting on the bench at such an hour, in her beckoning him, in her silence, or in the tender grip with which she now embraced him. John Robert DeBordenave took notice and affection however and whenever it came, and never questioned its source or motive. He was content to sit and hum and kick his legs in and out of the shadows of the trees, so that now and then a spray of sand fell twinkling like a shower of miniscule stars. And when Miss Elinor rose from the seat beside him and with no apparent effort lifted him up and set him on his feet and pushed him in the direction of the levee, he did not resist her gentle urging for a moment. She walked behind him with her hands on his arms and directed him toward the most advanced point of the levee construction.

  The levee-men on this day had upturned their carts of red clay, for the first time, onto Caskey land. Clods of clay had spilled out over Zaddie’s rake designs and shone black now on top of the gray sand that gleamed in the moonlight. Tomorrow the men would begin in earnest, and within a week or so the river would no longer be visible from the wi
ndows of James Caskey’s house. The generous grounds behind the houses would be narrower by twenty-five feet or so.

  John Robert was not allowed this close to the river, and obedience being such a habit with him he was uneasy despite the presence of Miss Elinor behind him.

  When John Robert stopped, instinctively knowing that he ought to go no farther, Miss Elinor’s grip on his arms became suddenly tight and painful. He could no longer move either his arms or his body, so tight was Miss Elinor’s hold. He twisted his head around and looked up at her in meek protest.

  But it wasn’t Miss Elinor’s face that returned his gaze. He couldn’t see much of it because the moon was hidden directly behind that head, but John Robert could see that it was very flat and very wide and that two large bulbous eyes, glimmering and greenish, protruded from it. It stank of rank water and rotted vegetation and Perdido mud. The hands on John Robert’s arms were no longer Miss Elinor’s hands. They were much larger, and hadn’t fingers or skin at all, but were no more than flat curving surfaces of rubbery webbing.

  John Robert turned his face slowly and sadly back to the river. He stared before him at the levee construction and the muddy water that flowed silent and black behind it. What little mind and consciousness the child possessed was being burned away by Miss Elinor’s betrayal, by her becoming something else, by her transformation into this terrible thing that held him in its grip. He began to weep, and his tears flowed softly down his cheeks.