Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

by Michael McDowell

  “What’s he done?”

  “He’s bothering her.”

  “How’s he bothering her, Mr. Caskey?”

  “He’s moved in on her.”

  “Aren’t they married?”

  “They are.”

  “Then what’s to stop him? A husband and a wife ought pretty much to be together. That’s about the way I’ve always heard it.”

  “James and I want him to leave. He’s making Queenie unhappy, and we care a great deal for Queenie, Mr. Key.”

  “I know Queenie Strickland,” replied the sheriff. “What I know of her, I like. I haven’t met her husband. Where’s he been?”

  “Florida pen,” said Oscar in a low voice. This wasn’t general knowledge in Perdido, and his tone of conspiracy was a plea for the sheriff to keep the information to himself.

  “What for?”

  “Don’t know. But probably just about anything you care to name.”

  “Is he out free and clear?”

  “He says he is.”

  “Then there’s nothing I can do.”

  “He’s making Queenie real unhappy, Mr. Key.”

  “Lots of unhappy marriages. I cain’t always be stepping in between a husband and a wife. Tell you what I will do, though. I’ll call up Tallahassee and make sure he hasn’t escaped. If he’s escaped from the pen, then I’ll go after him. If he hasn’t, then there’s not one thing in the world I can do, Mr. Caskey.”

  Sheriff Key wanted to show Oscar and the other Caskeys that their prominence in Perdido brought them no special treatment from the forces of order and justice. This Oscar understood, but he knew it was Queenie who would suffer on account of the sheriff’s procedural niceties. Oscar decided not to argue with the sheriff any longer. He returned home to where his wife and Queenie were waiting on the porch and related the disappointing news.

  Elinor was incensed, but her anger could not persuade Mr. Key, and without Mr. Key nothing at all could be done.

  Queenie said to Oscar and Elinor: “That man made my life miserable in Nashville, and he’s gone ruin my life here, too. You know what it’s gone be like to come home from work every day just knowing he’s sitting there on the porch, wanting to know what I’m gone fix him for supper?”

  “Oscar,” said Elinor, “why don’t you just run over there with your gun and shoot him? Queenie and I will wait here till you get back.”

  “Elinor, I’m not gone shoot Carl Strickland. Queenie, you think if I offered him money, he’d go away? That must be why he’s here, right? ’Cause you’ve got a job and a house and all?”

  “Won’t work,” sighed Queenie. “James offered him two hundred dollars a month if he’d go live two states away. Carl wouldn’t take it. Carl said he wanted to be near his ‘darling babies.’ I tell y’all, I am afraid for those children. It hasn’t been easy raising them on my own. Poor old Malcolm sure hasn’t come out the way I wanted him to. He gets in a lot of trouble already. I hate to think what Carl is gone do to ’em!”

  “Oscar, I really do think you ought to go over and shoot that man!”

  “You want me in jail, Elinor? That’s where I’d be. You’d have to come visit me up in the Atmore pen. I’d be out in the hot sun digging potatoes all day. That’s what murderers do up there in Atmore.”

  Nothing could be done. Oscar’s threats remained vague without the force of the law behind them. Carl had served his sentence in full for holding up a pharmacy in DeFuniak Springs and pistol-whipping the proprietor. He could now be accused of doing nothing that was against the law. He wasn’t working. What need had he of employment when his wife worked and pulled down good money, when the house was hers free and clear, and when there was food on the table and clothing on his childrens’ backs?

  Queenie was miserable. Whenever James came into her office, he’d find her attempting to cover up the fact that she’d been crying. Kindly, he always attempted to persuade his distraught sister-in-law that Carl’s residence was only temporary. “When the time comes, I’ll up my offer. And one day, I’ll name his price. Soon enough, Queenie, he’ll be moving on.”

  Carl had taken over his wife’s bedroom. Queenie slept on the sofa in the living room or sometimes with Lucille.

  How Carl spent his days no one was certain. After James picked Queenie up in the morning, Carl often took his wife’s car and drove off somewhere. Someone told Elinor she had seen him at the racetrack in Cantonement. Someone else saw him lunching off oysters in a restaurant on the Mobile pier. He was seen on the front porch of the house with the red light in Baptist Bottom. But he was always found sitting on the front porch by the time that Queenie returned from work, saying, “Hey, Queenie, what’s for supper? I’m starved to death!”

  One evening Queenie came home to discover that Carl had a large bruise around his left eye. She didn’t ask how it had come about, uttered no word of sympathy, didn’t warn him against becoming involved in possibly more serious altercations. “I bet you wish I’d gotten my whole head knocked off, don’t you?” said Carl with his customary leer. “I bet that, on the whole, you wouldn’t mind the state of widowhood, would you?”

  “I think I could bear up,” replied Queenie blandly.

  “I bet you’ve got my coffin all picked out!”

  Queenie reached into the pocket of her dress and drew out two coins.

  “You see these quarters?” she asked.

  “I see ’em.”

  “They’re for you.”

  “Give ’em here, then.” He reached out for the coins, but Queenie snatched them away.

  “No. They’re special.”

  “How special?”

  “Ivey Sapp gave ’em to me when I was over at Mary-Love’s yesterday.”

  “That fat nigger girl? Why was she giving you money?”

  “She told me she got ’em special for me,” Queenie went on with a smile that was very rare to her since Carl had come back to town. “She told me to save these quarters for the ferryman.”

  “What ferryman?”

  “Ivey told me to always keep ’em with me. So when you’re laid out dead and cold, I’ve got these two silver quarters to close your eyes with. And that’s what you’ll have to buy your ticket to hell with.”

  Carl’s grin faded. He reached out and swiped for the coins, but wasn’t quick enough and Queenie dropped them, with a little metallic clatter, back into her pocket.

  Chapter 30

  Danjo

  In the eight years since the death of Genevieve Caskey, the widower James Caskey and his daughter Grace had remained in perpetual harmony in the house next door to Mary-Love. It was wondered in Perdido whether any father and any daughter, anywhere on the face of the earth, got along as well as did James and Grace. James would have done anything to make his little girl happy. Grace had declared, as a high school senior, that she would never, under any circumstances, be persuaded to leave her father’s roof.

  “No!” he cried. “You cain’t stay here with me and rot, darling. You got to go to school!”

  “I don’t,” returned Grace. “I know plenty. I’m gone be salutatorian this year, Daddy.”

  “Doesn’t matter. You ought to go away to school. You ought to get out of Perdido for a while.”

  “I’m happy here. I’m perfectly happy, Daddy. I’ve got all my friends here.” Grace ran with a pack of girls in her class and the class behind hers. They were all on terms of great intimacy, and they never had fights. “Besides, Daddy, who would take care of you?”

  “About fifty million people would take care of me. Are you forgetting Mary-Love next door? Are you forgetting Elinor? Have you thought of Queenie? You think Queenie would let anything happen to me?”

  “Queenie has her hands full with Carl,” Grace pointed out. “And Elinor and Miss Mary-Love spend all their time raising little girls and fighting with each other.”

  “The point is,” her father went on, “you ought to go to school. You ought to get out in the world, and meet the man who’s gone make
you happy.”

  “He doesn’t exist!”

  “He does. There’s somebody for everybody, sweetheart! There’s some man just waiting out there to fix you up with a perfect marriage.”

  “I don’t believe it. I look around me, Daddy, what do I see? I see you and poor old Mama—”

  “That was my mistake.”

  “—and I see Queenie and Carl. You think I’m gone start looking under bushel baskets for a husband?”

  “What about Elinor and Oscar? They’re happy.”

  “They’re the exception, Daddy.”

  “Well, you could be an exception too, darling. I’m sure you would be. So I’m just not gone let you stay in Perdido, thinking you are doing me one bit of good. Darling, I love you to death, but let me tell you something—”

  “What?”

  “—I’ve had just about as much of your company as I can take!”

  Grace laughed aloud at her father’s patent lie.

  “I want you out of this house!” His attempt at sternness was belied by seventeen years of singular indulgence.

  “What if I say no?”

  “I will have Roxie sweep you out. I will hook the screens behind you. If you don’t go away to college, Grace, I’m not gone love you anymore.”

  Each was determined to make sacrifices for the other’s benefit and comfort. Though Grace desperately longed to attend college, she told her father her sole desire was to remain with him in Perdido. Though James knew he would be desolate without her, he told his daughter he was weary of her company, and only wished she would go to Tennessee. For several weeks, father and daughter continued to argue until at last Grace gave in. She realized what pleasure would accrue to her father in being abandoned in the cause of her personal happiness. So Grace made plans, though convinced that without her, James would be lonely and miserable. She was to attend Vanderbilt in September.

  And so, during the hottest part of August of 1929, Grace and James drove up through Alabama to Nashville, Tennessee, looked over the campus, were introduced to the president of the college, and chose the room Grace would inhabit. They went shopping for Grace’s wardrobe, and purchased enough to clothe the entire co-ed freshman class. They went around to all the jewelry, gift, and antique shops, and James indulged himself in the purchase of any number of fragile, pretty, utterly useless items that would be jammed into bursting closets back home.

  On their final evening together, James took his daughter to Nashville’s best restaurant. He gave her an envelope stuffed with five-dollar bills, and said, “Darling, if you need anything, pick up the telephone and call me, you hear? Send a telegram. Whatever it is, I’ll get it up here to you.”

  “When can I come home?”

  “Anytime. I’ll borrow Bray and he’ll meet you in Atmore. You always keep enough money for a train ticket, you hear?”

  “Daddy, I’m gone miss you so much!”

  “You think I’m not gone miss you?”

  “You said you weren’t.”

  “I was lying. I don’t know what I’m gone do without you. You’re my baby. If I could I’d keep you with me, but that wouldn’t do either of us any good. When I was your age, I was living with Mama. Daddy had already died, I didn’t miss him at all. I loved Mama very much—but probably I shouldn’t have stayed. I should have gone out on my own. If I had gone out on my own, I would have met somebody nice and married them. But look what happened, I stayed with Mama, and then when Mama died I went crazy out of my mind and I married Genevieve Snyder.”

  “Daddy, if you hadn’t married Genevieve, I wouldn’t be sitting here talking to you.”

  “You sure?”

  “Of course. What do you think? I’m Mama’s girl. I’m not anybody else’s daughter.”

  “Then I suppose it was all for the good,” sighed James Caskey. “Though it didn’t seem much like it at the time.”

  “Daddy, you’ll be fine. Everybody in Perdido knows I’m up here at Vanderbilt, and everybody in town’s gone want to take care of you. Loneliness isn’t gone be your problem. Well, for instance, just look at the number of Caskeys there are now! You know, when I was little, I was all by myself, I didn’t have anybody to play with, I didn’t have anybody to talk to. But good Lord, look what it’s like now! Elinor came to town during the flood, and now there’s Miriam and Frances, and Queenie showed up, and Queenie’s got three children—”

  “Don’t forget Carl!”

  “Wish I could! Anyway, Daddy, the town is full of family now. They snuck up on us. You will hardly notice I’m gone.”

  But a day or two following, while James Caskey was unwrapping the figurines and ornaments and plates he had purchased in Nashville, in his daughter’s company and with his daughter’s advice, it seemed as if each were a stone he was tossing down a deep, dry, black well that had opened itself wide at his feet.

  . . .

  Queenie Strickland worried that her children were too much exposed to their father’s contaminating presence and conversation. She tried to keep them out of the house and removed from their father’s baleful influence. She feared, however, that Malcolm was already lost. Carl had taken his elder son fishing on the upper Perdido, presented him with a gun on the first day of hunting season, had even allowed Malcolm to go with him to the race track in Cantonement one Saturday afternoon. Malcolm was easily won over to his father’s camp by these masculine blandishments. One day, in anger that his mother had denied him a trifling privilege, Malcolm declared that he loved Carl very very much, and that he hated Queenie’s guts.

  Carl tended to ignore his daughter, believing a little girl beneath his notice. He thought if Queenie taught Lucille to sew and cook and flirt, she would turn out well enough.

  With Malcolm all but lost, and Lucille in little danger, it was of greatest importance for Queenie to keep her younger son free of his father’s influence. As she explained to James Caskey, “That boy is not like Malcolm, and he’s certainly not like his daddy. He’s so quiet and shy! He doesn’t like the way his daddy talks. He doesn’t like the way his daddy acts. I wish...I just wish he didn’t have to live in the same house with Carl.”

  “Well,” replied James, as he sat down in a chair on the other side of Queenie’s desk in the outer office, “I don’t know that it’s so much worse for Danjo than it is for you and Lucille.”

  “It is. I’m used to it. I don’t like it, but I’m used to it. Carl doesn’t bother Lucille so much, ’cause she’s a girl. He won’t take Lucille out with him, see. He won’t take her hunting, he won’t take her with him to the track. That’s the difference. And Carl keeps on talking about getting a gun for Danjo. A gun, James! And that child is only five years old!”

  The telephone rang, and the conversation was broken off, not to be resumed that day. The next morning, James was at work early. As soon as Queenie arrived, and before she had even arranged her desk, James tapped on the glass and signaled for her to come into his office.

  “Morning, James.”

  “Morning, Queenie. How’d you sleep?”

  “Nightmares.”

  “Me too. I always have nightmares in an empty house.”

  “Oh, I know you miss your little girl! Have you heard from her?”

  “I have. She has sent me three letters, and I get a postcard near about every day. I’ve got an album to put ’em in, went out and bought it last week.”

  “So Grace is doing all right up at Vanderbilt?”

  “She is making one friend after another. She says she is so happy up there she can hardly stand it. She says she wants me to write her some bad news so she can come down off cloud nine.”

  “James, did you have something to say to me?” said Queenie, having noted from the first a distraction in her brother-in-law’s manner.

  “I did. Sit down, Queenie. I’ve been thinking about what you said yesterday.”

  “About what?”

  “About Danjo.”

  Queenie nodded.

  “Things didn’t get
any better last night, did they?”

  She stopped and considered the matter a moment. “I hate to say it, James, but I think I am getting sort of used to Carl’s being back. I mean, he doesn’t go out beating people up anymore. I don’t think he’s stealing. As long as he’s in one room at night and I’m in another that’s all right—or at least it would be if it weren’t for Danjo.”

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I was thinking maybe you should get rid of Danjo.”

  “He’s my preciousest!”

  “I know, but, Queenie, you don’t want him contaminated! That’s the word you used yesterday.”

  “I sure don’t, but what am I supposed to do with him?”

  “Give him to me.”

  “To you? You don’t want him!”

  “How you know that! I do want him!”

  “He’s so little! What would you do with a five-year-old, James?”

  “I’d raise him up right. I’ve had experience. I raised Grace, and as you know, most of that time I was working pretty much on my own. Genevieve was mostly with you in Nashville.”

  “Well, I know all that. What I mean is, what about all your pretty things?”

  “I don’t mind. Danjo is careful. He’s been in my house before. And if some things get broken, that’s all right. I can buy others. I’m not poor. I can build high shelves. Danjo will be just fine. So why don’t you go on and give him to me? Queenie, I’m so lonesome without Grace, I cain’t hardly stand it. I was moping around last night, just thinking that what I could use most in the world was a little boy to keep me company.”

  “And you think Danjo will do?”

  “Danjo would be the best, Queenie!”

  “I’d hate to give him up.”

  “Queenie, it’s not like I’d be taking him to a different town—you could come see him all the time. And look at it this way: I wouldn’t be taking him away from you, I’d just be taking him away from Carl.”

  “I’d like that,” Queenie admitted. “Carl will raise holy hell.”

  “What’s he gone do about it?”

  “Come and take Danjo back, that’s what.”