Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (7 page)

“Well, that’s good,” said the younger man, and looked over his uncle’s shoulder at the rising moon through the window. “But where is she gone live? She cain’t go back to the Osceola—they charge two dollars a day. A fourth-grade teacher doesn’t make that kind of money—not two dollars a day and having to buy food, too.”

“I’ve already thought about it, Oscar,” said James. “And what I’ve decided is—she’s gone stay with Grace and me.”

“What?” Oscar exclaimed so loudly that the Driver boys paused in their snoring as if to hear more or perhaps in order to incorporate the exclamation into their dreams. “What?” Oscar repeated in a far softer voice when the boys’ snoring had resumed.

“When we get the house cleaned up, I mean,” said James. “Grace loves Miss Elinor to death, and hasn’t known her since yesterday morning.”

“She’s gone live with you!”

“We got room,” said Oscar. “There’s Grace, that loves her.”

“James, what about Genevieve? What you imagine Genevieve is gone say when she comes back from Nashville and sees Miss Elinor sitting on the front porch with Grace in her lap?”

James Caskey turned over, away from his nephew. He didn’t answer.

“What you gone say to Genevieve, James?” demanded Oscar in a whisper. “And for that matter, what you gone say to Mama?”

“Lord!” said James after a time, stretching his feet against the iron bars at the foot of the bed, “aren’t you tired, Oscar? Aren’t you worn out? I am. I
got
to get to sleep or I’m not gone be able to get up in the morning at all!”

. . .

The sun shone bright and hot all day Easter and for the next three days. The floodwaters evaporated or they ran down to the Gulf of Mexico or they sank into the sodden earth.

The inhabitants of Perdido came down from high ground into the town and slogged up to the doors of their homes to find that the mud had got inside, that their heaviest and best pieces of furniture had floated up to the ceiling, and later when the water receded, had been left in broken heaps on the floor. Mortar had washed out of brick foundations, and every board that had lain underwater was warped. Porches had collapsed. The rigid limbs of pigs and calves stuck out of the muck in everyone’s front yard. There were drowned chickens on the stairs. Machinery of all kinds was clogged with sludge, and though patient little colored girls were set to the task of cleaning, all the mud was never to be got out again. Gas tanks and oil drums had floated out of the mill storage yards and smashed through the windows of houses, as if on purpose to wreak the greatest damage possible. Half the stained-glass windows of the churches had been broken. Hymnbooks in their racks on the backs of pews had become so saturated with water that they had, in their expansion, split the wood. The works of the new pipe organ at the Methodist church were filled with mud. There wasn’t a single shop on Palafox Street that didn’t lose its entire stock. And there wasn’t a square foot of property in the entire town that didn’t stink—of river mud and dead things and rotting clothing, rotting wood, and rotting food.

The National Guard and the Red Cross had arrived before the floodwaters had receded, bringing blankets and cans of pork and beans and newspapers and medicine to the encampments that surrounded the town. The National Guard remained a week longer than the Red Cross and assisted the mill workers in clearing away the largest pieces of wreckage. It was estimated by James Caskey, Tom DeBordenave, and Henry Turk that the three mills combined had lost a million and a half board feet of pine—warped, washed down to the Gulf, or simply come to rest and rot in the submerged forest around Perdido.

The worst-hit portion of town was Baptist Bottom. Half the houses had been totally destroyed; the remainder were severely damaged. Those blacks who had had so little before the flood now possessed nothing at all. These unfortunate householders were the first assisted. Mary-Love and Sister and Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk spent all day at the Bethel Rest Baptist Church feeding colored children rice and peaches, when they might have been at home superintending the cleaning of their own houses.

The homes of the workers were water-damaged, but for the most part intact. The homes of the shopkeepers, dentists, and young lawyers had fared best, for they had been built on the highest ground in Perdido, and some had escaped with no more than a foot of water on the carpets—not enough even to upset the chairs.

The houses of the millowners, built so near the river, had suffered of course, but the waters there had not reached more than a few inches past the level of the second floor, and most of the household belongings that had been stored upstairs were intact. However, James Caskey’s single-story home seemed nearly a total loss. Because the house was built in a slight depression and stood nearer the river than any other house on the street, it had lain longer beneath the floodwaters than any other structure in town. It was the first to be inundated, the last to be dry.

The schoolhouses, which were on the river just south of the Osceola Hotel, had suffered considerable damage as well, and the remainder of the school year was canceled, though fully a month of classes remained. The children, thus unexpectedly released, had unexpected brooms and pails put into their hands, and they did their part to setting the school to rights. But, though Edna McGhee and her husband had indeed moved away from Perdido and were now sending postcards from Tallahassee with some regularity, Elinor hadn’t yet been called upon to take her place. Under James Caskey’s recommendation, Elinor had been unanimously accepted by the school board. It hadn’t even been thought necessary to write off to Huntingdon College for a copy of her certification. After all, it had been lost in the flood, along with so many other of the young lady’s belongings. The school board felt that it would be adding insult to injury for Perdido to demand that Elinor Dammert produce what Perdido had taken away.

What was discovered in the months following the flood was that not everything could be put to rights, no matter what amount of effort was expended in the attempt. Washing tins of food under cold running water, for instance, did not entirely guard against botulism—or so everyone had been warned by the Red Cross—and all the stocks of the two groceries and the fancy foods store had to be jettisoned; this at a time when there wasn’t as much food as people were accustomed to. Great piles of warped lumber from the three yards were dragged into the cypress swamp in which the Blackwater River had its source five miles northeast of Perdido. It was left there to rot and be out of everyone’s way, though the following autumn it was discovered that many of these logs and boards had been laboriously dragged back to Perdido in order to rebuild Baptist Bottom, the houses of which, because of the warped boards, looked more crooked than ever before. Fine carpets had to be thrown out because they could not be cleaned of the stain of river mud. Books and documents and pictures had been severely water-stained—even those that had been above the high-water line were not unaffected—and only those that were necessary (such as deeds in the town hall and prescriptions at the druggist’s) were retained.

But the flood wasn’t all bad, they would say later. When it cut off the town’s water supply for several days, the citizens of Perdido understood the inadequacy of their present system and quickly voted an expenditure of forty thousand dollars to build a new pumping station on the nearest two acres of land that hadn’t been flooded. Because everyone’s yard was torn up and most of the streets had been washed away, it seemed the appropriate time to install a modern sewage system—and so, with money borrowed from the owners of the three mills, new sewers were laid into the ground all over the town. Even Baptist Bottom was not forgotten in these improvements, and for the first time there were streetlamps to illuminate the tin roofs of the shacks at night.

Perdido was forgotten by all but the Baldwin County legislator who tried, unsuccessfully, to get loans in Montgomery, and by several firms in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania who had placed orders with one of the mill companies and now learned how late those orders would be delivered. But the effects of the flood remained a long while in Perdido, months and months after the waters had receded, even after the sewer lines had been laid and the new pumping station was drawing up the coldest and sweetest water that anyone in town had ever tasted. The stink of the flood never entirely went away, it seemed. Even after the slime had been swept out of the houses, the walls scrubbed down, new carpets laid, new furniture bought, new curtains hung; even after every ruined thing had been carted away and burned and the broken branches and rotting carcasses of dead animals had been washed out of the yards and grass had begun to grow again, Perdido would start up the stairs last thing at night and pause with its hand on the banister, and beneath the jasmine and the roses on the front porch, beneath the leftover pungency of supper from the kitchen, and beneath the starch in its own collar—Perdido would smell the flood. It had seeped into the boards and beams and very bricks of the houses and buildings. Now and then, it would remind Perdido of what desolation there had been, and what desolation might very well come upon the town again.

During the five days that Miss Elinor spent at the Zion Grace Church, she had made herself as useful as possible, keeping the children, doing a little cooking, cleaning the church, washing the bedclothes, and complaining not at all. She had won the admiration of everyone but Mary-Love, and Mary-Love’s antipathy toward Miss Elinor was a subject of some remark. For lack of any better reason, it was ascribed to family pride—Mary-Love had seen what inroads Miss Elinor had made into the affection of Grace and the esteem of James Caskey, and possibly saw this as a dangerous disruptive element in her family. That, at any rate, was the least illogical possibility—though it was only a hypothesis; the real cause was probably something else altogether. No one thought to ask Mary-Love directly why she didn’t like Miss Elinor, but, as it happened, she wouldn’t have known what to answer. The truth was, she didn’t know. It was, Mary-Love confusedly told herself, Miss Elinor’s red hair—by which she meant: it was the way Miss Elinor looked, it was the way Miss Elinor talked, carried herself, picked up Grace, made friends of Miz Driver, and had even learned to distinguish among Roland, Oland, and Poland Driver—the female preacher’s three insignificant sons—and who had ever done that before? Such energy expended in a strange community seemed to indicate a firm purpose at work—and what could Miss Elinor’s purpose be?

“I am sorry for that child,” said Mary-Love emphatically as she and Sister sat rocking on the front porch, peering through the screen of dead-looking camellias to James’s house and watching for Elinor Dammert to appear at one of the windows. Mary-Love and Sister had been back in their house for nearly two weeks, and still the stink of the flood wasn’t out of everything.

“What child, Mama?” Sister was embroidering a pillowcase with green and yellow thread. So much linen had been ruined!

“Little Grace Caskey,
that’s
what child! Your tiny cousin!”

“Why you feel sorry for Grace? She does fine as long as Genevieve stays away.”

“That’s what I mean,” said Mary-Love. “For all intents and purposes, James has got rid of that woman, I am thankful to say. James had no business being married in the first place. James was not cut out for marriage, and he should have known it as well as everybody else in this town knew it. You could have knocked the entire population of Perdido down with a feather—the
same
feather—when James Caskey came back here with a wife in a sleeping compartment. Sometimes I think James was smart, and signed a paper with Genevieve that said she could come to Perdido, get pregnant, leave him a baby, and then go away again forever. I wouldn’t be surprised if he signs a check every month to the liquor store in Nashville giving Genevieve an open account. An open account at a liquor store would keep Genevieve in Moose Paw, Saskatchewan!”

“Mama,” said Sister patiently, “I never ever heard of that place.” It was the habit of mother and daughter to maintain contradictory stances on any question: if Mary-Love were excited, then Sister remained calm. If Sister waxed indignant, then Mary-Love became conciliatory. The technique had developed over the course of many years, and now was so natural to them that they did it without thinking or willing it to be so.

“I made it up. But, Sister, James got rid of that woman—we don’t know how, we are just grateful that he did—and what does he do first chance he gets?”

“What?”

“He takes in another who’s just as bad!”

“Miss Elinor?” asked Sister in a voice which suggested she didn’t think the comparison was justified.

“You knew who I was talking about, Sister.”

It was hard to rock steadily on the front porch now that so many of the floorboards had been warped. Grady Henderson’s Fancy Goods Store had brought in a shipment of scented candles, which were bought up immediately. One of them burned now in a saucer on the floor between Mary-Love and Sister; its scent of vanilla did something to cover the rankness of the river soil that had been deposited all around the house. Bray and three men from the mill, which wasn’t yet back in operation, were systematically turning over all the dirt in the front yard, burying what had been laid down by the flood.

“Mama, your voice carries. Don’t let Miss Elinor hear you.”

“She won’t hear me unless she’s listening at the window,” replied Mary-Love, in an even louder voice. “And I wouldn’t be in the least surprised if she were!”

“What don’t you like about her?” asked Sister mildly. “I like her. I don’t see any reason not to like her, to tell you the truth, Mama.”

“I do. I see every reason in the world.” Mary-Love paused a moment, then suggested: “She has red hair.”

“Lots of people have red hair. That McCall boy I went to school with—you remember him?—who died at Verdun last year, he had red hair. You told me you liked him.”

“Oh, not like this woman, Sister! You ever see a color like hers? A color like Perdido mud?
I
never have. Besides, it’s not just the red hair.”