BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (107 page)

Yes, came the reply from the bed.

Then Oscar heard a slight scuffle against the floor, and then immediately felt small arms—the arms of a child—grasping him around his thighs. The child's arms were wet, and their dampness penetrated the cloth of Oscar's pajamas. Oscar struggled to maintain his balance, but fell forward. Fortunately he was near the bed, and that stopped him. He reached out into that blackness, and his hand was suddenly gripped tight. The hand that grasped his was wet and slick. Its nails dug into his palm.

At the same time, the child dragged at his legs, attempting to pull him down to the floor.

This one. This one, hissed the child.

Oscar struggled. He freed his hand, then turned around, sitting on the edge of the bed. He flailed his arms before him, and grabbed the child. The boy tore viciously at Oscar with his long nails.

"Who is this?" Oscar cried, holding the child tight, and drawing him close. The boy was wet all over, and he stank. The foul air of the Perdido was breathed into Oscar's face.

John Robert, said the voice behind Oscar. Oscar felt the mattresses of the bed shifting beneath him. Whoever was behind him was sitting up. Two arms grasped him tightly from behind.

"John Robert DeBordenave," whispered Oscar, suddenly letting the child go. The name came to him without his searching for it, without his even remembering that such a child had ever existed, without his being able to recall what had ever become of him. Oscar heard the boy scramble away. Some small piece of furniture was knocked over, and Oscar heard the splinter of wood.

John Robert was dead. He had drowned in the Perdido. Oscar now remembered that. But if John Robert was dead, and were yet here in this room, then Oscar's mother Mary-Love, who was also dead, might be here as well. Oscar grasped the arms that held him tight. He turned his head over his shoulder. "Mama?" he asked. "Mama, is that you? Don't hold me so tight, you're squeezing me."

But if it was Mary-Love, then Mary-Love wouldn't let go. She squeezed Oscar tighter, until it seemed that he could not breathe at all. And meanwhile John Robert was further smashing up the piece of furniture he had overturned.

The rain beat against the front room windows, and it seemed to Oscar as if he were beneath the waters of the river, so deep and pervasive was the smell of the Perdido in the room. He scarcely noticed at first when John Robert began to beat him about the legs with a stick. But that insensitivity became pain as John Robert turned the stick around and a protruding nail—bent and rusted, but still sharp— was jabbed repeatedly into his legs, ripping his flesh as easily as it ripped the cloth of his pajamas.

"Mama," Oscar pleaded, "stop him. Stop him. I cain't. I'm blind. Mama..."

Oscar may have been wrong. It may not have been Mary-Love. But whoever it was, she did not stop John Robert, but instead she pushed Oscar forward onto the floor. And John Robert stood over him, and beat him about the breast and shoulders with the stick, digging the single nail again and again into Oscar's flesh with a savage monotony.

Oscar lay trembling, and then he lay still. Then he heard his mother's voice, slow and melancholy. Not for you, Oscar. But for Elinor.

"Mama?" said Oscar weakly. "Mama, I lost my eyes..."

The relentlessly beating stick moved upward toward Oscar's face.

The eyes, Mary-Love's voice echoed. John Robert, the eyes.

"Mama—" Oscar said. It was his last word. John Robert DeBordenave swung the table leg one more time, and that single nail exploded through the cataract of Oscar's eye, burst the eyeball, tore apart the optic nerve, and plunged three inches deep into his brain.

CHAPTER 81
Footsteps

It was Elinor who discovered Oscar's corpse, counted the punctures in his body, extracted the nail that was lodged in his brain, and persuaded Leo Ben-quith, in senile retirement, to sign a death certificate without even looking at his old friend. It was Elinor who prepared the body for burial, and she and Zaddie who lifted Oscar's stiffened form into his coffin. The town protested loudly, but Elinor said, "Oscar made me promise to do it all myself." The other members of the family did not protest; Elinor had her reasons, doubtlessly, and it was probably best not to enquire into them too closely.

All the furniture in that bedroom and sitting room—the furniture with which Oscar and Elinor had started out their marriage—Elinor gave to Es-cue Wells and Luvadia Sapp out at Gavin Pond Farm. All Oscar's clothing and the very linen they had used in those rooms was distributed among the poor through the Methodist Church in Baptist Bottom. "These rooms smell of Oscar," Elinor said to Zaddie. "I won't have these rooms smelling of him when I go to sleep at night. I won't be reminded of him like that. I think of him enough as it is."

A rumor got around that Oscar's death had not been natural after all. Murder, however, seemed unlikely. Nobody was at the house that night but Zaddie, and Zaddie's care for Oscar in his blindness was widely known and universally commended. Her lifelong loyalty to the family placed her above suspicion. Since Leo Benquith would not speak, even to provide details that would have corroborated heart failure as the cause of death—as the death certificate read— the town eventually decided that Oscar, depressed because of the failure of the operation on his cataracts, had committed suicide. His last note to Elinor, it was said, was now in a safety-deposit box in Mobile. Suicide was a sufficient explanation for all the mystery surrounding the very private disposition of Oscar Caskey's corpse.

Oscar had withdrawn so from the family the last years of his life that his death made a difference only to Elinor, and Zaddie, and Sammy Sapp, really. Only they had had anything to do with him for the past two years. Poor Sammy Sapp wondered if he'd have to give up his uniform and move back out to the farm. Like so many Sapps before him, he really did prefer the town existence. Elinor kept Sammy on; she said it befitted her station to have a chauffeur.

Perdido watched Elinor closely. The behavior of a widow was always a matter of interest and comment, and Elinor Caskey was, in herself, no ordinary woman. Perdido noticed a number of things: the first was that she did not weep at the funeral. And after that ceremony, she did not wear black, nor did she in any other manner appear to change the routine of her former existence. She went on living just as she had lived when her husband was alive. For the nearly fifty years of their marriage, she had appeared devoted to him, and he to her. Perdido uncharitably concluded that the marriage, in the last years particularly, had been only a sham. Elinor and Oscar had remained together out of convenience, because a rupture would have proved financially inconvenient to the entire family. Elinor and Oscar, Perdido was certain, had grown cold to one another as they got older. Elinor had become exasperated with her husband's blindness, Oscar had shrunk beneath Elinor's lack of sympathy.

In company, even within the family, Elinor never talked of Oscar. She never made a mistake, as many people do who have lost a loved one, and spoke of him as if he were still alive. Every morning, after the beds had been made, Sammy drove Elinor and Zaddie over to the cemetery and Zaddie got out of the car and placed fresh flowers on Oscar's grave. There was something so cold and perfunctory in this ritual—Elinor never got out of the car; never even rolled down the window, for that matter—that Per-dido concluded that it was as false as Elinor's grief. In the new part of town, among the people who had lived in Perdido for only twenty or thirty years, rumor had it that old man Caskey hadn't died a natural death, and that Elinor and her maid had done him in for the money that was to come to both of them.

It was indicative of the changes in the Caskey family that this rumor was able to get started at all; and it was indicative of the changes in the family's relationship to the town that the Caskeys never even got wind of it. Perdido had grown, and Perdido had got rich. The people who had bought up land after the discovery of oil were now rolling in money. And there were the owners of the new shops and other businesses who catered to and serviced this new wealth. The money that spewed up out of the earth, out of hundreds and hundreds of wells, settled over Perdido, and was spouted up again and again, until it seemed that the whole town might drown in it.

The Caskey mill continued, and expanded even further, under Miriam's direction, but it wasn't the small local operation that it had been. Workers now came from all over; they drove down every morning from Brewton, over from Jay, and up from Bay Mi-nette. Three full shifts kept the mills going twenty-four hours a day; Miriam allowed the plants to shut down only on Sundays and national holidays. Of course a great number of people from Perdido still worked at the mill, or made their livings indirectly from it, but it no longer seemed essential to the town's well-being. Perdido now was always full of strangers, people who had no real interest in the town.

The Caskeys, of course, were very rich—far richer than anyone in Perdido suspected, in fact, for they didn't make an ostentatious show of their wealth. The newest house in the Caskey compound was Elinor's, and that had been built fifty years before. All the new wealth in Perdido had put up huge houses on the outskirts of town, with triple-car garages, swimming pools, and tennis courts serving as proof of substantial means. One of the doctors in town even bought himself an airplane, and built a landing strip right beside his house on which to show it off. New wealth constructed beach houses down at Destin, and made yearly trips to Disneyland and Acapulco. New wealth ate out in Pensacola nearly every night, and sent its boys off to military schools in North Carolina and Virginia. Its girls stayed at home and got three years of braces. The Caskeys, however, lived on in their dowdy houses, with their old furniture, and did what they had always done. It was commonly recognized that the Caskeys had allowed Perdido to pass them by.

Queenie's death had broken up the Monday afternoon bridge club, and Elinor did not apparently care to play with the younger women who had taken it over. After Oscar's death Elinor allowed their membership in the Lake Pinchona Country Club to lapse, but an even more drastic change was the fact that the Caskeys no longer went to church. First Elinor stopped going, and then Billy stayed home—to keep her company, he said. Miriam bluntly announced, "Well, Mama, if you can stay away, then I can too. One less time to dress up every week is fine with me. And there is plenty of work I can do." Malcolm would never have thought of doing anything that Miriam didn't do herself, so all the Perdido Caskeys remained away. Elinor still punctually paid a yearly pledge to the church, and, discreetly, she was never to be seen on her front porch or riding around the town during the hours of Sunday school or morning services. The Caskeys' apparent apostasy was much discussed around town, and Perdido postulated decades of arguments between Elinor and Oscar on the subject of church attendance.

With ever greater frequency, Miriam and Malcolm were out of town on business. In the past decade Miriam had found a series of managers who pleased her and to whom she had turned over most of the day-to-day business of the mill. She retained for herself all the more complex, personal, and exciting business of investments and large-scale bargaining. There had been a time when she had relied a great deal on Billy Bronze. When Miriam encountered executives who didn't fancy dealing with a woman, Billy had been there to back her up. But now Miriam herself was well known, and even when she wasn't, she had developed enough finesse to handle just about any situation. Also, on those occasions when she ran into an executive who just wouldn't take her seriously because she was a woman, Miriam merely shrugged and walked out in the midst of the conversation, leaving the man to discover later what a foolish mistake he had made. She was rich enough to do that now. Miriam preferred to work alone, and Billy preferred to remain with Elinor. Billy gave up his downtown office, and converted two of the bedrooms upstairs to his own use.

When he was young, Billy Bronze had dreamed of many types of existence, but never this. He would never have chosen Perdido as a place to live. He was certain he didn't like small towns; he always preferred places like Houston and New Orleans. He didn't like the smell of the river. He had no friends in Perdido.

Yet here he was, living in an old house with an aging mother-in-law, rising at seven, sitting down to a formal breakfast in the dining room, and then retiring to his air conditioned office on the second floor, where he looked over the morning mail and talked on the telephone to Miriam at the mill, to brokers in New York, and to oilmen in Texas. He had a secretary come in at noon to type up all his letters, and while she worked Billy had lunch with Elinor and Miriam and Malcolm. After lunch he and Elinor sat out on the screened-in porch and talked until the secretary was finished. Then Billy went back and shut himself in his office again. He most often took supper alone with Elinor in quiet contented splendor. In the evening he watched television, or listened to the ball games on Oscar's radio— the only item of Oscar's private possessions that remained in the house. Billy went to bed early, not because the day had wearied him, but rather because there seemed nothing else to do.

He was quite rich now, richer than he had ever imagined possible; he had inherited all of Frances's money, all his father's, and he had much that he had made himself—but he did nothing at all with it. He never went anywhere, he never bought anything. It was Elinor who said, "Billy, it's about time you had a new suit." And then Sammy Sapp would drive him and Elinor down to Mobile and Elinor would choose three or four new suits for him and pay for them herself. Billy had assumed, when he was young, that he would have a family: a wife and three children— two boys and a girl. He had married, of course, but his wife was dead, and he lived on with his widowed mother-in-law. He had had a daughter, but that daughter had been taken away from him. Lilah no longer even called him "Daddy," and he saw her not more than once a year, and only then when it pleased her to come home for Christmas.