BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (17 page)

"What sort of jewelry did Genevieve have?" Elinor asked, holding up a fine linen skirt to her waist.

"Diamonds, mostly. Not big ones, but lots of them. In good settings, too. Ruby earrings. Emerald earrings. Bracelets. She didn't wear them a lot, but she always took them with her."

"Mama, you know why, too," said Sister. "She was afraid you'd come over and steal 'em!"

"I would have!" cried Mary-Love. "Who do you think took care of Elvennia Caskey when she was so sick? James didn't know what to do with her. And then that old woman had the nerve to go and leave James every damn one of those things!"

Elinor looked up: she had never before heard Mary-Love swear.

"After Elvennia's funeral," Mary-Love went on, "I said to James, 'James, you ought to give those things to me—I have earned them.' James wouldn't do it, though. He said it was his mama's wish that he should get them and he kept 'em. I still haven't forgiven him. Not for that. I said, 'James, just let me have the pearls.' And he wouldn't even do that."

"There were pearls?" said Elinor with interest.

"Black pearls," said Mary-Love. "Most beautiful things you ever saw. Three sets of double strands, fixed so you could wear them all at once. Genevieve could have kept all the diamonds and rubies and sapphires—people around here, after all, don't wear much but their wedding rings—but I could have worn those pearls anytime, anywhere. At least the smallest strand, I could have worn that one to church. And the thing was, Genevieve didn't like 'em. She wouldn't wear 'em 'cause they were black! She carried 'em everywhere, and I was dying for those pearls."

"I like pearls best," said Elinor quietly.

"Sapphires are my favorite," said Sister. "But I've only got this little baby ring, which I got for being the first grandchild. Mama, maybe you ought to ask James if he knows where that case is."

Mary-Love had been counting undergarments and dividing them according to quality. She draped five silk underskirts over the back of a chair and said, "I'm gone do just that. We ought to find out what happened to those things—that jewelry is valuable."

Elinor and Sister continued to unpack the dead woman's things. Mary-Love returned in about ten minutes. She stood in the door with a dumbfounded expression on her face, one hand behind her back.

"Mama," said Sister without looking up, "did James know where that case was?"

Mary-Love drew her hand around in front of her; she was holding Genevieve's jewelry case by a handle on its side. The other two women turned to look at Mary-Love. She unfastened the latch and the top fell open. An empty velvet-lined tray dropped to the floor, but absolutely nothing else was in it.

"Mama?" cried Sister. "Where is the jewelry?"

Mary-Love looked at her daughter, then at her daughter-in-law. She deliberately allowed the case to fall to the floor. The jolt unhinged the lid.

"James buried it," she said after a moment. "He put it all in Genevieve's coffin."

James Caskey had been more disturbed by his wife's death than anyone knew. He blamed himself for having sent her away—away to her death, as it turned out. He blamed himself for not having driven the Packard to Atmore himself—for then he might have perished in her place.

Oscar pointed out that, following this general line of reasoning, James might more logically blame Elinor and Bray for Genevieve's death. Elinor had sent Genevieve away; Bray's driving had, perhaps, caused the accident. But James didn't see it that way and took the guilt upon himself. It was for this reason, in partial expiation of his unintentional but fatal sin, that he buried with Genevieve all the jewelry he had inherited from his mother.

He looked surprised, in fact, when Mary-Love confronted him in her vast astonishment and indignation.

"But, Mary-Love," he protested weakly, "what on earth was I going to do with that jewelry?
I
wasn't gone wear it. And I have given every speck of it to Genevieve..."

Mary-Love sighed deeply. She had got James alone. They were the oldest surviving generation of Caskeys, and there were scenes and decisions to which they alone should be privy. For this she wouldn't have her son or her daughter by her.

"James," said Mary-Love, "who is in the next room, crying on the bed?"

"Grace," said James. The child's sobbing was audible through the wall.

"What is Grace?" asked Mary-Love, staring at her brother-in-law hard in the face. "Is Grace a little girl?"

"She is."

"Well, James, Grace is going to grow up, and when Grace grows up, she could have worn that jewelry. That jewelry—which in the first place ought to have come to me—could have gone to Grace. James, you foolish man, you could have divided up that jewelry—it's all Caskey jewelry after all. There would have been some for me and some for Sister and some for Elinor and a whole safety-deposit box full of it for Grace. You could even have sent Queenie Strickland away with a pair of earrings. .Everybody could have benefited."

James looked very troubled. "Mary-Love," he said, "I didn't think of it."

"I know you didn't. And even if you had thought about it you wouldn't have done it! I have a good mind to give Bray a shovel and tell him to go out there and dig Genevieve right out of the ground!"

James Caskey trembled. "Oh, Mary-Love, please don't do that!" he said. But Mary-Love would not give him the satisfaction of a promise not to do that very thing.

Genevieve's grave was not dug up, and Mary-Love forbade the subject of family jewelry to be mentioned again—it was too painful a loss. No one could believe that James Caskey had simply thrown away a easeful of jewels that couldn't be purchased now for any sum less than about thirty-eight thousand dollars. Mary-Love had long been in the habit of purchasing stones for investment and knew their value.

One morning in October Ivey was in the kitchen preparing the noontime meal. Since Genevieve's death six weeks earlier James and Grace had started having all their meals with Mary-Love and there was very little for Roxie to do all day, so she had taken to sitting out her morning with Ivey and Zad-die in Mary-Love's kitchen. "Oh, look at that!" cried Ivey, leaning over the stove.

"What you see?" asked Roxie.

"I'm looking at the 'tatoes."

"Have they got bugs?"

"Oh, no," said Ivey, "but I never saw the water boil away from 'tatoes so fast. That means it's gone rain today!"

"I don't see no clouds," remarked Roxie, planting both feet firmly upon the floor and leaning far to the left in her straw chair in order to peer up at the sky through the kitchen window nearest her.

"I'm not never wrong," said Ivey. "Not when it comes to reading 'tatoes."

And Ivey wasn't wrong. The clouds moved in at about noon, and the rain began to fall an hour later. James and Oscar, on their way back to the mill from dinner, were caught out in it, and stopped at the barbershop for shelter and, as long as they were there, hair cuts.

At first it hadn't seemed that the rain was going to be heavy, but the intensity of the falling water quickly increased, churning the muddy Perdido, splashing heavy gray sand onto the trunks of the water oaks in the yard, and keeping everyone indoors who hadn't some overwhelming necessity to be out. And since the town wasn't the get-up-and-go kind of place that produced overwhelming necessities in its inhabitants, everyone stayed inside. Out in the pine forests the mill workers took shelter in the logging cabins or beneath a cedar (the tree which provides best shelter in such downpours). Children huddled on back porches and watched the rain with awe, for in Perdido, rain may fall very hard indeed. The grounds around the Caskey houses were awash. Grace and Zaddie sat on the back steps of James Caskey's house and fashioned paper boats which they tossed into a large pool that had formed right in back of the kitchen. There was not a great deal of amusement in this occupation, however, since the rain immediately flattened the boats into soggy masses of pulp.

And at the cemetery, the rain beat down upon Genevieve Caskey's grave. It overturned the pots in which flowers had been placed every day by James Caskey. It tore the petals from the flowers and beat the petals into the earth—as if to deliver James's homage all the way down to his dead wife. In the space of only a little time the mound of earth that covered Genevieve's grave was washed away, and the earth was as flat as it had been when Genevieve was alive and had no thought of this narrow home. But the earth over a grave is loose, and the rain tamped it down. Soon there was a depression in the earth above Genevieve's coffin, a depression that quickly filled with water, and as the water sank down into the earth more water fell from the sky to replenish the pool. This soon sank into the earth as well, and after a time it would have been apparent to anyone who might have been around to look at Genevieve's grave that James Caskey's wife—jewels and all—was not only dead, but also very, very wet.

Mary-Love and Sister were caught over at the new house where they were measuring the back parlor windows for curtains. Since the house had been completed, Mary-Love's strategy had changed. She had no intention of allowing Oscar to leave her of his own volition, even when that meant continuing to share a house with Elinor. Now that Genevieve was dead, all Mary-Love's antagonism was turned toward her daughter-in-law. The fact that she was able to keep Oscar by her when it was inconvenient and onerous for Oscar to remain, and when there was a large house next door empty and waiting, only showed Elinor that Mary-Love's hold over Oscar was much stronger than her own. Mary-Love had declared that she could not allow them to take possession until she was herself satisfied. And satisfaction, Mary-Love contentedly mused to herself, was a thing that might be put off indefinitely. The principal rooms "had long been furnished, and now sheets protected these pieces from dust. The place was dark and silent, for the water and electricity had not yet been turned on.

On all four sides of the house, rainwater dropped in a heavy curtain from the high roof, digging neat troughs next to the new flower beds Bray had put in.

"Sister," said Mary-Love, looking apprehensively at the density of water through which they'd have to pass to get home, "do you have something to cover your head?"

"Let's just wait here till it's over," Sister suggested. "It cain't keep up long like this."

Mary-Love acquiesced, for it hardly seemed worth the soaking to return home without cover. The two women finished their measuring, and, after drawing back and carefully folding the sheets which had covered it, seated themselves on the new sofa in the front parlor. Sister opened the draperies here, hung only the week before, and they watched for some sign of slackening off of the downpour.

The sound of the rain was hypnotic, and though it was only October the air was somehow chill. The house, which had been built to let in lots of light and air, seemed gloomy, dark, and inhospitable.

"Mama," said Sister, "maybe we should light a fire..."

"Go ahead," said Mary-Love. "Have you got any matches? Have you got kindling? Have you got a scuttle of coal?"

"No," said Sister.

"Well, then, go right ahead," said Mary-Love, hugging herself tighter.

Almost imperceptibly, during this small exchange, the rain had diminished.

Sister lifted her chin suddenly. "Mama, you hear something?"

"I hear the rain."

"I mean something in the house," Sister whispered. "I hear something in the house."

"I don't hear anything. You hear the rain splashing on the porch, that's what you hear."

"Mama, no, I heard something else."

Something dropped to the floor in the room directly above them.

"See!" cried Sister, and jumped nearer her mother on the sofa. "There's somebody up there."

"No, there's not!" said Mary-Love firmly, but somehow without complete conviction.

They sat silent, listening. The rain continued to slacken, but it was very far from stopping.

Faintly, they heard a metallic jangle, soft and distant. What was it like? It was like hearing Grace opening her piggy bank on the bed in the next room.

Mary-Love rose, but Sister tried to pull her back.

"Sister," said her mother sternly, "there is nobody in this house. A squirrel got in. Or maybe a bat. Or the water is leaking through the new roof. Do you know what that roof cost me? I am going upstairs and see and you are coming with me."

Sister dared not refuse. There was a louder jangle. Mary-Love went out into the hall and started up the stairs. Sister followed, pinching a pleat in the back of Mary-Love's skirt. "It came from that front bedroom," said Mary-Love.

They paused on the landing and looked up to the second-floor hallway. All the doors were shut and the hallway itself was dark and dim. At the end, a door inset with squares of stained glass opened onto a narrow porch. The glass glowed richly in vermilion and cobalt and chartreuse, but the light wasn't strong enough to illuminate the dark carpet on the floor.

There was another jangle.

Sister shuddered and grabbed her mother's arm.

"Mama, that's not a bat!"

Mary-Love went resolutely up the stairs. She didn't hesitate, but advanced directly to the end of the hallway, stepping loudly on the carpeted floor in order to give warning to whatever was inside that front room. At the end of the hall she veered suddenly to the left and knocked on the wall next to the door; then she knocked on the door itself.

At first there was silence within, then a soft thump, and almost immediately after, another jangle.

Sister, who had dragged along behind, caught her breath in gasps. "Oh, Mama," she pleaded in a whisper, "don't open that door."

Mary-Love turned the knob and pushed open the door of the front room. It slowly swung wide to reveal a square dark chamber with thick curtains over the windows. The suite of furniture here had been the first purchased for the house, and it had lain under sheets longer than any other. The room was painted a dark green. Mary-Love and Sister could see nothing but the outlines of the walnut bed, the dresser, the dresser mirror, the chifforobe, and the chest of drawers. The two women stood absolutely still outside the door listening for another jangle, another thump, watching for some movement in the darkened room.