BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (26 page)

"No, Elinor," said Caroline shaking her head, "it's just not going well for Tom. Now, I'm sure I'm not telling you anything new, because Tom said that both Henry Turk and Oscar knew about his trouble. It's strange, Tom never told me. I was so surprised! The flood did it. Tom lost all his records. He says he remembers that he had almost a hundred thousand dollars..." Caroline paused, unable to remember the precise term her husband had employed.

"In uncollected bills?" suggested Elinor.

"That's right," said Caroline complacently. Her tone suggested that she was gossiping about some small matter that was of no possible consequence to her, and indeed it seemed to Caroline as if it were not. The mills were matters for men. She assumed that nothing could or ever would interfere with the money Tom gave her every month to run the household and buy clothes; with her needs taken care of, Tom could do what he pleased with all the rest. "See, Elinor, the problem is, he not only lost all that money, but he lost all the lumber that was stored at the mill and all the lumber that he took out to Mr. Madsen's place, because Mr. Madsen's barn washed away too. Then most of the machinery got filled with mud and that had to be replaced, and now there's no money. Tom says he doesn't know how he's going to be able to go on."

"Can't he borrow?" asked Elinor.

"Well, not much," said Caroline, with a little pride that she had taken care to ask her husband this question. "He went to the bank in Mobile and went down on twenty knees in front of the president asking for money to build the mill back up, but the president of the bank said, 'Mr. DeBordenave, how do we know there's not gone be another flood?'"

"Because there's not!" said Elinor, definitely.

"Well, I certainly hope not," returned Caroline. "Even my best rugs had to be just thrown out. I was never so unhappy in all my life. Anyway, Tom said the bank wouldn't lend him any money because they thought that another flood was gone come along and wash everything away a second time."

"So he can't get the money?"

"Well, maybe he can and maybe he cain't. The banks say that they will lend money after the levee's built, but not before. So Tom is real anxious to get that thing put up. He just hopes he can hold out long enough. I hope he can, too," Caroline concluded reflectively. "When Tom is worried about that old mill, he doesn't pay one bit of attention to anything else in the world."

After Caroline had gone home, Elinor remained on the porch with Frances, and, against her custom, waited up for Oscar. When he came up the stairs she called him out onto the porch and said, "Oscar, Caroline was telling me Tom is having trouble borrowing from the banks."

"Well, yes," replied Oscar hesitantly. "Fact is, we all are. Nobody's gone lend us any money to build up again until the levee goes up."

"What would happen if the levee never got built?"

Oscar sat down beside his wife. "Are you really interested?"

"Of course I am!"

"Well," said Oscar, sitting back and folding his hands behind his head, rocking the swing lightly, "old Tom would fold up his tents, I guess."

"What about us?"

"Well, we'd go along all right for a while. We'd get by, I guess."

"Just get by?"

"Elinor, what we're trying to do right now is build back up what we lost in the flood. But then if we really want to get the place going, then we've got to expand. We cain't do that without borrowing the money. There's not a bank in this state—or out of it for that matter—who's gone lend us money till the levee's built. That's why we're working so hard on this business. You see now?" Elinor nodded slowly. "I am dead on my feet," said Oscar. "You want to come to bed?"

"No," said Elinor, "I'm not tired yet. You go on." Oscar rose, leaned down over the crib to kiss sleeping Frances, and went inside the house.

Long after Oscar had undressed, knelt at the side of his bed to pray, lain himself down and fallen as deeply asleep as his daughter, Elinor remained awake. She sat in the swing, rocking slowly and staring out into the darkness. In the black night, the water oaks swayed in the slightest wind. A few rotted branches, covered with a dry green fungus, dropped twigs and leaves, or sometimes fell whole, with a crack and a thump, on the sandy ground. Beyond, the Perdido flowed, muddy and black and gurgling, carrying dead things and struggling live ones inexorably toward the vortex in the center of the junction.

CHAPTER 18
SUMMER

Summer came to Perdido. Elinor continued to ponder about her husband's minuscule salary and the Gas-keys' substantial wealth. Sister pushed, open the back door every morning to stare at the barely discernible mound beneath which the eviscerated chicken lay buried and wondered when Early Haskew was going to propose, or, conversely, when he was going to die. James Caskey sighed and looked about and counted off his loneliness on his ten fingers—it seemed as substantial as that! Mary-Love greedily watched the engineer's daily progress on the plans for the levee, anticipating with great satisfaction the effect the construction would have on her daughter-in-law. And every morning Zaddie's patient rake still made patterns in the sandy yards around the three Caskey houses.

Only children really loved the summer, for of course there was no school. The days were long, unbroken by hours and tasks and bells. It was odd, to Grace Caskey, how each summer was different and possessed its own character. Last summer she had played with the Moye children constantly, and now this summer she saw them only once a week at Sunday school. Every day the previous summer, Bray had driven her out to Lake Pinchona, where a swimming pool with concrete sides was fed by the biggest artesian well in the entire state. A monkey in a wire cage nipped at her fingers when she stuck them through the mesh. This summer she hadn't been out there once, even though they had begun to build a dance hall on stilts out over the muddy, shallow lake. The owners had imported alligators from the Everglades to stock Lake Pinchona, both for picturesque effect and in order to discourage bathers from swimming anyplace other than the easily policed concrete pool.

This summer of 1922 was given over to Zaddie Sapp. Grace was entranced by Zaddie. Grace worshipped the thirteen-year-old black girl and everything about her. Grace followed Zaddie around all day, and would scarcely let the black girl out of her sight. In the morning, she would help Zaddie rake in those portions of the yard invisible to Mary-Love's windows; Mary-Love didn't approve of Grace's helping servants. When Zaddie had finished work, Grace would go over to Elinor's house and Roxie, on temporary loan from James, would fix them dinner. Grace thought it a huge privilege to be allowed to eat in the kitchen with Roxie and Zaddie, and scorned a place at the dining room table with Elinor and Oscar. After dinner, Oscar gave each of the girls a quarter and told them to go down to the Ben Franklin and pick out whatever they wanted. The girls walked downtown hand in hand and roamed the aisles of the dime store. They pointed at everything and looked at everything with such intensity that they grew more familiar with the stock than the man who owned the store. Each purchased three small items with that quarter and tumbled them together in one sack. At home they took out their purchases and examined them minutely. Trading them back and forth, they wrapped the best one in colored paper and presented it to the other, and finally laid them all away with another hundred similar fragile happinesses in a hinged wooden box on the back porch of Elinor's house.

This unscreened porch, which was long and high-ceilinged and always shadowy and cool even in the hottest weather, was called the lattice, because of its crisscrossed woodwork. Like the rest of the house, it was raised high above the level of the yard outside, so that the infrequent breezes blew beneath it and through it. One of the windows of Zaddie's tiny room opened onto this lattice. The children could crawl in and out, with the aid of Zaddie's cot on one side and an old broken chair on the other.

On this cool lattice Zaddie and Grace invented, perfected, and played a hundred different games, the complex rules of which pertained only to themselves and to the geography and furnishings of the lattice itself. Grace took so many meals there and spent so much time with Zaddie, that Mary-Love began to complain to James that Grace had moved in to Elinor's, was bothering Elinor, and was always waking up Frances. How she could know this, when there was virtually no communication between the households, Mary-Love did not explain. James simply said, "Grace is still lonely with her mama dead, and I am not about to interfere in anything that makes her happy."

That her niece should find such profound pleasure in the company of a thirteen-year-old black girl— and, more to the point, always within the precincts of Elinor's house—was a slap in Mary-Love's face. She decided, without saying anything more to James, to wreck Grace's perfection of happiness. Grace would learn that she, Mary-Love, was the source of all felicity within the Caskey family.

Tom and Caroline DeBordenave had two children. The elder was a girl, fifteen, pretty, popular, and smart. Her name was Elizabeth Ann. The boy, four years younger, was called John Robert, and he was a problem. John Robert was thought fortunate to have been born into a family who would always be able to take care of him, for it was obvious he would never be able to take care of himself. He was a sweet, quiet child, but simple. In school, he was three grades behind, which is to say that he generally spent two years in any one grade, and even so he was always far behind his classmates. Promotions were granted not because he deserved them, but because it would have been cruel to keep him back longer. He sat at the back of the room, and was allowed to draw on tablets throughout the school day, no matter what the rest of the class did. He wasn't called on to answer questions or to read aloud, and when the others took tests, John Robert turned over the page of his tablet, bent down over it, and pretended that he too was in the way of being examined. At recess, John Robert didn't play organized games with the boys because he never quite managed to get the rules straight in his clouded mind, and he hadn't the coordination to jump rope with the girls. Every morning, however, Caroline DeBordenave filled his pockets with candy, and for a few minutes at the beginning of morning recess John Robert was very popular. Boys and girls surrounded him, tickled him, called out his name, and rifled his pockets until there was not a single piece of candy left. Then all the children went away to their games, and John Robert sat sighing on the bench next to his teacher, or on favored days, beat erasers against the side of the building until he and the bricks were white with chalk dust.

In school John Robert was happy, for if he didn't participate in the activities of his bustling schoolmates, the crackling industry of study and play surrounded him constantly. If he might sometimes be lonely, he was never alone. In the summers, however, no one thought of him. His mother still filled his pockets with candy, but that weight dragged on him through the day. By suppertime, the chocolate and the peppermint had melted into one sticky and unappetizing mass. Elizabeth Ann sometimes read to him. She rocked in a chair on the front porch, while he stood beside her with his elbow on the arm so that one whole side of his body moved up and down with the motion. Elizabeth Ann's voice was comfortingly near, but the meaning of the words she read was far away from John Robert.

He was lonelier this summer than ever before. Elizabeth Ann had been given a bicycle for Christmas and every day rode out to Lake Pinchona and took lessons in diving from a boy who was old enough to join the army. She also fed the monkey, and sometimes leaned out the windows of the dance hall and dropped hunks of stale bread down among the blooming water lilies below, hoping to attract the notice of the alligator that swam lazily among the pilings.

But John Robert wasn't permitted to ride a bicycle for fear he would be run down, and he wasn't allowed to go to Lake Pinchona for fear he would fall into the swimming pool and drown or lean too far out the dance hall window and drop down among the lily pads, where the alligator waited for choicer morsels than Elizabeth Ann's stale bread. So John Robert sat on the front steps of his house blinking at the sun, with his pockets filled with melting candy, forever in disappointed expectation of some child running up, calling his name, tickling his ribs, and rifling his pockets.

One day Mary-Love Caskey telephoned Caroline DeBordenave and said, "Caroline, your little boy is lonely. I see him sitting for hours and hours on your front steps, lonesome as an old country graveyard. I am gone send James's Grace over there and keep that child company."

"I wish you would," sighed Caroline. "John Robert doesn't know what to do without school. The summer takes the heart right out of John Robert. Some people are just sensitive to heat, I suppose." Caroline DeBordenave's way of dealing with John Robert's mental infirmity was not to deal with it at all, outwardly. She would attribute his silence, his vacancy, his manifold incapacities to anything but an incurably feeble intellect. But even if she always seemed to deny her son's handicaps, there was a reason that she filled his pockets with candy every day.

So the next morning, just as Grace and Zaddie were beginning their day's elaborate games on Elinor's lattice, the telephone rang in the house, and Elinor appeared a minute later and said, "Grace, Miss Mary-Love wants you over at her house right away."

And Grace went—in a sort of perplexed daze, for it wasn't easy to remember the last time she had been so summoned. Mary-Love sat in the front parlor, and of all surprising things to see on the sofa beside her, there sat John Robert DeBordenave in a new yellow playsuit with half a dozen sticks of peppermint candy protruding from the breast pocket.

"Grace," said Mary-Love, "here is John Robert who I have invited over here to play with you."

"Ma'am?"

"You and John Robert are gone have a good time for the whole summer, I know it."

Grace looked with some misgiving at John Robert, who was smiling timidly and alternately picking first at a button and then at a scab on his knee, about to dislodge both.