BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (28 page)

And indeed the day soon came that Mary-Love had feared and Sister had hoped for—when Sister was proven to be right and Mary-Love was shown to be wrong.

It was a particularly hot day in August. Sister and Early had driven far out into the country, over toward Dixie Landing on the Alabama River to a clay quarry that was of interest to Early. He and Sister had left Bray with the automobile at the single store at Dixie Landing. With sandwiches and a bottle of milk in a basket, they set out along a faint track in the pine forest. They found the quarry, and as Sister sat on a tolerably clean outcropping of sand-stone Early climbed all about the pit, getting himself quite red and dusty in the process. "It won't do," was his judgment.

After this inspection, instead of returning directly to the car, they climbed over the lip of the quarry and went down the other side to Brickyard Lake. This was a wide shallow depression of blue water in a vast green pasture in sight of the wide gray Alabama River. In contrast to the river they saw before them, and in contrast to the rivers that wound through Perdido, the water of Brickyard Lake was extraordinarily blue and beautiful. There was a solitary clump of cypress on the near margin of the lake, and as Sister and Early made their way down to it, intending to picnic in its shade, they discovered first that the ground was too soggy to allow pleasant picnicking, and second that there was a little boat, with two oars inside, tethered to a tree. As was the custom in that part of Alabama, they requisitioned the craft for their own pleasure.

"I made cookies, too," said Sister, as she climbed into the boat.

Early rowed out toward the center of the lake. A kingfisher screeched in the branches of the cypress, and then swooped down into the water not twenty feet from them.

"Do I snore?" asked Early suddenly, after they had glided along several minutes in silence.

"You sure do," replied Sister energetically.

"Mama used to say I did. Does it keep you awake, though?"

"Sometimes," said Sister. "But I don't mind. I can always take a nap if I'm tired in the afternoon."

"You're at the other end of the hall."

"Yes," said Sister, unwrapping a sandwich for him and reaching forward with it. "But, Early, once you get going, you are pretty loud."

He set the oars behind him and took the sandwich.

He ate it so quickly that he was finished before Sister had even taken the first bite out of hers.

"I was starved."

"You should have said something. We didn't have to wait."

"But what if you were in the same room?"

Sister's mouth was full. She cocked her head, to indicate What?

"If we were in the same room," said Early, "you wouldn't be able to sleep at all because of my snoring." He seemed troubled by this thought.

Sister continued to eat her sandwich.

"So you wouldn't, would you?" asked Early, casting down his eyes.

"Wouldn't what?"

"Wouldn't want to get married?"

Sister gobbled up the last of her sandwich. "Early Haskew, is that what you have been going on about?"

"Yes, what'd you think?"

"I couldn't begin to imagine. Who cares if you snore? Daddy used to snore all the time. And he's been dead twenty years. What I mean is, it obviously didn't hurt Mama any, since she's outlived him that long."

"So you will think about marrying me? Sister, you got another sandwich?" Pleasure and happy expectation appeared to increase Early's appetite.

Sister reached in her basket and brought out another. "On one condition," she said.

"What's that?"

"That we don't live with Mama."

"Is that why you would say yes to marrying me, to get away from Miss Mary-Love? Miss Mary-Love has been very good to me."

"Miss Mary-Love is not your mama. Early, I am gone marry you because I am in love with you, and for no other reason in the world. Except that it would give me a good deal of satisfaction to leave Mama high and dry."

Early Haskew put the oars of the boat back in the water and rowed around the edge of Brickyard Lake three times. He would have done it again but Sister reminded him that Bray was probably starting to get nervous.

In the course of the walk from the lake back to Dixie Landing, Sister smiled a secret smile of pride that she had engineered the engagement herself, without the help of Ivey and Ivey's spell-casting. She regretted that she had ever so much doubted her own power as to have gone to Ivey in the first place.

Then her smile of pride faded. Sister saw that, after a manner, the spell had worked. Ivey had sacrificed a chicken and torn out its heart. Sister had spoken words over that heart, pierced it five times with steel, and had inhaled the smoke of its burning. Now she was engaged to Early Haskew. There was no way that she could bestow all the credit on herself.

It could have been the heart of that hen—and the steel and the words and the burning smoke—that accomplished the deed.

How could she ever know for certain?

CHAPTER 20
QUEENIE

Early intended to tell Mary-Love Caskey that very evening of his engagement to her daughter, but Sister cautioned against this course. "Mama's gone make trouble, or at least she's gone try."

"Why?" asked Early simply. "I thought your mama liked me."

"Of course she does. But not in the person of a son-in-law. Mama wouldn't approve of my intended if he was the King of the Jews dropped down on the front steps with a shoebox full of diamonds. Mama is not gone want to let me go, that's all."

"Sister, I don't mind trouble. I can stand up to your mama."

They were still making their way through the woods from Brickyard Lake toward the Landing, where Bray waited with the automobile. They had spent hours on the water in their borrowed boat and now the sun was in its decline. The woods were shadowed, but the sunlight now and then broke through the tops of the trees and blinded them for a moment as they walked along hand in hand.

"Of course you can, Early. That's not the point. I'm thinking about the levee."

"How you mean?"

"I mean, I think you ought to finish off all your plans and get everything set before we tell Mama anything. 'Cause there's bound to be trouble, and if there's trouble, then you won't get your work done like you should. Besides, you couldn't rightly go away on a honeymoon with me if you hadn't finished what you had set out to do, could you?"

"I could not," said Early stoutly, proud that his fiancee should see the thing in so responsible, practical, and—when it came down to it—so masculine a perspective.

For a time nothing was said. Sister told Ivey of the engagement. To Sister's relief Ivey said only, "I'm so happy for you, Sister!" and made no mention of the buried chicken. Everything continued as before, except that Sister, having reached her goal, spent less time with Early. Mary-Love grew complacent, and imagined a cooling between the two. Sister, she thought, had at last been discouraged by Early's inattentiveness to her.

Early was working harder, knowing that when he had completed the plans he would have not only the cash bonus promised by James Caskey, but Sister's hand in marriage. From the back pages of a periodical he purchased at the pharmacy he cut out an advertisement and sent away for a patented guaranteed cure for snoring. Every day he expectantly awaited its arrival. He once had heard his mother say that she had almost abandoned his father on account of his nocturnal wheezings and snufflings, and he had no wish to take any such chances with Sister when they should share the same bed.

Summer gradually and grudgingly gave way to autumn. Across the Caskey property the wind blew sometimes chill and damp across the Perdido, but the leathery leaves of the water oaks remained in place on the twigs and branches of the ever-taller trees. Moss grew on the trunks, and tiny stunted ferns sprouted in the crotches of the roots, and Zaddie in a long woolen sweater went out early every morning and raked patterns in the sand.

On an afternoon in the early part of October Bray appeared in James Caskey's office, and said, "Mr. James, Miss Mary-Love wants you home right now."

"Bray, I'm coming," said James, and he got up from his desk and walked out of the office without a moment's hesitation. The last time his presence had been so commanded was the afternoon that Elinor had sent his wife away to her death.

"What is it?" said James as he got into the car.

"I don't know," said Bray, who knew perfectly well, but whose instructions had been to say nothing. James understood this, and asked no more questions, although he was very much disturbed. When Bray drew up before Mary-Love's house, James ran up to the front porch, wondering if Grace had been hit on the head with a falling timber in the collapse of her schoolroom roof.

"James!" said Mary-Love in her most musical tone. "We're out here on the porch!"

James stopped dead. Mary-Love's voice bore no hint whatever of disaster, yet there was something in its sweetness, coupled with his summons from the mill and the directive to Bray to say nothing to him, that put James on his guard as if Mary-Love had called out, Hurry up, James! the most awful thing has happened!

He slowly mounted the steps, then opened the screened door on to the porch. It was more crowded than usual: Mary-Love sat on the glider with Early Haskew next to her. Sister was on the swing with a little girl beside her. And on the other glider, the one with the chenille blanket thrown over it, sat James's sister-in-law Queenie Strickland and Queenie's son, Malcolm. Malcolm was picking the threads out of a chenille rose. James had not seen any of the Stricklands since his wife's funeral.

"James, I'm so glad you could get away," said Mary-Love. "Queenie came all the way from Nashville to see us!"

Queenie Strickland, who was short and dimpled with bobbed hair that was dyed a shiny black, jumped up and barreled her way toward James, crying out, "Oh, Lord, James Caskey, don't you miss her!"

"I do, I—" But he could say no more, for Queenie had grabbed him around his narrow waist and squeezed the breath right out of him.

"Genevieve was the light of my life! I am miserable without her! I came down to see if you were dead of grief yet!" She released James for a moment and pointed to the glider. "You remember my boy, Malcolm, he was prostrated at his aunt's funeral, say hello to James Caskey, your sweet uncle, boy!"

"Hey, Uncle James," said Malcolm sullenly, and managed at that moment to pick a hole through the chenille spread with his thumbnail.

"And that's my preciousest girl, Lucille, who came down with mumps on the day our darling died and wanted something desperate to come to the funeral but I wouldn't let her even though I had to put her in the hospital in order to get down here in time and one nurse told me she had never heard a child carry on the way that child carried on 'cause she couldn't come to her Aunt Genevieve's funeral!"

Lucille appeared to be about three years old, so she could not have been more than two when Ge-nevieve died. That seemed very young to show such a great interest in the obsequies of even one's closest relatives. However, as if on cue, Lucille burst into tears in the swing, and pulled away with beating fists when Sister attempted to put an arm around her for comfort.

James drew back from Queenie, who had lifted her short arms with the apparent intention of embracing him again. He felt distinctly as if he had fallen into a trap. He looked from Queenie to Mary-Love, as if wondering which of them had been responsible for laying this snare in his unobservant path.

"Well, Queenie," said James after a moment, "did Carl come down here with you?"

Queenie clapped the flat of her hand against her breast, as if to still the sudden beating of her injured heart.

"You have wounded me in speaking of that man!" cried Queenie, staggering backward and waving her other hand carefully behind her to make certain she did not trip over anything.

James stood very still, and was almost certain that he had just stepped into a second pitfall.

Queenie staggered all the way back to the glider, and fell into it heavily. She sat on Malcolm's hand, causing the boy to squeal. He made a great show of his difficulty in extricating his hand from beneath his mother's bulk, then wiggled his fingers to see if they were broken. When he judged them whole, he bunched them into a fist and punched his mother's thigh, but she took no notice at all.

"Mr. Haskew," cried Queenie, "I am sorry!"

"It's all right," said Early automatically, though neither he nor anyone else had any idea why Queenie Strickland should beg his pardon.

"You are not family," said Queenie in explanation. "You should not be burdened with the Strickland family troubles."

"You want me to go inside?" said Early amiably, already getting to his feet.

"You sit down," said Mary-Love in a low voice. Then she said more loudly, "Miz Strickland, if you are gone talk family trouble, then I would suggest that you send away these children. I don't particularly want to hear Strickland family tribulations myself, but I certainly don't feel they are fit for the ears of your little boy and your little girl."

"I will not!" cried Queenie. "These children know as much as I do! They have suffered as I have suffered! Has your father beat you, Malcolm Strickland?" she said, turning to her son as if in cross-examination.

"I'll beat him!" cried Malcolm belligerently, and he punched his mother's thigh again.

"Has he touched your pretty angel face, Lucille Strickland?" said Queenie.

Queenie's daughter, who had only just subsided from her previous eruption, suddenly threw her hands up to her face and burst once more into loud sobbing. Sister attempted to draw her hands away, but Lucille wailed so loudly that Sister allowed the tiny hands to snap back into position, so that at least the cries were muffled.

"Carl Strickland," said Queenie in a low, awful voice, "laid his hands on my body. My dress covers the bruises. I would not have you see them for the world. If I had stayed with that man, people in Nashville would have held my name dog-cheap. I will reveal to y'all the greatest mistake that I ever made in my entire life. I will say it out to you, even though there is one of you here who is of no relation whatsoever..." Here she gazed at Early Haskew, and then glanced over the porch in a general sort of way. "I got into the wrong pew with that man."