BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (36 page)

Miss Elinor still sat upon the bench, though now she leaned against one of the trees and patted the seat beside her in invitation to John Robert to join her.

John Robert hesitated, then with no more concrete reason for going on than there had been for the hesitation, he lifted his foot from the dewy grass and placed it down on the raked sand.

The sand stuck to the soles of his feet as he made his way across the yard. He timidly seated himself by Miss Elinor and looked up into her face. He could no longer make out her expression, however, for the shadow of the tree trunk shaded it into blackness.

John Robert said nothing, but he hummed a blurred little tune and waved his short little legs beneath the wooden plank, kicking up sand. He felt Miss Elinor's arms comfortingly encircling his shoulders. He stared before him at the dark hulk of the levee, and continued to hum.

The boy perceived nothing strange in Miss Elinor's sitting on the bench at such an hour, in her beckoning him, in her silence, or in the tender grip with which she now embraced him. John Robert DeBordenave took notice and affection however and whenever it came, and never questioned its source or motive. He was content to sit and hum and kick his legs in and out of the shadows of the trees, so that now and then a spray of sand fell twinkling like a shower of minuscule stars. And when Miss Elinor rose from the seat beside him and with no apparent effort lifted him up and set him on his feet and pushed him in the direction of the levee, he did not resist her gentle urging for a moment. She walked behind him with her hands on his arms and directed him toward the most advanced point of the levee construction.

The levee-men on this day had upturned their carts of red clay, for the first time, onto Caskey land. Clods of clay had spilled out over Zaddie's rake designs and shone black now on top of the gray sand that gleamed in the moonlight. Tomorrow the men would begin in earnest, and within a week or so the river would no longer be visible from the windows of James Caskey's house. The generous grounds behind the houses would be narrower by twenty-five feet or so.

John Robert was not allowed this close to the river, and obedience being such a habit with him he was uneasy despite the presence of Miss Elinor behind him.

When John Robert stopped, instinctively knowing that he ought to go no farther, Miss Elinor's grip on his arms became suddenly tight and painful. He could no longer move either his arms or his body, so tight was Miss Elinor's hold. He twisted his head around and looked up at her in meek protest.

But it wasn't Miss Elinor's face that returned his gaze. He couldn't see much of it because the moon was hidden directly behind that head, but John Robert could see that it was very flat and very wide and that two large bulbous eyes, glimmering and greenish, protruded from it. It stank of rank water and rotted vegetation and Perdido mud. The hands on John Robert's arms were no longer Miss Elinor's hands. They were much larger, and hadn't fingers or skin at all, but were no more than flat curving surfaces of rubbery webbing.

John Robert turned his face slowly and sadly back to the river. He stared before him at the levee construction and the muddy water that flowed silent and black behind it. What little mind and consciousness the child possessed was being burned away by Miss Elinor's betrayal, by her becoming something else, by her transformation into this terrible thing that held him in its grip. He began to weep, and his tears flowed softly down his cheeks,.

Behind him he heard a little hiss of wetness, as when the belly of a large and still-living fish is slit open with a knife. One of John Robert's arms was raised out from his body, and he continued ta weep.

There was a wrench and a tear, and a jab of pain so violent and strong that John Robert couldn't even identify it as pain. Then the child saw—but did not know what he saw—his own arm tumbling through the moonlight. It landed with a thump on the red clay at the very edge of the Caskey property. The moon shone down upon it, and ten feet away John Robert DeBordenave saw the fingers of his own disembodied hand grasp and squeeze the clods of clay that lay beneath it.

His other arm was raised and wrenched out of its socket. It, too, sailed through the air and landed across the other; this time the palm lay upward so that the clawing fingers clutched nothing but air.

John Robert now felt his body engulfed with warm liquid, and did not know that it was blood. Coherent thought had never come easily to John Robert, and now it had entirely forsaken him. He slumped to the ground, and one of those webby appendages that were not hands at all was pressed against his chest. With a splintering of bone, a stripping of tendon, and a tearing of flesh, first one leg and then the other was twisted all the way around in its socket. John Robert saw them arch through the air and fall twitching on top of his detached, crossed arms.

The last thing that John Robert DeBordenave perceived was the slight whistle of wind in his ears and a light breath of wind across his face as all that was left of him, his trunk and head, were picked up and hurled through the air. He turned and twisted, and saw his own blood streaming from the holes in his body, gleaming in thousands of black droplets in the moonlight. He jerked once when he fell atop the pile of his own limbs, and was conscious for one second more as he saw a sheet of clay and gravel from the top of the levee come sliding down on top of him. A small stone struck his right eye, bursting it open like a spoon plunged into the yolk of an egg. John Robert DeBordenave, his twisting head at last stilled beneath the small avalanche of pebbles and clay, knew no more.

CHAPTER 26
THE DEDICATION

Caroline DeBordenave was frantic for days after her son's disappearance. The noise of the levee-men, which had never bothered her before, seemed to drive directly through her skull now, and she demanded that her husband halt all the work until their boy had been returned to them.

No one had any idea where to begin to look for John Robert. The unlatched screen told how he had got out of the house. His missing pajamas told what he had been wearing, but of his disappearance no one could say more. Teenaged boys bearing stout sticks for defense against rattlesnakes walked through the woods and called his name. People in Baptist Bottom looked under broken-down wagons to see if the white boy had taken shelter there. The mayor of Perdido made a tour of inspection of the marble-floored room beneath the town hall clocks, but John Robert wasn't among the bats and bird-nests up there. Zaddie wriggled around in the crawl spaces beneath the millowners' mansions, but found nothing but rodent nests and spider webs.

After ten days, Caroline DeBordenave had to accept what everyone else in Perdido had known from the beginning: John Robert had drowned in the Perdido. Children in town didn't get bitten by mad dogs or fall down empty well shafts or suffer fatal accidents while playing at. "barbershop" or discharge loaded pistols into their throats. In Perdido, unlucky children drowned in the river, and that was that. Except for the junction, the young members of Per-dido's population led a charmed life. But the river took its sacrifice frequently, and sometimes the bodies were recovered by a fisherman far downstream. Most of the time, even when the dying throes of the girl or boy were witnessed by a dozen little friends, the body was never found. The child was dragged down to the bed of the river and buried there beneath a coverlet of red mud, to sleep undisturbed until the Resurrection should rouse those tiny bare bones to partake in Glory.

The search for John Robert went on longer than any had before. The boy's dim intelligence might have led him someplace other than the Perdido, and Caroline DeBordenave cried out that her son would no more go near that river, having been warned against it all his life, that he would have driven a heated spike through his own hand. The De-Bordenaves, too, were millowners, and their son, feeble in mind and body though he might be, was a personage of importance. And his feebleness made John Robert an object of greater pity than if he had been a ruffian white boy whose father was a drunk, or some untraceable black girl who was only number three of her parents' eight children and had shown not the least aptitude for cooking or laundry.

Despite the intensity of the search and despite Caroline's complaining, work on the levee did not halt. In fact, it hastened. Whatever it was that had held back work on the upper Perdido stopped on the day of John Robert's disappearance. Thereafter, the curtain of earth flew up, rod by rod, and before the Caskeys knew it, the view of the river from each of the three houses was blotted out. Even when Oscar stood on tiptoe on the sleeping porch he couldn't peer over the top of the levee to see the water on the other side. He could scarcely see the tops of the live oaks on the far bank of the Perdido.

Oscar had dreaded this moment, for he knew with what baleful foreboding Elinor had spoken of the time when the river should be obscured from their windows. Elinor surprised him; she hadn't complained, even of the noise and the litter of the workmen. In fact, she sent Zaddie and Roxie out with pitchers of iced tea and lemonade at noon. She hadn't been out of sorts at all. When she wasn't visiting with Queenie and her new little baby, Elinor sat on the porch and rocked in the swing and read magazines and only made little grimaces when occasionally some workman's blasphemy or obscenity sounded clear upon the breeze.

One Sunday afternoon when Oscar and Elinor were together on the upstairs porch, Oscar stood up, went over to the screen, and with a broad gesture pointed far to his left. "They gone take the levee about a hundred yards beyond the town line, just to make sure everything's all right. You never know, the town might grow in that direction and some-body'll want to build out there. But the way they going now, they gone be finished in another two or three weeks." He paused, turned, and looked at his wife, wondering if he had perhaps gone too far. But Elinor continued to rock with perfect placidity. Oscar ventured to remark, "You know, I really used to have the idea that you were gone be upset when the workmen got up this way."

"I thought I was, too," replied Elinor. "But it doesn't do any good to get upset, does it? I couldn't stop the levee all by myself, could I? And didn't you say that you would never get any money from the bank unless the levee was built?"

"That's right. We're all set now," replied Oscar.

Elinor said, with a small embarrassed smile, "I guess I feel a little better about that old levee now."

"What made you change your mind?" Oscar asked curiously.

"I don't know. I guess I thought Early and Mr. Avant were going to cut down all my water oaks, but Early told Zaddie this morning that he would be able to leave every one of my trees standing."

"I don't suppose, though, I'll be able to persuade you to go to the dedication ceremony?"

"Oh, Lord, no!" Elinor laughed gaily. "Oscar, I've already had a little party for the levee."

The levee was finished, and the levee-men were paid off. They dispersed with such rapidity that the five colored women who worked in the kitchens were left with four hundred pounds of beef, and three hundred pounds of pork, and one thousand pounds of potatoes. Eventually, through the largess of the town council, that surplus found its way into the skillets and pots of Baptist Bottom. The dormitories in which the levee-men had lived for nearly two years were swept out, boarded over, and locked tight until some use could be found for the buildings. The last bits of work on the curtains of clay that now protected every square foot of built-up Perdido could easily be accomplished by the twenty black men who remained in Early Haskew's employ.

The two white women who lived in Baptist Bottom returned to Pensacola when their red-light custom evaporated. Lummie Purifoy's gambling hall closed, and his daughter Ruel took up candy-making. The Indians out on Little Turkey Creek closed down two of their five stills. And Perdido, in general, breathed a little easier.

The dedication ceremony, arranged by James Gas-key, was held in the field behind the town hall; a triangular podium had been built in the corner where the upper Perdido levee met the lower Perdido levee. James Caskey made the introductory speech, and the town of Perdido cheered him and the levee. Morris Avant rose and promised that he would sit down at a table and eat the Methodist Church steeple if one drop of riverwater ever appeared on the town side of the levee. Early Haskew got up and claimed that there wasn't a finer town or friendlier people to be found in all of Alabama, and just to prove it he had gone and married Sister Caskey and they were already happier than pigs in sunshine. Tom DeBordenave and Henry Turk and Oscar Caskey then each in turn stood and proclaimed an era of unmitigated prosperity for Perdido on account of the levee. As the audience bowed its head, and the preachers prayed their prayers of dedication to the God of the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians, the downspout in the center of the junction, directly behind the speaker's stand, but invisible to all because of the curtain of clay, swirled the red water of the Perdido and the blacker water of the Blackwater faster than ever, dragging down to the bed of the rivers more detritus, living and inanimate, than it usually did, as if it wished it might draw in the whole town of Perdido—industry and houses and inhabitants and all. But the combined power of those two rivers and the desperate strength of the maelstrom at their junction had no effect on the levees, and the waters flowed and plunged and swirled and eddied and glided on, seen only by those brave and mischievous children who played atop the levees and by those who glanced curiously down into the water from the safety of the bridge spanning the river below the Osceola Hotel.

Perdido was no longer the same town, so much of Elinor Caskey's prediction had proved true. Perdido no longer saw the rivers that had given the town much of its character, except when it promenaded along the levee or crossed from downtown over into Baptist Bottom. Now Perdido saw the levee, the newer parts of it still red, but the first-built parts now covered over with the dusty deep green of the kudzu vine.