BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (40 page)

In despair, she went to her grandmother and explained her dilemma. Contrary to Miriam's expectations, Mary-Love was by no means angry with her. "You mean to tell me, Miriam darling, that that little girl next door is gone beat you out—and you're in the second grade and she's in the first?"

"James and Grace bought so many, Grandmama. And they wouldn't buy a single seal from me!"

"They wouldn't? And they bought from Frances?"

Miriam nodded glumly. "I hate Frances!"

"I am not gone let Elinor Caskey's child beat you out. How much has she sold so far? Do you kfnow?"

"Thirty-five dollars and thirty-five cents."

"And how much have you sold?"

"Three dollars and ten cents."

"And when is the contest over?"

"Day after tomorrow."

"All right, then," said Mary-Love, lowering her voice. "I tell you what, Miriam. After school tomorrow, you go find out if Frances has sold any more. Then you bring me her total, you understand?"

And on the final day of the sale of the Christmas seals, Miriam Caskey brought in forty-two dollars, an astounding sum considering that everybody in Perdido had drawersful of the things by now, and that up to that point Miriam had brought in no more than three dollars. When her teacher asked her who in the world had bought so many, Miriam replied, "I knocked on every door in town. I near 'bout walked my legs off."

The Caskey sisters came in first and second in the contest, but Miriam beat her sister by almost seven dollars. Miriam won a Bible with six illustrations in color and all of Jesus's words printed in red. Frances got a box of Whitman's candy.

After the presentation of the awards, Frances opened her box of candy and offered it to her sister, telling her to take as much of it as she wanted. But as Miriam bit into the largest piece she could find, liquid cherry squirted out over the front of her starched dress. "Ugh!" she cried, "it's your fault, Frances! Look at me now!" And with a fling of her hand she knocked the box out of Frances's grasp, spilling all the chocolates into the dirt of the schoolyard.

The rivalry that appeared to exist between the estranged sisters was emblematic of the much greater rivalry that had risen between Elinor Caskey and her mother-in-law, Mary-Love. Through those two little girls was played out, in distorting miniature, the passion that characterized the relationship of their mother and grandmother. Mary-Love was the undisputed head of the Caskey family, having acceded to that position upon the death of her husband many years before. No one had challenged her authority before the arrival in Perdido of Elinor Dammert. With single-minded energy that had matched Mary-Love's own best weapons, Elinor had arranged to be courted by and married to Mary-Love's only son, Oscar.

The two women had quite different styles. Elinor didn't have Mary-Love's bluster; her ways were more insidious. Elinor bided her time; her strokes were quick, clean, and always unexpected. Mary-Love knew this, and in the last few years she had grown restive, as if waiting for the blow that would topple her. Mary-Love's antipathy toward her daughter-in-law had grown strident and unbecoming. Perdido talked, and the talk was always against Mary-Love. It was one thing to disapprove of a son's wife; it was another to make that dislike so widely known. Mary-Love eventually had come to see that it simply would not do to give Elinor battle directly. Elinor remained cool, always seeming to contemplate the skirmish beyond the one that hotly occupied Mary-Love. Elinor gave way strategically, and then flashed her sword just at the moment that Mary-Love was raising her arm to claim victory. Like a palsied general, Mary-Love decided to retire from the field, but did not give up the war.

In her granddaughter Miriam, Mary-Love had an eager, conscienceless, and bloodthirsty little soldier. And Frances, Elinor's representative, was a sickly enemy—timid and weaponless. A skirmish between the sisters would incontestably give the victory to Mary-Love's side. Daily, Mary-Love wrapped up her granddaughter in her prettiest dresses and shiniest shoes, kissed her on the cheek, and whispered, "Give no quarter..."

There was no satisfaction, however, for either Miriam or her grandmother, in these easy victories, because Frances didn't fight at all. She looked around with puzzlement, not even realizing that she had wandered onto a field of battle. If she had seen fit, Elinor might have instructed her daughter in matters of combat and strategy, but Elinor had done nothing. Perdido talked about the two little girls, as before they had talked about Elinor and Mary-Love. Perdido's conclusion was that Miriam was disagreeable and much too big for her britches, and that Frances was as sweet as sweet could be. That said something about the two households in which the children were reared.

Thus, by sending out her emissary unarmed, unprepared, and even ignorant of the fact that war had been declared, Elinor had gained the day. How long would it be, Mary-Love wondered uncomfortably, before Elinor stormed the citadel itself, and claimed supremacy over the Caskey clan? Why had she not done it yet? If she waited for a sign or portent, what was it? How might Mary-Love prepare herself against that inevitable day? And when the two women came to do battle, what casualties would be borne bloody and broken from the field of conflict?

CHAPTER 29
The Coins in Queenie's Pocket

Queenie Strickland, after a tumultuous appearance in Perdido six years earlier, had settled down. She and her children had taken on a greater identity than mere penurious offshoots of the Caskeys. It was generally known in Perdido that Queenie's third child Daniel Joseph—universally called Danjo from the hour of his birth—was the result of a rape committed on Queenie by her estranged husband. It had also become generally known that Danjo's father was no good, that Queenie wanted no reconciliation, and that Danjo was much better off growing up without even having seen so much as a photograph of his father.

Queenie had gained a reputation in Perdido of being a sponger. The designation, though accurate, was repugnant to her. Shortly after the birth of her third child, she announced to James that she intended to seek employment. James, not wishing anyone else in town shouldering a burden he considered his own, appointed her his personal secretary. His sense of responsibility toward his unfortunate and indigent sister-in-law was greater than his doubt as to the extent of her clerical abilities and his misgivings as to what their daily propinquity at the mill office would be like.

In the summer of 1925 James had sent Queenie to Pensacola to take a typing course at the mechanics college there and thereby gave her a much needed rest from the demands of Malcolm, Lucille, and little Danjo. James would not have these rambunctious children in his own home, filled as it was with much that was fragile and valuable, but instead sent Grace over to Queenie's to care for them there.

When Queenie returned, she was proficient at the typewriter, and in a short time she became indispensable to her brother-in-law, providing pencils, advice, coffee, a sympathetic ear, and freedom from obtrusive callers. She proved her worth, both in her official and private capacities, far beyond anything James Caskey could have imagined, and Queenie quickly came to know everything there was to know concerning the running of the Caskey mill. Since Queenie was close to Elinor, Elinor in turn learned what little her husband had not already told her. Queenie had long before been trained as Elinor's spy, and she retained that position now.

Queenie's intimacy with James Caskey and Elinor helped her to feel more secure and thus she became calmer. During her first year or so in Perdido she had not hesitated to employ a gushing hypocrisy to get what she wanted; she had mooned over James's crystal, echoed Elinor's decrying of the levee construction, and nodded vigorously at the list of the wrongs Mary-Love perceived had been made against her. She learned how quickly all this had been seen through by the Caskeys, and now she took great care to examine her own feelings on any matter and always expressed those feelings cautiously. Honesty in this case proved by far the best policy, though Queenie employed truthfulness exactly as she had employed hypocrisy—as a means to an end, and not as a thing to be appreciated for itself.

Although her principal struggle had apparently been won—Carl Strickland remaining mercifully absent from the scene—Queenie experienced her share of trials. These usually involved her children, and centered mostly on Malcolm, her eldest. He was ten, in the fourth grade, and prone to many minor mischiefs. He broke windows in abandoned houses, pocketed small items at the Ben Franklin store, and went swimming in the upper Perdido, where he was in some danger of being sucked down to the junction and drowned. He threw sand through the screens of Miss Elinor's kitchen in order to annoy Zaddie Sapp. He knocked his teacher's plants off the windowsill for the pleasure of hearing the pots smash on the pavement below. He threw potatoes at little girls. He stole his friends' marbles. He was loud and raucous. He insulted every Negro child who crossed his path, and he continued to indulge every opportunity of punching his brother and his sister in the stomach. Every time the telephone rang in James's office Queenie feared it would be another call complaining of Malcolm's behavior.

Eight-year-old Lucille was easier on her mother's nerves, but still caused Queenie a fair amount of grief. Lucille was sneaky, although Queenie would never voice this appraisal of her daughter, even to Elinor. Lucille lied when it suited her purpose. Lucille couldn't be tucked into bed without her whispering in her mother's ear some wrong she had suffered at her brother's hand. If she decided she needed a new pair of shoes, she wasn't above climbing the levee—against all orders—and deliberately kicking one of her best patent leathers into the muddy water of the Perdido and therewith validating her desire.

For the third child, four-year-old Danjo, Queenie held great hope. He was remarkably different from his siblings; he was everything they were not. He was calm, quiet, truthful, pleasant, and well behaved. It was as if his whole being had been sobered by an intuitive knowledge of the unhappy circumstances of his conception. He was the only one of Queenie's children James would allow into his house, the only one Mary-Love would stoop down and kiss, and the only one Elinor invited to sit beside her on the swing. Danjo acted as if he lived only by the generous sufferance of the whole world, and that if he performed any untoward act or spoke any unsuitable word he would be picked up by one hundred hands and mercilessly hurled into the river. It was generally considered a point in Banjo's favor that neither his sister nor his brother liked him. During his nightly bath, Queenie generally found some new bruise or pinch mark that had been surreptitiously administered by either Malcolm or Lucille. The teachers in the school sighed in relief as Malcolm passed on up a grade, bore with stony resignation the presence of untrustworthy Lucille, and all sighed the same thought: Lord, I can hardly wait till I get that precious child Danjo Strickland! After Malcolm and Lucille I will have earned him!

Of her husband's doings, whereabouts, and condition Queenie had heard absolutely nothing. She thought there was a strong possibility that since he had not showed up again he was being prevented from doing so by the interposition of iron bars and prison walls. Whatever the case, Queenie knew that she would be protected from Carl by James and Oscar, who had come to her aid before, but still she always feared being taken by surprise. At night her house was locked tighter than any other home in Perdido, and an intruder might have got into the Perdido bank with greater ease at the same hour. When Queenie sat on her front porch she always had an escape route should she see Carl come walking down the street. Every strange automobile pulling up before the house caused her trepidation. She dreaded the postman because he might be delivering a message from Carl. She hated to pick up the telephone at home for fear Carl's voice would greet her on the other end.

But all her precautions were of no avail; when Carl did return, Queenie was wholly unprepared for the hour and the manner of his arrival.

He was simply sitting on her porch one afternoon when she came home from work. Danjo was held an unhappy captive on his father's lap. Lucille and Malcolm stood inside the safety of the house, wildly gesticulating to their mother through the screen door.

"Ma!" cried Malcolm in a stage whisper as she came up the steps, "we locked the door. We wouldn't let him inside."

"Hey, Queenie," said Carl softly, "how you?"

He was wearing a suit, and looked uncomfortable in it.

Queenie suddenly felt herself borne down with the weight of the world. She realized how happy she had been for the past five years, how she hadn't known a moment of real disquietude, had never gone without money or company or—she was astonished to think it for the first time—respect. With the reappearance of her husband in Perdido, all of that instantly vanished.

"What you doing back here, Carl?"

"Came to see you, Queenie. Where'd this here boy come from?"

Queenie didn't answer.

"Been lonesome, Queenie?" he asked with a leer.

"No," she returned. "Not one single little bit." She waved Malcolm and Lucille away from the door. They retreated a few steps, but returned almost immediately as soon as their mother's back was turned. Queenie seated herself in the rocker across from Carl. "Give me my baby," she said.

"Whose baby is he?"-said Carl, not letting go of Danjo.

"He's yours."

"You sure, Queenie? Maybe you made a mistake."

"I didn't make any mistake. Danjo, come here."

Carl said, "Kiss your daddy."

Danjo wriggled out of Carl's grasp and fled to his mother's lap.

"Where you been?" asked Queenie. She didn't look at her husband, but stared out across the street.

"Here and there."

"What pen were you in?"

"Tallahassee." He grinned.

"What for this time?"

"Never you mind."

Queenie was silent a moment, then she said, "Carl, I want you to go away. Me and Malcolm and Lucille and Danjo don't need you. We don't want you."