BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (46 page)

Carl cried out, but the cry was strangled as his lung filled with blood.

One side of him remained whole but the other was squeezed into a third of its former space.

With a similar motion, Elinor brought the appendage that was not a hand down on Carl's other shoulder. She pressed it swiftly toward the earth.

Carl's face gaped up at her. His whole body was mangled, nearly all the bones dislocated, ligaments torn, organs displaced. The backbone remained intact, but it served only to curve him into the shape of a ball. He was half as tall as before. Instinctively he attempted to straighten himself, to stand up, but his body of course could not obey. Only his neck stretched upward a bit and his battered chin lifted into the night air.

Suddenly, Elinor dropped down before him, but the motion was not that of a woman squatting, or falling to her knees. It was the movement of some other sort of creature entirely. Carl heard Elinor's dress tear in a dozen places, as if it no longer fit the body that it encased. Her face was only a foot from his, and in the darkness he could see that her countenance had become wide and flat and round; the eyes bulged, and were huge; her mouth was monstrous, lipless, and it hissed wetly in a grin that had nothing human about it.

Her arms were once more lifted on either side of him. He gasped and winced against the blow that he was certain would kill him. But the blow did not come, only darkness, and the overpowering odor of burlap.

She was drawing the croker sack over his body.

Carl prayed for death, but death did not come. Neither did unconsciousness. Though his body below the neck seemed a continuing explosion of pain, his head maintained an unmerciful clarity through it all.

The pain, he considered, could not be worse, not in a thousand deaths, not in a thousand years of hell.

But Carl was wrong; the pain did become worse, for he was suddenly jerked up into the air inside the croker sack, and carried along upside down. The sack didn't drag the earth, or strike against Elinor's knees, so she must have been carrying him in one hand, and at arm's length. But what woman—what man— was as strong as that? Carl's brain filled with blood. His broken limbs dropped down around his head inside the croker sack until he was stifled with them. The fragments of his left arm were smothering him. Carl Strickland had been a big man, and now he was being carried along in a sack that wouldn't have properly held his own daughter.

The confusion of broken limbs that pressed against his face didn't smother him quickly enough, for his consciousness lasted long enough for him to realize that he was being carefully carried into the river. Elinor waded slowly into the water. At the top of his head, he perceived the river water permeating the burlap. Then more strongly, pressing the fabric against his ear, he felt the current of the river. Its ever stronger odor invaded the close confines of the sack, and he tasted the mud of the Perdido as water began to fill the bag and pour into his mouth.

It wasn't the torn arteries, the punctured lungs, the ruptured organs, or the shattered bones that killed Queenie's husband. Carl Strickland drowned in Perdido water.

CHAPTER 34
The Caskey Conscience

On the night that Carl Strickland fired wantonly into Oscar Caskey's house, the sheriff of Perdido was having a drink with friends across the state line in Florida. By the time that Charley Key returned to Perdido and heard about Carl Strickland's rampage, the Caskeys were surveying the damage. Key entered the house, gave a low whistle, looked at Oscar and said, "Mr. Strickland did this? You positive?"

"Yes," replied Oscar grimly.

"Is he still out there?"

"No, he's gone."

"How you know that for sure?"

Zaddie was on the stairs, sweeping glass and splinters down, step by step. Elinor came out of the kitchen, holding her bandaged daughter in her arms. Frances, pale and distracted, clung tightly to her mother's neck.

"I know it for sure," said Oscar, "because Elinor went out the front and sneaked around to the levee."

"I saw him take his guns and climb over the levee, and get in a boat," Elinor added with no particular friendliness toward the sheriff. "But he must have been drunk because the boat turned over in the water."

"Miz Caskey, you were foolish to go out there! Look at what he did in here. You might have got yourself shot!" cried Sheriff Key.

"I had a gun," Elinor said coldly. "And the fact was, we didn't see the law crawling all over the house trying to protect us. Oscar was firing at Carl from our window, and I went out to get him from behind."

"Did you shoot?"

"I didn't have to. The river got him. Sheriff," Elinor went on, laying ironic stress upon the title, "Oscar and I appreciate your dropping by—and we're glad you waited till most of the excitement was over, earlier we wouldn't have had much of a chance to speak—but could you excuse us now, please? I've got to finish bandaging my little girl."

"We're gone drag that river," said Charley Key importantly. "We're gone take care of Carl Strickland!" •

"Charley," Oscar reminded him, "that's exactly what I asked you to do a few weeks ago, but you couldn't be bothered. You didn't want to do me any favors. Well, right now, Queenie Strickland, still black and blue, is upstairs crying in the bedroom. My little girl here is all cut up with glass. Our house has every damn window in it broken. And Carl Strickland is spinning round and round in the junction. Why don't you just go home and get some sleep?"

Zaddie swept a large pile of splintered wood and shattered glass between the balusters, and it fell to the hallway below with a musical crash and a cloud of dust.

Frances refused to return to the front room that night. Elinor was about to insist, but Zaddie interceded for the child. "Miss El'nor, she still scairt. Let her sleep with me."

"You don't have more than a three-quarter bed, Zaddie!"

"I don't care, Mama!" cried Frances desperately, and was reluctantly allowed to sleep in the room behind the kitchen. It was made clear to her, however, that this indulgence was solely on account of Carl Strickland's attack.

Toward dawn, when the house was quiet again, and the children were asleep, Elinor and Oscar lay awake in their bed. A breeze off the river—smelling of both the water and the red clay of the levee—blew through the windows that had been shattered by Carl Strickland's gunfire.

"Can't sleep, Oscar?"

"No, I cain't."

"Because of the excitement?"

"Yes, partly. I was thinking, Elinor."

"Thinking what?"

"Thinking that what you told old Charley Key was a lie."

"Course it was a lie," returned Elinor quickly. "You think I'm going to waste the truth on that nincompoop?"

"What happened out there with you and Carl?"

Elinor didn't immediately reply. She turned over in the bed and put her arm across Oscar's chest.

"What do you think happened, Oscar?"

Oscar lay still a few moments. The dawn dimly lighted the room now.

"I don't know," said Oscar. "What you told Charley Key was a lie—you didn't have a gun. When you came back into the house, your nightgown was dripping river water. Your bare feet had Perdido mud on 'em. I knew you had been in the water, because when you walked back in the house, you brought the smell of that river back here with you. How you're ever gone be able to wear that gown again, I don't know."

Elinor snuggled closer to Oscar's side in the bed. She wound her arm around him and pressed her foot against his feet.

"Carl is dead," she said in a low voice. "I saw him drowned."

"I believe you," said Oscar. He lay staring at the ceiling. His arms were crossed behind his head on the pillow. "I wish," he went on, "that when I was shooting out the window here, that I had blown Carl's head off. That's what I wish. He was firing at this house! He could have hit Frances or you or Queenie or any of us. I would have walloped his head off if I could have gotten close enough. Elinor?"

"What?"

"Did you cause Carl Strickland to die?"

She rubbed her thumb against his neck. "Yes."

"I thought so," said Oscar, in a low sad voice. "How'd you do it? How'd you get close enough to him without him shooting you?"

Elinor drew her leg across Oscar's legs and pressed her foot beneath his ankles. She was wound tightly around him.

"What if I tell you?" she said. "Will you be mad?"

"Lord, no," he said softly. "I just said that
I
would have done it if I could have."

"It was dark," said Elinor. Her head was next to his on the pillow, and she spoke softly in his ear. "He couldn't see me. I swam under the water and overturned his boat as he was going across."

"Did he fight you?"

"No, he didn't even know I had done it," said Elinor.

"Were you trying to kill him?"

"Not really," said Elinor. "I just wanted to get those guns of his wet so it would ruin them. But he panicked once he was in the water. I saw him struggling, then I saw him drown."

"Did you try to save him then?"

"No," said Elinor. "I can't say that I did. Are you upset? Do you think I should have tried?"

"No, no," sighed Oscar. "I think you did just right. I just wish you hadn't had to do it. Is this gone be on your conscience?"

"I don't think so," said Elinor.

"Good," said Oscar, " 'cause it shouldn't be. Carl brought this on himself. If you hadn't done it, it would only be a matter of time before he came back and killed one of us—Queenie, probably. She was the one he was really aiming for, I guess. It beats hell out me how some people can get matched up so badly. Poor old Queenie. She'll probably be glad to know Carl's gone. I don't think we should tell her that you killed him, though."

"Oscar, do you think badly of me? You know, some husbands might object to their wives going out in the night and killing people."

Oscar gave a short little laugh. "Not me. At least not until you start making a habit of it."

"You seem a little upset, though."

"I am," said Oscar. "It should have been me that went out and killed him, not you. I should have it on my conscience."

"How would you have done it?" laughed Elinor. "Oscar, you know you couldn't hit the levee with the rifle if you were standing twenty feet away. And you know you wouldn't go swimming in the Perdido in the middle of the night. It had to be me."

"I suppose. But listen, Elinor, if there's got to be any more killing in this family, you let me handle it for now on, you hear? Now, are you ready to try to get some sleep?"

"Not yet," she whispered.

Elinor had bathed, and her nightgown was fresh, but in that dawn following the death of Carl Strickland, Oscar found that the smell of the river was still caught in his wife's hair and in her limbs twined around his body.

Early the next morning, Bray and Oscar carried Queenie Strickland in a folding chair up to the top of the levee. Elinor brought her an umbrella against the sun, and then, joined by Zaddie, Frances, and Queenie's children, the entire household settled in to watch the dragging operation.

Within half an hour the state police came up with Carl's three rifles, which were identified by Queenie and Malcolm. Nothing could be found of Carl.

"Queenie," said James, who had joined the group on the levee, and now stood sympathetically at Queenie's side, "I'm so sorry."

"What for? What for, James?" cried Queenie. "Do you see what that man did to me? Do you know I may limp for the rest of my life? Do you know that I may be blind in one eye? Carl Strickland broke every single window in the back of Elinor and Oscar's house! It was a miracle nobody was killed. Have you seen the cuts on Frances's face?" Queenie held the umbrella above her head, twirling it in her agitation.

In the course of the morning, most of the rest of Perdido climbed the levee and walked along it to where Queenie sat watching the highway patrol and Sheriff Key in their boats below. Everyone knew that it was probably a pointless operation to drag the river. The current was swift, and the junction an inexorable maelstrom from which bodies were almost never recovered. Carl Strickland, though, had been a criminal, and it had been thought a good idea to attempt to prove his death.

Mary-Love made a brief appearance, hand-in-hand with Miriam. "Queenie," she said, "why'd you bring that man to town? Why didn't you leave him in Nashville? He was shooting off those guns at night! He could have got his aim wrong and shot my precious little Miriam in her room next door!"

"Those guns woke me up!" added Miriam in a petulant parenthesis.

"Mary-Love, I tell you, I didn't do it on purpose..."

"I sure hope they find him down there. Then we could be sure he'll never be coming back here again. I don't think Miriam and I got one wink of sleep after your husband started firing those guns! Just the echoes were hurting my ears!"

"I hope they find him too," said Queenie. She reached into the pocket of her dress and clacked together the two silver coins there. "Mary-Love, I want to see that man laid out on the bank of the river, and when I do, I'm gone slide right down this levee. See, I got these two quarters for Carl Strickland's eyes..."

Carl Strickland's body never was found, and there was no doubt in anyone's mind that he had drowned. His automobile was found parked in the live oak grove, his guns lay on the bed of the river, fragments of his boat washed up against the side of the levee down below the junction. At school Malcolm told prideful stories of his father's attempt to murder them all: "He was aiming right at my head, but I ducked! I wasn't gone let him shoot me!" Lucille pretended grief in order to be excused from participating in unwanted class activities.

The third day's dragging was desultory; only one policeman with a metal hook was being slowly propelled about by Bray in his boat. Queenie, watching from the levee, said to Ivey Sapp, who had brought up a pitcher of iced tea: "What do you think I ought to do about these quarters, Ivey? You think I should hold on to 'em?"

"Mr. Carl ain't gone be coming back, Miss Queenie."