BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (53 page)

Back at bedside, he assured her, "I'll turn it back on in a minute. I just wanted to make sure you heard what I was going to say."

He paused, waiting for some indication that she had heard, or that she assented to his continuing. None came, but Oscar felt that he had to proceed.

"Mama, I'm real sorry you're sick. The only good thing about your being sick is that you're letting Elinor and me take care of you. You know what that shows, don't you? It shows nobody's upset anymore. Elinor wouldn't do everything she's doing for you if she were still mad at you, would she? She wouldn't spend all day up here every day. She wouldn't sleep in here at night. Mama, I just want you to know that I'm not mad anymore either. I'm not even thinking about the things that made me mad. I just want you to get well. By the time everybody comes back from Chicago, I want you back in your own house, fussing. I want you to get mad because everybody went away and left you here by yourself. But I tell you something, I'm glad they did, because it means Elinor and I have got the chance to prove how much we really do love you. That's what I wanted to make sure you heard me say. Just because I'm not being your nurse doesn't mean I don't care, because I do. I just wouldn't know what to do in here. See, I cain't even look at you and make sure you're hearing what I'm saying. I wouldn't know what medicine was what, and that's why Elinor is doing all this and not me. Elinor is being better than I thought she could be, Mama. Now, doesn't it make you want to cry that you two have not been getting along all these years? You know what? Elinor and I have been married sixteen years now, isn't that something? I remember the first time—"

At that moment, Elinor opened the door of the room, and said, "Oscar, that's enough for right now. It's time for your mama's medicine. Turn the fan back on."

He did so. "Do you think she heard me?" he asked. "I said some things I wanted to make sure she heard."

Elinor turned her gaze to the woman in the bed. "I'm sure she heard every word." From a tray beside the fan, she took up a bottle of reddish liquid, unscrewed the cap, and poured out a dose into an old silver soupspoon.

"Can you tell for sure?" he persisted anxiously.

"Yes. Oscar, it's time you got back to the mill. You can speak to Mary-Love later." She went around the bed with the medicine.

"Is that Leo's prescription?"

With one hand she pressed Mary-Love's cheeks sharply together, so that her mouth involuntarily opened. Oscar watched as Elinor poured the liquid in, then rapped upward Mary-Love's chin so that her mouth clapped shut with a clack of teeth.

"No," replied Elinor, standing up straight, "this is mine."

Oscar stood at the door and opened it softly. "Elinor, I'll be back at five." He looked once more at his mother in the bed. Mary-Love's eyes now seemed to stare back at him. In them Oscar saw what he thought was fear. "Mama," he said, "Elinor's gone take good care of you."

He slipped out and closed the door quickly behind him. He did not see his mother's lips struggle to form three syllables.

"Per-di-do," Mary-Love whispered.

Elinor looked at her mother-in-law and turned the fan on high. Mary-Love's rasping breath could not be heard.

Elinor sat down in the rocker at the foot of the bed and opened a magazine on her lap.

Mary-Love's fingers weakly twisted the hem of the sheet. Her moving lips formed the words, "I'm drowning..."

Feebleness, inconsequence, immobility, dependence—things Mary-Love Caskey had never known before had suddenly crowded in upon her. She remembered getting sick in the Atmore station, and she remembered when she first opened her eyes in the front room. She knew where she was from the hand-painted flowers on the footboard of the bed; she had picked the suite out in Mobile. It was the first furniture she had purchased for her son's house.

Her limbs were without sensation and very cold at the same time. Her head burned. She seemed always to be waking up, though she never had to open her eyes. She could never remember falling asleep. She wished she could dream. As it was, nothing held her mind but her cold limbs, her burning brow, and the profile of Elinor Caskey, rocking in a chair at the foot of the bed. Zaddie appeared sometimes, and the young black woman's voice seemed distant as she spoke to Elinor. It was as if Mary-Love heard it from the house next door, as if it were a voice caught in her sleep.

Elinor's voice, in contrast, always sounded close and clear, as if the words had been whispered directly into Mary-Love's ear in the dark.

She was never hungry, and she never remembered having eaten anything. The only thing she remembered was Elinor's fingers pressing her cheeks, so that the red liquid from the unmarked medicine bottle could be poured between her opened lips. Hours later, she'd feel the grit it left behind, pressing against her gums and her teeth. She wondered at Leo Benquith's prescribing it. Afterward, she always felt worse and weaker.

As the days progressed—Mary-Love supposed they were days, but reckoned them only by the difference in outfits Zaddie wore when she came into the room with the trays bearing Elinor's meals—Mary-Love lost more and more sensation in her body. Her limbs were no longer cold, but the sheets, the spread, and the coverlet were leaden upon her. Her hands rested free, but the very air of the room seemed weighted; it seemed to press down against her until she could not move at all. She felt the perspiration that gathered upon her brow, which sometimes dripped into her eyes and stung. She welcomed that sting, for it was the only sensation left to her.

Otherwise, she was overwhelmed with the sense that she was filling up with liquid, as if her body were only some stretching skin into which day by day Elinor poured that noxious red liquid. It wasn't sweet, but it reminded her of the blackberry nectar she had been served the day before she fell ill. Her legs and belly were already so heavy that they seemed to sink deep into the bed. She was certain that she would never be able to move them again. A soupspoon of that medicine seemed to fill her body with gallons of liquid! She grew heavier and heavier. It was filling her lungs, leaving little room for her to bring in air. Her breath grew shallow and quick, and she felt that she was beginning to drown. Her brain held an involuntary image of floating slowly down the Perdido, her body lying just below the surface, with only her mouth, eyes, and nose protruding into the air. The rest of her was submerged in the river. If she struggled, she would certainly drown in that dry, airless front bedroom of Oscar's house. Even if the draperies were drawn back, the Venetian blinds opened, and the shades lifted, Mary-Love would have seen only the levee, not the Perdido behind it, the Perdido daily spooned between her lips by her daughter-in-law.

Mary-Love was certain that that unmarked bottle held Perdido water. She now recognized the taste. She knew the texture of the red clay granules that were left behind on her tongue when she swallowed. She could smell it whenever the bottle was unscrewed. Yet she couldn't prevent her lips from parting when Elinor squeezed her cheeks, and couldn't help but swallow when Elinor jarred her mouth shut again.

Elinor was tireless. Elinor never left her.

Mary-Love prayed to be alone; she prayed to die in peace. She prayed to be able to sleep dreamlessly forever. She prayed for some death other than that which her daughter-in-law was preparing for her. When she realized that none of these prayers was to be answered, she beseeched God only that her doom not be prolonged.

Elinor sat at the foot of Mary-Love's bed and rocked. She leafed quietly through stacks of magazines and took trays from Zaddie at the door. She stood by reporting to Leo Benquith, and when he was gone, she poured whole currents of Perdido river water down her mother-in-law's throat.

Once only did Mary-Love Caskey come to consciousness and find her daughter-in-law absent from the room. Her eyes, as usual, were already open. The sense of waking had not come to her, only the realization that previously she had been asleep. She hadn't the power to move her eyes in their sockets. She could only stare directly before her. Elinor was not in her chair. By some subtle means she couldn't precisely figure out, Mary-Love knew that Elinor was not in the room—and she also knew that it was night.

She drew an extra breath—a tiny sniff that wouldn't have been noticed even by someone leaning over her—in order to feel to what extent her lungs had filled with water.

Mary-Love's heart contracted. She had only an inch of space remaining in her lungs. Only an inch of breath to sustain her. She was heavy, filled with Perdido water, and the water was rising.

Lungs don't work that way, some voice belonging to the old Mary-Love told her sternly. Bodies don't fill with water like cauterized skins. Women don't drown in their beds.

Mary-Love didn't want to panic. If she panicked, she'd gasp for breath. If she gasped for breath, the water would move and slosh, and she'd die sputtering. She hadn't any hope except to cling to life. She wanted to stave off that doom for which she had so recently prayed.

She continued by force only to breathe her shallow, almost imperceptible breaths.

The front room darkened, as if she had closed her eyes, yet Mary-Love knew her eyes were open. She could not know how long it remained so. She felt, however, that she never lost consciousness.

Light came suddenly, but it wasn't morning light. It wasn't lamplight. It wasn't light from the opened door to the corridor. It was merely a pale bluish-white glow, outlining the closet door to the right of the fireplace.

Mary-Love made an effort to focus her eyes upon it. That was as much as she could do.

The closet door was slowly opening.

A little boy stood inside, and he was looking about himself in apparent confusion. Like Mary-Love, he also seemed not to have awakened, but to have found himself in a state of consciousness that had not existed before. He lifted his hand before his face and stared at it. He peered cautiously out into the darkened room. Though Mary-Love thought that she knew him, she could not think clearly enough to identify him. Was he one of hers? Was he Queenie's boy?

The child stepped out of the closet and into the room. The bluish-white light faded behind him. The room was dark again.

Though the fan was off, Mary-Love heard nothing but her own shallow breathing.

Now that she could no longer see him, the boy's name came to her suddenly. John Robert De-Bordenave.

More than his name came into her memory.

John Robert had disappeared twelve years before. He had drowned in the Perdido during the final stage of the levee construction, but now appearing so briefly in the light of the opened closet door, he was no older than on the last day that Mary-Love had seen him.

Has Elinor kept that boy locked up in there?

She heard a stray footfall then, though it was infinitely soft against the carpet.

Propped on her pillows, hands clasped neatly outside the regimented covers, Mary-Love might have been arranged for a visit from five' governors and a member of the Cabinet. In the darkness, she could see nothing.

Then, there was a tug on the sheet, the hem of which was folded beneath her hands. Powerless to resist, her hands slipped apart.

Mary-Love saw nothing, but by a creek of springs, and a shifting of the mattress, she knew that John Robert DeBordenave was crawling beside her into the bed.

CHAPTER 40
The Wreath

The Caskeys had a wonderful time in Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans. The adults were as full of wonder and enjoyed themselves as much as the children. Only Miriam seemed out of sorts. She missed her grandmother sorely, or rather she missed her grandmother's never-yielding championship of her superiority to other children. Without Mary-Love, Miriam was just another little girl, with no special privileges above those accorded to Frances and Queenie's children.

Every day, James telephoned Oscar to ask how Mary-Love was getting along. Every day, Oscar said that she was improving, though still unable to write, still unwilling to get out of bed and come to the telephone. He did not say that there was a stack of postcards from Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans sitting on the hall table downstairs, unadmired and unread. He did not say that since James had left, Mary-Love Caskey had not spoken a single intelligible word to him, or evinced the slightest interest or curiosity about anything whatsoever, and that the front room, which had first smelled of sickness, had now begun to smell of something stronger.

James Caskey may have heard some of this in Oscar's tone and in Oscar's evasions. But no one else in the party suspected anything except that Mary-Love would be dreadfully angry with them all when they got home. On the last leg of the journey, the five-hour ride from New Orleans to Atmore, they all sat quietly in their compartments. Most of the talk was of facing Mary-Love on their return. The consensus was that Mary-Love would never forgive them for leaving her at home and going off and having a good time on their own.

"Lord," sighed James, "I know she's gone come down hard. That's why we haven't heard a single word from her. She's saving up."

"She's gone say," said Sister, '"I got well in two days flat, but y'all wouldn't wait, y'all just went on without me.'"

"She's gone say," said Queenie, '"I paid for this trip, and I want y'all to know that I didn't get one moment's pleasure out of it. Don't anybody ever ask me again, "Miss Mary-Love, can we go somewhere?" 'cause I'm not paying for anybody to go anywhere ever again!'"

They laughed at the predictability of her reaction at the same time that they dreaded her displeasure.

A few miles before the termination of the journey, the weary party began to gather in the train's narrow corridor. They would have very little time to get off the train, and the group was loaded down with what they had taken with them as well as what they had picked up along the way. All the Caskeys stood in a long line with Ivey foremost, and James and Sister in the rear. Queenie and the children were in the middle. Everyone stared out the window, watching for the first exciting glimpse of a familiar landmark or person.