BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (58 page)

Frances stared at Miriam almost as if in a stupor.

"Well," said Miriam impatiently. "Do you want to go or not?"

"Yes," blurted Frances.

"Can you be ready at five-thirty?"

Frances nodded.

"That's when I leave. If you're not out on your porch, I'll leave without you. I'm not gone be going up to Elinor's door and knocking at that hour of the morning, and I'm not gone call out to you, either. Are you gone be out on the front porch when I'm ready to leave?"

Frances nodded again.

"Good," said Miriam. "Ivey'll fix us something to take along, so don't worry about something to eat. If you're gone want to buy things at the concession stand, then you'd better bring a little money."

"All right," returned Frances, lingering hesitantly for further instructions.

None came. After a few moments, Miriam looked up and remarked, "Well, why don't you go away now? I'm busy."

In a daze, Frances wandered home. Neither her father nor her mother could interpret the significance of the invitation. Elinor called James to see if he or Queenie had any ideas about what it portended. They couldn't figure it out, and James called Sister. Sister didn't know for sure, but she had an idea: "Maybe Miriam wants everybody to know that she's not going down to Pensacola every day to meet a boy. That could be why she's taking Frances along."

Miriam drove fast. The top of the roadster was down, and the wind was so loud that the sisters were unable to talk to each other. The sun was still low in the sky at that hour of the morning. Miriam and Frances wore bathing suits under their sundresses. The ride took only slightly more than an hour, and when the sisters got to the beach it was still empty. The casino hadn't opened yet, but half a dozen fishermen had cast their lines from the end of the pier. Miriam walked a few hundred yards or so beyond the pier to a stretch of deserted sand and laid out her blanket. She silently pointed to where Frances should spread hers.

"Did you bring any lotion?" asked Miriam abruptly.

"No," said Frances. "Should I have?"

"Of course. You're going to burn anyway because you're not used to the sun, but without lotion you're going to be in horrible pain by the time we get home. Here, use some of mine."

Frances meekly submitted to being doused with the cold lotion. Miriam brusquely rubbed it in, and when she was finished with Frances, performed the same operation on herself.

"What do I do now?" asked Frances timidly.

"Nothing. Just switch sides every once in a while. And don't talk."

When Miriam lay on her stomach, tanning her back, she read. When she lay on her back, she closed her eyes and slept, or at least appeared to sleep.

Frances had never been so bored in her life, not even when she had been confined to her bed with arthritis. She hadn't brought anything to read. Her head was filled with the dull roar of the Gulf of Mexico. Sand fleas jumped onto her legs and bit them. The blindingly white sand and the washed-out sky bleached all color from the landscape, until everything seemed overwhelmingly pale and overwhelmingly bright, like the continual flash of a news camera. She could feel her skin beginning to burn. She dared not speak to her sister, who had peremptorily prohibited conversation.

Frances sat up on the blanket and began to look longingly at the water. At last, when she felt as if her skin were frying and the blood simmering in her arteries, she turned to Miriam and said, "Can I go in?"

"Go in where?" snapped Miriam.

"Go in the water?"

"Yes. Though I don't know why you'd want to. I hate swimming. Watch out for jellyfish. Be careful of the undertow. Somebody saw a shark out there on Wednesday."

"I'll be careful," said Frances, getting up from the towel.

She raced toward the water, and leaped into a wave just then crashing against the shore. The water was deliciously cool and she loved the motion of the waves. She even liked the taste of the salt. Frances had never been in the Gulf before. When she thought of water and bodies of water, she thought only of the muddy Perdido. The Perdido's voice was low, secretive, and made up of a hundred smaller noises, incessant and unidentifiable. The Gulf, on the other hand, had but a single voice, regular, loud, insistent. The Perdido's water was dark and murky, as if it purposely hid things in its depths; the Gulf water was bright and blue and white, and Frances could see her feet through it. The bed of the Perdido was a fathomless sheet of soft black mud in which dead things were concealed; underneath these crashing waves lay hard-packed white sand and millions of fragments of colored shells. Only an occasional sullen bream or catfish swam in the Perdido; here were clams gaping in the sand, bright clean seaweed, vast schools of minnows, and larger fish that sometimes flew cleanly out of the top of a wave.

Frances swam farther out where the fish were even larger. They moved lazily away at her intrusion. She perceived the undertow Miriam warned her against, yet somehow she did not feel she was in any danger. She let herself be pulled out farther. She now saw that the pier was no more than a dark line jutting into the water, and her sister was not visible at all. She realized that she was probably too far out, but still she was undisturbed. As she lazily swam back in toward shore she realized she had never been less than fully confident of her ability to do so.

"I thought you had drowned," said Miriam calmly, looking up from her book as Frances once again stood by her towel on the beach, dripping wet. "I looked up and you had disappeared. You must have gone out too far."

"No, no..."

"It's time to go home."

Frances glanced at her sister, puzzled. "It cain't be time to go home yet. We just got here."

Miriam looked up, shading her eyes. "How long do you think you were out in the water?"

"Twenty minutes? Half an hour?"

Miriam pointed up into the sky. "Look at the sun," she said. "Straight overhead. It's almost noon. You were in the water for over three hours!"

Frances looked up into the sky, then turned and gazed once more into the warm blue waters of the Gulf of Mexico.

Miriam was silent on the drive home, but Frances didn't mind. Miriam steered with one hand on the wheel and stared pensively at the road through her dark glasses. Frances lay with her head back, limp but not exhausted. As they neared Perdido, Frances tried to think of a way to thank her sister for the surprising invitation, an invitation that had unexpectedly provided a mysteriously important event for her. When they pulled up before Miriam's house, however, Frances had not yet found the courage to speak.

They got out of the car. "Thank you," said Frances meekly, troubled by the inadequacy of her words.

"You better go buy you some lotion this afternoon," said Miriam. "I cain't keep on letting you use mine."

Frances stopped dead in her tracks and considered this. "You mean we're going back tomorrow?" she asked cautiously.

"I go every day," said Miriam, not quite answering the question.

"And you're inviting me to go again?"

Miriam wouldn't go so far as to admit that. "I leave at five-thirty every morning, and there's room in the car. But I never wait for anybody."

Frances grinned and ran home. She told her astonished parents about the morning.

"Are you going again?" her father asked.

"Of course!" cried Frances. "I had a wonderful time!"

"You're burned, darling!" said Elinor. "When you're down there, I want you to spend all your time in the water. That way the sun won't be so bad on your skin!"

"Oh, Mama! I love that water so much! I can hardly wait till tomorrow!"

Elinor Caskey seemed to take particular delight in this announcement, and for weeks thereafter was not heard to speak a word against Miriam, who had provided Frances with a way that she could swim in the Gulf every day.

The pattern for the entire summer was set that first trip. Every sunny morning of the week Miriam and Frances drove down to Pensacola beach. Miriam rarely spoke to her sister, other than to say, "Are you ready?" or "Did you bring money for the toll bridge?" Miriam lay on her blanket, reading, napping, her skin growing ever darker and darker. Frances swam in the Gulf, sometimes breasting the waves, sometimes swimming in the calm water yards below the surface, sometimes lazily allowing herself to be dragged along by the undertow. Once she discovered herself so far out that a school of leaping porpoises passed around her. She threw her arms about one of the smaller ones and was pulled through the water for several miles at a pace faster than any she had ever known before. Another time she dived deep into the water in order to avoid being seen by the workers on a passing shrimp boat, and she narrowly escaped being caught in their trawling nets. When the boat was gone, Frances wondered why she had deliberately and instinctively avoided being seen. Then she realized that to be discovered so far from the beach would excite suspicion. The fishermen would not believe that a sixteen-year-old girl was not in danger bobbing in the water five miles from shore.

Something about the hours spent in the Gulf reminded Frances of the time of her sickness, and of even more vague and distant times before that. She seemed to lose consciousness the minute she breasted the first wave of the morning—or rather she seemed to lose her identity as Frances Caskey. She became someone—or something—else. She could swim from before seven o'clock when she and Miriam arrived at the beach, until eleven, without touching bottom, without feeling fatigue or fear of undertow, sharks, jellyfish, cramps, or loss of direction. When it was time to come in, she did not say to herself, Miriam is getting ready to go. Rather, she simply found herself walking up through the waves and onto the beach. Ths sensation was akin to her recollection of the baths her mother had given her during the course of her illness three years earlier. Frances remembered nothing about them except the moment that her mother took her beneath the arms and lifted her from the water. In that motion her identity, temporarily lost in the water, had come back to her. Rising through the breaking surf, feeling the sand and bits of shell beneath her feet, Frances's old identity returned to her, and she forgot all that she had felt and experienced so far from the shore.

Miriam always made some remark to Frances that went something like: "I looked up for you once or twice, but I could never see you. Sometime I'm going to tell Oscar how far out you go. One day you're going to drown, and everybody's going to blame me."

On the always wordless drive back to Perdido Frances tried to remember exactly how she had spent those hours in the water; tried to recall how far out she had gone, how deep she had dived, what fish she had seen. But the sun beat against her eyelids, and she could fetch back nothing more than a vague impression of having plunged so deep that the sunlight produced only a dim sea-green radiance. Or she could summon up only a hazy recollection of having sat cross-legged on the undulating sandy bottom four miles out, or of having stalked and devoured sea trout and crabs that came temptingly near her. All I these things were dreams, doubtless, for how could they have been real? Though Frances had spent four hours in the water, and had had no breakfast, she was never the least bit hungry when she trod up the sand toward the blanket on which Miriam lay sunning. At home her father urged her to eat just a little dinner, but her mother always said, "If Frances says she's full, then we ought to leave her alone, Oscar. When she wants food, I guess she knows where to find it."

CHAPTER 44
CREOSOTE

One cloudless pink dawn in September 1938, Frances Caskey was sitting on the front porch of her family's house with her towel draped over her shoulder and a bathing suit on under her dress, waiting for Miriam to emerge from the house next door. No one in the family had been able to determine just why Miriam took Frances to the beach with her every day. It might have been to allay any suspicion that she was meeting a boy in Pensacola, it might have been that Miriam was surreptitiously glad of her sister's company, but whatever the reason Frances was happy to be taken along. On this particular morning, however, Frances waited but Miriam did not come. Although the two sisters had gone to the beach nearly every day for the past two months, they had spoken little, and Frances did not feel assured enough of their relationship to be able to knock on Miriam's door.

Elinor was surprised to find her daughter still sitting on the porch when she came down to breakfast about an hour or so later.

"What happened to Miriam?" Frances's mother asked.

"I don't know. Do you think she's sick?"

"I'll send Zaddie over to speak to Ivey," said Elinor. "Ivey'll know."

Zaddie returned in a few minutes with alarming news. "Miss Miriam packing up! Miss Miriam going away for good!"

At the moment this information was delivered, there was the sound of a door slamming, and Frances, Elinor, and Ivey turned in time to see Miriam with two suitcases marching out the front door and down the sidewalk toward her roadster. Frances, bewildered, called out to her sister, "I guess we're not going to Pensacola this morning."

"I guess we're not," returned Miriam. "Do I look like I'm dressed for the beach?" She wore a white dress buttoned up the front and low-heeled red shoes. "Do I usually carry suitcases to Santa Rosa?"

"No," said Frances. "Where are you going?"

Miriam had already turned back toward the house. She spoke over her shoulder: "I'm going to college!"

No one had anticipated it. Not even Sister had an inkling of Miriam's plans. Sister stood nervously on the front porch with a cup of coffee, watching as Miriam, now being assisted by Bray, carried bags and packages out to the car. James Caskey came out onto his porch, having sensed that something was up. Sister called over to him, "Miriam's going off to college this morning!"

"No!" cried James Caskey. "Where's she going?"

At that moment Miriam emerged with three hat-boxes.

Sister replied to James pointedly, "I don't know. She hasn't told us yet where she's going."