BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (7 page)

The damage inflicted by the floodwaters had not been confined to animals and man-made objects. Flowers, shrubs, and trees had perished by the thousands, and the whole town had to be replanted. The most extensive damage had been to the Caskey grounds. All the trees had been uprooted. There were no more crape myrtles or roses, no more beds of day lilies, bearded irises, and King Alfreds, no more hedges of oleander and ligustrum, no more specimens of hawthorne or Japanese magnolia. The azaleas remained in their beds around the house, but they were dead. The camellias looked dead, but Bray said they had survived and Mary-Love accepted his opinion—at any rate, she did not demand that they be dug up. And certainly there was no more grass. The river had deposited over the ground half a foot or more of sopping red mud. Every day, Mary-Love and Sister watched for blades of grass to sprout through the red soil, but every day they watched in vain.

The DeBordenave and Turk yards, which had suffered equally, had been dug up and reseeded, and the mud from the Perdido seemed to have brought with it a great number of nutrients, for their lawns sprang up sudden, green, and splendid, growing more lushly and certainly faster than ever before. But next door at James Caskey's, the yard was a flat expanse of dark mud. And at Mary-Love's place it was the same. After a few weeks the sun dried out that dark river soil and left a layer of gray sand two inches deep, with the reddish river soil packed beneath that. Sister picked up a fistful of this sand and let it drift through her fingers. Mixed in with the sand were the desiccated grass seeds that Bray broadcast every Friday afternoon. The destruction of the Caskey lawns was a subject for comment in Perdido, for the little plague of sterility was confined only to the Caskey lots. The DeBordenaves were not affected at all, the sand stopping in a straight line at the end of the Caskey property and the grass beginning immediately on the other side. The sand continued to the edge of Mary-Love's deeded property, at the town limit, where the pine forest began with its dense and prickly underbrush. By the end of June, Mary-Love and James had given up hope of ever growing grass again, and Mary-Love hired little Buster Sapp to come every morning at six-thirty and rake patterns in the sand with a leaf broom. By the end of the day most of Buster's careful work had been obliterated by footsteps of servants and visitors and the inhabitants of the houses, but Buster was always there first thing the following morning to renew the artificial symmetry and texture he gave to the injured Caskey demesne. The expanse of sand—somewhat more than two acres in all—was a depressing sight when one remembered the fine gardens and lawn that had surrounded the houses. Only Buster's rigorous patterning made it bearable. So despite talk, Buster worked even on Sundays (for which he was paid double). The households quickly grew accustomed to waking to the sound of rake on sand. Buster was a small, sleepy, infinitely patient child—who moved slowly about, producing an impromptu map of concentric circles and elongated spirals. He plied his rake with a rhythm as inexorable as that of a pendulum. And perhaps it was that indication of time passing that made the sound of the rake on the sand so suggestive of death.

Each morning at six o'clock, before he began his work, Buster's sister fixed his breakfast in Mary-Love's kitchen. Buster was finished by ten, and at that time James Caskey's cook Roxie Welles made him a second breakfast. Then he took a pillow and went down to the mooring dock and took a nap until it was time for the midday meal. In the afternoon he ran errands for the two households. Sometimes he was paid by Mary-Love and sometimes by Miss Elinor—and sometimes he was inadvertently given money by both.

For several months Buster Sapp was practically the only line of communication between the two households, which formerly had been greatly intimate. Mary-Love Caskey didn't approve of Elinor Dammert's living with her brother-in-law and she didn't allow her daughter to approve of it either. James Caskey knew how his sister-in-law felt, but he was too pleased with Elinor's being in the house with him to argue with Mary-Love about the matter. After all, if he got into an argument with Mary-Love, Mary-Love would probably win it, and if Mary-Love won it, Elinor would have to go—and that was exactly what James Caskey did not want.

Elinor took care of him in the way that Genevieve might have if Genevieve had been a real wife. Elinor had supervised the cleaning and repair of the house. Each day in his absence she ordered about Roxie and Roxie's girl, Reta, and Roxie's boy, Escue. Reta spent all day on her knees, scrubbing the floors. Escue painted everything that could be attacked with a brush. Elinor and Roxie sat on the front porch and sewed new curtains for every room in the house. James gave Elinor three hundred dollars and told her to go out and buy what she needed; one day Elinor and Escue drove a wagon ten miles over to Atmore and came back with a load of new linens. Everything that had been touched by the floodwater she threw out. Sooner than any other house in town, James Caskey's—which had been the worst damaged—was in the best repair.

Through means James never discovered, Elinor was able to save many of the fine pieces of furniture that had been thought lost to the floodwater. "I don't know what she did, Oscar," James said one morning at the mill, "but I got home last evening and there was Mama's sofa—the one I was all ready to throw out the back door—bright as bright could be. The rosewood was all polished and every last carved medallion back on it—and I know two of 'em broke off and floated out the front door—and a kind of blue upholstery exactly like I remember from when I was just little. I'd forgot all about it till I walked in and saw it! I could have sat down and cried it made me think so much of Mama!"

"James," said Oscar, "are you working Miss Elinor too hard, you think?"

"I think I am," replied James modestly, "but she doesn't. That house is in as good a shape as when Mama was living in it and Daddy was dead and couldn't mess it up. That's what that house looks like now! And Grace! Have you seen Grace of late?"

"I have," said Oscar, and they paused to speak to a man who was about to go out of the lumberyard in a wagon.

"But have you seen Grace's dresses?" James went on when the wagon was rolling out the front gate. "Miss Elinor doesn't think a thing in the world of sitting in the kitchen with Roxie and running up an outfit for Grace, while Grace is sitting under the table watching her do it! And with all this, Mary-Love is asking me to charge Miss Elinor room rent!"

"Mama doesn't know Miss Elinor, that's all," said Oscar.

"Mary-Love doesn't want to know her, that's what it is! Oscar, you know how I love your mama, and you know how your mama has always been right about everything, but I'll tell you something, she is wrong about Miss Elinor. Grace loves her, and I think the world of her! Do you know," said James in a low voice, tapping a bony finger in the air, "that she has polished all my silver and wrapped it up in yellow felt?"

Oscar Caskey was frustrated. The thing he wanted most in the world was the thing he could not have— and that was the opportunity to learn more about Miss Elinor Dammert. The exigencies of his work at the mill required that he be either in the office or off somewhere in the forest by seven o'clock every morning. He returned home at noontime, but could spare only half an hour to eat, and had to drink his second glass of iced tea on the way back to work. In the evening he might not get home until six or seven o'clock, and by then he was so weary it was all he could do to sit up straight at the supper table. And sometimes in the evening his presence was required at a meeting, the purpose of which was to plan the restoration and improvement of Perdido after the disaster of the Easter flood. He could scarcely do more than wave at Miss Elinor on the front porch of his uncle's house as he rode past in his automobile, or call out, "How you, Miss Elinor?" as he trudged up the steps of his own home, to where his mother held open the door for him and shut it and hooked it as soon as he got inside.

Mary-Love Caskey didn't pretend to be able to control her son's actions and emotions the way she could Sister's. Mary-Love knew that Oscar liked that red-haired schoolteacher next door, and she also knew that it wasn't her place to tell him that he ought not to like her. Oscar was now the man in the family, and that must stand for something. So Mary-Love was glad that despite the proximity of Oscar and Elinor there had been so little commerce between them. The flood had brought them together, but the aftermath of the flood was—at least for the time being—keeping them apart.

Early one Saturday morning, however—Saturday morning, the twenty-first of June, 1919, to be exact, when the sun had just crossed over from the air sign of Gemini into the water sign of Cancer—Oscar Caskey rose at his usual hour of five, then remembered that it was Saturday and he wouldn't have to be at the lumberyard until eight o'clock. He would have turned over and tried to sleep another hour then, but he was disturbed by a slight noise outside his window in the still morning. He got up and looked out. The dawn hadn't yet taken hold of the day. The sand below was a wide dark sea, showing only here and there what remained of Buster's work from the previous day. And now marring even more of the patterns was Elinor Dammert, coming up from the mooring dock. She held something tightly in one hand.

Oscar was curious. He wanted to know what had brought her out so early in the morning. He wanted to know what was hidden in her closed fist. He wanted the opportunity to speak to her without his mother or James or tiny Grace or any of the servants around. Hurriedly slipping into his pants and boots he clambered down the back stairs, then stood on the back porch and watched Elinor through the screen. Standing in the middle of the expanse of gray sand that sloped all the way down to the river, she was toeing a small hole in the earth.

The sky was pink and canary yellow in the east, but still dark blue—a blue more radiant than that morning's dawn—in the west. Birds called from across the river, but on this side only a single mockingbird, perched on James Caskey's kitchen roof, could be heard. From even so far away, Oscar could hear the water lapping against the pilings of the mooring dock. He pushed open the screen door.

Miss Elinor looked up. She dropped something out of her hand; it fell into the small hole at her feet. With the toe of her shoe, she covered the hole with sand.

"What are you doing, may I ask?" Oscar said, stepping outside and descending the steps. His voice sounded oddly hollow, breaking that early morning silence. It was so still that the soft shutting of the screen door behind him produced an echo against the side of James Caskey's house.

Miss Elinor moved several feet to her right and toed out another small hole. Oscar came nearer.

"I've got acorns," she said.

"You planting them?" Oscar asked incredulously. "Nobody plants acorns. Where'd you get 'em?"

"River washed 'em down," Elinor replied with a smile. "Mr. Oscar, you want to help me?"

"Acorns aren't gone do anything here, Miss Elinor. Look at this yard. What do you see here? Do you see sand, sand, and no grass? That's what I see. I think you are wasting your time planting acorns. Buster is gone come by in a while and rake 'em all up anyway."

"Buster doesn't rake deep," said Elinor. "I've told him I was going to plant trees out here. Mr. Oscar, if the grass won't grow, then we've got to have shade at least. So I'm planting acorns."

"I suppose those are live oak," said Oscar, examining the four acorns that Elinor dropped into his hand. They were wet, as if indeed she had just scooped them out of the water. She hadn't said, though, what she was doing down at the mooring dock at five o'clock in the morning; after all, she couldn't have been waiting for the acorns to wash down the Perdido and into her hand, could she?

"They are not," she said. "They are water oak."

"How can you tell?"

"I know what water oak acorns look like. I know what they look like when they wash down the river."

"And you think they'll grow here?"

She nodded.

"I don't know of any stand of water oak up the Perdido," said Oscar after a pause, as if he were trying to recall one. This was a polite way of contradicting Miss Elinor, for in truth Oscar Caskey knew every tree in Baldwin, Escambia, and Monroe counties, and was perfectly certain that there were no water oak branches overhanging the upper Perdido.

"Must be there, though," said Elinor as she dropped another acorn into the earth, "if they were washing downstream."

"I tell you what," said Oscar as he dug a hole with the heel of his boot and dropped in an acorn. "This afternoon I'll get off work early and you and I will go out in the wagon." He covered up the acorn.

"Go out where?" She reached into the pocket of her dress and pulled out another handful of acorns. She dropped several into Oscar's outstretched palm and held the rest of them herself. As he spoke she continued the planting.

"Out in the woods. You're gone pick out the trees you like—anything up to twenty-five feet—and I'll mark 'em with a blue ribbon, and Monday morning I'll send out some men to dig 'em up and we'll bring 'em back here and put 'em in. I don't know why I didn't think of it before. What do I hire men for, anyway? Even if these acorns were to grow—and there's prettier trees than water oaks, Miss Elinor— it would take 'em so long that you and I would be bent over before they provided enough shade to take off our hats."

"You're wrong, Mr. Oscar," said Elinor Dammert, "and I'm not going to pick out any trees in the woods. But you come back here at three o'clock and I will have Escue's wagon ready. We will go for that ride."

Mary-Love didn't like it a bit, and that evening after his return, Oscar hardly had time to wash his hands before supper was put on the table.

"What did you talk about?" Sister asked.

"About James and Grace and school. We talked about the flood. Just like everybody else in town."

"Why were you so long?" asked Mary-Love. She thought that Oscar's scandalous behavior shouldn't be talked of at all, but her curiosity overcame her misgivings about sanctioning the episode with her questions.