BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (77 page)

This son-in-law had ushered the Caskeys into an entirely new stage of their history.

CHAPTER 59
What Billy Did

During the months when the war was obviously winding down, the Caskeys changed gears. Miriam and her father decided that they should begin a reconversion to their prewar type of operation as soon as possible. Soon the military would be building no more bases, no more barracks. The Caskey mill, in the latter months of 1945, had still been filling back orders, but few new ones were coming in. Miriam had realized, from what she saw in Perdido, that things would be different after the war. Returning veterans would want new housing, for instance. Factories would have to be rebuilt or remodeled to permit new industries and establish employment for these former soldiers. The country would have to learn to deal with prosperity as it had learned to deal with impoverishment. By the beginning of 1946, the Caskey mill was running at full tilt, in all its divisions, even when there weren't orders for the lumber, poles, sashes, and boxes. Oscar had his carpenters throw up new warehouses on the property that had once been the Turk mill. When the civilian orders began to come in, as Miriam was convinced they would, the Caskeys would be ready.

When Billy Bronze took over the personal finances of the Caskeys, he took a portion of their fortunes and began to invest it in stocks that he and Miriam considered would soon rise considerably. To diversify, he bought apartment houses in Mobile for Sister, and Gulf-front property on Santa Rosa Island for Oscar, and poured Queenie and Grace's money into the development of Gavin Pond Farm. Danjo knew from his mother of James's death, and he learned from Billy of his substantial inheritance. The young man asked Billy to invest the money in America, and send him only the income. To Billy Danjo wrote: "Really the only reason I was going to come back to Perdido at all was because I knew James was so lonesome. Now that he's dead, I'm going to stay over here. Fred doesn't want to leave, and I don't mind staying. Come see us in our castle." Billy went along with Banjo's cover story to his mother that his not returning was a matter of problems with immigration.

The general comment among the Caskeys was that they didn't know what they had ever done without Billy.

Late in 1946, when Frances had been married to Billy for somewhat more than a year, she discovered that she was pregnant. Or, rather, Elinor found it out through a careful series of questions regarding her daughter's times and seasons. The diagnosis was confirmed by Leo Benquith. The doctor was an old man now and had greatly curtailed his practice. He tended to the Caskeys and a few other families, but most of his patients had passed to two young new doctors in town.

"Billy will be so happy," said Elinor as she drove her daughter home from the doctor's office.

Frances was silent.

"Aren't you happy, darling?"

"I don't know, Mama. Should I be?"

"Of course," Elinor replied with a bland smile. "Every young married woman wants to have children."

"Not if the children are going to be deformed," returned Frances quietly.

Elinor shot a glance at her daughter, but said nothing until they had drawn up in front of the house. Frances started to get out of the automobile, but Elinor caught her by the arm and said fiercely, "Deformed? Is that what you think? Is that what you call yourself? Is that what you call me?"

"Mama—"

"Is Zaddie Sapp deformed because she was born with black skin?"

"Of course not—"

"Are Grace and Lucille deformed because they have given up men and live out at Gavin Pond Farm together?"

"No, Mama, that's not—"

"That's how they were born, darling! Zaddie was born with black skin and Grace Caskey was born to dote on girls, and just because they're different, do you think Creola Sapp should have said, Tm not going to give birth to this child'? Do you think Ge-nevieve and James should have said, 'We don't want a little baby if she's not going to grow up to be just like everybody else in this town*?"

At first Frances didn't answer, knowing her mother would interrupt her again. But Elinor was silent, looking straight ahead, her hands convulsively grasping the steering wheel.

"Mama," said Frances softly, '1 wasn't thinking of me, I was thinking of the baby. I was thinking, 'What if the baby's not happy?' That's all. I'd love it, I know I would."

"You said 'deformed,'" said Elinor.

"I guess that's not what I meant. I meant... different. I meant, is the baby going to be like you and me?"

Elinor glanced at her daughter once again, and now the glance was softer. "Are you that unhappy?"

"No!" cried Frances, rocking forward. "Mama, I'm not unhappy! How could I be unhappy, being married to Billy and still being able to live with you and Daddy? There's not a single thing wrong with my life. Mama, we didn't even lose anybody in the war! And so many people did."

"All right then," said Elinor. "Let's say you had a baby that was just like you, just like me—it would be different. And that's all. But Zaddie is different, Zaddie is black. Grace is different, Grace is never going to get married and have children of her own. But they're happy. And you're happy. Why do you think your own baby couldn't grow up happy, too?"

Frances thought about this for a moment. "I guess it could," she concluded. "I guess what I really wanted to know was, is the baby gone be like us, Mama?"

"There's no way of telling until it's born," said Elinor slowly. "Then we'll know." Elinor reached down and began to open the door of the car.

"Wait," said Frances, impulsively placing a hand on her mother's shoulder. "Mama," she whispered, "I was just worried... I was just thinking of the baby. I didn't mean..."

"I know you didn't, darling."

When they got inside the house, Billy said, "Why'd you sit out there in the car so long? Y'all must have been freezing!"

Frances smiled. "We were just talking over the good news."

"What good news?"

"I'm gone have a baby," Frances announced.

Billy's surprise and happiness were evidenced in a grin that looked as if it might split his face, and a string of scarcely articulate protestations that this couldn't be true. Frances assured him that it was.

"Are you sure you're gone want a little baby who does nothing but cry all the time?" Frances asked.

"Our* little baby can cry all she wants, so far as I'm concerned. When is it due?"

"July," put in Elinor quickly.

"Are you going to take care of Frances?" Billy asked his mother-in-law.

Elinor nodded. Billy always said the right thing. "Zaddie and I are. We're going to make sure that baby's healthy."

"Mama," said Frances, with a little uneasiness in her voice, "I'll be fine. Dr. Benquith can—"

"Zaddie and I will take care of you," said Elinor firmly and without looking at her daughter. "Not Leo. I nursed Frances through her arthritis—"

"You did cure me," Frances admitted.

"—and I am going to see you through this, too."

"Do you think there might be complications?" asked Billy.

"I think," said Elinor, "that starting tomorrow, I am going to bathe Frances just the way I used to when she was so sick."

"In Perdido water?" asked Frances in a low voice.

Thereafter, as if she were a little girl again, Frances Bronze sat in the bathtub for one hour each day while her mother knelt on the floor and sponged Perdido water all over her body. While Frances never really looked forward to this ablution, she did not, after the first few times, dread it either. She actually seemed never even to think of it or remember it, until Elinor would seek her out, and say softly, "Time to go upstairs, Frances." Then that unvarying phrase would act as a trigger in Frances's mind; when she heard it spoken, she seemed to forget everything else. She would drop whatever she was doing, and march upstairs. Her clothing seemed to fall off her, and she would step into the bathtub. With that muddy red water being rubbed into her skin, and the odor of the river rising up around her, Frances would think there was no pleasure equal to it. After one brief stab at sending her mother away, Frances gave herself up to the intense pleasure. At the last moment, before she forgot everything else, Frances would ask herself, Is there a transformation now? or There is a transformation now, but how complete is it?, and would vow to question her mother afterward. But afterward—always more than an hour later by the clock, though she could scarcely believe the time had passed so quickly—Frances no longer recalled those questions. She remembered, in fact, only two things: her mother locking the door of the bathroom to make sure there would be no intrusion, and then standing out of the tub, with the sensation of the muddy red water flowing off her body and back into the bath. But the hour between that click of the turning key and the feel of the muddy water pouring off her was lost to Frances, and she had no more memory of it than she had of the three years she had lain in bed with her illness years before.

Billy sometimes complained of the smell of the river in his wife's hair and upon her skin. Frances, acquiescent to her husband in all else, said only, "You'll get used to it."

To everyone else in the family, Frances's pregnancy was another undeniable instance of the forth-rightness of Billy Bronze. When he set his mind to something, he walked right in at the door and did it. When he had got it into his head to become part of the Caskey family, he had picked out a marriageable daughter, wooed her, won her, married her, and got her pregnant in order to produce more Caskeys. The family's admiration for Billy Bronze was unbounded, and much faith was put in his judgments and opinions.

Grace, for instance, was constantly seeking his approval and advice on her plans for the development of Gavin Pond Farm. With the money that had come to her from her father, Grace was anxious to buy more land. Most everyone in the family was against this, saying that Grace already owned more property than she knew what to do with over there on the other side of the Perdido River in Florida, that most of what she contemplated buying—south of her current holdings—was merely swampland, good neither as farmland or as usable forest. Yet Grace found two unexpected champions—Billy and Elinor. Billy said, "If you have money you're not using, and aren't likely to need, then go ahead and buy that land. You'll never lose."

Elinor said, "I have a feeling about that swampland."

"You've never even seen it!" cried Oscar.

"How do you know that?" Elinor returned, arching an eyebrow at her husband. Oscar said no more.

With an irrational acquisitiveness worthy of the deceased Mary-Love, Grace Caskey bought up more than sixteen thousand acres of seemingly worthless swampland directly south of Gavin Pond Farm. Though claimed over the decades by the Creek Indians, the Spanish, the French, the English, and the Americans successively, this desolate expanse of marsh and pool and cypress had never been lived on, hunted on, or even completely scouted. This land, added to Gavin Pond Farm, made Grace's holdings contiguous to the fifty thousand acres of timber owned by Oscar in that westernmost county of Florida. Outside the federal government, the Caskeys had become the largest landholders in the Florida panhandle.

Queenie, visiting her daughter and grandson at the farm, shook her head at Grace and said, "I don't understand it at all. Why did you buy all that land— if that's what you can call it."

"Ma," protested Lucille, "Grace didn't want us to be hemmed in."

"Hemmed in!" cried Queenie, bouncing little Tommy Lee violently on her knee in her agitation. "There's not anybody living within five miles of this place. You could scream your head off for years and wouldn't anybody come! And who in his right mind would try to do anything with that old swamp? Y'all are not even gone have poachers!"

"Queenie," said Grace calmly, "Tommy Lee has just gotten all his teeth in. Are you trying to shake them loose?"

Shortly after this, Sister received a letter from Early Haskew. She had not seen her husband since Christmas of 1943. The note read:

Dear Sister,

I am in Kitzen, Germany, working on some bridges for the Allies. I heard Queenys boy was living over here and went to see him. His wife is real sweet I guess. They live in a big castle that belonged to her daddy and it is too big for them. Castles can be real cold and cold in Europe is not what cold is in Perdido. I should be through in March and then I am coming home. Look for me around the middle of April I guess. Ask Ivey if her Mama will give us some puppies. It sure is hard living without a dog. How is Grip?

Love,

Your husband Early

"Grip is dead!" Sister wailed to Ivey, as she staggered through the dining room and into the kitchen. "Grip was chasing a car and got run over. What am I gone do?" Sister's distress was not for her dead bird dog, but rather for herself. There was no longer any pretense on Sister's part that she missed Early Haskew or that she wanted to renew her married life.

"Oh, Lord! Oh, Lord!" Sister cried, flinging herself in through the front door of Elinor's house with the crumpled letter in her hand. "Why in the world did so many people die in the war, and Early's coming back alive!"

"Early wasn't in the fighting," said Elinor, coming out into the hallway with a dinner napkin still in her hand.

She led Sister back into the dining room. Sister threw herself into Elinor's vacated chair at the head of the table and pushed away Elinor's plate as if it had been her own and she had lost all her appetite. Elinor went into the kitchen and brought out a glass of iced tea. Sister was now sprawled in the chair, her head down on her breast. "I don't want anything!" cried Sister.

No one said anything.

Sister suddenly looked up; fevered hope was in her eyes. "Billy!" she cried. "Billy Bronze! You tell me what to do! You tell me how to keep Early Has-kew out of Perdido!"

But in this instance Billy had no advice; he could think of no solution, could provide no help.

The weeks passed. April arrived, and every day brought Sister closer to the time of her husband's dreaded reappearance.