BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (80 page)

Sister did not reply. She turned her head aside on the pillow, away from her husband. Early walked out of the room and motioned with his head for Elinor and Miriam to go back in.

Sister remained in the hospital in Pensacola. She declared that only Miriam could visit. With a duti-fulness born of affection that surprised everyone, Miriam drove to Pensacola every night after she had finished at the mill and spent the night there on an army cot set up at the side of Sister's bed. She drove back to Perdido early the next morning in time for breakfast with Elinor and Oscar. She never complained of this regimen and never deviated from it. Sister was morose, Miriam said. Sister had never been so unhappy. She wasn't mending as quickly as the doctors thought she ought to.

Oscar shook his head, and carefully folded his napkin. "Poor Sister!"

Miriam said, "Sister doesn't want to get well."

"Why on earth not?" demanded Frances.

"Because when she gets well," explained Miriam, "Early Haskew's gone come back to Perdido and take her away."

"Lord!" cried Elinor, "he can't take her away unless she wants to go."

"You cain't talk to Sister about it," shrugged Miriam. "And I don't want anybody here to mention the fact that I said one word about it."

After three weeks Sister was released from the hospital. According to the X-rays, she was as well as could be expected, though she still complained of pain, difficulty in breathing, and a lack of sensation in her left leg. The hospital had offered to recommend a nurse, but to this, Sister said, "No, my family will take care of me. And if they won't then I'd just as soon die anyway."

Sister was driven home in an ambulance, and Grace and Ivey, under Leo Benquith's direction, carried her upstairs and put her in bed. Leo examined her once more, told her she'd be up and about within a month, and then left. Sister said, "He doesn't know what he's talking about. It will be six months before I can walk again. I know that. Ivey, get me a cup of coffee will you? You don't know how much I've missed your cooking. Grace, you go right next door and tell Queenie to get herself over here and keep me company. She doesn't have anything else to do all day, so she might as well make herself useful."

Grace was amused. This was a new Sister. Never had she been so decisive, so opinionated, so imperious. Here she lay, in her bed with two extra mattresses and three extra pillows, giving orders and making judgments with as much ease as Mary-Love had so many years before.

Queenie was duly brought to Sister's bedside. "It sure is nice—" she began, but was impatiently interrupted by Sister.

"Come over here and fix my pillows. I am slipping down in the bed."

Queenie placed one fat arm behind the invalid's back, shifted her into a sitting position, and rearranged the pillows behind her. She eased Sister back down.

Sister sighed, and said, "Just right."

"I used to take care of my daddy when he was sick," declared Queenie. "I know all about sickrooms."

"I am not sick!" cried Sister. "I am crippled!"

Here were changes no one could have predicted. Sister returned from Pensacola an invalid, her very nature altered along with her body. A few days later Oscar approached Miriam and said, "You were down there with her every night. Did you notice a change?"

Miriam shook her head. "I don't understand it." Nobody could figure it out, but the changes were unmistakably there. Sister, who in years past had made a habit of anticipating the desires of others, now seemed to think of nothing but her own comfort. She was the axis of her household. Ivey Sapp did nothing but wait on her, bringing her endless cups of coffee and plates of cookies, which was all she liked to eat during the day, and taking her a specially prepared supper at night on a tray. And strangest of all, the only help that Sister gladly suffered was that of Queenie. Queenie sat with Sister an hour in the morning, two or three hours in the afternoon, and an hour or two in the evening. Nobody but Queenie could fix Sister's pillows to her satisfaction. Medicine was undrinkable except when Queenie held the spoon. Unless Queenie fixed the curtains, the room was either drafty or stuffy. Ivey's cooking was inedible unless Queenie was there to watch Sister eat.

Elinor shook her head, and said to Queenie, "Sister is worse than Mary-Love ever was. I wouldn't blame you if you moved away, just so that you could get a little peace."

"I don't mind," returned Queenie. "It gives me something to do now that James is gone. I feel like I'm earning my keep."

CHAPTER 62
The Swamp

The relationship between Elinor Caskey and her daughter Miriam had become less strained than it ever had been. Neither, it appeared, had anything more to prove to the other. If Miriam never displayed a great deal of affection toward her mother, at least she never showed any animosity. Elinor's only words against her formerly estranged daughter concerned Miriam's wardrobe, which Elinor considered embarrassingly casual for a young woman of Miriam's station in the town.

One Saturday morning early in June, after breakfast, Elinor knocked on the screen door of Miriam's house, and called out her daughter's name.

Miriam came to the door but didn't open it. "You want to see Sister?" she asked.

"I want to see you," said Elinor.

Miriam came warily out onto the porch.

"I came to ask if you would take a little ride with me this morning."

"Where?"

"You'll find out."

Miriam refused to give her mother the satisfaction of any more questions. "Let's go," she said, and marched down the front steps.

Mother and daughter got into Elinor's car, and drove out of town, heading south down a rarely used road that ran along the western bank of the Perdido. After ten miles or so, this road petered out altogether, and Elinor turned onto a bumpy logging track. They passed evidence of recent timber cutting.

"This is our land," remarked Miriam conversationally. "Oscar was out here on Thursday, I believe."

Elinor drove on for another couple of miles, saying nothing. Then even the logging track disappeared. They were in the darkest depths of the forest. Miriam looked about, deliberately damping her curiosity and wonder, and said nothing.

"Get out," said Elinor.

"We're in the middle of nowhere," said Miriam, but it wasn't an argument. She got out of the car.

Elinor had already taken off into the forest, heading east. The sun had been shining murkily through hazy clouds, but in the woods little of its light reached the needle-carpeted ground because of the high canopy of pine boughs.

"I should have worn long sleeves," muttered Miriam, following Elinor and swatting at ferocious mosquitoes that continually alighted on her arms.

The low brush recently had been burned off preparatory to logging, so walking was relatively easy. But every footstep brought up a stink of charred greenery.

After they had gone about a quarter of a mile, Miriam caught a glimpse of flowing water. "That's the Perdido," she said. A few steps ahead of her, Elinor nodded.

"If you had wanted to show me the Perdido," Miriam remarked, "you could have taken me to the top of the levee."

Elinor did not respond.

Elinor halted above a strip of red sand and gravel, several yards wide, that had been left when the river had slightly altered its course not long before. This forlorn little beach was strewn with sticks, tufts of pine needles, and a few decaying carcasses of dead birds and rodents. A small green boat had been dragged up onto this strand, out of reach of the current.

The Perdido, a hundred feet wide here, flowed swiftly by. On the western bank of the river, where Elinor and Miriam now stood, the pine forest was uninterrupted as far downstream and upstream as could be seen. But on the opposite side of the river the land was different.

"Ah," said Miriam, understanding at last. "That's the swamp."

"Yes," said Elinor, and she stepped down onto the red, gravelly beach in the direction of the boat.

Across the river there was no real shore, only a succession of hammocks of tall grass, cypress, and palmetto. Insects swarmed in slowly roiling clouds above the hammocks. The water of the Perdido at the edge of the swamp seemed hardly to flow at all, and it changed from its usual deep red to a nearly unreflecting black.

"You're planning on taking me across?" Miriam asked uneasily, as her mother effortlessly dragged the boat toward the water.

"That swamp is going to make us all very, very rich, Miriam. You know it and I know it, but this morning at the breakfast table it occurred to me that you had never even seen it."

"I haven't—and I'm not sure I want to."

"Why not?" asked Elinor. She had shoved the boat into the water and only her foot, placed in the prow, kept the little craft from being carried out into the current and down to the Gulf of Mexico.

"Elinor, we're going to be eaten up over there. Look at those bugs!"

"They're blind," said Elinor.

"What?" asked Miriam, stepping forward and gingerly getting into the boat despite her protestations.

"Hand me the paddle," said Elinor. As Miriam obediently did as she was told, her mother further explained: "They're mosquitoes, but they're blind. They don't bite."

"I think," said Miriam crossly, "that you are making that up."

Elinor sat down in the boat, and in another moment the current had pulled them several yards downstream. Behind the levees in town the Perdido was strong and fast-moving, but it was not as strong and fast-moving as this, Miriam thought uncomfortably.

But as soon as Elinor had placed the paddle into the water, the boat halted its downstream course. Its nose turned easily, and with no effort apparent in the muscles of Elinor's arms, they were headed directly across the river.

They drew nearer to the hammocks and the clouds of insects. Miriam shrank back, but said nothing. The red water of the Perdido left off in a line that seemed unnaturally abrupt, and the fetid black water of the swamp was suddenly all around the boat.

"Lord!" exclaimed Miriam. "It stinks!"

"It smells like every swamp," said Elinor.

It seemed to Miriam that her mother was paddling them directly into the grassy shore, and she grasped the sides of the boat, prepared for a jolt. But no jolt came. The tall grasses parted before them, their sharp-edged stalks, dry feathery flowers, and rasping seeded spikes slashing along Miriam's arms and face. A cloud of insects descended over the boat, and enveloped it like the Egyptian plague. Miriam cried out, and mosquitoes filled her mouth and nostrils. She flailed her arms madly, shook her head, then crouched down in the bottom of the boat to escape the buzzing swarm; then the cloud lifted.

Miriam looked up and around in surprise.

Elinor paddled unperturbed. "They're only at the edge of the swamp," she said. "Now you have to watch out for the ones that do bite." Miriam slapped one that had just bitten her on the wrist.

"I hate this," said Miriam.

"I knew you would," returned her mother, "but I still thought you ought to see it."

Miriam nodded and looked around, still uncomfortably, but with interest. The only picture she had had in her mind of the swamp south of Gavin Pond Farm had come from her knowledge of the cypress swamp between Perdido and Atmore. But this swamp was wholly unlike that: this place was vast, but cramped with clogged waterways and overgrown hammocks and what seemed entire continents of rotted tree trunks overgrown with moss. Birds screeched everywhere, and small animals scuttled secretively away. Everything stank, and everything was rotting. Parasite festered on parasite. Nothing existed that wasn't adulterated with decay. Elinor paddled quickly, and they slipped deeper into the swamp. Miriam mechanically slapped at mosquitoes and stared at everything around her.

"Elinor," said Miriam, "what I cain't understand, is how you find your way around in all this. You act like you are looking at a road map."

Elinor only laughed. "I don't know where I am," she said.

"Are you gone get us out of here?" Miriam said, suddenly alarmed.

Elinor merely nodded, raised her paddle smoothly, and pushed away an alligator that rose lazily to the surface of the murky water beside the boat.

After half an hour Elinor caught the exposed roots of a toppled cypress with her paddle and dragged the boat over to a rotting hammock that looked to Miriam exactly like countless others they had passed. Orchids grew in the crotch of the overturned cypress, and snakes slithered out of a smooth hole just beneath.

"Get out," said Elinor.

"Is it safe?"

"Just don't put your hand on anything, that's all." Elinor held the boat steady, and Miriam gingerly climbed out onto the hammock. The ground beneath the rotting grass was slimy; she slid back, and one foot slipped into the water. She felt a stinging sensation, and when she brought it up again, she found that three leeches had attached themselves to her ankle. But before Miriam had even had a chance to cry out, Elinor leaned over, plucked them off, and crushed them in her hand till the blood flowed around her fingers.

Miriam stood, shuddering slightly, atop the hammock. "All right," she said, "now what?"

"Nothing," said Elinor. "I just wanted to show you the spot where they drill first."

Miriam looked down at her mother, then gazed around in a little careful circle. Swamp, slime, and decay. What had been green was turning brown, what had been brown was turning black. The sky was washed-out looking; the sun a pale white disc. The air was close, still, heavy.

Miriam suddenly felt diz2y. She looked down again at her mother. Elinor was wiping away the remains of the crushed leeches on the side of the boat. She waggled her hand in the water to cleanse it of gore.

This must have been the action of only a few seconds, but to Miriam, standing on the hammock, dizzy and numbed, those simple actions of her mother's appeared to take hours. Miriam watched Elinor's hand as it disappeared beneath the surface of the water at the side of the boat, watched Elinor's delicate wrist move back and forth, and watched as that hand withdrew from the water.