BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (92 page)

"I don't know why we're working at all," Oscar said, staring at an enormous check. "We could close down the mill and sit back and relax."

"And put six hundred people out of work," Miriam pointed out. "And make us all lazy and fat."

"I'm lazy and fat already," her father argued.

Miriam made no reply.

After receiving the checks from Billy, the Caskeys always just endorsed them and handed them back. "What are we supposed to do with money like that?" Queenie demanded. "I couldn't spend all that money if I was to work seven days a week at it. Billy, you go on and invest it somewhere."

Billy laughed. "Queenie, if I invest it, you're just going to make more."

"All right," said Queenie, "so don't tell me about it. Just go ahead and do it."

As the oil wells in the swamp continued to pump, and as other wells were sunk, the Caskeys grew accustomed to the new wealth, though they never quite grasped the meaning of such overweening prosperity. Queenie, for instance, judged all sums as fractions or multiples of twenty-nine dollars, which had been the cost, in 1943, of a new dress. A check for one hundred sixteen thousand dollars would purchase four thousand new dresses, and Queenie couldn't even begin to imagine closets to hold such a wardrobe as that. The limit of her imagination was a new car every year; anything beyond that exhausted her mind.

Miriam continued to run the mill, and Miriam and Billy together guided the Caskeys through the machinations of the oil companies and the exploitation of the swamp. There were trips now not only to Houston, but to New Orleans, Atlanta, and New York as well—sometimes by airplane. The Caskeys were rich, and their investments became more complicated. In whatever city Miriam visited, she always picked up some bijou made of diamonds, pearls, or colored gems to put in one of her safety-deposit boxes—she now had seven altogether. But even when she and Billy went out to a nightclub together on one of their trips, she never wore any jewels except the diamond bobs that had belonged to Mary-Love.

In the first years of this new financial grandeur, the Caskeys did not change the way Perdido thought they might. The greatest difference was in Oscar Caskey, who gave up his work at the mill. He ceased to take any interest whatsoever in the business except for the maintenance of the forests themselves. He still loved the smell of growing pine, he said. When Lake Pinchona opened a nine-hole golf course, Oscar took up the game, and played eighteen, twenty-seven, or even thirty-six holes every afternoon.*He soon lost the fat he had gained in the past few years. He slept later in the mornings, and after his shave in the barbershop, he sometimes lingered around the back room of the establishment in hope of getting up a domino game. Miriam did not even pretend that he was needed at the mill. When she wanted his advice or opinion, she asked for it, but said otherwise, "Go on Oscar, do what you like, we'll get along here just fine."

Oscar heard of a fine golf course over near Tallahassee and had Bray drive him over early one morning. He made up a foursome in the clubhouse, and played all afternoon. The following week he returned and stayed for three days, playing morning and afternoon, this time taking Malcolm along for company. In time Oscar heard of other courses, some even farther away than Tallahassee, but he visited them anyway. Bray always drove him, and always in the back seat was the folded-up feather mattress he had so much missed the night he had been forced to spend out at Gavin Pond Farm. Oscar was rich and set in his ways. He loved to travel; he never went without his bed.

Elinor refused to go with him. She didn't like to be away from Perdido, she said. She couldn't bear leaving Frances and Lilah alone. Elinor and Frances were always in each other's company—except during Frances's daily swim in the Perdido.

Increased wealth did nothing to improve Sister's temper. She still kept to her bed. While originally the bed had been an excuse to get away from Early, Early had now become an excuse to remain in the bed. It no longer mattered that at first her contention that she could not walk had been a mere falsehood to keep her safe from Early Haskew; Sister's legs had withered. Now she most definitely could not walk, and she smugly considered her husband's loneliness in his house in Mobile with all the day lilies in the back yard.

Also, at the same time, for lack of anything better to occupy herself with, Sister picked a fight with Ivey Sapp. She accused Ivey of crippling her with the contents of the blue bottle she had swallowed on the night that Early Haskew had come to take her away. Ivey said in reply, "You know what was in that bottle, Sister. You know it made you blind—that's all. You couldn't see and you fell down the stairs. And next morning you could see fine again. Don't try and tell me I had anything to do with your legs!" But Sister maintained her stance, and Ivey no more went upstairs. Queenie was needed all the more then.

Queenie was sixty, but lively and proud of her family. She rather wondered at her good fortune. There had been a time not so long ago when it had seemed that she had lost all three of her children to distance, disaster, or disappointment. Danjo was firmly entrenched in his castle in Germany now, that was true. But she had Malcolm to take up his place at the table. And here was she, possessing more money than she had ever dreamed it possible for any one human being to be possessed of, able to give Malcolm and Lucille cars and new clothes and little trips and big trips—anything in the world, in fact, that they wanted or would make them happy. Was there ever an aging woman who was happier than Queenie Strickland?

Malcolm was the Caskeys' workhorse, commanded to do many tasks, which he performed with ever-increasing facility. And it was apparent to everyone that Malcolm was in love with Miriam. Once, in her office at the mill, Malcolm looked up from some figures he was totaling for her, and said, "Miriam, you want to get married?"

"To who?" Miriam asked, not looking up.

"To me," said Malcolm.

"Why you want to get married to me?"

"I don't know. Just 'cause, I guess."

"No," said Miriam. "If we got married, where would we live? We couldn't live with Queenie. She grates on my nerves, always has. And you couldn't live with me, 'cause you grate on Sister's nerves. Sister wouldn't even let me bring you in the house. That's why we cain't get married."

This odd refusal of marriage made sense to Malcolm, and he never raised the subject again. He'd wait for Queenie—or for Sister—to die.

Roxie, who had remained with Queenie after James's death, died. Her fifty-year-old daughter, Reta, who remembered helping Miss Elinor scrub James's floor after the flood of 1919, came to Queenie's assistance. At Gavin Pond Farm, Sammy Sapp had a little brother and a little sister who could pick up pecans and put them in a sack before they could properly walk. Ivey and Zaddie had a fight in 1950— about what, no one knew—and by 1954, though they continued to work in Elinor's kitchen together every day of the year, they still did not speak to each other. Bray's eyes failed, and his job as chauffeur was handed over to a younger man, the husband of yet another of the Sapp daughters.

At Gavin Pond Farm, Grace and Lucille got along as well as they ever had, and Tommy Lee was growing up in the constant company of Sammy Sapp, Luvadia's boy. Grace put Tommy Lee on the tractor for the first time when he was four, and showed him how to steer. Because his feet wouldn't reach the pedals, she placed a large rock on the accelerator and allowed him to till a recently cleared field. With the money coming in from the oil, Grace bought two of the best bulls in the country and opened a stud service. She built two barns, a stable, and a silo. And she doubled the size of the house with the addition of a living room, three bedrooms, two baths, and a playroom for Tommy Lee. She bought horses for herself and Lucille and a pony for Tommy Lee. She had a catfish pond scooped out of the earth and graveled the road from the Babylon highway. They began to entertain, and Thanksgiving for the Caskeys was held out at the farm instead of at Elinor's. Grace and Lucille were hosts of a vast New Year's Eve party. They invited everybody they knew from Perdido, Babylon, and Pensacola. Grace had a houseboat specially constructed for her in Pensacola which she moored on the bank of the Perdido and where she and Lucille went when they wanted to be alone. Grace's great itch remained the acquisition of land, and she unmercifully badgered owners of property next to the farm. With the backup of ever-increasing oil revenues, her offers increased steadily until they were irresistible, and every year Gavin Pond Farm's fences lengthened. By 1955 it was the largest private landholding in the Florida panhandle.

What was good for the Caskeys was good for the entire area. Now oil companies began-to look at the area on both banks of the Perdido. Other wells were drilled, some on Caskey property. More than half struck oil; more money poured into the region.

With the prosperity of the Caskey mills and oil enterprises the population of Perdido doubled to more than five thousand. The Caskeys bought the pecan orchard and cattle pasture across the road from their houses so that it could not be built upon. The town expanded south along both banks of the Perdido and west into the pine forest. The Caskeys relinquished some of their land near the town for building. More shops opened downtown, and their quality rivaled those in Pensacola and Mobile. Perdido society, with more money in its pocket, began to dress up. Little parties were arranged to go to Mobile for the evening. Rented railroad cars transported carousers to the Auburn-Alabama game in the fall. Beach houses were erected at Destin or Gulf Shores. Lake Pin-chona became the Perdido Country Club. With money lent at low interest by Oscar, the country club added another nine holes to its golf course.

The town seemed overrun with children. The grammar school expanded with funds donated by the Caskeys. A municipal swimming pool was installed next to the high school, and now no one in Perdido need be tempted to swim in the Perdido or the Black-water. There was even talk of repairing the levee, which had developed visible cracks and had eroded away in a few places, although no one remembered the last time the water had been high enough to threaten the town. In recent years the rivers behind their walls of clay had been placid, and it seemed a waste of money to recondition the levees when two faces of the town hall clock didn't keep correct time and so many streets in Baptist Bottom were not paved.

Miriam was revered in Perdido for having brought prosperity to the area. In Babylon and other towns of Escambia County, Florida, Grace was given the credit. Whenever she went to the seed and feed store in Babylon she was besieged. Men thanked her for what she had done; men asked for the names of the top people at Texas National Oil; men offered to sell her their land for sums that staggered her. She liked these men and wished them success; her great fortune made her want the same for others

One day in the store Grace ran into a farmer she had known for several years. He was a hard-working churchgoer. His wife had died of pneumonia two years back and he had always known bad luck. He said to her, "Well, Miz Caskey, you know where my place is, my boy and I have about two hundred acres right down there between Cantonement and Muscogee. We raise a little soybean, raise a little corn. Make a little money when there's rain, lose a little money when there's not. Well, my boy and me was standing out in the field one day, saw this machinery on the other side of the fence—not our property—talked to the men there, found out they was looking for oil. And they was finding it! So we just took down our fence there, and we said: 'Y'all come on through!' And they did, and they found oil. I wasn't surprised. Somebody come up to my boy yesterday and says, 'What's the soybean crop gone be like this year?' And my boy says, 'Hell, I don't know why you're asking me—we don't raise soybean no more. We got machinery on our land, and we don't plant soybean, 'cause the roots might go down and disturb the machinery.' You don't hardly make money on soybean anyway. We raise oil now. Not hardly no comparison between the two, so far as money goes. We don't even have to run that machinery. All we have to do is slit open them checks every month. We have bought us two pick-'em-up trucks. Drove up to Atmore to get 'em, and we had our choice so we bought two of 'em that look just alike. That damn oil is flowing like a artesian well..."

The Caskeys owned one thousand times this farmer's two hundred acres of oil-rich land.

CHAPTER 71
Legacies

Everyone in the town knew that a strangeness had grown between Frances Bronze and her husband Billy. Some said Billy was having an affair with his sister-in-law Miriam. Those who knew the Caskeys better discounted this information on three counts. First of all: "Billy wouldn't do it." He was upright, God-fearing, and wholly devoted to the Caskey family; he would never create a situation so destructive to family interests. The second argument was: "Miriam wouldn't do it." No one had ever known Miriam to be interested in anything but making money, buying jewelry, and speaking her mind without a moment's thought about consequence. So far as anyone had ever seen, Miriam had no interest in men. Those trips to Texas were strictly business, and besides, didn't Malcolm Strickland always go along? The third argument went: "Elinor wouldn't have allowed it." Everyone knew how deeply Elinor loved her daughter, knew how faithfully she had nursed Frances through her dreadful childhood illnesses, and knew that Elinor was fiercely protective of Frances. If Elinor had thought there was anything between Billy and Miriam she would have put a stop to it instantly.

Frances no longer denied the feelings that had taken root in her. She was devoted to "her other daughter," Nerita. She lived for those hours spent in the water. Recognition only increased these feelings. Oscar, though distracted with thoughts of golf and travel, noticed his daughter's remoteness. Frances had withdrawn, not only from Billy, but from them all. "Talk to her, Elinor," Oscar said. "Talk to her sometime when I'm not here."

Oscar was gone somewhere every week it seemed, at one golf course or another; and he preferred those far away, in landscapes different from those of the Alabama panhandle. Billy was absent often, too, on business. When the women were left alone, their lives were quiet and circumscribed and formal. Elinor now insisted that the family dress for dinner at her home. Their enlarged fortune and expanding importance in the region required it, she said. Even Oscar, though it chafed, put on a coat and tie before he sat down at the table. Elinor invariably wore the black pearls.