Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (20 page)

“Well, I don’t,” said Sister sullenly. “I guess that’s why I’m never gone get married.”

“Don’t say that,” said Mary-Love with some severity. “When you get ready...”

Oscar’s automobile pulled up before the house.

“You want us to go inside?” Mary-Love whispered, but Elinor shook her head no.

“All I’m going to do is tell him,” said Elinor easily. “There’s no reason for you not to be here.”

Oscar came up onto the front porch and was about to go inside the house, but Elinor called, “Oscar, we’re out here!”

Oscar came around. “Hey y’all,” he said, “sure is a pretty night. All the clouds cleared away.”

“Oscar,” said Elinor without preamble, “I’m going to have a baby.”

Oscar stood stock-still, then he grinned. “Elinor, I’m so happy. But what I want to know is, is it gone be a boy or a girl?”

“You’ll take whatever you get,” said Mary-Love.

“Which do you want?” asked Sister.

“I want a girl,” said Oscar, sitting down and putting his arm around his wife’s shoulder.

“Well, Oscar, you are in luck today, because that’s what it’s going to be.” Elinor stated this not as a matter of belief or conjecture, but rather as if it had been a matter of choice, just as she might have said,
I’m going to buy a pink dress,
rather than
I’m going to get a blue one.

“How you know?” demanded Sister, who that day had come to feel that there was entirely too much about life she did not understand.

“Shhh!” said Mary-Love. “I think it’ll be wonderful to have a little girl baby in the house!”

Elinor’s announcement completely overshadowed the little agenda of news that Oscar brought with him from the town council meeting, and they didn’t hear it until the next morning at breakfast. A third man was about to be added to the town police force; the Palafox Street merchants had agreed to bear half the expense of new concrete sidewalks; and finally, an engineer from Montgomery, whose name was Early Haskew, had put up at the Osceola the previous afternoon, had introduced himself to the town council (“a real nice man, and good looking,” remarked Oscar, hardly satisfying his mother’s desire for a detailed description), and would today begin his survey of Perdido.

“Surveying for what?” asked Sister.

“Well, for the levee of course,” said Oscar. Elinor put down her fork with a clatter.

. . .

Oscar knew nothing about pregnancy except that it required nine months. So he calculated the birth of his daughter nine months from the day Elinor told him he was going to be a father, as if she had been impregnated the night before and somehow knew it. He was overjoyed to learn that he would have to wait only seven months—his daughter (of
that
he was certain, for Elinor had said it) would be born in May.

That night, while Elinor was undressing and Oscar was rising from his prayers at the side of the bed, he said, “Elinor, I think you ought to give up the school.”

“I won’t do it,” returned Elinor.

“You’re pregnant!”

“Oscar,” she said, “do you think that I want to sit in this house all day long with Miss Mary-Love perched on one shoulder and Sister perching on the other?”

“No,” he admitted, “I suspect you wouldn’t be partial to that.”

“Oscar,” said Elinor, going over and drawing back the curtain so that the moon could shine into the room, “it is time we moved into our new house.” She raised the screen and leaned out the window. Looking to her left, she could see the house that had been built for her: large, square, and stolid, rising from a pitted lake of shining sand, with the dark pine forest sighing softly behind it.

“Oscar,” Elinor went on, “that house was our wedding present. We have been married for six months and we are still living in the room you had as a little boy. Every time I hang up a dress I see your old toys in the back of the closet—they’re still there, and I don’t have anywhere to put my shoes! The house next door has sixteen rooms and not a single person in any one of them.” She got into bed.

“Mama will be lonesome when we go,” Oscar ventured.

“Mama
will have Sister,” snapped Elinor.
“Mama
will be able to look out her window—without even getting out of her bed—and see if we are up and stirring in the morning.
Mama
can lean out the back door and shake her mop in my face. Oscar, we’re not going to the end of the earth. We’re moving thirty yards away. And what you got to remember is, I’m going to have a baby. We’re going to need that house.”

“I know it,” said Oscar uncomfortably. “And I’ll talk to Mama.” A thought suddenly occurred to him. He turned on his pillow and looked into his wife’s face. “Elinor, let me ask you something. Did you get pregnant just so we could move out of this house?”

“I would do
anything
to get you out of this house, Oscar. I would go to any length,” replied Elinor, then turned over and went to sleep.

Oscar talked to Mary-Love, but she wouldn’t hear of his leaving her. Mary-Love objected that the house wasn’t furnished yet; Mary-Love declared that there were bats upstairs and Bray hadn’t been able to kill them; Mary-Love pointed out that before Oscar and Elinor moved into the house, she’d have to find them at least two colored women to work there, and every decent colored woman in Perdido was already taken. Elinor was pregnant and shouldn’t have to run a house all by herself, going up and down stairs all day, worrying about linens and cushions. And to make certain that Elinor and Oscar did not move one day when she was out of the house for a few hours—in remembrance and imitation of the circumstances of their wedding—Mary-Love made surreptitious visits to the water board and the Alabama Gas and Power Company and forced them to promise not to turn on the water, electricity, and gas before she gave her written consent.

Oscar gave in. “I cain’t fight Mama,” he told his wife with a despairing sigh. “She’s always got one more argument than I have. And Lord, Elinor, the only thing she wants in this world is to take care of you while you are pregnant! I don’t know why you don’t sit back and enjoy it!”

“There is not
room
to sit back in this house, we are so cramped!”

“There is room enough here,” said Oscar mildly. “Elinor, we will go next door just as soon as our little girl is born. Listen, you know that little room behind the kitchen?”

“I know the one you mean.”

“I was thinking we might put up a cot in there and make Zaddie sleep there all the time. Keep you company, keep care of our little girl. Zaddie loves you to death, and I know she’d like nothing more in the world than to come live with us.”

This was a large concession. If that innocent and salutary arrangement came to pass, Zaddie Sapp would be the only black in the entire length and breadth of Baldwin County—the largest, though not the most populous county in the entire state—to live in a white household.

“I think that’s a good idea,” said Elinor with a grimace, “but, Oscar, let me tell you something. I’m not won over. I’m not going to let you buy me off with promises about Zaddie’s sleeping arrangements. I think we ought to go next door, and I think we ought to go next door tonight!”

“There aren’t even any sheets on the bed!”

“I will go to Caroline DeBordenave and
borrow
them if I have to!” cried Elinor.

“We cain’t do that,” said Oscar.

“You
can’t do it,” Elinor corrected. “You can’t go against Miss Mary-Love. That’s all.”

“Then
you
talk to her,” said Oscar. “You stand up to her.”

“It’s not my place,” said Elinor. “I refuse to be accused for the rest of my life of taking you away from Miss Mary-Love.”

So Elinor and Oscar remained in Mary-Love Caskey’s house for the entire term of Elinor’s pregnancy. Despite Mary-Love’s remonstrances, Elinor still rowed Bray’s little green boat to the school every morning with Grace perched in the prow, and she didn’t miss a day for sickness. Mary-Love and Sister knitted baby clothes and went to Mobile to pick out a set of nursery furniture. Ominously, however, when this suite was delivered, Mary-Love had it placed not next door, but in a spare bedroom of her own home. When Oscar returned from the mill that afternoon, Elinor took him upstairs, opened the door of that room, and pointed at the wicker bassinet that was still wrapped in brown paper—but she didn’t say a word.

“When the time comes,” Oscar promised in a low voice, “I will put down my foot.”

The time came sooner than anyone expected. After school, on the twenty-first day of March, Grace Caskey stood on the mooring dock while Elinor tied the boat to the iron ring of the outermost piling. Grace gave Elinor a hand and helped her up onto the weathered pine planks of the dock. This was an awkward operation on account of Elinor’s extended belly. Elinor put a hand to her forehead, closed her eyes for a moment, and said, “Grace, will you do something for me?”

Grace said, “Yes, ma’am.”

Elinor said, “Go tell Roxie to fetch the doctor. Then run over to Miss Mary-Love’s and have Ivey turn down my bed.”

Grace hesitated. “Are you sick?” she asked in a trembling voice.

“Grace,” said Elinor with a weak smile, “I am about to have my little girl!”

Grace ran off, as excited as she had been on the day that Miss Elinor got married.

. . .

Two hours later, Elinor Caskey—with Sister holding her left hand and Ivey Sapp holding her right and Mary-Love mopping her brow—was delivered of a three-pound little girl. The child was so small that for two months she had to be carried around the house in the hollow of a feather pillow. By Elinor’s decree and Oscar’s consent, she was to be called Miriam Dammert Caskey.

Miriam didn’t look like Elinor; she took after Oscar and all the other Caskeys. This fact alone would have endeared her to Mary-Love, even had Miriam not been the first of her grandchildren. She had the Caskey hair, hair that was no color at all, and the Caskey nose, which wasn’t quite straight but certainly couldn’t have been said to be hooked or bulbous or too little or too extreme in its formation or size.

Miriam had been born on Monday. Zaddie took a note to Miz Digman’s house that evening to say Elinor wouldn’t be at school the following morning, but hoped to return on Wednesday. And Elinor did return on Wednesday, though Mary-Love cried in protest, “You are leaving your two-day-old baby alone!”

“Not exactly alone,” remarked Elinor. “In this house there are you and Sister here and Ivey. Next door are Zaddie and Roxie. If the five of you can’t handle it, then call up Oscar—he’ll be coming by here five times to look in on her, anyway.”

“I would have thought,” said Mary-Love, “that you would have been going to give up your class.”

“But I’m not, though,” said Elinor. “What would Miz Digman think of me! What would my Indians think!”

“But poor old Miriam...” cried Mary-Love.

“Miriam is two days old, like you said,” Elinor pointed out. “She doesn’t know me from the man in the moon. Sister, you go in my room and open my closet door and put on one of my dresses—you pretend you’re me when you’re leaning over the crib.”

In the months following Miriam’s birth, Elinor did not press her husband in the matter of his promise. Miriam was tiny—was there ever a child who was tinier?—and wanted much attention on account of her size and general frailty. The baby had very white skin beneath which, on all parts of her body, you could see a delicate tracing of blue veins. She scarcely ever seemed to cry, and Ivey said confidingly of this phenomenon to Roxie, “That child don’t have enough breath to go around—breathe and cry too. That child just cain’t do it, and if she sees the other side of two years of age, why I will toss her directly across the Perdido River and let Bray catch her on the other side!” Roxie tended to agree.

Four rolled blankets were placed in the bassinet in the bedroom that lay between Oscar and Elinor’s room and Sister’s. Within that rectangle of security lay Miriam all night long, quiet and unmoving, and Sister—who had specially asked for the privilege of administering the two o’clock feeding—often had to wake the baby for it. But sometimes, turning on a soft lamp in the corner and creeping over to the bassinet, Sister would find the little girl looking up at her with a tiny smile, as if saying, Sister said,
Oh, Sister, you cain’t sneak up on me!

Miriam grew quickly and increased in strength. Sister and Mary-Love, who were there at the house all day long while Elinor was at the school, quickly began to think of the baby as their own and to resent, the least little bit, Elinor’s hour or so with her in the late afternoon. They would snatch Miriam away from Oscar, whom they considered insufficiently schooled in the ways of handling undersized infants.

“Lord, Mama,” Oscar protested, “I ought to know as much about it as Sister!”

“You don’t!” cried Sister. “Oscar, I can just see you dropping that child head-first on the floorboards...”

Oscar thought himself happy. He had a baby girl who was very pretty and very well behaved—he told James he thought they could have taken Miriam to morning service and she wouldn’t have made a peep. And Elinor seemed to be satisfied with the arrangement—she no longer thought of moving into the house next door, or if she thought about it, she no longer mentioned it. Miriam had changed all that, Oscar was sure. Elinor needed Mary-Love and Sister to take care of the baby while she was teaching. “I know Elinor loves Miriam to the bottom of her toes,” he confided to James, “but I’m not so sure Elinor wants to take care of Miriam twenty-four hours a day. And that’s
exactly
what Mama and Sister want to do!”

Oscar, however, had erred in this interpretation. He found it out on the Sunday that Miriam was christened. It was the middle of May and the weather was hot and the Caskeys were sweltering in their pew. Mary-Love leaned across Sister every two minutes, and with her handkerchief wiped the perspiration from Miriam’s tiny brow as she lay quietly in Elinor’s arms. Between the pastoral prayer and the sermon Oscar and Elinor and Miriam were called to the front of the church and the service of baptism was read over Miriam Dammert Caskey. The preacher lifted the mahogany cover of the silver baptism basin—a gift of Elvennia Caskey many years before—and was about to dip her fingers into the water to sprinkle the infant’s head, when she stopped in consternation.