Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (27 page)

“Mary-Love, it’s nothing like that,” James replied. “They don’t need new furniture or a new car or anything, but Elinor needs money to buy food every week. They need money to pay the coalman in winter. Oscar ordered a new set of ivory dominoes last week, and when they came in he had to borrow ten dollars from me to pay for ’em. Mary-Love, I say we give old Oscar a little bit more money. You know he earns it.”

“You tell Oscar to come to me,” said Mary-Love. “I will give my boy whatever he wants. You tell Elinor to knock on my front door. She will have her heart’s desire.”

Mary-Love liked to see herself as the family cornucopia, dispensing all manner of good things, unstintingly, unceasingly. She considered herself amply rewarded by her children’s gratitude, and if she perceived that her children were not sufficiently grateful, she could make something of that, too. There was no difficulty in keeping Sister in a position of servile dependence, because, Mary-Love was certain, she had no prospect of marriage and no money of her own. Sister would never leave Perdido, her mother’s house, or Mary-Love’s fervid embrace. Oscar, though, had thrown himself into the bonds of matrimony with Elinor, and had thus weakened the emotional cords that had bound him to Mary-Love. The financial ties between mother and son, however, remained strong, or at least they would as long as Mary-Love had anything to say about it. Lady Bountiful had no intention of allowing Oscar to escape her boons.

Elinor understood all this and explained it to her husband.

Oscar replied, “You’re probably right, Elinor. That’s probably how Mama does it. It makes me sorry for poor old Sister, too. But what am I gone do?”

“You can fight her. You can tell her you’re going to leave that old mill high and dry if you don’t get some decent money out of it. You can tell her that you and I are going to pack our bags and move to Bayou le Batre next Tuesday, and let her know that I’ll be back in another month to pick up Miriam. That’s what you can do.”

“I cain’t do that. Mama wouldn’t believe me. Mama would call my bluff. What would you and I do in Bayou le Batre, that old place? I don’t know anything about shrimp boats!”

“If James and your mama did right by you,” Elinor went on, “they would give you a one-third interest in that mill. They would sign over to you one-third of all the Caskey land.”

Oscar whistled at the very thought. “They won’t do it, though.”

“Maybe not right now,” said Elinor thoughtfully, “but, Oscar, if you’re not going to do anything, then it looks like it’s going to be up to me...”

“What you thinking about doing?” Oscar asked uneasily.

“I don’t know yet. But, Oscar, let me tell you something. There is no sacrifice I would not make to put you where you are supposed to be.”

“Elinor, you shouldn’t have to go out of your way for me. We get along pretty well, it seems to me.”

“Not as well as we could, Oscar. I didn’t marry just
any
body, you know. My daddy used to say he’d like to see the man
I’d
marry. My mama used to say he’d have to be mighty powerful or mighty rich.”

Oscar laughed. “I guess you proved your mama and daddy wrong. I’m not powerful and I’m certainly not rich.”

“Mama and Daddy weren’t wrong,” said Elinor. Those words somehow didn’t seem at home in Elinor’s mouth; certainly she wasn’t in the habit of speaking of her parents. “In fact, I have every intention of proving them right. Oscar, let me ask you something. What in the world would have been my purpose in coming to Perdido at all, if it wasn’t to marry the best man in town?”

“You mean you married me because you thought I was rich and powerful?” He didn’t seem in the least disturbed by the idea.

“Of course not. You know why I married you. But, Oscar, I have no intention of allowing you to continue to wear yourself out down at the mill just so James can buy crystal and silver and Miss Mary-Love can fill her safety-deposit box with diamonds while we are poor as poverty.”

“Well, Elinor, you just tell me what to do, and I’ll do it. I wouldn’t mind having a lot of money.”

“Good,” replied his wife. “So when I tell you to jump, you’ll jump?”

“Right over the roof!”

. . .

Recently, a mania for the game of dominoes had infected the male population of Georgia, Alabama, and Florida. Perdido had not been immune. The malady took hold with virulence, and in the first hectic flush of fever there had been domino parties every night throughout the town. Now that first unhealthy spasm had subsided, but many men continued to play regularly. Among these were the men of the three mill families, James Caskey, Oscar Caskey, Tom DeBordenave, and Henry Turk.

Every Monday and Wednesday evening at six-thirty they gathered at the square red table in Elinor’s breakfast room, joined by three others: Leo Benquith, Warren Moye, and Vernell Smith. Leo Benquith was the most respected doctor in town. Warren Moye was a dapper little man who stood behind the desk of the Osceola Hotel every day; he always brought with him a cushion, which he transferred from chair to chair to ease the pain of his everlasting hemorrhoids. Vernell Smith was rather in the character of a dwarf jester at the Spanish court; he was young and desperately ugly, with a long face that reminded farm folks of the head of a stillborn calf, except that Vernell’s had a number of large moles with long hairs in them.

On Mondays and Wednesdays, Elinor took special care to keep the doors to the breakfast room closed all evening long, for every one of those men smoked cigars or cigarettes and the smoke could fill the house. Every Monday and Wednesday afternoon, Zaddie took down the curtains in that room so that they would not become impregnated with the odor of tobacco. During the game, the countless cigar and cigarette butts were thrown into a glass cistern of water the size of a fishbowl. After a couple of hours, the room was always so filled with smoke that Zaddie could not come in to empty the cistern without her eyes immediately watering. And the room was noisy. The men growled and slammed their ivory dominoes down on the square table. The shuffling was thunderous and could be heard all over the house. There was no cursing, except an occasional “damn.” With the exception of Vernell Smith, all these men went to Sunday school. The stories and the tales traded over that red table in the course of the evening were not so different from the stories and tales that Perdido ladies told over their afternoon bridge games.

On these evenings, Elinor and Zaddie sat on the front porch or on the porch upstairs. Elinor sewed and Zaddie read. Soon it became the custom for one of the other domino wives to come over with her husband and spend the evening with Elinor or to call and talk to her on the telephone. Whenever the visitor was Manda Turk or Caroline DeBordenave, Elinor showed an uncommon and insatiable interest in the details of their husbands’ mills, soaking up every detail of the lumber business that those two women could summon up from minds untrained to such matters. Manda and Caroline agreed that Elinor must have a motive for the acquisition of this information, though Elinor declared that it was only curiosity. When the domino party finally broke up, the domino wife had already gone home alone and Elinor and Zaddie had gone to bed.

As Oscar saw his friends out the front door and the men spoke their good-nights, each one—except modest James Caskey—would relieve himself against one of Elinor’s newly planted camellias. Then Oscar would wander back into the house and call out loudly, “Zaddie, get up and lock the doors!” Oscar was a kind man and a good one, but he had been trained to laziness by his mother, and if there was anything he could get a woman to do for him, he wouldn’t hesitate to ask her to do it. As Oscar trudged upstairs, Zaddie would open the windows of the breakfast room, pour the cistern of butts out into the sandy yard, lock the front door, turn out all the lights, return to her own closet, and with eyes still smarting from the smoke, lie down upon her cot and drift into sleep.

. . .

One Monday evening, while the men played downstairs, Elinor Caskey and Caroline DeBordenave sat on the porch upstairs. Frances’s crib had been brought out and placed so that as the two women rocked in the swing they could peer over at the child. Elinor as usual had brought up the subject of the lumber business, and Caroline—knowing her hostess’s interest in the topic by this time—had come prepared with information. She had questioned her husband to some extent at supper, and though he was surprised by his wife’s sudden interest in what had never seemed to matter to her before, he answered all her questions in detail.

“No, Elinor,” said Caroline, shaking her head, “it’s just not going well for Tom. Now, I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new, because Tom said that both Henry Turk and Oscar knew about his trouble. It’s strange, Tom never told
me
. I was so surprised! The flood did it. Tom lost all his records. He says he remembers that he had almost a hundred thousand dollars...” Caroline paused, unable to remember the precise term her husband had employed.

“In uncollected bills?” suggested Elinor.

“That’s right,” said Caroline complacently. Her tone suggested that she was gossiping about some small matter that was of no possible consequence to her, and indeed it seemed to Caroline as if it were not. The mills were matters for men. She assumed that nothing could or ever would interfere with the money Tom gave her every month to run the household and buy clothes; with her needs taken care of, Tom could do what he pleased with all the rest. “See, Elinor, the problem is, he not only lost all
that
money, but he lost all the lumber that was stored at the mill
and
all the lumber that he took out to Mr. Madsen’s place, because Mr. Madsen’s barn washed away too. Then most of the machinery got filled with mud and that had to be replaced and now there’s no money. Tom says he doesn’t know how he’s going to be able to go on.”

“Can’t he borrow?” asked Elinor.

“Well, not much,” said Caroline, with a little pride that she had taken care to ask her husband this question. “He went to the bank in Mobile and went down on twenty knees in front of the president asking for money to build the mill back up, but the president of the bank said, ‘Mr. DeBordenave, how do we know there’s not gone be another flood?’”

“Because there’s not!” said Elinor, definitely.

“Well, I certainly hope not,” returned Caroline. “Even my best rugs had to be just thrown out. I was never so unhappy in all my life. Anyway, Tom said the bank wouldn’t lend him any money because they thought that another flood was gone come along and wash everything away a second time.”

“So he can’t get the money?”

“Well, maybe he can and maybe he cain’t. The banks say that they
will
lend money after the levee’s built, but not before. So Tom is real anxious to get that thing put up. He just hopes he can hold out long enough. I hope he can, too,” Caroline concluded reflectively. “When Tom is worried about that old mill, he doesn’t pay one bit of attention to anything else in the world.”

After Caroline had gone home Elinor remained on the porch with Frances, and, against her custom, waited up for Oscar. When he came up the stairs she called him out onto the porch and said, “Oscar, Caroline was telling me Tom is having trouble borrowing from the banks.”

“Well, yes,” replied Oscar hesitantly. “Fact is, we all are. Nobody’s gone lend us any money to build up again until the levee goes up.”

“What would happen if the levee
never
got built?”

Oscar sat down beside his wife. “Are you really interested?”

“Of course I am!”

“Well,” said Oscar, sitting back and folding his hands behind his head, rocking the swing lightly, “old Tom would fold up his tents, I guess.”

“What about us?”

“Well, we’d go along all right for a while. We’d get by, I guess.”

“Just get by?”

“Elinor, what we’re trying to do right now is build back up what we lost in the flood. But then if we really want to get the place going, then we’ve got to expand. We cain’t do that without borrowing the money. There’s not a bank in this state—or out of it for that matter—who’s gone lend us money till the levee’s built.
That’s
why we’re working so hard on this business. You see now?” Elinor nodded slowly. “I am dead on my feet,” said Oscar. “You want to come to bed?”

“No,” said Elinor, “I’m not tired yet. You go on.”

Oscar rose, leaned down over the crib to kiss sleeping Frances, and went inside the house.

Long after Oscar had undressed, knelt at the side of his bed to pray, lain himself down and fallen as deeply asleep as his daughter, Elinor remained awake. She sat in the swing, rocking slowly and staring out into the darkness. In the black night, the water oaks swayed in the slightest wind. A few rotted branches, covered with a dry green fungus, dropped twigs and leaves, or sometimes fell whole, with a crack and a thump, on the sandy ground. Beyond, the Perdido flowed, muddy and black and gurgling, carrying dead things and struggling live ones inexorably toward the vortex in the center of the junction.

Summer came to Perdido. Elinor continued to ponder about her husband’s miniscule salary and the Caskeys’ substantial wealth. Sister pushed open the back door every morning to stare at the barely discernible mound beneath which the eviscerated chicken lay buried and wondered when Early Haskew was going to propose, or, conversely, when he was going to die. James Caskey sighed and looked about and counted off his loneliness on his ten fingers—it seemed as substantial as that! Mary-Love greedily watched the engineer’s daily progress on the plans for the levee, anticipating with great satisfaction the effect the construction would have on her daughter-in-law. And every morning Zaddie’s patient rake still made patterns in the sandy yards around the three Caskey houses.

Only children really loved the summer, for of course there was no school. The days were long, unbroken by hours and tasks and bells. It was odd, to Grace Caskey, how each summer was different and possessed its own character. Last summer she had played with the Moye children constantly, and now this summer she saw them only once a week at Sunday school. Every day the previous summer, Bray had driven her out to Lake Pinchona, where a swimming pool with concrete sides was fed by the biggest artesian well in the entire state. A monkey in a wire cage nipped at her fingers when she stuck them through the mesh. This summer she hadn’t been out there once, even though they had begun to build a dance hall on stilts out over the muddy, shallow lake. The owners had imported alligators from the Everglades to stock Lake Pinchona, both for picturesque effect and in order to discourage bathers from swimming anyplace other than the easily policed concrete pool.