Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (36 page)

“I don’t know anything about it,” replied Elinor.

“Queenie loves you,” said James. “If she would tell anybody then she would tell you.”

“She hasn’t told anybody then. I don’t know why you need to know anyway, James.” Elinor was a bit curt. “Queenie has had enough trouble, and her trouble isn’t over yet.”

“Is that man coming back?”

“No, no,” said Elinor quickly. “Oscar would shoot him. Or Queenie would. Or I would. But she’s going to give birth to that man’s child.”

“Well, the child is legitimate at least.”

“He
raped
her. That won’t be a happy child, James. Now, why do you want to know about Queenie and Carl?”

James explained why he was uneasy; Elinor seemed mollified. “All right, I see. I really
don’t
know anything about their life together. Why don’t you go ask Queenie herself? She’ll tell you, just explain everything to her.”

James reluctantly admitted that he could probably satisfy himself in no other way, although he dreaded to intrude upon his sister-in-law. After her trouble had been revealed to him, James had gone around to all the stores in town and lifted the limits he had placed on Queenie’s spending. He had not talked to her, and suspected that, since she hadn’t taken advantage of this largess, she knew nothing of his little gesture of sympathy.

Now, from Elinor’s house, he telephoned Queenie, and said in the cheerful coo that his voice always assumed over the telephone: “Hey, Queenie, it’s James. Listen, I’m over at Elinor’s and she told me you weren’t doing anything tonight. You think you could come over to my house and sit for a spell? It’s been so long! No, you bring Lucille and Malcolm over to Elinor’s and they can play quiet with Zaddie. I’m gone send Grace over here too so you and I can talk by ourselves!”

When he had hung up, he said apologetically, “Elinor, I have just managed to fill up your whole house with children for the entire evening.”

“It’s all right, James. They may be rambunctious everywhere else, but those children always play quiet here. I don’t know why that is.”

“They won’t disturb Frances?”

Elinor laughed. “Don’t you worry. I can’t
get
them up here on the second floor. They say they’re afraid of this house. They say there’s ghosts and things in the closet, even though this is practically the newest house in town.”

James looked about him a little uncomfortably and, thanking Elinor again, took his leave.

. . .

James hadn’t laid eyes on Queenie recently, and the greatest difference in her seemed not her enlarged belly, but her dazed calmness. It was as if she had been severely chastened, and for what transgression she had no idea at all. At the same time James looked at her through Mary-Love’s eyes. James had a tendency to do this, for Mary-Love represented to him the chief arbiter on matters of morality. In that perspective, Queenie appeared somehow more respectable. They sat together in James’s formal parlor, James in a rocking chair, Queenie in the corner of Elvennia Caskey’s blue sofa. Queenie at first wouldn’t look directly at James, but ceaselessly rubbed the nap of the velvet upholstery first one way and then the other, giving that action total attention with her eyes.

“James,” she said, “I feel so guilty for not coming over here and thanking you as soon as I found out.”

“Found out what, Queenie? Sure is good to see you again,” he added parenthetically.

“Good to see you, too. Found out about my little bills around town. Berta Hamilton showed me everything she had in the place and said I could take away anything I wanted. Everywhere else too. James, down at Mr. Gully’s, I was offered a fleet of automobiles that would have put down the Kaiser.”

“Queenie, if you want to put down the Kaiser, I’ll buy you those automobiles!”

Queenie laughed, but the laugh faded quickly enough. “James Caskey,” she said, looking up at him and for the first time catching his eye, “I thought I was gone be happy the day I showed up in Perdido. I thought I was gone be happy for the rest of my life.”

“Nobody’s happy for the rest of their lives, Queenie.”

She shook her head. “I guess not. James Caskey, what’d you want to say to me? Why’d you call me up out of the blue?”

“I wanted to ask you something.”

“Ask me what?”

James’s mouth twitched, and he paused. “Ask you about Carl, I guess.”

“I thought everybody knew.”

“Knew what?”

“This is Carl Strickland’s baby.” She patted her belly.

“Of course it’s Carl’s baby,” James assured her. “Carl is your husband. Whose else baby would it be? Queenie, I want to know about you and Carl in Nashville. That’s why I asked you to come over here.”

“What about us?”

James shrugged; he didn’t know how to put politely what he wanted to ask.

“James,” said Queenie after a moment, “Carl Strickland wasn’t around much.”

“Ah!”

“Is that what you wanted to know? Carl Strickland drinks, Carl Strickland does a lot of things, Carl Strickland doesn’t have very nice habits, and—praise be to God—he was away most of the time. How you think Lucille and Malcolm would have turned out if I had let their Daddy pick ’em up and talk to ’em all the time? Oh, I know what those children are like, I know they’re not ever gone be welcome in this house till they can walk through a room and not pick something up and smash it on the floor, but I have done the best I could…”

“Queenie—”

“Ohhh!” cried Queenie in an exhalation of breath which produced something between a squeal and a sigh, “Genevieve couldn’t
stand
him! She couldn’t stand to be around him!—and he couldn’t stand her. When she’d come up there and see me, he’d go away. So when I couldn’t stand to be around Carl Strickland one minute more I’d call up Genevieve and say, ‘Genevieve Snyder, you come up here tomorrow morning.’ James, I ’pologize for that, I ’pologize for keeping your wife away from you—’cause that’s just what I did.”

Queenie didn’t exactly look as if she were about to cry, but she began smoothing and ruffling up the nap of the upholstery once again.

“It’s all right, Queenie. I’m glad you told me.” It made him think better of his dead wife, that she had abandoned him and his daughter for reasons that were partially unselfish. His uncertainties, too, were now resolved, but what was left was a little curiosity, so he asked, “Queenie, when Carl would go away, where would he go?”

“I don’t know,” answered Queenie. “I never asked. But he couldn’t have gone far, because the minute Genevieve walked out the door with her suitcase he was back. Maybe he was living in the house across the street, and just watching us out the window. He was sneaky like that.”

“What’d he do for work?”

“He worked for the power company. He cleared land.” Queenie stopped fidgeting with the nap of the sofa and looked up again into James’s eyes. “James, you have been good to me. And here I am sitting on this sofa, just lying to you. I’m not exactly lying, I guess, I’m just making things sound better than they really were. Carl Strickland is no good. He was no good the day I married him, he was no good the day he showed up in this town, and he was no good every day in between. He
did
do work for the power company—or at least he used to, but he got fired when they found out he was stealing things. I don’t even know what kind of things. And he was in jail—twice. One time for beating up a man about something and one time for cutting a woman’s arm with a razor-knife. See, that’s when Genevieve came to stay with me, when Carl was in jail, ’cause I was afraid to be alone and ’cause I didn’t have any money and that’s how Malcolm and Lucille and me lived, on that money you sent Genevieve every month. And when Carl would get out of jail, then Genevieve would come back here to stay with you.

“James, Genevieve wasn’t an easy woman to get along with, I know that, but you didn’t know our daddy either. James, our daddy beat Genevieve. One day he fired a gun at her, and if I hadn’t thrown a platter at his hand the bullet would have gone right through her head. Daddy got killed out in the woods—I don’t even know how, and I don’t think I want to know—and Genevieve and I were all by ourselves. Pony was already off in Oklahoma. We took care of ourselves; Genevieve went to school and I went to work, and when Genevieve needed help I helped her and when I needed help she helped me. Neither of us would ever have won any prizes for anything, but she was good to me and I was good to her. It was like cutting off my arm when I opened that telegram and found out she was dead. James Caskey, you have been so good to me—when you didn’t have to be—that I thought you should know all this. Nobody else knows it, not even Elinor. I guess I would appreciate it if you would not spread it around.”

James was silent for several moments, though obviously greatly perturbed. Finally, he rose and paced up and down behind the sofa on which Queenie still sat, now again smoothing and ruffling up the nap of the blue upholstery. “Queenie, isn’t there
something
I could do for you? Isn’t there something you want I can buy for you? You know, don’t you, that I’m always gone take care of you, and I’m always gone take care of Lucille and Malcolm?”

“Long as they don’t come in here and break things, you mean?” said Queenie, with a little giggle that was reminiscent of her old way, before the trouble had come upon her. “James Caskey, there’s nothing I want. Or wait, there is one thing, just one thing…”

“What is it?”

Queenie stood up and straightened her dress. She turned and faced James and she looked at him seriously. “Sometime I want you to send me a telegram. And the boy will come up to the door, and say, ‘Miz Strickland, here’s a telegram for you,’ and I’m gone give that boy a silver dollar, and I’m gone sit down on the front porch and open that telegram, and it’s gone say,
Dear Queenie, I have just put Carl Strickland twenty feet under the ground in a marble casket with combination locks.
That’s the one thing you can do for me. You can send me that telegram.”

Interesting as were Queenie’s problems, the subject couldn’t hold up for long against the all-consuming fascination with the levee. The project had continued apace, and with far fewer snags than appeared in the brief lengths of the Perdido and Blackwater rivers as they flowed through the town limits. The bond issues had been approved by the legislature, the bonds sold and the money gathered in and deposited in the Perdido bank. Already the levee had been completed on both sides of the river south of the junction, and the townspeople congratulated themselves on the fact that were the water to rise tomorrow, only the two sawmills and the stately homes of the Caskeys and the Turks and the DeBordenaves would be destroyed. All the rest—the town hall, downtown, the workers’ houses, Baptist Bottom, the homes of the shopkeepers and professional people, and even the dormitories and kitchen of the levee-men themselves would be only as wet as falling rain could render them. Just before Christmas of 1923, the first wagonloads of dirt were poured out at the edge of the junction, and the second levee began to creep northeastward along the Blackwater River toward the cypress swamp, to render safe the Caskey, Turk, and DeBordenave mills, whose prosperity had made the building of the levees possible in the first place.

The levees may have been no more than massive lengths of packed red clay, but already Perdido was growing so accustomed to their presence that they began to seem not so unattractive after all. The roses, the dogwoods, the holly, the smilax—and above all the kudzu—had taken root, and there was more green and less red to be seen every day, at least on the townsides. The narrow path atop the levee on the western side of the Perdido had become a favorite promenade for the white population after church, and mistresses waved to their maids disporting themselves on the far side of the river in
their
best clothes. People would look at the levees and exclaim vehemently, “Lord, I am just about to forget that the levee is there, I am getting so used to it!” Or people would remark, “It was always so
flat
around here, I don’t know why we didn’t think of this before!” Or they judged, “The levee is gone be worth every penny we pay for it, just to know that our children aren’t ever gone have to learn what it’s like to go through a flood.”

Soon the levee along the Blackwater was completed. A hundred yards beyond the Turk mill it ended in a steep ramp that descended onto the low mound of an Indian burial place. This ramp became a favorite spot for the boys of Perdido—led in mischief by Malcolm Strickland—who rode their bicycles on top of the levee all the way from the workers’ dormitory, past Baptist Bottom, turning at the junction as the levee turned, past the sawmills, and out into the piney forest again. The rivers were at the left and the town below to their right. The boys wondered if they could ever get nearer the sky, and were certain that the Rocky Mountains themselves could be no higher than their town’s levees. At the end, they let go of their bikes’ handlebars, threw their arms up into the air, and sailed down the ramp across the top of the Indian burial mound. They then grasped their handlebars again and applied their brakes at the last possible moment before coming to grief in the thicket of briars and broken bottles and other detritus of construction work that lay on the other side of the mound.

The levee along the Blackwater had been finished in very good time, and now there remained only the levee along the upper Perdido, which would protect no more than the millowners’ houses. Early Haskew and Morris Avant had worked wonders with the construction so far, and were actually under budget.

Work continued without interruption, beginning at the thicket between the Turk house and the town hall. The levee-men went at it with a will, for the end of the project seemed in sight. But, oddly, progress here began to slow down. Early Haskew wasn’t sure why. Perhaps it was an instability of the bank along this section of the Perdido, but every night half the clay that had been brought to the riverside during the day slid down into the water and washed away with nothing to show for the effort but a slightly redder tinge to the already red Perdido water. The other portions of the levee had seemed almost to build themselves, the work had gone so easily—or so it seemed now in comparison with this final recalcitrance. No headway could be made. Tons and tons of clay and gravel and plain old dirt were brought in every day and piled up and packed tight, but half of what was built up was certain to be eroded away in the night.