BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (108 page)

All his little dreams as a young man—all those things he would get, and have, and be—were merely means to the end, and the end was personal happiness. Things hadn't turned out the way he imagined they would, not at all, but he was, nonetheless, quite happy. He worried that he was fooling himself, that he was closing his eyes and declaring loudly that the bars that constrained him were not there at all. Perhaps they were there: were this house, and Elinor, and the pecan orchard across the way, and the levee and the river flowing behind the levee, Miriam making demands on him over the telephone on one side, and the dark pine forest on the other. If they were, though, he didn't feel them. He honestly didn't feel constrained; or if he did, then it was constraint itself that gave him pleasure.

Now it seemed likely that he would attend Elinor on her death-bed, for he was only forty-seven, and Elinor at this time was probably seventy-four or seventy-five. Sometimes that was his thought, and no other, when he raised his eyes from the foot of the dining room table and stared down the expanse of white linen to where his mother-in-law sat, erect and regal, with the candlelight gleaming on the ropes of black pearls about her neck.

Some years before, Oscar had had the house air conditioned throughout, and the two large units, located just under the window of Zaddie's room, hummed loudly from April through October. Oscar had liked the house chilled, for he was very warmblooded, and Elinor and Billy and Zaddie had grown so used to it that they did not raise the thermostat after Oscar's death. As a result, Billy always slept under covers, and in the summer he always fell asleep with the noise of forced cold air in his ears. That and the hum of the cooling units themselves outside covered up all the small night noises in that large old house—or almost all. As he lay awake so many nights, Billy noticed that his hearing became acuter. He could make out noises beneath the air conditioning: the creaks, and the false footpads, the snaps in the furniture, and the slight ringing in cupboards filled with glassware.

Yet the noises on some nights were more than that, more than the occasional creak, snap, and ringing. Sometimes Billy seemed to hear one of the outside doors swinging damply open, as if Zaddie had peered out the back door perhaps to see if the moon had yet risen, and then allowed the door to swing softly shut again. On other nights he seemed to hear footsteps on the stairs. He knew that one stair in particular creaked, on the right-hand side going up, and sometimes he heard that stair. Perhaps Zaddie was going up to the staircase window to peer out at the stars. Billy never got up to look. Once he was in bed, he stayed there. Even when he had nightmares, and lay sweating and trembling in bed, his feet remained unswervingly pointed at the bouquet of violets painted on the foot board and his hands lay palm upward atop the neatly folded covers. He often awoke chilled with the sweat of the nightmare clammy upon his brow.

On rainy nights, the water falling against the windows of the house further masked whatever noises played in the house. Yet, as if whatever caused those sounds was emboldened by that extra masking noise, the footsteps and the creaks and the snaps became less surreptitious. Billy would gaze toward the door that opened onto the linen corridor leading to the front room. Or he would stare at the lightly curtained windows that looked onto the screened porch. He would strain to hear, and particularly on these rainy nights, he thought he detected voices in the house— whispers, low laughter, and tiny smothered squeals.

Billy grew used to these noises, just as he had grown used to his strictured life. He did not mention them to Elinor or Zaddie. For all he knew, one of them might be sneaking friends into the house; or they might be staying up late together and talking of Oscar and all the others they had seen die. Whoever moved so softly about the house at night wished to remain unknown to Billy. And Billy delicately refused to pry.

One morning just after dawn, one of Billy's worst nightmares returned, and he was so frightened that he woke up rather than allowing it to continue. He immediately forgot its substance, though he knew that whatever it was, he had dreamed it before. He lay still in the bed, feeling the salty sweat drip from his forehead into his eyes. He turned his head and examined the door to the linen closet. He did this every morning, he knew not why, but he was always relieved to find that it had not been opened—though who should open it, or why he thought it might swing open of its own accord, he had no idea. Then he looked in the other direction, and saw the early morning sunlight filtering through the sheer curtains. He could make out the green furniture of the porch dimly, and that too was a comfort. He got out of bed, went into the bathroom, and quietly bathed and shaved; it was fully an hour before his usual time, and he did not wish to disturb Elinor across the hall. He dressed, and then stepped out into the hallway, intending to go downstairs and beg an early cup of coffee from Zaddie. He wondered if he'd have to wake her up.

But Zaddie was not only up, she was kneeling on the staircase landing beneath the great window, wiping up a large puddle of water.

Billy quietly went down the stairs.

"Morning, Zaddie. What happened?" Billy asked.

"I spilled a glass of water," returned Zaddie uneasily.

Billy said nothing, though he didn't believe her. Zaddie didn't like to lie, and lying showed in her face. But even if Zaddie's face had borne the serenity of lying Sapphira's, Billy would have known that it was not a glass of water that spilled there. As he passed Zaddie on his way downstairs, he was assailed with the smell of muddy Perdido water.

He still said nothing, but he noticed that the stairs were all damp. Zaddie, then, had just finished mopping up Perdido water from all the stairs.

In fact, Billy said nothing about the incident for so long a time that his very silence on the matter seemed to take on substance for him in that sluggish household. Elinor had never said a word about hearing noises or voices at night. Neither had Zaddie. But both Elinor and Zaddie looked at Billy every morning as if they wondered whether this morning, he would say anything. And when he never did, the women seemed to look at him in a way that suggested that they approved of his decision to say nothing. This, at least, was Billy's interpretation of what was going on in their minds and was very likely— he thought—only more of his imagination.

Yet as if reassured by his silence, Billy was certain that the noises grew louder, less constrained. Now, beneath the air conditioner, beneath the rain, Billy very definitely made out footsteps; steps that came up the stairs and sometimes went directly into Elinor's room, and sometimes paused at his own door first. Billy would lie in bed, unmoving, but thinking bravely, Come in. Come in. But always the steps turned away. Occasionally there was a second set of steps, too, but these were quite different, halting and clumsy, and they never paused at his door. Then would come the voices. He could make out Elinor's voice now—that was easy. The second voice was more difficult to identify. It wasn't Zaddie, of that he was certain. Yet it was familiar. It sounded, in fact, like Frances's voice. But since Frances was dead, it must be someone whose voice made him think of his drowned wife. But he could think of no one, and that bothered him. The third voice wasn't like any that he had ever heard before, sometimes it was a hoarse bleat, and sometimes a kind of singing—singing that was neither happy, sad, reverent, patriotic, or any of the other things he had ever associated with song.

Billy never investigated these phenomena, never attempted to discover their source or identity. They were Elinor's business, he intuited, and he would do nothing that abridged her privacy. Even when he woke earlier than usual, he remained in bed. He would not go out of his room, for he did not want again to surprise Zaddie in the act of mopping up Perdido water from the stairs. He laid no traps, he made no insinuating remarks, he put aside even the appearance of curiosity or puzzlement. This, however, did not mean that his curiosity and puzzlement did not increase, almost daily.

One day in October the air conditioning was turned off, and when Billy went to bed that night he wondered whether the noises would continue as before. They did not, that first night, and he was disappointed. He hardly slept at all, and next morning both Elinor and Zaddie commented on how poorly he looked. "It's because the air conditioner got turned off," he said blandly. "I'm used to all that noise, I guess."

But the following night Billy was pleased to hear the footsteps again, and the two voices: Elinor's and the one that sounded so much like Frances's that he could not imagine its belonging to anyone else. About a week later, the second visitor came as well, and Billy heard quite vividly the clumsy steps upon the stairs, a hoarse muffled bleat in the hallway, and much later in the night, the high-pitched singing. Billy listened and tried to imagine who could be singing thus, a wandering interminable hypnotic song, in accents, and pitches, and rhythms that were wholly unfamiliar.

The autumn passed, winter came on, and Elinor put down carpeting on the stairs. Most mornings it was still damp when Billy came down to breakfast. Elinor always asked him, "How did you sleep last night?"

"Fine," Billy always replied. "I dreamed of Frances. I dreamed Frances came to see us."

One rainy night in February of 1969, Billy lay long awake. Both sets of footsteps had come not long after he had got into bed, and he was upset that the loud patter of the rain kept him from hearing nothing more than an occasional laugh or croaking bleat. Yet that night, just as Billy was finally drifting off to sleep, the singing came again, stronger than ever before; singing that was at once caught in the rhythm of the falling rain, yet running counter to it in such a way that he could catch every quaver of its wandering melody. He listened in delight, and then in wonder when a second voice was united with the first, in precise cadence and then in counterpoint; and his wonder turned to rapture when a third voice joined them. The third voice was Elinor's, and she was singing as neither Billy nor anyone else in Per-dido had ever heard her sing. The three voices— female but not human, Billy thought—went on for more than an hour, lasting as long as the rain. But as the rain slackened, so did the three voices. When the water was no more than an irregular dripping from the eaves, the singing stopped altogether. Billy had long ago lost the habit of prayer, but now he prayed for the clouds to return, and to open up above the house in hope that the voices might again unite in song. The clouds had flown beyond Perdido, however, and the house was silent except for an occasional drip from the roof. But Billy did not sleep; straining against sleep, he waited for the footsteps to leave Elinor's room. At last, when he thought that dawn must soon be upon them, he was rewarded. The door of Elinor's sitting room softly opened, and he heard the footsteps move out into the hallway. Instead of going directly to the stairs, however, they paused before the door of his room.

This is something else new, Billy thought excitedly.

He had trained his eyes as well as his ears, and he saw quite well in the darkened room. He saw the glass knob of the door turning softly, and it shone a little fractured light into his eyes.

The door was pushed quietly open.

Billy closed his eyes. Whoever it was expected him to be asleep, and he would no more have appeared to be awake than he would have said to Elinor, "Who do you entertain every night in your room?"

Billy's eyes were closed, but he could not refrain from smiling.

See, whispered the voice that was Frances's—but not Frances's, because Frances was dead, drowned in the black waters of the Perdido. See, Nerita? That's your daddy.

CHAPTER 82
Mrs. Woskoboinikow

In the spring of 1969, Lilah Bronze graduated from Barnard with high honors. If she hadn't fought relentlessly with her tutor during her senior year she would probably have graduated Summa rather than only Magna cum laude. The Caskeys wondered whether Lilah would return to Perdido, but no one asked her her plans. They would find out quickly enough, and Lilah was just the sort to say, "I have no idea," just for the perversity of it. She returned home once that summer, in August, and then barely long enough to reassure her family that she had taken no part in the campus riots of the previous spring.

"And I'm only here for a week," she said at the Sunday dinner table to which all the Caskeys had gathered to welcome her back. "So nobody run off accepting invitations for me or anything like that."

Elinor and Billy, Miriam and Malcolm all glanced at one another, but for several moments no one said anything. Grace and Lucille said nothing; they did not approve of the manner in which Lilah had always been allowed to go her own way, unchecked. Tommy Lee Burgess simply looked embarrassed. Then, at last, with vast diffidence, Malcolm said, "Ah, Lilah ..."

"Yes?" Lilah returned quickly and almost savagely.

Malcolm saw that it was his responsibility to ask the great question, and he cast about in his mind for a framework for it that wouldn't anger Lilah. He at last found a supremely delicate interrogatory: "If you decide to change your telephone number, you might write down the new one and send it to me—just in case there's an emergency or anything."

Lilah nodded, and everyone felt relieved. Lilah was evidently appeased by Malcolm's subtlety.

"In fact," Lilah said, mollified, "I've already changed my number. I'll give it to you before I leave."

Billy cleared his throat, and said, "Lilah, did you move out of your old apartment or did you just have the number changed?"

"Why the hell would I change my number unless I moved?" Lilah demanded.

Her father shrugged as if to indicate that nothing Lilah did could astonish him.

"I've moved about two blocks away," Lilah continued reluctantly. It seemed as if her family had ferreted out her most private and long-guarded secret.

"A bigger place?" asked Miriam.

"Yes..." said Lilah thoughtfully. "Yes, it is bigger."