BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (63 page)

Miriam wasn't certain how this promotion had come about.

What Miriam didn't suspect—and never found out—was that Grace and Sister had told the Caskeys everything. Everyone knew that Miriam had suffered badly with homesickness, had cried herself to sleep every night, had felt hatred for Sacred Heart and disgust with everything that was not of Perdido. The Caskeys were touched by the revelation. No one had suspected Miriam had such sensitivity; and when she returned for the Christmas holidays, no one threw it in her face.

By New Year's Miriam knew that in a week she must either return to Sacred Heart or declare her intention never to leave Perdido. So far as she knew, no one in her family knew her detestation of the place and her love for her home. She could not now suddenly say, I was miserable at Sacred Heart, and I don't want to go back. Her family wouldn't know what to think, but leaving Perdido again—when Perdido was sweeter than ever to her—seemed an equally impossible course.

Her father solved her problem. On New Year's Day, as the plates of turkey and pheasant and ham were being passed around the dinner table, Oscar said to his daughter, "Miriam, I wish to God you wouldn't leave us. I have never seen so much of you as in the past few weeks, and it's gone break my heart to see you go back to that college."

"I got to go, Oscar," replied Miriam weakly.

"Not if you don't want to," said Sister. "It's important these days for a girl to have a college education, nobody knows that better than I do, but I wish for once you'd give up your selfish ways and think of me, Miriam. I'm so lonely without you." Sister could now confidently speak of loneliness without anyone pointing out that she might, as a solution, return to her husband in Nashville.

Miriam didn't know what to say. Now that the way had been paved for her staying—now that her family had, in its way, capitulated and begged the mercy of her continued presence in their midst—it began to seem to Miriam that her months at Sacred Heart hadn't been so bad. She had been unhappy, she had cried herself to sleep and awoke each morning with dried tears welding shut her eyes; yet her grades hadn't suffered, and she had liked being so near to the amenities of Mobile. Only with her family asking her to remain in Perdido did returning to Sacred Heart become a possibility.

"Miriam, you remember how last summer we drove to Pensacola every morning?" said Frances tentatively.

"I remember," said Miriam absently.

"Well," Frances went on, "Mobile's not any farther away. Why don't you just drive down there every day? It only takes about an hour."

"It takes longer," said Miriam, looking up with interest now. " 'Cause Sacred Heart's on the far side of town."

"You could still do it," said Sister excitedly. "You could live at home, drive down to Mobile every morning, and be back in time for supper. I could get Ivey to stay on later, and make you something hot."

"I could do that," said Ivey, coming in from the kitchen at that moment with a dish of creamed corn. "I'd be happy to cook for you, Miss Miriam."

Oscar said, "It's settled then. You're not gone leave us. You're gone drive down to school in the morning and come back in the evening. You will sleep in your own bed and you will keep us all happy."

"This is gone be a whole lot of trouble for me," said Miriam.

"We don't care one bit," said Sister. "You are gone let us impose on you, and we don't care how much trouble you're gone have to go through."

The administration of the college said no to Miriam's request to live at home. Miriam, desolate, went to her room and wept. She tearfully telephoned Sister to say that all was off.

Grace appeared at the college at eight o'clock the following morning and spoke to the provost. She told him that Miriam was needed at home in the evening to care for her aunt and, guardian who was ill—still recovering from her stroke—and would have no one but Miriam about her. Otherwise, for the sake of the aunt, Miriam would have to be withdrawn from the school. The provost gave in. Miriam packed her bags, shook hands with her roommates, and raced back to Perdido.

Every morning Miriam drove her roadster down to Mobile, attended her classes, and returned home by four or five o'clock in the afternoon. Some days she was home in time for midday dinner. She never complained of the trip, though everyone thought she probably would soon get bored with it. Sometimes Grace or Sister or even her mother rode with her, and spent the day shopping in Mobile. Miriam, though still often abrasive and short, became accustomed to being with her family, and could manage now to sit through a whole meal without growing huffy or taking offense at someone's innocent remark. Her dead grandmother's influence was waning.

She saw no reason to alter her situation during her sophomore year at the college. One day she suggested to her sister Frances, then a senior in the Perdido high school, that she go to Sacred Heart as well. "As long as I'm driving down there every day, you might as well come too."

Frances was delighted with the offer. She had thought of the plan herself, but had not dared put the question to Miriam for fear of an abrupt refusal. Elinor and Oscar were pleased. They still thought of their daughter as frail and dependent. It would be a comfort to them to know that in her first difficult years at college Frances would have Miriam so near. Oscar was a little uneasy that Frances might not withstand conversion to Catholicism as Miriam had, but Elinor assured him that Frances would hold on staunchly to her Methodist principles. Frances applied to Sacred Heart and was accepted. In the autumn of 1940, the roadster's passenger seat was occupied each day by Frances.

It was odd to Frances that, while it was always over the same route, their journey to Mobile in the mornings should be so different from the late afternoon trip home. Leaving Perdido, the road first wound through pine forest—much of it owned by the Cas-keys themselves—and then into Bay Minette, the county seat of Baldwin County. The highway led on down to Pine Haven and Stapleton, bleak hamlets occupied mainly by pecan and potato farmers, and then across to Bridgehead. Then there was a won-drously long, straight causeway on either side of which lay marshes, rivers, and islands, all fading imperceptibly one into the other in the early morning light. Rivers were a mile wide here, their sources no more than ten miles upstream. There were vast islands of grass scarcely two feet above the level of the water, where fishermen often disappeared. On both sides of the blacktopped road were vistas of nothing but pink sky, blue water, and green marsh grass. The Blakeley River faded into Dacke Bay which in turn became the Apalachee River. The boundaries were nebulous between all these bodies of water— Chacaloochee Bay, the Tensaw River, Delvan Bay, and the Mobile River.

On those rides to Mobile, begun before either of the sisters was well awake, Frances stared at the water and the sky and the grass, and was reminded not only of the summer she and Miriam had spent on the beach at Pensacola, but of earlier times, hazy times in her past and in her childhood, and of times that, impossibly, lay even further back, before there was a Frances Caskey. The top of the car was always down, and the loud wind prevented conversation. The smell of the salt marsh, where all these rivers, estuaries, and streams emptied into the great maw of Mobile Bay, filled Frances's brain. Without actually sleeping, she seemed to dream. The pink sky was bright and empty. The water below was blue and torpid. The wind became a song, without notes or melody or words, but with pitches and rhythms that were wholly familiar to her.

In her dreams, Frances saw the secret things that swam out of sight below the surface of the bright water and stared greedily up at the automobile passing along the causeway. Frances dreamed of what hid in the low grass of the insubstantial marshy islands, and what dead things lay twisted and broken in the ancient mud. She dreamed of what bones were buried in hummocks, saw what tore fishermen's nets, and understood why fishermen themselves sometimes disappeared.

She woke—or ceased to dream—when the roadster emerged from the tunnel that ran beneath the last tendril of the segmented Mobile River. She turned and smiled, and always said, "Oh, we're here already ..."

The return trip to Perdido late in the day was different. Clouds defiled the purity of the sky, already darkening in the east ahead of them. The marshes, bays, rivers, and hummocks of grass seemed dirty and sodden. The small towns of Baldwin County were crowded, noisy, and crass. Even the pine forest was dusty and wearying. On the trip home Frances never dreamed, and never remembered what she had dreamed in the morning.

In the evenings she always felt that something was missing, and she longed for the hours to pass, and for dawn to come again. Then in the morning, as Miriam drove over the causeway, Frances would again dream of what lay beneath the surface of the blue trembling water.

CHAPTER 48
MOBILIZATION

Perdido gave scant thought to the war in Europe; the town was for the Allies, against the Axis, and that was that. Perdido was preoccupied with the upward struggle from the severe and repeated assaults of the Depression. Then, like the stunning surprise of a blow to the back of the head, the National Guard was mobilized in November of 1940. One hundred and seventeen young Perdido men were notified that they might be instantly called away. One of the old dormitories below Baptist Bottom that had been used to house levee workers was quickly converted into an armory, and those one hundred and seventeen mill workers, layabouts, and high school seniors congregated there every morning in expectation of marching orders. Christmas and New Year's passed, but no orders came.

Oscar was grateful that no call for the men had yet come; he needed his workers. During the Depression he had provided employment in Perdido that was far beyond the actual manpower needs of the Caskey mills and factories. In recent months, however, activity had picked up sharply. The War Department had placed orders for vast quantities of lumber and posts. Oscar learned that the new Camp Rucca was being built in the Alabama Wire-grass. He heard that Eglin Field, the air base over the Florida line, was tripling its size. Oscar placed notices in the Perdido Standard and in the newspapers of Atmore, Brewton, Bay Minette, Jay, Pen-sacola, and Mobile offering work to those men not yet put on active alert. Some came, but not as many as he had hoped. Many Baldwin and Escambia county boys had already been sent away. Every morning, as he was shaved in the barber's chair, Oscar considered what he could do: hire high school boys in the afternoon, employ women in the lighter jobs that before had been held by men, and promote colored men into jobs that were presently denied them. These strategies were not yet necessary, and only Oscar anticipated a time when they would be required.

Oscar had lost some of his buoyancy. The death of Mary-Love and the retirement of James had placed the management of the mill squarely and exclusively upon his shoulders. He had at once to deal with an expanded operation and declining receipts. He was no longer youthful, for that matter, nearly forty-five now, with two daughters in college, and the responsibility for an industry on which the well-being of the entire town was dependent. He had settled into a narrow, strictured life, hemmed in by his family and by the mill. He loved his family, and he was proud of the mill, but sometimes he looked about and wondered. Sometimes his eyes fell upon his wife, and he thought, Who is she?

Elinor had changed, most noticeably since the death of Mary-Love. She was a good deal calmer now, less prone to fits of anger; she seemed less dangerous. She hadn't the destructive instincts he had seen in her before. There had been times, Oscar knew, when his wife had been motivated by a kind of unselfish greed—that is, greed for his and Frances's sake, more than for her own. The wellsprings of that loving avarice seemed to have lost some of their strength recently. Oscar occasionally thought of the future of the mill as he and Elinor lay in bed at night, and he would ask Elinor's opinion. He wanted to know what she would do in his place; he wanted to hear what people in town thought about this and that. But Elinor's interest in such conversations had waned. In fact, her interest in nearly everything had diminished to such an extent that Oscar became alarmed, and he suggested that she visit Leo Ben-quith and get a prescription. He was certain that something was the matter with her.

"Elinor," he asked one night, turning toward her in the darkness. "Tell me something. How old are you?"

"You have never asked me that question before," returned Elinor. "Why are you asking me now?"

Oscar hesitated. "You've been acting so funny, I thought you were pregnant."

Elinor laughed, but her laugh was small and weak.

"I've been thinking," said Elinor.

It suddenly occurred to Oscar that his wife had only been waiting for such a question from him to enable her to speak about something that had oppressed her spirit for some time.

"Thinking about what?" her husband asked gently.

"I was thinking about Miriam and how homesick she got when she first went away to school."

"She sure did. And she didn't let on, either."

"I'm homesick, too, Oscar," said Elinor in a small voice, and wound her arms around her husband's neck in a kind of cold desperation.

"Elinor," he cried in surprise, "I don't believe you have mentioned Wade once in fifteen years."

Elinor paused. "I've thought about it a lot, though."

"Do you have any people who are still alive? I know you never hear from them."

"There's not many of us left, that's true. And we never were big on letters or the telephone."

"Then why don't you just drive on up there and visit with them a spell?"

"I think I might do just that," said Elinor.

"It might do you some good to get away from here. I think you've been cooped up. Perdido's so small. And it's been so long since you were home..."

"It has been," sighed Elinor. "I miss it too. I've been feeling tired lately, peaked, and maybe all I need to get my strength back up is to go home for a little while."