Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga (17 page)

“Yes’m?” cried out Zaddie.

“You go to the mill and fetch Mr. James—this minute, you hear?”

Elinor’s head disappeared. Zaddie went over to the swing and held Grace’s trembling hand for a moment.

“Go on, child!” cried Mary-Love. “Do as Miss Elinor says!”

. . .

Sister took Grace up to her own room, washed her face, and after lowering the blinds and closing the curtains, put Grace onto the bed. She sat at Grace’s side, whispering words of consolation and fanning her face—for the room was stifling and dark—until the child was asleep. Then Sister seated herself in a rocker at the foot of the bed with the fan in one hand and a novel in the other. She wanted to make sure that if the child woke up she wouldn’t find herself alone.

Mary-Love remained on the side porch with Ivey, and the two women watched the house next door with unabated and ungratified interest. They saw nothing; they heard nothing. James drove up in his automobile twenty minutes after Zaddie had left to fetch him. The black girl jumped out of the car first, and James went not to his own house but to his sister-in-law’s. He stood between two great camellias and spoke to Mary-Love.

“James,” said Mary-Love, “did Zaddie tell you what happened?”

He nodded. “Where is Grace?”

“She’s in Sister’s room. And she is gone stay there until—”

“Where is Genevieve?”

“Genevieve and Elinor are over there”—Mary-Love pointed at James’s house—“but what they are saying to each other I have no idea. James, I don’t know if you remember it, but Genevieve once came after me with a broom!”

James did indeed remember it, and didn’t have to be reminded of the circumstance. “What do you suppose Elinor is
saying
to her?”

“I have no idea,” repeated Mary-Love impatiently, “all I know is you better get on over there.”

James turned and walked reluctantly across the yard toward his own house. But before he got there the front door opened and Elinor came out with two suitcases. She was grim.

“Mr. James,” she said, “put these in the car.”

“Elinor,” he said in a whisper, “did you talk to Genevieve?”

“There’s two more,” said Elinor, and she went back into the house.

Zaddie and James loaded the four suitcases into the car; then came three hat boxes, a jewelry case, and two smaller cases that contained they didn’t know what. They were all in dark blue leather and bore the gold initials,
GC.
Genevieve herself came last of all, wearing a black dress and a black veil so thick you couldn’t have seen her face if you had walked right up to her and raised a lantern.

“Lord,” cried Ivey in a whisper to Mary-Love, “she must be burning up in there.”

“Who went after who with a broom is what I want to know,” remarked Mary-Love.

Elinor came out of the house after Genevieve and stood before the front door as if guarding it.

“Elinor,” said James, who did not dare to speak to his wife, “where are we going?”

“Over to Atmore. Genevieve’s catching the Hummingbird to Nashville. And, James—you are not going to drive.”

Genevieve was already climbing into the car. If ever a woman’s posture indicated defeat, Mary-Love said to Ivey, that woman’s did.

“Then how’s she gone get there?” demanded James in perplexity. He was greatly relieved that the women were handling this very difficult situation—somehow the women always
did
—but he wished they had made it a little easier for him to understand the part that had been written for him in this little drama.

“You are going to let Bray drive her, and Zaddie’s going to ride in the back,” replied Elinor.

Hearing that, Ivey ran over to the new house to fetch Bray who was planting camellias and hawthorns in the side yard. He wasn’t even allowed to change out of his gardening clothes into his uniform, but got directly into the automobile. With Zaddie in the back and Genevieve silent and stone-still in the front, he took off toward Atmore.

“Bray,” called Elinor, “you drive careful! It’s going to rain!”

James Caskey looked up at the sky. The accumulated heat of a whole day of blistering sunshine poured down upon him out of a cloudless expanse of white-blue air.

. . .

Elinor wouldn’t tell what she had said to Genevieve Caskey that persuaded that woman to return to Nashville. And since it had been conjectured that Elinor Caskey was the very reason that Genevieve had stayed in Perdido as long as she had, the mystery seemed even deeper. Elinor would only say, “How you think I could have
let
her stay around here after what she did to Grace—that poor child! And she didn’t even
break
the lamp!”

James and Elinor went up to Sister’s room and stood at the side of Grace’s bed. The child still slept soundly.

“That’s her way of hiding,” said Sister in a low voice. “I do it too.”

Back down on the porch Elinor said to James, “I am so sorry. This is my fault.”

“Your
fault!” cried James. “Not a bit in the world, I—”

“Why you say that?” demanded Mary-Love of her daughter-in-law suspiciously.

“I ought to have seen what Genevieve was capable of. I ought to have got her out of here before what happened today had a chance to happen.”

“I wish you had, too,” said Mary-Love, “but I will tell you the truth, Elinor. I wouldn’t have placed any bets this afternoon when I saw you go into that house, and Sister and Ivey wouldn’t have either.”

Elinor waved this away. “Two months ago” she said, “I should have picked her up and put her on that train myself.”

“James,” said Mary-Love, “it is time to talk about divorce.”

“No,” said Elinor, interrupting. “Talk about it later. No need to talk about it now.”

“Why not now?” demanded Mary-Love. “What better time than now, when that child is lying upstairs with belt marks all over her entire body? James has witnesses right here on this porch.”

“Wait till this evening,” said Elinor. “Wait till Bray and Zaddie get back and we hear Genevieve’s been taken care of.”

. . .

The road to Atmore went northeast from Perdido, past the sawmills and through a few hundred acres of pine owned by Tom DeBordenave. It skirted the cypress swamp in which the Blackwater River had its marshy source, then emerged into the vast, flat potato and cotton fields of Escambia County. Atmore was the nearest place to catch the train, though it was such a small town that the trains would stop for passengers only if alerted by a signal from the stationmaster.

Bray drove along this road rather more quickly than was his wont. He had been warned that Miss Genevieve had to be at the L & N station by five-thirty in order to get her ticket and prepare the stationmaster to stop the Hummingbird. James Caskey’s automobile was a small touring car he had purchased in 1917, a handsome Packard with a metal top and a glass windscreen that Bray drove with much pleasure.

The waning afternoon was still very bright and oppressively warm. Genevieve Caskey sat silently, did not look at Bray or take any apparent notice of the countryside as they passed through it. Zaddie sat apprehensively in the back seat. Bray, Zaddie knew, had been sent on this errand because Elinor had not wanted to allow Genevieve the opportunity during the ride to “explain things” to James; to excuse her temper on account of the heat or the dullness of the town. And Zaddie knew that she had been sent along to prevent Bray’s giving in to any temptation offered by Genevieve
not
to see her onto that train to Nashville. But Genevieve might as well have been a dummy in the front window of Berta Hamilton’s dress shop, for all the explanations or bribes that she proffered.

By the time they reached the cypress swamp the heat in the automobile had sent Zaddie nearly over into sleep. She sat with her head far back, her eyes closed against the glaring sun in the empty Alabama sky. It burned patterns on her eyelids and she forgot everything but the intense yellow and red that swirled in her brain. But suddenly that yellow and red faded out, and a coolness settled over Zaddie’s upturned face. She opened her eyes. A single dark gray cloud had blown across the sun. It wasn’t large—probably no bigger than the plot of land on which the Caskey houses were built, Zaddie thought—but it looked very much out of place. Zaddie was certain that five minutes before it hadn’t been visible anywhere. And there was another peculiar thing, she realized: solitary clouds were usually much higher in the sky and tended to be wispy, frozen, white. This one was dark, roiling, and it hung low.

She couldn’t take her eyes from it. It seemed to be flying directly toward them. Zaddie cowered in the corner of the seat.

Bray had reduced the Packard’s speed. Zaddie looked to the front. Not far ahead of them was a great logging truck lumbering slowly along with a full load. It was doubtless headed toward Atmore, where there were two more mills. Long trunks of pine, denuded of branches, protruded far beyond the back of the truck, bobbing up and down with the motion of the vehicle. The longest of these was tied at the end with a red kerchief so that drivers coming up behind could better judge what distance to keep.

Zaddie looked up into the sky again. The cloud had passed over them and gone on ahead.

Then the girl noticed something else strange: the feathery branches of the cypresses in the swamp were not being stirred at all by breezes. They drooped in the heat and were perfectly still; no wind blew the rank grass at the side of the road. Yet just above, that roiling black cloud had fairly flown across the sky.

Not far ahead, the cloud seemed to pause, and as Zaddie watched it began suddenly to pour out rain, as if it were a sponge and God had wrung it. Even Genevieve’s head lifted up at this. From the distance—no more than a quarter of a mile—they could see that the rainwater was falling directly onto the road on which they were traveling. Zaddie had never seen anything like it. The sun shone down all around them, and the tops of the trees in the swamp were illuminated in its yellow-white light, yet there was that black solitary cloud spilling pails of rain right onto the highway.

“The devil is beating his wife!” cried Zaddie aloud, as Ivey invariably exclaimed when it rained as the sun was shining.

“Hush, Zaddie!” said Bray. “We got to go right through that.”

Just up ahead the road curved a little to the right. It was possible for Bray and Zaddie to see that for a distance of perhaps a hundred yards in front of the truck water from the dark gray cloud was splashing against the macadam of the road.

“That truck don’t go faster, we’re not gone get you there in time, Miss Genevieve.”

Genevieve didn’t reply.

The truck ahead, as if in answer to Bray’s need for haste, suddenly picked up speed. Zaddie conjectured the driver didn’t want to spend any more time than was necessary driving through that peculiar downfall of rainwater.

Bray didn’t either. He kept exact pace.

The logging truck drove into the shadow of the cloud. The water poured down and beat on the felled trees, and in the space of two or three seconds the red kerchief on the end of the longest log was soaked and limp. Great waves of water shot up on either side of the truck.

“Bray!” cried Genevieve suddenly, “Don’t!” She meant don’t drive the automobile through that uncanny veil of rainwater.

But it was too late to stop. The Packard itself had now driven into the cloud’s stormy venue. Never had the passengers of the car seen so great a downpour in so small an area. The water beat against the roof so loudly that they were deafened. Rain gushed through the windows in sheets and instantly soaked Bray and Zaddie and Genevieve to the skin. It poured so heavily against the windscreen that their vision of the road ahead was completely obscured. In an instant all their senses had been occluded by rain: they saw, heard, tasted, felt, and smelled nothing else.

The Packard skidded to the left, and Bray speeded up a little, trying to regain control. He got control again, but the extra speed was taking the car too close to the truck ahead. The long pine trunk with the red kerchief attached to it was suddenly right there. It dropped onto the front of the Packard, skidded up the hood, and smashed through the windscreen.

Genevieve Caskey had no time even to cry out. She saw a flash of red on the other side of the windscreen, but by the time that fugitive color had registered in her mind, the pine trunk had smashed through, and its jagged, resinous tip—sharp as a pointed spear—had been run through her right eye and out the back of her skull. The impact in fact was so great that her entire head was ripped from her body and thrust into the air over the back seat.

Zaddie looked up and saw Genevieve’s impaled head bobbing above her, with rain-diluted blood dripping off the still-attached veil.

The pine trunk that had beheaded Genevieve Caskey had also caught against the interior of the automobile’s roof, and so, although Bray had lost control of the car again, the Packard was pulled right along behind the logging truck. When they were out from beneath the cloud and onto dry road, Bray put on the brakes and at the same time reached up to pull the pine trunk free of the roof.

Unmindful of the accident behind, the driver of the logging truck did not halt his vehicle. While Genevieve Caskey’s trunk and body quivered convulsively on the front seat of the Packard, the speared head was drawn right back out through the hole in the shattered windscreen. There it remained impaled all the way to Atmore where it was discovered by two workers who had been sent around to unload the great logs. Neither of them would touch it, but with a stick they worked it off its spear until it dropped into an old orange crate they had placed on the ground underneath.

“See,” said Elinor placidly, when they all learned of it, “I said there wasn’t any need to talk about James’s divorce.”

Everybody in Perdido came to Genevieve’s funeral. You couldn’t have kept them away if James Caskey himself had stood at the church door with a stack of crisp two-dollar bills and given one out to anyone who would turn right around and go back home without trying to sneak a look at the damaged corpse. People didn’t see much, however, even after they got inside, because the nature of Genevieve’s death demanded a closed coffin.