BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (12 page)

"I know it!" he exclaimed, and he meant it.

"—because you don't see how much Elinor and Mama are alike. Mama tells you what to do and you do it. Elinor tells you what to do and you do it."

"But, Sister, that's the whole problem. Elinor won't tell me what she wants!"

"Of course, she won't," said Sister. "She is waiting for you to do a little something on your own. That's why she won't say anything. She's not gone say anything against Mama. She's not gone tell you what you ought to do. But, Oscar... my Lord, if you sat down for five minutes you'd know what to do. And why you haven't done it, I'll never know!"

Sister got up and walked out of the room. Oscar sat there a quarter of an hour longer staring out the window at the river. In all his life he had never heard Sister speak so much to the purpose.

On the last Thursday in May, Oscar dropped by his uncle's house on his way home. As usual, Elinor, Zaddie, and Grace sat on the front porch. Zaddie and Elinor were shelling early peas; Grace was reading aloud from a book about Eskimos. Oscar leaned over close to Elinor and said without preamble, "Elinor, you think you could take tomorrow off from school?"

"I could," replied Elinor. "Is there a reason why I should?"

"There is," said Oscar.

"Then I'll do it," said Elinor. She didn't ask his reason.

"Why?" said Grace.

"Shhh!" said Oscar. "Not a word to my mama, not a word to anybody, you hear, Grace? You hear, Zaddie?"

"We hear!" cried Zaddie and Grace in unison.

"I'm taking off tomorrow, too," said Oscar. "Elinor, I'll be over just as soon as Mama leaves for Mobile. She is going with Caroline DeBordenave. Miss Caroline likes to leave early, I know that."

Elinor nodded, and said only, "Oscar, Miss Mary-Love is looking at you from the side porch and probably wondering what you are whispering about."

"Hey, Mama!" cried Oscar, as he turned and waved. "I'm home now!"

Caroline DeBordenave and Mary-Love Caskey left at seven o'clock the following morning in Caroline's automobile. They intended to stay the night in Mobile. Oscar, who had lingered over his breakfast so long that his mother began to wonder, got up and watched the car go off. "Sister," he said, "you gone help Elinor and me today?"

"Help you what?" asked Sister, slicing the crust off a piece of toast.

Oscar turned back with a grin.

"Help us get married, that's what."

Zaddie was raking the yard and glancing up at the clear sky, wondering when the clouds would roll in—she knew it was going to rain because Miss Elinor had told her so. Miss Elinor, Grace, and James Caskey were still at breakfast. Oscar walked into James's house without knocking.

Elinor said, "Zaddie is going over to the school at seven-thirty and tell Miz Digman I'm not feeling well." She still did not ask Oscar the reason for his request that she stay at home.

"I am head of the school board," said James Caskey. "Oscar, I cain't approve of Elinor's lying to Miz Digman, so I want you to tell Elinor and I want you to tell me what all this is about."

"Elinor and I are gone be married today."

Elinor didn't look a bit surprised. "What does Miss Mary-Love say to that?"

"I don't know," said Oscar.

"What about your bargain?" asked Elinor.

"Mama tricked me into that! Mama got me by surprise!"

"This is not going to make her happy, Oscar. She may even take back her house."

"And give it to who?" demanded James Caskey, actually pleased with Oscar's decision, even if it meant deceiving both Miz Digman and Mary-Love.

"Me!" cried Grace. "I want it. It's got a sleeping porch on the second floor and Aunt Mary-Love said there was gone be four swings on it. Daddy, you and me and Zaddie can live there."

"I am not leaving this house," replied James, who always responded to his daughter's wildest suggestions with the utmost gravity.

"Mama cain't do anything," said Oscar. "I have got a license and I have talked to Miz Driver and that is that."

"I'm glad," said James. "I think you are doing the right thing, Oscar. I think you are going about it the right way, but I just want Miss Elinor to know that we are all gone shrivel up and die without her. Aren't we, Grace?"

Grace nodded her head vigorously. "We're gone die!"

"You are not," said Elinor. "Where is this wedding supposed to take place? And when is it?"

"Today, of course. Today, while Mama is in Mobile. I don't know where, I—"

"Here!" cried Grace.

"Here," said James. "Have it right here in the parlor."

"All right," said Oscar.

Elinor took Oscar's proposal that they be married immediately with an almost bewildering calmness, as if she had for months past expected this most unexpected thing. She merely said, "Oscar, I want to finish my breakfast. Then I will have to see about something to wear. You haven't given me much time to prepare."

Sister, in fact, was seeing about the dress. She had called Miz Daughtry, the dressmaker, and before Elinor had got up from the table, that woman was knocking on the door. Elinor had a biscuit in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other as Miz Daughtry took her measurements.

All morning long, while Miz Daughtry sat in the sewing room and cut out the dress that Elinor Dam-mert was to be married in, Ivey Sapp baked cakes and pies, and Roxie Welles worked on the wedding supper. Zaddie took a hatchet and went down to the banks of the Perdido and hacked off tree branches to decorate James Caskey's parlor.

Elinor and Oscar and James sat down for a hurried dinner at twelve o'clock, joined by Annie Bell Driver. Elinor had been in town almost a year now, but was close really to no one but James and Grace and Oscar. Outside the Caskey family and the children at the school, Elinor saw no one, with the exception of Annie Bell Driver, who would stop for a quarter-hour or so when she drove her wagon past James Caskey's house and saw Miss Elinor sitting on the porch. Elinor and the female preacher were by no means intimate, but Annie Bell knew Mary-Love and knew what Mary-Love thought of the engagement of her son to Miss Elinor. So Oscar had asked Annie Bell to perform the wedding ceremony not only because of her friendship with Elinor, but also because no other preacher in town would risk Mary-Love's displeasure.

After dinner Elinor sent Zaddie with a note to tell Miz Digman that she was feeling much better, so much better in fact that she had decided she might as well go on and get married to Oscar and probably wouldn't be back in the school until Tuesday. Zaddie brought back congratulations from Miz Digman. She brought back Grace, too, which was just as well since Grace was almost delirious with thoughts of the wedding and hadn't heard a word that her teacher had said all morning long. In the afternoon Elinor and Oscar packed for the honeymoon and Sister sat weeping on the front porch. By two o'clock it had begun to rain, just a little at first from clouds that didn't even completely cover the sky. The sun shone through to the south, and formed a rainbow that arched over the Perdido. Ivey Sapp told Zaddie that the rain falling as the sun shone was indisputable evidence that the devil was beating his wife.

"Sister!" said Oscar, coming through the front door out onto the porch, "what are you crying for?"

"You're getting married, Oscar!"

"I know it," said Oscar. "I am doing it on purpose, too. I have gone out of my way."

"You are leaving me here with Mama. It's a crying shame! I want to go with you and Elinor tonight. Take me with you!"

"Sister, we cain't take you on our honeymoon. You know that."

"I want to go! I don't want to be the one to tell Mama you got married while she was out shopping for portieres!"

I'll tell her—after the honeymoon. Though truth to tell, Sister, I don't much look forward to it. But it's my wedding and I'll be the one who tells her."

"Oscar, she's gone know as soon as she gets back and sees you gone and sees Elinor gone too!"

"You tell Mama we couldn't wait, you tell Mama I couldn't wait all summer long."

The rain was pouring down off the roof and splashing on the porch railing; Oscar pulled back. Elinor waved to him from next door. "Half an hour!" she called. "Send Zaddie over here and let Roxie fix her head!"

The wedding was at five o'clock. The parlor was decorated with the hemlock and cedar branches that had overspread the Perdido that morning. Miz Daughtry hadn't had time to finish the dress, and it was only basted together, so the dressmaker warned Elinor not to make any sudden moves or try to lift her arms. Zaddie and Grace were flower girls, dressed in white, with baskets of crape myrtle petals over their arms. James Caskey gave Elinor away. Roxie and Ivey and Bray were the only guests, and they stood in the dining room door. Sister sat on the sofa and wept bitter tears.

The rain never let up, and now the sky was completely clouded over.

To be heard over the noise of the rain beating against the windows and the roof, Annie Bell Driver had to speak as loudly as if she were delivering a sermon in a Mobile church. Rain rattled the win-dowpanes and splashed off the sills and dripped down the chimney until the entire room smelled of rain-soaked evergreens.

Bray had put the couple's suitcases in the Torpedo earlier, and Elinor wouldn't even take an umbrella to get through the downpour to the automobile parked in front of Mary-Love's house. The temporary stitches in her sleeve pulled apart as she lifted her arm to wave to everybody on the front porch. She sat laughing on the front seat as soaked-to-the-skin Oscar drove off down the street that was three inches deep in churning water dyed the color of the clay beneath—dyed red, Perdido red.

CHAPTER 7
Genevieve

By the afternoon of the first Monday in June the weather had turned hot in Perdido. The river behind the Caskey houses flowed low, muddier and redder than ever before. Mary-Love and Sister sat on the side porch out of the reach of the oppressive declining sun. Mary-Love had two large pieces of patterned cotton, one in light blue and the other in a pale violet, and by a cardboard pattern was cutting out squares and triangles. Sister, who had patience and a steady eye, was stitching these together to form large squares. In another week or so, they'd have enough to put together a quilt.

Sister looked up when Oscar's automobile pulled up in front of the house; Mary-Love didn't.

"Is that them, Sister?" Mary-Love asked calmly.

Sister looked apprehensively at her mother and nodded. Upon her return from Mobile the Saturday previous, Mary-Love had learned immediately from Sister of her son's precipitous wedding with the red-haired schoolteacher. But from the moment that that dread news fell trembling from Sister's lips, Mary-Love had allowed no one to speak a word about the subject. Friends—even Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk—with congratulations sincere or ironic, had been turned from the door. People felt that Mary-Love was taking it badly, but no one could know for sure. Certainly it must have been humiliating for your only son to get married one afternoon when you were down in Mobile picking out curtain material. Mary-Love hadn't even gone to church, and Sister for two days had been afraid to speak for fear some chance word would kindle her mother's dangerously smoldering resentment into searing flame, "What is Miss Elinor wearing, Sister?"

"She looks real pretty, Mama."

"I'm sure she does," said Mary-Love, and her scissors went clack-clack.

Elinor and Oscar came up the flagstone walk to the front porch.

"We're around here!" Sister called from the side porch.

Elinor rounded the corner unhesitatingly. Oscar, with two suitcases, hung back. He had allowed himself to cherish a faint hope that his mother had decided to leave town for a few weeks, and he stood still a moment, recovering from the disappointment that she was sitting there on the porch, awaiting their return with a pair of scissors in her hand.

"Afternoon, Sister. Afternoon, Miss Mary-Love. Oscar and I are back now."

"Oh, you're so pretty!" cried Sister, getting up so quickly that the unsewn squares and triangles of material spilled out of her lap onto the rug at her feet.

"Sister," cried her mother reproachfully, "I have gone to so much trouble...!"

"Mama, I'm sorry, but isn't Miss Elinor pretty, she—"

"She certainly is," said Mary-Love quickly. "Come here, Elinor, and kiss me." Obediently, Elinor went over and lightly kissed Mary-Love's upraised cheek. "Oscar," said Mary-Love.

Oscar came around the corner. "Mama, we're back."

"Aren't you going to kiss me?"

Oscar did so, and then the newly married couple stood together before Mary-Love's chair.

"So," said Mary-Love, "you just couldn't wait."

"Not one minute longer," said Elinor.

Mary-Love looked at them together for perhaps five seconds. Then she picked up her scissors and her cardboard pattern again. That was all she intended to say.

"Mama," Oscar began apologetically, "it's not that we didn't want you at the wedding, it's—"

"Don't apologize to me!" cried Mary-Love quickly, looking up at him once more. "I wasn't the one getting married! This has saved me trouble and expense! But you know, Oscar, that house next door is not ready for you yet. It's not near ready—"

"I know, but, Mama—"

"Where do you and Elinor intend on living, I'd like to know?"

"With James," replied Oscar. "James said we should just stay on in Elinor's room until our house is fixed up. He didn't want to lose us at all, and it would do him good to have us both around, he said. He said Grace wasn't ready to let go of Elinor, either."

Sister's teeth went clack-clack.

"What's wrong?" Oscar asked.

Elinor had seated herself in the swing across from Mary-Love, and Oscar backed down into it beside her.

"You're not gone be staying over there," said Mary-Love.

"You cain't stay with James!" cried Sister. "Poor Grace!"

"Why not?" demanded Oscar. "James told me—"

"Sit real still," said Mary-Love with her scissors poised. "Sit real still and be quiet." Elinor stopped rocking the swing, anchoring it with her foot. Oscar and Sister held their breaths. From across the yard they heard a woman's strident voice within James Caskey's house. Oscar then also noticed the absence of footprints in the sand between the houses, which was strange, for the constant back-and-forthing had resumed in recent months. The strident voice within the house rose and fell, and as they listened, it moved from the dining room window to the kitchen window.