BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (16 page)

"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 station-master.

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 sta-tionmaster to stop the Hummingbird. James Cas-key'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."

CHAPTER 10
The Caskey Jewels

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 couldn't see much, however, even after they got inside, because the nature of Genevieve's death demanded a closed coffin.

All the Caskeys sat in the front pew on the left. The women were dressed in black with thick veils. Heavy mourning had gone rather out of fashion in the past couple of years. However, the Caskeys were high people in town, and they all had their funeral dresses ready at the back of a closet. Even Grace had a little crushed hat with a heavy veil attached. Many in town thought this affectation, but the veil in fact was to hide the bruises and welts visible on her face, inflicted by the dead woman two days before.

Genevieve's husband wept. His were the only Cas-key tears that morning. Mary-Love and Sister and Elinor didn't even affect sorrow.

In the pew behind Mary-Love sat a man and a woman whom no one had ever seen before. The man, who was tall and ill-favored, coughed a great deal. The woman, who was short and dimpled, wheezed and cooed at a child at her side—a boy about four years old who complained of boredom in an incessant whisper and whistle. No one had to be told that this was Genevieve's family. What little polish Gene-vieve had exhibited—her clothes, her knowledge of the presidents' middle names—was shown up for the sham it had been once you saw this family. They turned out to be Queenie and Carl Strickland and their son Malcolm. It was with the Stricklands that Genevieve had lived when she was in Nashville.

They had arrived only an hour before the service and they drove away directly from the cemetery. Mary-Love had nodded when she was introduced and Oscar had shaken hands all around. Elinor and Sister had smiled. Everyone had been immensely glad that the Stricklands evaporated before anyone had been driven to the extremity of saying something nice to them about the dead woman.

Genevieve was buried in the town cemetery, which was situated on a piece of high sandy ground west of the workers' houses. This place had fortunately been little affected by the flood. It might be pointed out that the graveyard next to the Bethel Rest Baptist Church in Baptist Bottom had not been so lucky. There, bones and coffin fragments had floated right up to the surface of the earth and were found scattered over several blocks when the waters had receded. Colored women, before they had even stepped inside their own ruined homes, gathered up those bones in croker sacks, and colored men dug a deep grave into which the unidentifiable remains of their parents, wives, children, and friends were once again laid to rest until the next flood should bring them up again.

There were now five graves in the Caskey plot: Elvennia and Roland, James's parents; Randolph, James's brother and Mary-Love's husband; the little girl who had been born Randolph's and James's sister; and now the deep rectangular hole in whose depths Genevieve's severed head and body were casually reunited.

That afternoon, Mary-Love, Elinor, and Sister changed out of their black and went next door to go through Genevieve's things. Her clothing would be portioned out among the three of them—according to fit, principally. What would fit none of them would be given to Roxie and Ivey. (If Queenie Strickland had remained in Perdido, as everyone had feared she might, she would have received a portion of this wardrobe, though as Mary-Love remarked, referring to Queenie's height, "She'd have to take up all the hems about two feet.") All Genevieve's bags had been removed from the wrecked Packard and brought back to the house. While Elinor and Sister began taking things out of the suitcases, Mary-Love opened the smaller bags. Two contained cosmetics, but Mary-Love couldn't find the one in which Genevieve had kept her jewels.

"They were Elvennia's things," said Mary-Love. "They should have come to me. But Elvennia left them to James—I don't know what she supposed he was going to do with them." The truth was, and Sister at least knew it, that Mary-Love hadn't got along with her mother-in-law and Elvennia had left the jewels to her son out of pure spite. "I just hope," said Mary-Love earnestly, "that no one came along and took the bag out of the automobile while it was sitting out there on the highway."