BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (3 page)

The wagons were covered with tarpaulin and driven up through the forest to the church. The families followed in their automobiles and the servants came on foot. Despite the tarpaulins, despite the canvas covering on the automobiles, despite the umbrellas and the newspapers that the servants held atop their heads, despite even the thick canopy of the pine forest itself, everyone and everything arrived soaked with rainwater.

The benches had been moved out of the way and mattresses were brought in and laid out over the floor of the church. The white women got one corner, the black servants got another, the children a third, and the fourth was reserved for the preparation of food. This refuge was an expediency only for the women and children—all the men stayed in town, preserving what they could at the sawmills, helping the merchants raise their wares from the lower shelves to the upper, removing the infirm and persuading the recalcitrant to move to higher ground. When the town was finally abandoned to the waters, the Caskey, Turk, and DeBordenave men and male servants slept in the Driver house, a hundred yards up the road from the church. The children looked on all this business rather as an adventure; the servants looked on it as greater and less pleasant work than they were used to; the rich wives, mothers, and daughters of the millowners said nothing of difficulty and inconvenience, did not mourn their homes and their belongings, smiled for the children and the servants and themselves, and made quite a pet of little Ruthie Driver. The Zion Grace Church had been their home five days.

On Easter Sunday morning, Mary-Love Caskey and her daughter, Sister, sat with Annie Bell Driver in the corner of the church. They were the only ones awake in the large room. Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk lay closest to them on adjoining mattresses; they were turned toward each other and snoring lightly. The servants lay with their children in the far corner, now and then stirring, or crying out softly at a dream of high water or water moccasins, or raising a head and looking blearily about for a moment before falling asleep again.

"Stand outside the door," said Mary-Love quietly to Sister, "and see if you see Bray and your brother coming up the road."

Sister rose obediently. She was thin and angular, like her widowed mother. Her hair was the usual Caskey hair: fine and strong, but of no particular color, and therefore undistinguished. She was only twenty-seven, but every woman in Perdido—white or black, rich or poor—knew that Sister Caskey would never marry or leave home.

The wagons with all the Caskey, Turk, and DeBordenave goods had been drawn up before the church and were guarded day and night by one or another of the servants with a loaded shotgun. The DeBordenaves' driver sat sleeping now on the buck-board of the wagon nearest the road, and Sister walked quietly so as not to disturb him. She peered down the wagon track through the pine forest in the direction of Perdido. The sun was just rising over the tall pines and shined in her eyes, but the light in the forest was still dim and green and morning-misty. She craned her head this way and that. The driver stirred on the buckboard, and said, "That you, Miz Caskey?"

"Have you seen Bray and my brother?"

"Haven't seen 'em, Miz Caskey."

"Go on back to sleep then. It's Easter morning."

"The Lord is risen!" the driver cried softly, and lowered his head to his chest.

Sister Caskey shaded her eyes from the watery morning sun that was the color of cheap country butter. A man and a woman stepped through a veil of mist in the forest and paused in the wagon track.

"Where'd your girl go?" asked Annie Bell Driver.

"Well," said Mary-Love, craning her head, "I told her to walk outside and see if she could see Oscar and Bray. They went into town to see what the damage was. I didn't want them to, Miz Driver. I didn't want them in a rowboat. Oscar since he was little was always trailing his fingers in the water, not thinking about it. There's nothing in the water but water moccasins and leeches, I know it for a fact, so I told Bray to watch out for him. But Bray doesn't pay any attention," Mary Love finished with a rueful sigh.

Sister appeared in the doorway.

"You see them, Sister?" demanded Mary-Love.

"I see Oscar," said Sister with hesitation.

"Is Bray with him?" asked Mary-Love.

"I didn't see Bray."

"I want to speak to Oscar," said Mary-Love, rising.

"Mama," said Sister. "Oscar's got somebody with him."

"Who is it?"

"It's a lady."

"What lady?" Mary-Love Caskey went to the open door of the church and peered out. She saw her son, a hundred feet away in the track-road, standing talking with a woman who was thinner and more angular than Mary-Love herself.

"Who is it, Mama? She's got red hair."

"Sister, I don't know."

Annie Bell Driver stood behind Mary-Love and Sister. "Is she from Perdido?" the preacher asked.

"No!" cried Mary-Love definitely. "Nobody in Perdido has hair that color!"

From the live oak where Bray Sugarwhite deposited Oscar Caskey and the rescued Elinor Dammert a wagon track ran through the pine forest. It went past the Zion Grace Church and the Driver house, crossed the Old Federal Road, and ended three miles farther on in a sugarcane camp run by a black family called Sapp.

Oscar Caskey was the first gentleman of Perdido; even in a town so small, that distinction goes for something. He was first gentleman not only by right of birth—being the acknowledged heir of the Cas-keys—but also by his appearance and his natural bearing. He was tall and angular, like all the Caa-keys, but his movements were looser and more graceful than those of either his sister or his mother. His features were fine and mobile, his speech was careful and elegantly facetious. There was a brightness in his blue eyes, and he seemed always to be suppressing a smile. He had a courtly kind of manner that did not alter according to whom he spoke—he was as courteous to Bray's common-law wife as he was to the rich manufacturer from Boston who had come to inspect the Caskey lumberyard.

On Easter morning, as Oscar and Elinor walked along, the sun behind them shone through the top branches of the pines. Steam rose out of the dew on the underlying carpet of pine needles, and billowed around them. Great sheets of water, still and steaming, lay now and then in slight depressions on either side of the track where the water table had risen above the level of the ground.

"That's not river water, that's groundwater," Oscar pointed out. "You could get down on your hands and knees like a dog and lap it." He stiffened suddenly, with the fear that this had perhaps been an impolite suggestion. To cover up the possible awkwardness, he turned to Miss Elinor and asked, "What did you drink in the Osceola? I believe, Miss Elinor, that it's just not possible to drink floodwater without dying on the spot."

"I didn't have anything to drink at all," replied Elinor. She didn't seem to care that she mystified him.

"Miss Elinor, you went thirsty for four days?"

"I don't go thirsty," said Elinor, smiling. "But I do go hungry." She rubbed her stomach as if to soothe rumblings there, though Oscar had heard none and Miss Elinor certainly did not give the appearance of having gone four days without food. They continued some yards in silence.

"Why were you here?" Oscar asked politely.

"In Perdido? I came for work."

"And what is it you do?"

"I'm a teacher."

"My uncle is on the board," said Oscar eagerly. "Maybe he can get you a job. Why did you come to Perdido? Perdido is out of the way. Perdido is at the end of the earth. Who comes to Perdido except to write me a check for lumber?"

"I guess the flood brought me," Elinor laughed.

"Have you experienced a flood before this?"

"Lots," she replied. "Lots and lots..."

Oscar Caskey sighed. Elinor Dammert was, in some obscure manner, laughing at him. He reflected that she would fit in well in Perdido, if indeed his uncle did find her a job at the school. In Perdido all the women made fun of all the men. Those Yankee drummers coming in and staying at the Osceola talked to the men who ran the mills, and shopped in the stores where the men of Perdido stood behind the counters, and had their hair cut—by a man— while they talked to the men who loafed about the barbershop all morning and afternoon long, but they never once suspected that it was really the women who ran Perdido. Oscar wondered if that were the case in other towns of Alabama. It might, he thought suddenly and terribly, be true everywhere. But men, when they got together, never talked about their powerlessness, nor was it written about in the paper, nor did senators make speeches about it on the floor of Congress—and yet, as he walked beside her through the damp pine forest, Oscar Caskey suspected that if Elinor Dammert was representative of the women of other places (for she must have come from somewhere), then it was likely that men were powerless in towns other than Perdido as well.

"Where are you from?" he asked, a question which followed naturally in the train of his thought.

"North."

"You're not Yankee!" he exclaimed. Elinor's accent didn't grate like a Northerner's, certainly, for it had Southern rhythms and its vowels were sufficiently liquid for Oscar's ear. But there was something strange about it nonetheless, as though Elinor were more accustomed to some other language—not English at all. He had a sudden mental picture, as strong as it was improbable, of Elinor lying on the bed in the Osceola, listening to the voices of men in the rooms all up and down the hallway, imitating their patterns and storing their vocabularies.

"North Alabama, I mean," she said.

"What town? Do I know it?"

"Wade."

"I do not know it."

"Fayette County."

"Did you go to school?"

"Huntingdon. And I have a certificate to teach. It's in my bag that Bray's getting. I hope he won't let anything happen to my bags. I've got all my credentials in one of'em." She spoke her concern a little absently—not as if she really cared what happened to the bags, but as if she had suddenly remembered that she ought to care.

"Bray is a colored gentleman with a large bump of responsibility," said Oscar, touching his forehead as if to point out where that bump might have raised itself upon Bray's head. "As a younger man, he was apt to shirk his duties, but I beat him over the head with a two-by-four, raised a welt in the proper place, and he's never failed me since." As he spoke these words Oscar suddenly decided, in another part of his brain, that he might charitably and conveniently attribute all Miss Elinor's mysteriousness to mental confusion brought on by four days spent alone in a flooded hotel. "But I still don't understand why you came to Perdido," he persisted.

A veil of mist blew away before them and they were suddenly within sight of the church. His sister stood on the front steps, evidently watching out for him.

"Because," said Elinor with a smile, "I heard there was something here for me."

Oscar introduced Elinor Dammert to his mother, his sister, and to the female preacher of the Zion Grace Church.

"No sunrise service this year," said Annie Bell Driver. "There's too much trouble in the town. If people can sleep knowing their houses and their chattels are underwater, I say let 'em sleep."

"Miss Elinor came to Perdido looking for a job in the school for next fall," said Oscar, "and she got caught in the Osceola when the water started to rise. Bray and I just now found her."

"Where are your clothes? Where are your things, Miss Elinor?" cried Sister in sympathetic alarm.

"You must have lost everything," said Mary-Love, staring at Elinor's hair. "Floodwater takes everything. I'm surprised you got away with your life."

"I've got nothing at all," said Elinor with a smile that was neither brave resignation nor studied indifference, but a smile that seemed to mock credence.

"Where were you coming from?" asked Annie Bell Driver. One of the children, a colored one, had awakened inside the church and now peered sleepily out the front door.

"I graduated from Huntingdon," said Elinor Dammert. "I came to teach in the school here."

"The schoolhouse is underwater," said Oscar with a sad shaking of his head. "A school of bream have the run of it."

"I saw two desks floating down Palafox Street," said Sister Caskey.

"Only thing the teachers saved was their grade books," said Mary-Love.

"Have you got anything to eat?" asked Elinor. "I've been sitting on the side of a bed in the Osceola Hotel for four days watching the water rise. I had one tin of salmon and a box of crackers and I am fainting on my feet."

"Carry Miss Elinor inside!" cried Annie Bell Driver.

Sister took Elinor's hand and led her up to the steps of the church. "Bray got some tins out of Mr. Henderson's store after it was already underwater," said Sister. "The labels were all washed off so we don't know what's in 'em till we open 'em. Sometimes we get green beans for breakfast and English peas for supper, but you can tell the salmon cans by their shape. 'Course, you won't have to eat any more salmon unless you want it!"

"Thank you," said Elinor, turning at the top of the steps, "for rescuing me, Mr. Oscar."

Oscar would have followed her inside, but his mother touched his arm, saying, "You cain't go in there, Oscar. Caroline and Manda are still in their nightclothes!"

Oscar watched Miss Elinor disappear, then said goodbye to his mother and turned his steps back onto the road in the direction of the Driver house. He tipped his hat politely to the sleeping driver.

Elinor was fed on salmon and crackers in the corner of the church. She sat on the end of one of the benches and stared at the little sleeping map of children in the corner opposite. All the servants had risen and were huddled in a distant corner to wash and dress as best they could under the difficult circumstances. Sister Caskey sat beside Elinor, and now and then whispered a question that was answered in a whisper.

Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk had risen in time to see the stranger led inside by Sister Caskey. They dressed quickly and ran out of the church to question Mary-Love, who waited for them on the other side of one of the wagons. The three women fell immediately to a discussion of Elinor Dammert's muddy red hair and the peculiar circumstance of her having been left for four days in the Osceola Hotel.