BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (8 page)

"I took her out to the Sapps and we bought some cane juice. You know they got a three-year-old girl running that press now? She is so small that they have to lay her on her stomach on that old mule's back and tie her on with a rope."

"Those Sapps!" cried Sister. "I declare we are gone end up hiring every one of those nine children just to keep 'em from getting worked to their deaths."

"So," said Mary-Love, "you went out to the Sapps and you came right back. That took you three hours and thirty-five minutes?"

"We stopped in and spoke to Miz Driver, that's all, and Miz Driver gave us some of her early watermelon. We wouldn't have stopped I think except that Oland and Poland—or it might have been Roland— ran out and stopped the wagon. Those boys think the world of Miss Elinor. You know that those three boys eat watermelon with pepper instead of salt? I had never even heard of that, but Miss Elinor had. Mama, Miss Elinor is smarter than you give her credit for."

And next door, at the table, Miss Elinor told the same story for Grace and James Caskey.

"But you had a good time," said James Caskey.

"Oh, yes," said Miss Elinor, "Mr. Oscar was very good to me."

"Well, as long as you had a good time," said James Caskey, "that's all that matters."

Eight days after the planting of the water oak acorns, Elinor Dammert attended morning service in Perdido for the first time. Previously, after Sunday school, Elinor had returned home with Grace, who was thought too little to sit through a sermon. But suddenly Grace had gotten older or was better-behaved—or perhaps Elinor Dammert had a particular wish for wanting to go to church. At any rate, next to Elinor sat Oscar Caskey, and when they rose to sing hymns, he held the book open for her as she lifted little Grace in her arms.

Mary-Love didn't like it, but between stanzas Sister whispered, "Mama, you cain't expect her to hold Grace and the hymnbook too!"

When they all returned from church that morning, Buster Sapp was waiting on the front steps of James Caskey's house. He ran up to Miss Elinor, grabbed her hand, and dragged her around to the back.

When the others followed, wondering at Buster's even being awake at that hour of the morning and even more at his failure to finish his raking on one side of the house, they saw Miss Elinor standing near the back parlor windows. She was smiling broadly. Right beside her, wide-eyed and still astonished, Buster Sapp rocked back and forth on his haunches. With a quivering finger he pointed at a little foot-high oak sapling. The acorn from which it had sprung lay split and rotted and loosely covered with coarse gray sand. And as James Caskey and Mary-Love and Sister and Oscar looked on with astonishment equal to Buster's, the black child rose and rushed all over the yard, and pointed out seventeen more water oak saplings that had raised themselves overnight in the sterile sandy earth.

CHAPTER 4
The Junction

What was known for certain about Elinor Dammert's life in Perdido could be easily summed up: she had been plucked from the Osceola Hotel on Easter morning by Oscar Caskey and Bray Sugarwhite; she lived with James Caskey and took splendid care of his small daughter Grace; she was to teach fourth grade in the fall; and she was being courted by Oscar Caskey whose mother didn't like it one little bit.

But everything else was a mystery, and seemed likely to remain so. Elinor Dammert was not unfriendly—she always spoke on the street, had a memory for names, and was polite in all the stores— but she didn't go out of her way to join in the life of the community. In other words, she didn't gossip— about herself or about others. Nor did she do much that was out of the ordinary—except to live apparently without care that Genevieve Caskey was bound to return someday and raise holy hell that her place in James's household had been usurped; and to have raised enmity in Mary-Love Caskey, a kind if slightly domineering woman, who had never before been known to dislike anyone who wasn't a thief or a drunk.

Actually, it was thought that Miss Elinor didn't really take to life in Perdido. The common remark was that she looked peaked, almost as if she weren't used to the climate, though how that might be when she was from Fayette County, not all that far north, no one knew. Certainly during these summer months, Miss Elinor spent a great deal of time in the water, and the muscularity of her shoulders—a strange thing in an Alabama woman—was a frequently remarked upon fact. People also said that she looked as if she weren't getting enough to eat (or perhaps not enough of the right things), though since James kept an ample table and Roxie was one of the best cooks in town, people didn't see how this explanation of Elinor's condition could apply.

Buster Sapp arrived at the Caskeys' one morning early, even before the sun was up. He had set out from his parents' home in the country and miscalculated the time needed for the journey into town. As he went around the back of the house, intending to nap for a bit on the back steps, he was startled to see someone standing on the mooring dock. It was Elinor Dammert, and her white shift gleamed in the light of the setting moon. She dived into the river. Buster ran down to the water's edge and watched her as she swam in easy strong strokes directly across to the other bank. The swift current didn't deflect her an inch. This astounded Buster, who knew with what difficulty strong-armed Bray paddled from one bank to the other.

Before she had quite reached the other side, Elinor turned, and raised her head above the water. "I see you, Buster Sapp!" she cried out. The swift water flowed strongly past her, but Miss Elinor seemed immovably anchored.

"I'm here, Miss El'nor!" Buster called back. He was already quite in awe of the woman, because of the water oaks she had planted. Buster, raking around their slender trunks each morning, noticed daily growth. Was that natural? His sister Ivey told him it was because the acorns had been planted at the dark of the moon, but even that seemed an insufficient explanation.

"You come in here with me and we'll swim down to the junction!"

"Current is too strong, Miss El'nor! And I don't know what's in that water at night! They was oncet a alligator up in the Blackwater Swamp—Ivey told me. She told me that alligator ate up three little baby girls and spit up their bones on a sandbar!"

Grinning, Miss Elinor rose up straight in the early morning air until Buster could see her white bare feet shining beneath the surface of the black water. Then, in a graceful easy motion and without bending she toppled sideways into the current and began to slip gracefully downstream.

Buster knew what the whirlpool was like at the confluence of the Perdido and the Blackwater no more than a quarter of a mile away. He feared that Miss Elinor would drown. Help couldn't come in time even if he called, however, so the black boy ran along the bank of the river, stumbling occasionally on the exposed roots of trees, following Miss Elinor's white shift glowing just below the surface of the water. As he scrambled through a little screening thicket of pin oaks and magnolias, his trouser leg caught on a thorn and he had to sit down and carefully free himself. Rushing on, he soon found himself in the empty field in back of the courthouse. Here before him was the junction, where the red water of the Perdido and the black water of the Blackwater met, fought, and then were both sucked into the swiftly revolving maelstrom at the center.

Behind him the town hall clock began to toll five o'clock. He turned and stared a moment at its green-illuminated face. Miss Elinor ought to have got this far by now—she had been swimming fast, and Buster had been waylaid in the pin oak thicket. But he didn't see her anywhere. Had she already been dragged down? Buster trembled. Then suddenly he saw her head bob above the surface of the water a dozen yards upstream. The water flowed swiftly around her motionless body as if she had snagged there, but the Perdido was deep and without snags in that place. Then, almost as if she had simply waited for Buster to find her, Miss Elinor resumed her downstream journey. Buster watched with perfect terror as she moved on and then was caught up in the circular motion of the junction proper. Absolutely still and straight, and a few inches below the surface, she went round and round in the whirlpool. Buster called out wildly: "Miss El'nor! Miss El'nor! You gone drown!"

The woman was being drawn in closer and closer to the center of the spinning vortex. She stretched out her arms before her, and her body began to blend itself into the curve of the maelstrom. Soon, Buster saw, her body had formed itself into a complete circle. She had taken hold of her own toes, and she formed a white frame around the black whirling hole of the downspout.

Suddenly the circle of white skin and cotton that was Elinor Dammert sank out of Buster's sight.

He was overwhelmed with the certainty that this woman he so respected was doomed. Ivey told him that something lived right at the bottom of that whirlpool, something which during the day buried itself in the sand, but at night dug itself out again and sat on the muddy riverbed and waited for animals to get pulled down the whirlpool. But what it liked best was people. If you ever got pulled down there, it grabbed you so tight that your arms got broken and you couldn't fight back. Then it licked the eyeballs right out of your head with its black tongue. Then it ate your whole head, and then it buried the rest of your body in the muck so that nobody would ever find out what became of you. It looked mostly like a frog, but it had the tail of an alligator, and that tail swept the riverbed constantly, keeping all the bodies buried so that none of them ever floated up to the surface. It had one red gill for Perdido water, and one black one for the Blackwater. If it got real hungry it came up on the land—once Ivey had seen its trail from the river-bank to the house in Baptist Bottom where a washerwoman's two-year-old boy had disappeared the night before, and nobody ever found out what became of that child. Whatever it was, whatever waited on the murky riverbed for unlucky swimmers, whatever crawled up the clayey banks on dark nights; whatever that thing was, Ivey had assured her brother, it had been there before Perdido was built, and would be there when Perdido was no more.

Buster was now standing on a small piece of clay riverbank that jutted into the river. What Buster couldn't see was that it had been undermined by the action of the current. Suddenly it gave way. Flailing and screeching, Buster Sapp was thrown into the water. He tried to scramble up the bank again, and could feel the hard clay beneath his feet, giving him hope of recovery, but suddenly the circular motion of the junction seemed to enlarge itself to the very banks of the rivers. Inexorably, Buster was pulled away from the achingly close safety of that bank and into the whirlpool. He tried frantically to swim downstream, but he remained in the turning current.

As he was pulled beneath the surface of the water, he opened his eyes for a moment and saw distorted the green clock face on the town hall. He screamed, and muddy water filled his mouth.

A large pine branch was also caught up in the maelstrom, and he grasped it as a spar to keep him afloat; but the branch was no more anchored than he, and they simply spun along together. He managed to get his head above the surface for a moment and catch two breaths of air, then was sucked below again. He was closer now to the downspout, spinning around ever more quickly.

He let go of the pine branch suddenly, and leaped out of the water—or at least he performed the motion of leaping, for he succeeded only in initiating a tumbling motion below the surface of the water. He was not only going around and around, he was being tossed head over heels in a dizzying succession of somersaults—and being inexorably drawn nearer the center.

The current was so swift at that center, the whirlpool so pronounced, that there was a depression in the surface of the water more than a foot deep. Quite suddenly, Buster was there, at the top of the downspout that was the entrance to the watery hell below. He managed to get two gulps of air, and to open his eyes. The surface of the river was at a level above his eyes. He tried to scream, but at the moment that he drew in one last breath, he was sucked straight down toward the bottom.

The thing Ivey had warned him against grabbed him. Buster's arms were pinned to his sides with such force that the bones splintered inside them. His breath was squeezed out until none was left, and he braced for the coarse black tongue that would lick out his eyeballs. Unable to refrain, he opened his eyes, but so far beneath the surface he could see nothing at all. Then he felt a thick heavy coarseness press over his nose and mouth. As it licked up toward his eyes, Buster Sapp slipped into a blackness that was deeper and darker and more merciful than the cold Perdido.

No trace of Buster was ever discovered, but no one expected it to be otherwise. Elinor Dammert, unable to sleep and up early, said she had seen Buster dive off the mooring pier into the Perdido. Unquestionably he had been swept down to the junction and drowned. So many persons had been drowned at the junction and their bodies never located, either in town or much farther down the river, that no one even thought of attempting to assure the bereaved Sapps that the corpse of their little boy might be recovered. "He had no business getting in that water by the light of the moon," said his mother, Creola, and she took comfort in the eight children who remained to her.

After Buster's disappearance, Mary-Love set Bray to poor Buster's monotonous task. Bray so little liked it, thinking the job beneath his dignity, that he drove his common-law wife, Ivey, out to the Sapp cane field one day and requisitioned one of Ivey's sisters, a ten-year-old called Zaddie. Zaddie took up residence in Baptist Bottom with her sister and brother-in-law and was presented with her unfortunate brother's rake.

And however it was, whether her system became suddenly accustomed to the local climate, or whether Roxie Welles began to feed her better, Miss Elinor no longer looked peaked. Her face regained the healthy color it had had when she was rescued from the flooded hotel. Miss Elinor looked as if she were settling in.