BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (27 page)

"You don't seem to have the little friends around this summer that you had last summer, Grace, and when I mentioned that to Caroline DeBordenave, she said to me, 'Goodness gracious! John Robert is all alone, too.' So Caroline and I have decided that you and John Robert are gone spend the rest of your summer together. You will have such fun!"

Grace began to understand. "I have friends," she protested. "I have Zaddie!"

"Zaddie is a little colored girl," Mary-Love pointed out. "It's all right to play with Zaddie, but she's not your real friend. John Robert can be your real little friend."

Grace thought she began to detect some small piece of injustice here, but before she could put her finger upon what it was exactly, Mary-Love went on: "Now I want you two to go and start playing together. I'll send Ivey to get you when it's time to eat. You and John Robert are gone have dinner with me every day."

It wasn't that Grace disliked John Robert. She felt sorry for him, and always in school went out of her way to be nice to him, always asking permission before she ransacked his pockets for candy. He was a boy, though, and his mind wasn't right. She would never love John Robert DeBordenave the way that she loved Zaddie Sapp.

"All right, Aunt Mary-Love," said Grace slyly, "I'll take John Robert over to Elinor's and we'll play on the lattice."

"No, you won't," said Mary-Love. "You can play in this house or you can play in John Robert's house. You cain't play in Elinor's house because I don't want you bothering Elinor and I don't want you bothering Elinor's baby."

"Well, can we play in my house?"

"May we play," corrected Mary-Love. "No, you may not. There is nobody to watch you over there."

"I don't need to be watched!"

Mary-Love sat silent and glanced at John Robert. Grace understood perfectly well what that silence and that glance meant, but she refused to be drawn into her aunt's conspiracy.

"All right, ma'am" said Grace sullenly, "but I got to go tell Zaddie I'm not coming back this morning."

"No, you don't," said Mary-Love. "There is no reason for you to explain yourself to a little colored girl who is hired to do something else besides play on a lattice porch all summer long. So, John Robert, what do you think you and Grace would like to do this morning?"

John Robert looked about the parlor astonished, realizing for the first time—and still dimly—that the new playsuit, this enforced visit, Grace's presence, and the conversation between her and Miss Mary-Love, all had something to do with him.

Mary-Love could have broken up Zaddie and Grace's friendship that summer if she had mounted a campaign of eternal vigilance, but she hadn't the time or the inclination for such warfare. She chose, rather, to imagine that she had crushed the enemy in a single blow, but Mary-Love did not take into account the depth of Grace's attachment to Zaddie. Grace found ways around Mary-Love's prohibition against having anything to do with the black girl, and ways to make the eternal presence of John Robert DeBordenave less onerous.

First, Grace went to Elinor and told her what had happened. Elinor said nothing at first, but by the expression on her face, her sympathies clearly lay with Grace and Zaddie. "You can come over here as much as you want this summer, Grace," said Elinor. "And you bring the DeBordenave boy over here too. -Though I must say that I think it is a mistake for Caroline DeBordenave to give a ten-year-old girl charge of her child, who is not right in the head."

So Grace's afternoons with Zaddie continued, but they were no longer perfect, because of the presence of John Robert DeBordenave. Previously both girls had been good to John Robert, and on several occasions Zaddie had been called over to the De-Bordenaves' to watch him on Monday afternoons when Caroline was at bridge. Now, however, the two girls grew to resent John Robert because his company was forced upon them every day—and for so many hours. His conversational ability was limited almost entirely to pantomimic actions and an occasional word, which he always had to repeat at least three times before he could be understood. And he hadn't the remotest notion of what Zaddie and Grace's complex games were all about, but would blunderingly attempt to join in all the same. From resentment, there was only a short step to cruelty.

Grace began to taunt the boy. John Robert didn't exactly understand taunts, but he could sense the contempt behind them. Grace would take candy from his pockets, shove it into his mouth, and force him to swallow it whole. She deliberately spilled milk and iced tea on his new clothes, and then cried, "You are so clumsy, John Robert DeBordenave!" If he broke any of her Ben Franklin treasures—as he tended to do if he so much as picked one up—Grace would snatch the pieces away from him and then fling them in his face. She would never say, It's all right, you couldn't help it, when he began to weep large silent tears. Grace ignored the infirmity that crippled the child and saw only his exasperating slowness. She took note only of his inhibiting presence, and thought of him only as the instrument by which Mary-Love sought to separate her and Zaddie. If Grace was ashamed of her cruelties at all, she laid the blame at Mary-Love's door.

One day when John Robert was standing in the open door of the lattice staring out at the Perdido, Grace, without a thought to the consequences, ran up from behind, and shoved him down the steps.

He tumbled over and over, banging his head on the sharp corner of the bottom step. When Grace ran down and lifted his head, blood dripped from the wound and filled a groove in the patterned sand below.

Elinor, alerted to the accident by Grace's hysterical screams, called Dr. Benquith. John Robert was brought back to consciousness, examined, bandaged, and carried home by Bray. Grace ran along behind Bray, explaining tearfully, "He fell. He fell down the back steps and rolled all the way to the bottom!"

Grace was certain everyone knew that she had pushed John Robert. But her aunt said only, "How could you have let it happen? Why weren't you watching? You know that boy doesn't have sense enough to come in out of the rain!"

At first, Grace was relieved that her culpability had not been found out; it was better to be charged merely with neglect of duty than with murder. But as the days passed, Grace came to see that, because she had not been charged with the crime, she must bear all the guilt within herself. She was morose and downcast; her appetite was gone and her sleep was racked with nightmares. James worried about her. Mary-Love said, "She ought to feel guilty—that boy could have died! How would she have felt then? How would we have felt?"

Elinor called Grace to her one afternoon. Elinor sat in a swing on the upstairs porch, stood Grace before her, and said, "You feel real bad about John Robert, don't you?"

Grace nodded slowly. "Yes, ma'am. Is he gone die?"

"Of course not! Who told you that?"

"Aunt Mary-Love said he might. She said it would be my fault if he did!"

Elinor bit her lip for a moment, glanced over Grace's shoulder at Mary-Love's house, and then said, "John Robert is not going to die, and even if he did, it still wouldn't be your fault. You understand me, Grace?"

Grace trembled and bit her lip, then suddenly burst into tears and plunged her head into Elinor's lap. "It would be, it would be!" wailed Grace. "I pushed him!"

"Oh..." said Elinor slowly. "I see..."

Without removing Grace's head from her lap, Elinor moved the child around and drew her up into the swing beside her. Grace cried for a few minutes more, then sat up, red-eyed.

"All right, tell me what happened," said Elinor, and Grace told her.

"And you don't know why you did it?" Elinor asked when Grace had finished her description of the event.

"No, ma'am, 'cause I like old John Robert. I just didn't like having to take care of him all the time. Sometimes Zaddie and I just wanted to be by ourselves!"

Grace sat beside Elinor a long while, now feeling a great deal better for her confession. When at last Elinor drew apart and stood up, she said, "Grace, I'm going to speak to Caroline DeBordenave for a few minutes."

"You gone tell her I pushed John Robert?" cried Grace in a frenzy of terror and guilt.

"No," said Elinor. "I'm going to tell her that it was not your fault that John Robert fell down the back steps, that we were all sorry it happened, but that you had no business being a nursemaid for John Robert for the entire summer. You are too young to have that kind of responsibility. If she had wanted John Robert watched every minute of the day, then she should have hired a colored girl to do it. That's what I will say, and I will tell her how bad you feel— even though it wasn't your fault—and that you want permission to go visit John Robert and ask him how he's feeling. You do, don't you?"

"Yes, ma'am!" cried Grace vehemently, and meant it.

Caroline DeBordenave understood all that Elinor said, and agreed with her. "Lord, Elinor, when Bray brought John Robert home and I saw all that blood I was just about out of my mind! I didn't mean to slam the door in poor old Grace's face, it's just that I wasn't thinking straight. John Robert means more to Tom and me than anything else in the world. If anything happened to that boy, I don't know what we'd do. I suppose we would pack up and move away. I don't think either one of us would have the heart to stay behind."

Grace and Zaddie were no longer forced to bear the company and responsibility of John Robert DeBordenave. Mary-Love's scheme, undermined by Elinor's interference, came to nothing.

CHAPTER 19
THE HEART, THE WORDS, THE STEEL, AND THE SMOKE

Sister wondered, that summer, how she could have been so foolish as to allow Ivey Sapp to cast a spell upon her and upon Early Haskew. Sister remembered with shuddering embarrassment how she had walked around the kitchen table with a bleeding chicken heart in her hand, and how she had spoken words over it, how she had skewered it, how she had thrown it into the fire. She prayed no one ever found out how silly she had been. Now, when she brought that scene to mind, her recollection involuntarily saw a row of human heads in the window of the kitchen; the heads had eyes that watched her movements, ears that heard her words, and mouths that would spread the humiliating story all over town.

Yet nothing happened. Even her most suspicious inquiry could detect no knowledge of the business in the faces that passed her on the street or in the voices that greeted her each day. The mound beside the back steps, beneath which the remains of the sacrificed chicken were buried, had been beaten down by the rain and one could no longer tell where it had been.

If Sister felt relief that her foolishness had not been discovered, she was also chagrined to find that the spell so far hadn't seemed to have had any effect. When she was alone in the house with Early, Sister sat in a good dress on the best sofa in the usually closed front parlor, conspicuously ready to accept a proposal of marriage. Early would only pass by and say, "Good Lord, Sister, aren't you burning up in there?"

Sister would sigh, get up from the sofa, and close the parlor doors, then go upstairs and change into something that was less appropriate for a proposal, but more comfortable for the weather. She decided, after several repetitions of this, that a man as straightforward as Early Haskew wasn't to be caught only by spells and stratagems. Sister realized she could not just simply put herself in the way of being asked; she would have to press the matter. If she hadn't much experience in dealing with men, well then, Early Haskew—who had always lived with his mother—probably hadn't had much opportunity to deal with young women. She doubted whether he had ever proposed to anyone, and if he had not, why should she assume that he would recognize, when she displayed it, the proper attitude of availability?

Thereafter, whenever Early was in his sitting room working on the plans for the levee Sister loitered there, and made no attempt to cover the fact that she was loitering. If Early went out to inspect a riverbank or talk to someone whose shed would be moved or examine a vein of clay out in the forest, Sister begged permission to come along with him.

"It's just gone be boring, Sister!" he'd exclaim.

Sister would reply, without a trace of a simper, "Lord, Early, I just like being with you!"

This tactic began to work. Soon she didn't bother to ask. When she saw him going out the door and climbing into the automobile, she would hop right into the back seat and say, "Where we going today? Who we gone speak to, Early?"

If it happened that Sister was in another part of the house and didn't see him go out the door, Early would linger in front of the car, and when Sister appeared at a window he would call out: "Hey, Sister, you holding me up!"

"You are bothering Early, Sister," said Mary-Love every evening at the supper table, quite as if Early were not sitting at her right hand.

"If Early doesn't want me trailing along behind him," said Sister, "then Early ought to tell me to stay at home."

"Sister's good help to me, Miz Caskey."

"How? How? I'd like to know."

"Well, she writes down my figures for me. She carries along a little notebook, and that frees me up.' And she knows the people, too. Sister, I bet you know everybody in this town! We get over there in Baptist Bottom, I'm gone need some help. The way those colored people speak, hard sometimes for me to understand what they're talking about—in Pine Cone, colored people speak totally different—and I need Sister there to tell me what they've been saying to me."

"Sister is a drag on your work, Early," said Mary-Love, who had begun to see what was happening, and had set about to head it off before anything serious came of it.

So every evening Mary-Love objected to how much trouble Sister was for Early, and always dismissed his protestations to the contrary as mere politeness. And every evening she demanded that Sister leave the man alone for thirty minutes at least, but Sister merely shrugged and said, "Mama, I'm doing what I want to do because I'm happy doing it. So don't expect me to leave off just because it's what you want." Mary-Love thought about asking Early to leave the house altogether, but for several reasons she couldn't bring herself to do so. For one thing she had begged him to come, and the whole town knew it and he had probably even kept the two letters that she had written to him so she couldn't ask him to leave now without risking a severe ebbing of her reputation. He also remained a goad in the side of Elinor Caskey next door, and Mary-Love wouldn't have removed that goad for the world. At last she decided to give up any further subversion, trusting that Sister's bumbling inexperience would soon sink this matter-of-fact romance. Still, Mary-Love had nagging worries that some kind of attachment might be growing between her daughter and the engineer.