BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (32 page)

The draperies were sewn that evening and hung the next day. Mary-Love thanked Elinor, and accepted her daughter-in-law's invitation to take supper with her and Oscar. For the first time, Mary-Love ate a meal in the house she had built for her son and his wife. Miriam, nearly two, was placed in a high chair brought over earlier by Zaddie, and throughout the meal eyed her real mother with a mixture of curiosity and suspicion.

A few days later, Sister and Early returned. She kissed Mary-Love hello, and before she had even taken off her hat she exclaimed, "Mama, I smell new furniture! Have you been down in Mobile again?" Then Mary-Love took her upstairs and showed her what had been accomplished in her absence.

Early, a simple man, remembered that Sister had said that very little would give her greater pleasure than to leave her mother high and dry. He had therefore assumed that upon their return from honeymoon, they would find another place to live. This newly furnished room puzzled him, as did the expression on Sister's face.

"It's real pretty, isn't it, Early?" Sister asked.

He nodded, asking, "Is this where we're gone be living?"

Sister looked at her mother. "For the time being,"

Sister said. "Mama, it's real pretty, you went to a lot of trouble."

Mary-Love now knew several things. First was that, despite "for the time being," Sister had no intention of leaving the house; and second, that she never had such an intention, the appearance she had given of having decided to leave her mother had been merely a feint. In this, Mary-Love thought she saw a little too much of herself. Sister knew what she was doing, and it was to an equal that Mary-Love replied, "Of course I went to some trouble, Sister! I had to do something to keep you with me! What would I have done if you and Early had wanted to find someplace else to live? What would we have done with poor old Miriam? Would we have cut her in two with a sword? Would we have given her back to Elinor?"

"Couldn't give up Miriam! But, Mama," warned Sister, unwilling completely to give up the edge she had attained, "don't go getting too used to having Early and me around. You never know when we'll up and leave you high and dry!"

"Oh, you wouldn't do that to your poor old mama," said Mary-Love softly, then left them to unpack.

Several contractors to whom Early had spoken the month before submitted sealed bids for the construction of the levee, and Early's choice for the job, Morris Avant, had the next-to-lowest. On Early's recommendation, Avant was awarded the first part of the contract.

But a great deal had to be accomplished before actual work on the levee could begin. The construction would require the services of between one hundred fifty and two hundred men, and though some might be unskilled and drawn from the unemployed ranks of Baptist Bottom, most were going to have to be imported. When the water pumping station had been built the year after the flood of 1919, twenty-five workers had been brought in. The foremen had stayed at the Osceola Hotel and the lower-paid workers had camped out on the stage of the school auditorium and been fed in the school kitchen on weekdays and at the Methodist Church on Saturdays and Sundays. This arrangement was hardly sufficient or appropriate for a near-army of men. Someone suggested housing the men in the schools, but depriving the schools of the use of the buildings for nearly two years wasn't really to be thought of seriously. So in a field just south of Baptist Bottom, the Mines brothers went to work putting up two large buildings for the accommodation of white workers, one a dormitory, and the other a kitchen and dining room.

Perdido citizens began to realize to what extent the levees would alter the aspect of their town. In the short term, it would mean the influx of workers and the expenditure of money, which was bad enough; but now they began to think about what it was going to be like to be hemmed in with walls of dirt for the remainder of their lives; to look out their windows and see not the rivers flowing past but only red walls of clay higher than their houses, wide and stolid and unhandsome. Some remembered how Elinor Caskey had spoken out against the levees, saying just some such thing, and had spoken even though her own husband was one of the prime movers in the business.

People now began to ask Elinor's opinion of the plans that had been made, and the preparations that were afoot, but Elinor would only say, "I told everybody what I thought. I still think it. By the time the levees are finished—if they are ever finished—it will be like living in an old clay quarry. Levees can wear down, and levees can wash away. Levees can spring holes, and levees can crack wide open. There's nothing that's ever going to stop the flow of a river when it wants to flow down to the sea, and there's nothing that can keep water from rising when it wants to spill over the top of a mound of clay."

Elinor wasn't to be meddled with during these days. There was something volatile in her temper, in her manner, and in her opinions. Her supper invitation to Mary-Love was not repeated, and though she had made curtains for Sister and Early's marriage chamber, she never even so much as welcomed them back from their honeymoon.

One day when Mary-Love was visiting Creola Sapp, down with some sort of winter fever, she found Creola's youngest child crawling about the floor wearing a dress that she, Mary-Love, had made for Miriam a year earlier. The garment had been one of the many articles of baby clothing that she had turned over to Elinor for the use of Frances, and which Elinor had accepted with apparent gratitude.

"Oh, yes, ma'am," said Creola, when questioned, "Miss El'nor good to me, bring me out a whole box of things for Luvadia. Prettiest things you ever saw!"

"Ill say they are, Creola. I'll just say they are!" murmured Mary-Love, furious that Elinor would give all those fine things away to Creola Sapp. She was even more distressed about Elinor's action because it had been discovered by merest accident— that is to say, it had not been done simply for effect. To Mary-Love, to do a thing not merely for effect argued a perversity in Elinor's character. It quite took away Mary-Love's breath.

Mary-Love rushed home and ran upstairs to Sister, who was in the nursery with Miriam. Mary-Love waxed indignant over the notion of those fine clothes going directly from their precious Miriam, two years old, and she cried unless there was a tiny diamond bracelet clapped around her wrist, to Luvadia Sapp, a fat grinning morsel of alligator bait crawling around on the splintery boards of a crumbling shack in the piney woods. "I cain't understand why Elinor would do a thing like that!" cried Mary-Love, but included in her frustration was her inability to understand anything her daughter-in-law did.

Sister's teeth went clack-clack. She said, "Mama, Elinor is upset."

"What have I done now?"

"Elinor's not upset because of you, Mama. She's upset because they have started to work on the levee, and she hates that levee the way you and I hate hell and the Republicans."

Mary-Love looked first at Sister, then out the window at Elinor's house as if that facade, perhaps in the configuration of draperies opened and draperies closed, might provide confirmation of Sister's thesis. Then she glanced down at Miriam toddling gravely across the rug, and said, "Sister, I think you may be right about that."

Frances caught a bit of a cold late in February, a little cold that Roxie said was no more than any child could suffer at that time of the year and at her time of life. Dr. Benquith saw the child and agreed with Roxie. Despite the reassurances, Elinor insisted that the child was in danger of her very life. She told Oscar that for the time being she would sleep in the nursery in case the child should experience difficulty in breathing. Oscar, who could scarcely bring himself to argue against the well-being of his daughter, acquiesced to this. A cot was set up in the nursery and Elinor abandoned her husband's bed.

Frances, to all appearances, soon got over the cold, but Elinor continued to stay with her day and night. Mary-Love and Sister next door speculated that Elinor remained as close to the child as she did not for Frances's protection and comfort, but rather so that no one might discern that the child was totally recovered. In any case, Frances's illness, whether supposed or real, went on and on, and it kept Elinor indoors. Her only foray into Perdido society was her Tuesday bridge games, and these she insisted be held, ignoring rotation, in her own home for the duration of the child's danger.

Queenie Strickland saw more of Elinor than anyone else. Queenie believed in Frances's illness, mainly because it seemed politic to do so. She frequently passed on to Elinor magazine articles that gave precise instructions for the care of ailing infants. She purchased little bottles of quackery at the pharmacy, tied the necks with pink ribbons, and waved them like a pendulum in Frances's face. She came daily to ask after the child, and to relate to Elinor the progress of the levee. From Queenie alone did Elinor accept such news, and as the two women sat in the swing on the second-floor porch, Elinor gazed out through the screens at the Perdido and listened tight-lipped as Queenie spoke: "Yesterday afternoon Sister was down in Baptist Bottom, and on the spot she hired three colored women to work in the kitchen. They gone get two dollars a day and not gone do nothing in this world but cook for seventy-five men. I wish
I
got paid like that for cooking for Malcolm and Lucille! Then over at the mill, they tore down those 'little store-buildings that are right on the edge of the river, and some other men were there building 'em right back up again except thirty feet back, and this time they are putting in windows 'cause those buildings are so hot in the summer that the men cain't hardly stand to go in there. And Mr. Avant and Early rode out to Mr. Madsen's—where Mary-Love gets her potatoes?—and told him they'd pay him two dollars for every wagonload of dirt they took out from behind his house. Y'see, he's got this mound right in back of his house—they say it's Indian burying ground and some old Indian bones are laying at the bottom of it pro'bly, and Mr. Madsen says if they find the bones they got to take them away with everything else. He says he was planning to clear it off and plant potatoes back there anyway, but he'll take the two dollars if they offer it to him, he's not proud..."

Because Elinor never objected to hearing these things, and because she had once cautioned Queenie not to tell anyone that she listened to them, Queenie understood that it had become her duty to find out everything there was to know about the building of the levee and to report it directly to Elinor. It was as if Elinor had been a proud sovereign, and the levee builders of Perdido had been her subjects raising earthen barricades and fomenting rebellion. Queenie was the loyal spy who reported every movement of the rabble so that her sovereign might know everything and yet still maintain the appearance of being above such small considerations.

The Hines brothers continued work on the dormitory and dining room for the expected workers. Early and Sister went around Baptist Bottom knocking on doors looking for people in need of employment. Every Thursday the Perdido Standard was filled with long articles detailing the preparations under way for the construction of the levee, always including at least one photograph of Early Haskew. In general, the town wound itself up very tightly in preparation for the very first wagonload of dirt to be spilled out onto the bank of the Perdido River. As all these events were rumbling along with ever-increasing speed and ever-increasing noise, Elinor Caskey kept more and more to her own house, and was never seen anywhere near the construction.

CHAPTER 23
QUEENIE'S VISITOR

Work on the levee began on the Baptist Bottom bank of the Perdido south of the junction. Early hired men in Pensacola, Mobile, Montgomery, and even from as far away as Tallahassee, to come and live for a year or so in the dormitory. Quarries in three counties were widened and deepened as stone and earth were extracted and loaded onto trucks or mule wagons. Every morning these vehicles lumbered into town along each of the three roads by which Perdido was accessible to the rest of the civilized world. A few small houses had been razed in Baptist Bottom and the first loads of dirt dropped there, the loose earth packed and molded by an army of colored men with spanking-new shovels. This first wall of clay seemed no more than a child's mud castle raised to enormous and ridiculous size, so that everyone wondered if so fragile-seeming an embankment could hold against the river if it took it in its mind to rise?

Every day the local colored population gathered and watched for hours with never-failing interest as the same actions and motions were performed over and over again: a wagon pulled up, dirt and clay were unloaded, dirt and clay were raised to the top of the mound under the direction of an overseer, dirt and clay were tamped into place. On the other side of the river, in the field behind the town hall, an equal number of idle white people gathered and gawked equally hard. Both groups of spectators declared that it was such a slow and such a massive job that there could be no hope of its being finished within their children's lifetimes. Perhaps Early Has-kew was a great confidence man and nothing more. Hadn't they better stop the business right now?

A month or so later, one of the early morning gawkers behind the town hall looked across the Per-dido and seemed to see the earthwork with new eyes. Previously, the mound of earth on the Baptist Bottom shore had seemed shapeless and amorphous to this man; but this day, in the morning air, without much actual change from the morning before, it seemed a gaudy vision of what the whole rampart would eventually be. This man, astounded by his sudden visionary extrapolation, pointed out what he saw to the next gawker. The second man was even more astonished, for he saw it too, and he had been one of the levee's most vociferous detractors. The word—or rather the vision—spread, from man to man and from woman to woman throughout Perdido, and everyone went over to Baptist Bottom and looked at the thing up close, and actually applauded Early Haskew when he drove up in his automobile. Suddenly the levee had become a great thing in Perdido.