Rain

BLACKWATER: VI RAIN

is an original publication of Avon Books. This work has never before appeared in book form.

AVON BOOKS

A division of

The Hearst Corporation

959 Eighth Avenue

New York, New York 10019

Copyright © 1983 by Michael McDowell Published by arrangement with the author Library of Congress 

Catalog Card Number: 83-90054 ISBN: 0-380-82792-1

Cover illustration by Wayne D. Barlowe

All rights reserved, which includes the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever except as provided by the U. S. Copyright Law.

For information address The Otte Company, 9 Goden Street, Belmont, Massachusetts 02178

First Avon Printing, June, 1983

AVON TRADEMARK REG. U. S. PAT, OFF. AND IN

OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U. S. A.

Printed in the U. S. A.

WFH 10 987654321

Our story 'til now...

In THE FORTUNE, Volume V of the BLACK-WATER saga, the Caskey clan becomes the leading family of Perdido, millionaires many times over. Elinor's mysterious foreknowledge of the existence of oil on swampland held by the family is confirmed by geologists—another proof of her uncanny kinship with the watery world—and she and daughter Miriam lead the family into a period of unparalleled wealth.

Frances—Elinor's second, and favored, daughter—discovers to her alarm that she is pregnant. Though Elinor tries to reassure her about the strange differences that set them apart from the rest of the family, nothing can adequately prepare Frances for the horrors of the childbirth bed. As Elinor had predicted, twins are born: one, named Lilah, who will be greeted with joy by the rest of the family; the other, Nerita, Frances's "river daughter," whose existence must remain a secret from all and who will eventually lure her mother away.

Meanwhile, Sister Haskew, sister of Elinor's husband Oscar, wills herself into invalidism to prevent the return of her husband, Early; Queenie Strickland's long-lost son Malcolm, who had left town in disgrace many years before, is discovered in a small-town barbecue joint by Miriam, and dragged home to rejoin the family; and, in a horrifying resumption of a pattern of inexplicable deaths by drowning, the town of Perdido again loses one of its young to the river.

Perdldo, Alabama
pop. 1,200  

1.  OSCAR & ELINOR CASKEVS HOME

2.  MARY-LOVE CASKEY'S HOME

3.  JAMES CASKEY'S HOME

4.   DeBORDENAVES  HOME 5   TURKS HOME

TO GULF OF MEXICO

P
erhaps they were only that: two old women gossiping, gossiping forever in a back bedroom of an old house in a remote corner of Alabama. In 1958 Sister Haskew was sixty-four-years-old, crippled, bed-ridden, querulous, weak, dependent, and demanding. Queenie Strickland was sixty-six, fat, happy, bustling, devoted, and cheerful. Both women were immensely rich, and neither one of them ever gave a second thought to the money they possessed. Queenie was Sister's slave and spy. Queenie fetched and carried. Queenie left her own house, next door, promptly at six fifty-five in order to bring Sister's breakfast tray to her at seven o'clock every morning, and at seven o'clock every evening, Queenie carried Sister's supper tray down to Ivey's darkened kitchen, and dropped the dishes on the counter with a clatter and a sigh. Sister would never have allowed Queenie away from her beside at all had it not been for Sister's insatiable curiosity about the goings-on of the town, the mill, and her own family. Queenie was allowed to play bridge, go shopping, drive out to her daughter Lucille's farm, and eat dinner next door at Elinor's, only because when she returned to Sister's musty, close, cluttered bedroom, she would be able to relate to Sister all that had been done and everything that had been said. Sister would take these random bits of information and draw wild conclusions and predictions, and invariably Queenie said, "Sister, you are wrong, that's not gone happen." And indeed, Sister's predictions never did come true, not a single one of them. Sister had been so long removed from society that she had almost forgot how it worked. Queenie was a faithful reporter, but Sister's analysis was never correct.

The house in which Sister and Miriam lived had altered its whole character in the past dozen years. When Mary-Love was alive, and during Miriam's adolescence, the place had seemed suffused with a kind of vitality bred—some would say—of meanness, but perhaps really only of energetic purpose. It had firmly stood its ground between Elinor's much larger residence on one side, and James Caskey's more genteel home on the other. Now something in its aspect, with the porches and all the first-floor windows hidden behind azaleas and camellias that had been allowed to grow unchecked, suggested that the house was drawing in upon itself, that it no longer set itself up in any sort of competition with its neighbors, that it wished to retire from the fray. Inside it smelled of age. The furniture was still exactly as it had been on the day of Mary-Love Caskey's death twenty-two years before. This was not out of reverence for the dead woman, but because for one thing Miriam didn't care enough to want to change it, and for another, Sister liked to be reminded as often as possible—although she would never admit it, even to herself—that Mary-Love was, after all, dead. Ivey Sapp was an old woman, too, as old as Queenie, and she had buried Bray in the spring of 1957. She now had Melva, a granddaughter of James's cook, Roxie, to help her. Ivey was fatter even than Queenie, and did nothing but sit in the kitchen all day listening to the radio and giving directions to Melva; she would bestir herself only to cook the few dishes that Sister would eat.

Sister had lain so many years in bed that the entire house smelled of her and her infirmity, a pale powdery lavender sweetness like the herbs used by the Egyptians to fill the cavity of an eviscerated corpse. A person of delicate temperament might have gone mad in that place without ever realizing why. Miriam Caskey, thirty-seven now, was of a temperament robust enough to withstand the fragility of the atmosphere in which she slept every night, though perhaps the air in her room, the door of which she made sure was kept carefully shut all day, was not so sickly.

Though Early Haskew had never returned for Sister, she declared that she could not rest comfortably at night until Miriam had double-checked the locks on all the downstairs doors and windows. "That man will climb through to get at me," Sister constantly declaimed. "That man will raise ladders against the side of the house and peer at me through the window." Miriam had given up arguing that Early, wherever he was, was sixty-four years old, probably very fat, and unlikely to be inclined toward feats of athletic prowess.

Sister and Miriam weren't close. Miriam could not forget that Sister's infirmity, though real enough now, had begun in fakery. After her fall down the stairs, occasioned by her temporary blindness, Sister had taken to bed on account of a supposed weakness in her legs. And in order to avoid her husband, she had kept to that bed, willing her legs to wither so that Early would never have the opportunity to spirit her away from her cherished home. Miriam could not bring herself to cater to a woman who had deliberately crippled herself. And Sister, for her part, felt that Miriam spent too much time with the mill and the Caskey oil business and not enough time with her. Sister said to Queenie, "I'm rich, you know that? I've got so much money I don't have the first idea what to do with it. And you know who it's going to? Every penny goes to Miriam. I've told her so. And how does Miriam treat me? She treats me like I'm a poor cousin."

"I used to be a poor cousin," Queenie pointed out.

"Exactly," said Sister, nodding her head, "and Miriam treats me the way that Mama and everybody else in the family used to treat you. Like I was a no-class, no-account sponger."

This speech startled Queenie, not because it was rude—which it certainly was—but rather because it sounded very much like something Mary-Love Caskey herself might have said. It set Queenie to thinking, and she told herself that she would pay more attention to Sister's manner in the future. Queenie watched, and Queenie listened, and Queenie concluded that Sister was growing more and more like her dead mother.

One day after church, in early fall of 1958, Queenie stopped Miriam outside in the yard, and said, "Miriam, have you noticed something about Sister?"

"You mean that she gets more demanding every day?" The Alabama summer still lingered, and Miriam stripped off her gloves with relief. She unpinned her hat, and shook out her hair.

"No," said Queenie with a little frown. "I mean the fact that she's getting more and more like Mary-Love every day."

Miriam smiled. "Haven't you realized before this? Haven't you seen the way she signs checks?"

"'Elvennia Haskew.' How else would she sign checks?" Queenie returned, surprised.

"No," said Miriam. She turned and went up the steps onto the porch and sat down in a wicker rocker; Queenie did the same. "About a year ago," Miriam continued, "I got called down to the bank because they said somebody was forging Sister's checks. So I went down there, and looked at the checks that had come in. There was 'Elvennia Haskew' all right— but it was in Grandmama's handwriting." Miriam laughed. "My heart jumped, and I thought, 'Lord God, she's come back from the grave, and what are we gone do?' The n's were the same, and the a at the end of the word. Just like Grandmama's. I came back here, and I said, 'Sister, why are you playing games with your signature? You are upsetting the people down at the bank.' And Sister didn't even know what I was talking about. So I showed her her old signature, and then I showed her the one she had just put on that check, and she said, 'I don't see any difference.' I didn't say anything else. But you look sometime, get her to write something out for you— the handwriting is Grandmama's, stroke for stroke."

"You loved your grandmama," remarked Queenie, though the spirit of Miriam's remarks had suggested otherwise.

"I did," said Miriam. 'I loved her very, very much. I've never loved anybody as much as I loved her. But thank God she's dead, and thank God she's never coming back. She ruled the roost back then. And right now I rule the roost. So it's just as well that she and I don't have to fight it out."

"If Mary-Love were alive," said Queenie, "she wouldn't be fighting with you. She'd still be fighting with Elinor. She'd leave you alone."

"Nope," said Miriam. "She'd think I was uppity, and she'd try to keep me down. Just like Sister is now. Sister thinks I'm uppity, running the mill the way I do. Never mind that I'm making money for all of us, I'm not paying enough attention to her. Not waiting on her hand and foot the way you do."

"I don't mind," said Queenie.

"I know you don't, but I would. And I'd never do it, either. Sister brought all this on herself, Queenie, you know she did. Sister fell down the stairs eleven years ago. She could have been up and around in a few weeks, but all these years later she is still making people wait on her, people that have better things to do with their lives. I love Sister. I was brought up to love Sister. I will love her until the minute she sinks down dead in those five feather mattresses and those seven damned pillows. But I'm never gone say, 'Sister, I'm sorry you're crippled,' or 'Sister, I'm sorry you're lonely up here.' And she knows better than to ask me."

Just then Lilah wandered over from the next door.

Miriam smiled and held out her hands to her eleven-year-old niece. Lilah came up the steps.

"Grandmama says dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes and come on over when you want."

Queenie, whose appetite had never faltered in all her gathering years, stood up immediately. "Coming?" she asked Miriam.

Lilah said quickly, "Miriam, will you take me upstairs and let me see your jewelry?"

"I'll show you some," said Miriam. "And I'll let you try on a few things, too." So Miriam and Lilah went into the house and Queenie walked across the sandy yard to Elinor's, hoping to find something to nibble in the kitchen before they all sat down.

"Who's that?" cried Sister, hearing the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

"It's me!" called Miriam. "And Lilah!"

"Lilah, come speak to me!"

Lilah ran down the hall, leaned into Sister's room, and impatiently cried, "Not yet! Miriam's gone let me try on some of her jewelry."

"You try it on and then you come down here and show it to me."

Lilah hurried back to Miriam's room. She feared she had missed what for her was the best part, the opening of the drawer, but she hadn't. Miriam just stood before the dresser, smiling. "I'll let you do it today," she said to Lilah.

Lilah dropped to her knees and reverently pulled out the bottom drawer of the old dresser. In it were stacked nine jewelry boxes, each one of a different size, each of a different age, each of a different texture. To Lilah, they were as dissimilar as any nine persons waiting in line at the bank. And each one was filled with treasure.