Blackwater - The House Part 14

"I sure do."

"Sister," said Miriam, "will you stay on here with me? Be my mama?"

Sister dug into the second piece of pie. "Let me think about it, Miriam. Let me put that idea under my pillow."

Next morning at breakfast, the first thing Miriam said to Sister was: "Did you decide?"

"No, and I don't want to be pestered about this, either. You have no right to ask me to leave Early just so you can do what you want."

"Then you're leaving?"

"Not yet."

"When?"

"I said that I don't want to be pestered about this."

"When can I ask you again if you've made up your mind?"

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"Never."

"Then what do I say to Elinor when she comes over here and wants to carry me off?"

"I'll deal with your mother, Miriam. Just stop asking me about it."

Miriam said no more. And her evil day was postponed, because Sister did not return to Chattanooga. She remained in Perdido a week beyond the reading of the will, then two weeks, then a month. The girl, lived, however, in continual suspense, because Sister never would say how long she intended to remain in the house that had been deeded to Miriam.

Next door, Oscar worried. He thought it was time for Sister to return home, and for Miriam to move into the front room. He mentioned his misgivings to Elinor, who said, "Leave it alone, Oscar. Don't push things."

"What do you mean, Elinor? What is there to push? Is there something you know about that you're not telling me?"

"n.o.body's told me anything. If I were you, though, I'd just leave Sister and Miriam alone for the time being."

"I have," protested Oscar. "And now I just want to know how long this 'time being' is going to go on. Do you know?"

"I do not."

"I'm gone have to go over there."

Elinor didn't waste any more words in an attempt to dissuade her husband, and that evening he knocked on the front door of his daughter's house. Sister let him in. He hadn't been inside the house for five years. "Sister, can I speak to Miriam for a minute?"

"Of course, Oscar. Let me go upstairs and get her."

In a few minutes, Miriam came down alone. "h.e.l.lo, Oscar," she said, pointedly eschewing the appellation "Father."

"h.e.l.lo, honey. I came over because I thought there were a few things we ought to talk about."

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"All right," said Miriam, seating herself in the mahogany platform rocker which her grandmother had often occupied. Oscar sat in a corner of the blue sofa, where he had so often been placed as a child.

"Miriam, darling," Oscar began, "your mama and I need to figure out what's going to become of you."

"How do you mean?"

"Where you're going to go and what you're going to do, now that Mama's dead."

"I'm not going to do anything," Miriam replied calmly. "I'm not going to go anywhere."

"You mean you don't want to come over and live with your mama and Frances and me?"

"No, sir. I have my own room here, and I don't want to leave."

"You'd have your own room next door. Elinor says you could have the front room."

"I don't want that room-or any room in that house. I just want to stay here. This is my house. Grandmama left it to me because she wanted me to live here. And that's exactly what I intend to do."

"But what happens when Sister goes back to Chattanooga? What would people in this town think if they heard I was allowing a sixteen-year-old girl to live all by herself in a big house like this?"

"They could think whatever they wanted," returned Miriam. "What do I care what people think? I don't intend to leave, and n.o.body can make me."

"Your mama and I could make you," said Oscar. "We're your parents."

Miriam looked directly at her father. "I suppose you could make me. I suppose you could rope me to the bed. I suppose you could stick food down my throat till I swallowed it."

"You don't want to live with us?" Oscar asked his daughter, plaintively.

"Of course, I don't."

"Why not?"

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"You didn't want me when I was born. And now it's too late."

For a few moments, her father sat stunned.

"That was.,. sixteen years ago... darling!" Oscar faltered when he had recovered himself. "And Mama wanted a little girl of her own. You're not sorry we gave you to Mama, are you?"

Miriam made no reply.

"You cain't still be upset about that, not after all these years. You know how much your grandmama loved you. You know how happy you were with Sister and Mama. We would never have let you go if we hadn't thought you were gone be happy as the day is long."

Miriam looked at her father impa.s.sively and said nothing.

"Miriam, you are only sixteen years old. You cain't tell me what to do and expect me to hop to it." This injunction carried no conviction in Oscar's mouth.

"I'm not trying to tell you what to do, Oscar. I'm just telling you what I'm not gone do. And what I'm not gone do is leave this house, at least not of my own free will. You can get Mr. Key down here and have him throw me in jail for not doing what you tell me to do, or you can get Zaddie to tie me up with clothesline and put me in a croker sack and carry me over there on a cane pole, but that's about the only way you will get me inside that house."

"It hurts me to hear you speak like this, darling!"

Miriam said nothing.

"I'm gone send Elinor over here to talk to you. She's gone have to try to talk some sense into your head about all this. You are so upset about Mama that you're plumb not thinking straight."

"If Elinor comes over here..."

"Yes?"

".. .just tell her to make sure she brings me the rings she stole off Grandmama's fingers. Otherwise, I'm not gone speak to her."

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Oscar sank deeper into the corner of the blue sofa where he had so often been placed as a child to listen to his mother's p.r.o.nouncements. He looked at his daughter Miriam as he had looked at Mary-Love Caskey in that far-off time. In his daughter, who was so great a stranger to him, he saw much of his mother. He understood for the first time that Miriam bore as much animosity toward Elinor as Mary-Love had. Oscar didn't know what was to come of all this, but he now knew that Miriam would never take up residence in his house.

Miriam sedately rocked beneath the red-shaded lamp, her thick, carefully brushed hair falling across her face and shadowing her expression. She did not appear to concern herself overmuch with this discussion of her future". She seemed only politely to conceal her impatience with her father to get on with whatever it was he had come to say.

Seeing his daughter thus, Oscar decided to say no more. Miriam might be only sixteen, but Oscar decided that he would be very surprised if she did not get her own way. He wondered if Elinor had yet realized to what extent Miriam was prepared to take her grandmother's place.

CHAPTER 42.

The Linen Closet

Sister remained on in Perdido through the winter. There was speculation as to why she had deserted her husband in that manner. Early Haskew came to town for Christmas, but his visit was strained. He was gone again by New Year's. Perdido, and all the Caskeys-including Miriam herself-a.s.sumed that it was on Miriam's account that Sister stayed. Sister was sacrificing her own marriage at the whim of that spoiled girl, everyone thought. She elected to remain in Perdido in a house of mourning for the wholly inadequate reason that Miriam Caskey didn't want to move twenty yards to the west and take up residence in her parents' home.

No one ever brought this up to Sister Haskew directly. No one had the right. It was Sister's prerogative to throw her marriage away for Miriam's sake, as surely as it had been her right to marry against her mother's wishes.

Sister actually remained in Perdido, however, not 165.

for Miriam's sake but for her own. Sister hid behind the sacrificial theory of her conduct, rather than to admit-even to the members of her own family- that she had made a mistake in her choice of husbands.

In thirteen years of marriage, Early Haskew had coa.r.s.ened. During their courtship, Early had been a resident in Mary-Love's house, and in those prosperous surroundings, he had been on his best behavior. After he and Sister were married, left Perdido, and began living on Early's meager and uncertain earnings, his country ways rea.s.serted themselves. He chewed tobacco, a habit that Sister despised as much as did Miriam, though she would never have admitted it. And she never had grown accustomed to his eating peas off a knife. His habitual clumsiness deteriorated into slovenliness. His body grew fat and shapeless. He would take a biscuit, punch a hole in it with his forefinger, fill the hole with mola.s.ses, and then swallow the whole thing in one gulp. Pillowcases smelled of the rancid oil he used on his hair.

Early's friends were even coa.r.s.er than he, so coa.r.s.e that Sister wouldn't even allow them inside the house, but made them, on visits, remain on the front porch. They lived in a run-down section of Chattanooga, and Sister couldn't afford more than a woman who boiled linen. She had to do ironing herself. One day she came home from the grocery and discovered Early and two of his cronies lifting a Coca-Cola vending machine onto their front porch.

Early bred pit bull terriers for fighting, and seemed to care about nothing but those d.a.m.ned dogs-Sister never thought of them except in those words. He insisted on her rising twice each night to feed new litters out of a baby bottle. When the dogs weren't feeding they were yelping, and Sister got no sleep between-times. Early's coa.r.s.eness finally wore her down. Now in Perdido, she was getting worn down 166.

by having constantly to defend her husband against that charge.

When Sister came into her inheritance, she at first had a vision of herself returning to Tennessee and buying a decent house, purchasing a new wardrobe for Early, encouraging him to drop his ne'er-do-well friends and his reprehensible pastimes, and raising him to a level of gentility commensurate with her own. This she thought was possible, yet it was a task she did not look forward to with relish. Early seemed too set in his ways, too far along the path in which he had been born. The real Early Haskew, Sister thought, was the Early Haskew who went about the house without a shirt and trained puppies to vicious-ness with slaps and red meat, the one who chewed tobacco and snored loud enough to wake all creation. The man she had met and married in 1922 had been a man caught then in a brief and deceptive stage of development, like one of his own handsome pups that would soon grow into a snarling vicious brute.

Mary-Love, Sister remembered, had known the change would come, and she had warned her. Sister herself might have foretold it, for there were many similar men around Perdido. Sister's marriage had been as much an act of defiance toward her mother as it had been an attraction toward Early. Early's attraction faded quickly for Sister, while her need to defy her mother continued strong and unabated till the day of Mary-Love's death-when it suddenly evaporated. With it went any good reason Sister had to return to the white frame house in the run-down section of Chattanooga, the pit bull pups, or Early Haskew.

She seized upon Miriam's desire to remain in Mary-Love's house as an excuse not to return to Tennessee. In using this as a disguise for her real motive, she was being craftier than her mother had ever been. Everyone thought that Sister's remaining in Perdido was a great sacrifice; no one for one moment sus- 167.

pected that she dreaded the day when Miriam would go off to college or marry. Then Sister would have to announce her total disgust with Early Haskew.

Though she was only a few months liberated from her bed and wheelchair, the three years of crippling illness Frances had suffered were a misty time- garbled, drowsy, and leaden. She had grown in those missing years-not much, it was true-but enough to now make her unfamiliar with her body. Prior to that terrible time she had been a child, with a child's fears. Now she was nearly an adult; the childish fears were put behind her.

On the night of her return from the journey to Chicago, when Mary-Love lay in the casket in the front parlor, Frances slept in her own room. Elinor and Oscar had considered that their daughter might be terrified of sleeping in a house in which her grandmother's body lay, but Frances told them that there was no need for her to bother James or Queenie with her presence that night. She said this not because she no longer was afraid, but so that she might test the extent to which those fears remained with her. It had been no surprise to Frances that her grandmother had died in the front room.

After the funeral, as Zaddie helped her unpack her traveling clothes and all the new little treasures that James and Queenie had purchased for her, Frances could perceive no alteration in the atmosphere of the house because of the death in the front room. She even thought to herself, Grandmama died in the next room, but she didn't shake. She smelled the air and detected no odor of death or of her own fear. She stood in the hallway and looked down at the door of the front room. Still the fear didn't come. She approached the door and touched the handle gingerly-no electricity, no fear.

She turned the k.n.o.b and pushed the door open. It 168.

swung wide and Frances stood on the threshold of the room, feeling nothing.

She looked into the room. She smelled nothing but the dried lavender that had been placed in a bowl on a table beside the bed.

Daringly, she stepped far enough into the room to be able to push the door shut behind her.

She looked at the closet door, and she said to herself, Mama says Grandmama died of a fever. Sister says Grandmama would have lived if only Daddy had put her in the hospital. But I know that Grandmama was killed by whatever it is that lives in that closet.

The closet door didn't open. Frances didn't die. "I am fifteen years old," she said aloud, "and I'm not afraid of closets that are filled with feathers and leather and fur."

Months pa.s.sed, and Frances turned sixteen. She had never been close to her grandmother and had not seen her at all during her illness. She did not often think of her dead, and sometimes she actually forgot, when she looked out her bedroom window at Mary-Love's house, that Mary-Love had died the previous summer. Frances checked-as she had as a child-to see if her grandmother were sitting in her rocker by her bedroom window.

An Italian stone cutter in Mobile carved Mary-Love's monument in Georgia marble. It was raised seven months after her death. All the Caskeys attended the brief, informal ceremony. Miriam, Queenie, and Frances laid flowers. Frances once again thought, Grandmama died in the front room.

That night she fell asleep immediately and did not dream. And a short time later she was just as immediately awakened; not by any sound, but by a sense that something was horribly wrong.

Her room was suffused with a weak, bluish-white light. It shone through the window, as definite as though a streetlamp had been raised in the vicinity of her dead grandmother's house. She had no idea 169.

what the source of that strange illumination might be, but she stared with terror at the white sheer curtains over the window. She dared not rise to look out. She turned to the other window, that opened onto the screened sleeping porch. The porch, too, was illuminated by the glow, though it wasn't as strong as in her own room.

Then quite suddenly and with alarm, she remembered the light which had filled the front closet, and afterwards the entire front room, on the night that Carl Strickland had fired on them from the levee. Frances had been very young then, and all incidents that occurred prior to her long bout with illness were vague and dreamlike. But this light she recognized and remembered. It had been no dream then; it was no dream now.

It wasn't that unnatural light that raised fear in Frances's soul. Without her willing it, her head turned to look at the door that opened onto the narrow linen corridor that separated her room from the front room. She knew something had found its way into that narrow closed hallway. It was there, and she knew it wasn't a person. It wasn't her mother. It wasn't her father. It wasn't Zaddie. Whatever lived and hid in the front room closet had gotten out of the closet, roamed over the front room, opened the door of the linen corridor, and had slunk down it. Now it waited on the other side of the door.

It wasn't her grandmother's ghost, but Frances knew that it was somehow connected with the raising of the marble stone over her grandmother's grave.

She lay terrified in her bed. The crippling arthritis seemed to have returned to her hands and feet. She tried to imagine what the thing on the other side of the door was like, but couldn't. She knew it was the color of the light outside, and that if she looked to the door again, she would see the light pouring through the crack beneath it. That was where the outside light was coming from. The front room was 170.

so bright that the light shone out of the windows, and that's what she was seeing through the curtains. The pa.s.sage to the front room was filled with even brighter light, because whatever it was, was there, just behind her door. It had no outline that Frances's unwilling imagination could pin down because that outline shifted. She thought of a little boy wearing overalls with bulging pockets. She thought of a hunchbacked man crouching with his mouth open wide. She thought of a handsome, smiling woman with a rope of black pearls about her neck, holding a pound cake on a platter. Images faded into others and between them were shapeless things or shapes she couldn't recognize: fishy things, froggy things, snaky things, things with bulging eyes and webbed hands and shining rubbery skin. The images changed as quickly as shadows that pa.s.sed across the windows of a train traveling through a sunlit forest. Frances lay with her eyes tight closed for she knew not how long.

Hoping that her fear had its basis only in her mind, she tried to think of something else. If she wasn't close to sleep, she nevertheless seemed close to dreaming. In that half-dream she began to remember the years of her illness. It hadn't been all that long before, but the memories of that buried period of time were like those of earliest childhood, or the fugitive memories of a former existence. As Frances lay in her bed with her eyes tightly shut, trying to will out of existence the thing in the linen closet, she suddenly remembered two things about her illness, one of them impossible, the other improbable.

The first-the impossible-memory was of the thrice-daily baths she had received. At other, more conscious times, she had been able to recall vividly the moment that she was lifted out of the bathtub by her mother. But now-and the sensate memory was sharp despite the impossibility of the thing- 171.

her conviction was that during those baths she had always been fully immersed, so that she had spent five or six hours a day with her entire body-including her head-beneath the water's surface.