Blackwater - The House Part 8

"What if it's twenty miles or something?"

"It's not. 'Cause if it were, Highway 31 would cross it and I know it doesn't, so the source cain't be more than five or six miles away."

"But if this old river starts winding around..."

"I don't mind paddling. Only thing is, at some point we may have to get out and walk."

"I don't mind that," said Frances. So Grace continued to ply her paddle. The river narrowed until it was no more than a creek, then only a branch. It never, however, lost its muddy red color. Even with Grace's paddle often gouging pebbles and mud from the bed, they were never able to see to the bottom. The trees that overhung the little stream, shading it from the sun, were mostly hardwoods, not pine at all. The forest was thick here, its floor spongy with fallen trees and rotting leaves.

"Frances, you know what? I don't think this land has ever been cut."

"Really? Who does it belong to?"

"I've been trying to figure, and you know what I think?"

"What?"

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"I think this used to be Tom DeBordenave's property, and it's some of the land that he sold to your daddy. That's about what I make out."

As Grace made this observation, she engineered a sharp turn around a ma.s.sive fallen oak that had at one point rerouted the stream. Ahead of them was a small muddy pool of reddish water, its surface quivering and suffused with ripples. All around it was a stand of tall, gray, ma.s.sive water oaks-far taller than those Elinor had years ago planted in the sandy Caskey yards. The slender trunks gravely swayed in the slight breeze and ma.s.ses of leathery leaves quaked in their hundred-foot crowns. The ground was a thicket of rotting fallen limbs with no vegetation except the scaly green fungus that seemed the parasite peculiar to the species.

"This is it," murmured Grace. "This is where the Perdido starts."

There was something solemn in the place. The tall, sentinellike trees seemed almost ominous; and the little red pool that was the source of the Perdido looked threatening with its nervous, rippling activity. Even the birds seemed to have abandoned the place. The sun fell behind the water oaks as Grace placed her paddle in the crotch of two branches of the fallen tree, and held the boat stationary. It seemed to Frances that she feared to advance into the pool that was the river's source.

"Grace," said Frances after a few moments, "don't you think we ought to turn back? Mama wouldn't want us to be on the river after dark."

"It won't take us any time at all to get home. I won't have to paddle at all, except to steer us clear of sandbars. You know," she said in a lower voice, "it's a little scary up here. I used to think Perdido was out of the way, but Perdido is nothing compared to this place..."

Grace and Frances continued to sfare in silence. The spot seemed divorced from the countryside they 103.

knew well. It seemed absurd to speak of Oscar's owning such a place, or to think that this glade and pool and stand of water oak might even appear on a map. The source of the Perdido seemed outside all that; seemed to be part of something that rose above lumber leases and land sales and geological surveys. It seemed impossible that a state road or a county bridge or some tenant farmer's shack or some Cherokee's liquor still might be anywhere close by, yet both Grace and Frances knew that all of these were situated no more than a mile or two away. All civilization seemed separated from this strange spot by s.p.a.ce and time. Suddenly, Grace gave a little shudder. The atmosphere was abruptly altered. With the paddle, she pushed away from the tree and set the boat back into the current of the river. As she did so, the commotion on the surface of the water of the pool seemed to grow as if a greater amount of water, or of a very different kind had been released from below.

Grace glanced at Frances. She saw that terror had spread over her cousin's face. Frances's body was trembling feverishly, and she convulsively grasped the sides of the boat. "Hurry," she whispered. "Please Grace, hurry."

Grace paddled energetically and in another moment they were around the sharp bend around the fallen tree. With that, Frances felt a bit calmer, and she could not resist a glance back at the muddy red pool that was the source of the Perdido. In a moment, it was beyond her sight, obscured by another bend of the river. But in that moment, slowly breaking the surface of the water, Frances Caskey saw a face, wide and pale green, with bulging eyes and no nose at all. Something about it-despite the horror of it- was familiar to her.

"Mama," she whispered, but Grace did not hear.

CHAPTER 37.

Upstairs

Grace was silent on the journey back down the Per-dido. As they were carried along by the current of the ever-widening river, Frances sat rigidly in the front of the boat, facing away from her cousin.

"Frances, are you all right?" Grace asked anxiously more than once.

Frances nodded weakly, but did not turn around.

After Grace had tied the boat to the tree near the end of the levee she discovered that Frances was unable to walk. Grace had to carry her all the way back to the house.

Elinor still had not returned, but Zaddie took one look at the child in Grace's arms, and said, with ominous significance, 'That's the arthritis again."

Frances was taken upstairs and put into bed. Grace sat at her side until Elinor returned, a half hour later.

Grace was nearly in tears. "Elinor, it's my fault!"

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"Don't be silly," said Elinor sternly. "Dr. Benquith said it could come back at any time."

The child lay in a feverish doze. When she woke late that night, the palsy in her legs had got no better.

In her last days in Perdido, Grace Caskey was convinced that the excursion to the source of the Perdido was solely responsible for the recurrence of Frances's crippling ailment. Elinor, Oscar, James, and Frances herself did what they could to a.s.sure Grace that it was not so.

Grace left for Spartanburg, and when she returned at Christmas, Frances still had not got up from her bed. Dr. Benquith had wanted to send the child to Sacred Heart in Pensacola, or even to one of the big hospitals in Cincinnati, but Elinor would not hear of this. "I'm going to continue to nurse my child until she's better."

Nothing seemed to ease Frances's pain but warm baths. For two hours every morning, two hours every afternoon, and for an hour in the evening after supper, Elinor sat at the side of the bathtub, sponging water over Frances's helpless limbs. The child seemed always weary. Sometimes her eyelids twitched with some pain that had registered in her brain, but she never complained. Elinor gave up playing bridge; she no longer went to church. She didn't like to leave her daughter. There was never the air of the martyr about her, never the sense that she was sacrificing anything for Frances. On her good days, the girl was carried out onto the screened porch and laid in a little cot-bed.

But Frances's good days were infrequent. At times she appeared to have no mind whatsoever. She lay uncomplaining in her bed, twitching violently when overtaken by the palsy, perfectly still at all other times. Looking at her clenched hands, Oscar was certain that Frances was tense and bitter. Elinor said that contraction of her fingers into uncontrolled 106.

claws was only the arthritis, as were her in-turning, twisted feet. Occasionally the girl made an effort to reply when she was spoken to directly, but more often she did not. Nothing held her interest. Nothing could bring emotion into her face, not a Christmas stocking nailed to the hearth in her room, not a cake with lighted candles on her birthday, not Malcolm's Fourth of July firecrackers. When it was time for her bath, Elinor lifted her daughter from the bed. Oscar hated to see this more than anything else about the sickness. He saw that Frances wanted desperately to clasp her arms about her mother's neck, but all those muscles seemed atrophied or recalcitrant, and the thin pathetic limbs hung limply down Elinor's back.

Frances missed the sixth and seventh grades. Elinor borrowed books from the school and kept up with her daughter's lessons, but how much of her mother's reading Frances comprehended, no one could be certain. Oscar and Elinor's household was completely altered during Frances's enfeeblement. Elinor withdrew from Perdido society. She became a voluntary drudge to her daughter's meager comfort. Oscar ventured to object: "Let Zaddie do some of the work, Elinor. You act like it was your fault that Frances got sick again. It wasn't anybody's fault."

Elinor paid no attention to her husband. She rose at five and on winter mornings built a coal fire for Frances. She kept it going all day. When she wasn't bathing Frances, she was reading to her, or feeding her, or simply sitting at the side of the bed rubbing alcohol onto Frances's wasting limbs. Before each bath, Elinor took two pails and walked through the pine forest to the west of the house and around the end of the levee. She filled the pails with water from the river and brought them back to the house. They were warmed in a great pot on the stove and carried upstairs. One of these pails was added directly to Frances's bath; the other was sponged over Frances's 107.

twitching limbs. Oscar and Dr. Benquith couldn't understand this worthless treatment, but there was no talking Elinor out of it. When Mary-Love heard of it, she declared that Frances must be red as an Indian by now with all that Perdido water poured over her.

This for Frances was a blurry time of confusion and weakness. Her brain seemed to have taken on the same palsy as her limbs. She slept and woke and ate and heard her mother read all in a state of only partial awareness. She sat in the bathtub with equal la.s.situde and low consciousness. She seemed always feverish, always dreaming. She was never certain whether she had fully awakened after that trip up to the source of the river with Grace. The only time total consciousness approached was when Elinor lifted her out of the bath. She felt the muddy Perdido water wash off her and drip back into the bathtub. This was the only thing in Frances's life that was sharp, except for the pain that racked her limbs. Hours faded, days drifted by, season slipped into season, and she did not know whether Thanksgiving had just pa.s.sed, or whether it was already summer. Everything she felt was dreamlike and vague, except for the pain in her legs and arms-and the water of the Perdido slipping from her body.

Eventually, Frances Caskey's health began to improve. Dr. Benquith called it remission. Mary-Love sententiously claimed it was her prayers. Ivey Sapp said it was red Perdido water.

Frances's hands became less clawed. Once more she was able to hold a pencil long enough to write a note to Grace in Spartanburg, to say how well she was coming along. She could lift a gla.s.s without spilling its contents. She could use a fork, though it would be some time before she regained the strength and agility to employ a knife at the same time. On the porch, she sat in a wheelchair. In the spring of 1936, nearly three years after she was stricken, she 108.

was able to take a few steps by grasping pieces of furniture or woodwork and pulling herself along.

Frances missed three years of school, but she had learned from her mother's excellent tutelage after all, so when she returned she was put back only one grade. But physically she had grown very little in her illness. The first Sunday that she returned with Elinor to the Caskey pew, Mary-Love ungenerously remarked, "Why, Frances, you aren't hardly any bigger than the last time I saw you."

In the three years of illness, Mary-Love Caskey hadn't once visited her granddaughter, though on still summer nights she could hear Frances next door whimper from her pain. Mary-Love claimed this neglect was only a reluctance to intrude. She said she had feared that Frances would be disturbed by too many visitors, but this excuse fooled no one. If Oscar had ever felt inclined to make things up with his mother, any such feeling was now completely gone. His mother's treatment of Frances seemed a piece of conspicuous cruelty to the child.

Miriam, who had grown tall and thin, said to her sister, "Grandmama said whatever you had was probably infectious, and that's why I never went over to see you. How on earth are you going to catch up, after being out of school for three years? I don't imagine you'll ever catch up, really..."

There were other changes, besides her sister's height, that Frances noticed. Perdido looked as if it were falling into decay. Fifteen houses in Baptist Bottom had burned one New Year's Eve, and no one had yet bothered to clear away the rubble. A line of stores downtown was boarded up, and the windows had been smashed. The ragged curtains in the open windows of the Osceola Hotel blew in the wind.

Frances often sat in the kitchen with Zaddie, and was astonished by the number of black children who came to the lattice door and knocked softly. Zaddie always had a plate of cornbread or a part of a ham 109.

or a slab of bacon for them to take home. Next day the child would return with the plate, and a thank you from its mother.

Frances asked her mother about this.

"n.o.body has anything, darling. I wish we could afford to do more, but even we don't have what we used to."

Frances shook her head; she understood nothing about money.

"We'll be all right," Elinor a.s.sured her. "But while you were upstairs"-Elinor always referred to her daughter's illness by that euphemism-"your daddy had some hard times out at the mill. He had to let people go."

"Is it all right now?"

"I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. Henry Turk, it looks like, is going under. He's going to have to sell out."

"To whom?"

Elinor shook her head. "To us, I'd like to think. He hasn't got anything left except his land. He shut down the mill last year. I'd like to get hold of that land, but only your grandmama has the money for that, and I don't think she'll put it up."

"Why not?"

Elinor laughed. "Why am I telling you all this? Do you care?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"No, you don't, darling. You don't know anything about it, and there's no reason for you to care one little bit." Elinor laughed, and held her daughter close.

When Sister Haskew moved away from Perdido in 1926 and took up residence first in Natchez and later in Chattanooga, she insisted on introducing herself to new acquaintances as Elvennia, her given name. By then she was thirty-five, two years older than her husband, and felt that it was high time she 110.

was called by a name that was hers alone, and did not suggest-as the t.i.tle "Sister" did-that her ident.i.ty was subservient to a familial relationship. In her occasional visits to Perdido, however, nothing in the world could persuade Mary-Love Caskey from calling her daughter anything but Sister.

This was a minor irritation, however, and no more than was to have been expected from Mary-Love. Sister-or El, rather-was happy in her new life. She liked the sense of rootlessness after so many years of having had such strong bonds to Perdido, to the house in which she had been born, and to her mother. She liked making new friends who knew nothing of what she had been before her marriage to Early, who were wholly ignorant of sawmills and board feet, and didn't care about her family history. She wrote her mother twice a week, as Mary-Love had commanded, and on alternate weeks wrote to James and to Elinor. Sometimes, when Early was called away for a week or two on a job, Sister would pack her bag and take the train back to Perdido. On these occasions she would always begin to argue with her mother as soon as she walked in the door.

"h.e.l.lo, Sister!" Mary-Love would cry. "We cain't tell you how much we have missed you!"

"Mama, everybody calls me El now."

"Oh, Sister, after all these years, you cain't expect me to change what I call my little girl..."

Mary-Love's little girl was now a woman of middle age, and Mary-Love herself was approaching old age, although she would never admit to such a thing.

"Sister," Mary-Love always wanted to know, "are you settled down yet? Have you got you a good cook?"

"Mama," said Sister, "I don't have a cook, I do all the cooking."

"Oh, Sister, is that man driving you into the ground and making you work all day long?"

"Mama, Early and I cain't afford to have a cook, so I do it myself."

Ill "If you lived here, Ivey and I would be able to take care of you. You wouldn't have to lift a finger."

It was usually at this point that Sister, weary of making the old arguments, would simply say, "Mama, Early and I are never gone come back here, and the reason we aren't is that we don't want to live with you, because you drive us both crazy."

"I don't think you and Early are very happy in Chattanooga."

"We love it there!"

"I don't believe that you and Early would be happy anywhere."

"What do you mean?"

"If you and Early had been happy all these years away from me, then you would have had children. Now you're too old for that. And there must be a reason why you leave your husband and come to see me every three months, Sister."

"I come to see you, Mama, because every week you are on the telephone for half an hour saying, 'Sister, why don't you ever come home?'"

"If you loved your husband the way you should, you wouldn't be leaving him so often."

Mary-Love didn't approve of the independence exhibited by her daughter since her marriage to Early Haskew, and it was only a short step from that to disapproval of the man responsible for Sister's liberation. Because he wasn't around, it was convenient to attack him; and because Sister was his wife, she must be ever on the defensive. "I'm still not sure," Mary-Love said soon after Sister's arrival on a visit in late winter of 1936, "that Early Haskew was the right man for you, Sister."

"Who was?"

"Oh, somebody else. Somebody with a little education. A little polish."

"Early attended Auburn. Early's been to Europe. I never even got to go to college. And I never got taken to Europe, either."

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"Does he still eat his peas off a knife blade?"

"He does! And he said one day he'd teach me how to do it too!"

"Does he eat that way in a restaurant?"

"Mama, we cain't afford to go out much."

Mary-Love shook her head and sighed. "I hate to see you grubbing for money, darling, when I have so much."

"Then give me some, and I won't have to grub."

"I cain't do that."

"Why not, Mama? It wouldn't hurt you to send me a little something now and then."

"Early would think I was interfering. And I would be."