Blackwater - The Levee Part 10

"I don't either, but what can I do? I want to sell my place."

"Sell Henry part of it," Oscar suggested.

"What part?"

"Anything he wants-your customers, your inventory, your notes outstanding, your equipment, your mill-yard-whatever he wants except the land. I want all your land. You make sure I get every acre."

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"You're asking me to go to more trouble."

"You'll get more money out of it if you sell to two instead of one. And I want old Henry to feel good about this. If he buys up your mill over there it'll look to him like he beat me out, and he'll feel fine. All Henry wants is a bigger yard to walk around in, and all I really want is the land."

"Oscar, let me tell you something. I think you're foolish buying up all this land. You don't even cut what you've got now. You haven't got the mill capacity to do it."

"Oh, Tom, you're right, you came to the right man when you wanted to sell, 'cause I know I'm no good at this sort of thing. But the fact is, Mama and James and I decided that we wanted land, so whenever we see it coming down the road we flag it down and hop on."

The men talked at greater length, though to no altered purpose. In the way of Southern business, any agreement of this complexity must be talked over until every point has been argued out and agreed upon at least three times, by way of fixing it not only in the minds of the parties involved, but in their hearts as well. At Elinor's direction, Zaddie brought up a tray with two small gla.s.ses and a bottle of pre-Prohibition whiskey on it, and the third reiteration of the agreement was worked through rather more quickly with the help of the liquor.

The next morning, Oscar led James Caskey out into a remote corner of the pine forest and told him of Tom's offer. James thought it an excellent opportunity for Oscar, and by Oscar's decision to take only the land, the whole thing might be kept more or less a secret from Mary-Love. She would otherwise object to any plan by which her son achieved any semblance of financial independence, even if that semblance 176.

were no more than a debt for a quarter of a million dollars.

Within the week, a kind of treaty had been worked out among the three millowners for the division of the DeBordenave holdings. Henry Turk, as Oscar had predicted, took over the physical plant along the Blackwater River-all the land there, the buildings, the inventory, and the machinery. This cost him three hundred thousand dollars, which he was to pay in eight installments without interest. This excellent bargain Tom DeBordenave was able to accede to because Oscar was paying him an equal amount, in cash borrowed from the Pensacola bank, for the thirty-seven thousand acres of timber he owned in Baldwin, Escambia, and Monroe counties.

Two lawyers came down from Montgomery, put up at the Osceola Hotel, and worked for a week straight on the business of deeds and transfers. Only when everything had been signed was the announcement made of the part.i.tion of the DeBordenave property. This was a vast shock in Perdido, and all the townspeople walked about in a daze, wondering how the change would affect them personally.

Tom and Caroline, bereft of their son, their pVop-erty, and their position, quickly packed and left for North Carolina. Mary-Love and Manda Turk had time to do no more than take Caroline to lunch one day in Mobile and present her tearfully with a dia-mond-and-ruby brooch in the shape of a peac.o.c.k. At this meal Mary-Love learned that it was Oscar, not herself and James, who possessed the former DeBordenave acreage. She was so humiliated and angered by James and Oscar's high-handedness in the matter that the next day without a word to anybody she took Sister and Miriam and Early on a two-week's trip to Cincinnati and Washington, D.C.

"They'll be back," said Elinor, without concern.

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"Mary-Love and Sister will take good care of Miriam. I'm not worried."

Nothing, in fact, could have disrupted Elinor's equanimity at this time. The big money of Perdido, which formerly had been part.i.tioned equally among three families, was now divided between only two. Oscar, who had had no share of the wealth before, was now a man rich in timber-bearing land spread over three counties. Although Elinor might no longer be able to see the river from where she rocked in the swing, she continued to spend her afternoons on the upstairs porch, where she bounced Frances up and down on her knee and cooed, "Oh, my precious baby! One day your daddy is going to own all the mills along the river. And one day we are going to have a whole s...o...b..x full of land deeds, and every acre of land we own will have a river or a creek or a branch or a run on it for my precious baby to play in. And Frances and her mama will have more dresses and more pearls and more pretty things than everybody in the rest of Perdido put together!"

John Robert DeBordenave lay immolated in the levee, the town's right and savory sacrifice to the river whose name it bore. John Robert's death had permitted the levee to be completed and had given Oscar Caskey ownership of the land that would make the Caskey fortune even greater than Elinor herself dreamed. John Robert's parents had gone away from Perdido and gravel had stopped his mouth from calling out to them. Red clay had prevented his detached arms from waving them to return. Black dirt had held down his severed legs from running after them. But, torn, pinned, and buried though he lay, John Robert DeBordenave wasn't finished with Perdido, or the Caskeys, or the woman responsible for his death.

CHAPTER 27.

The Closet

In the years following, Perdido grew considerably. The levee had been the primary cause for this increase in population, wealth, and prominence. Not all the men who had worked on it went away when it was finished. Some were offered jobs at the mills, took them, and settled down. The banks in Pensacola and Mobile, seeing that the future of the mills was protected by the embankments of earth, were now willing to lend money to the millowners for the expansion of their businesses. Both the Caskey and the Turk mills took advantage of this, bought more land, ordered more equipment, and together helped to finance a spur of railroad track from the mills up to the L&N line in Atmore. With this useful track and the larger trucks being produced by Detroit, the rivers were employed less and less for the transporta- 179.

tion of felled trees and lumber. No longer were the Perdido and Blackwater rivers of overwhelming economic importance to the town.

Except for the business of the mutually advantageous construction of the railroad spur, the two lumber mills drew apart. Henry Turk's only idea was to do what he had always done, only much more of it. Oscar and James Caskey, on the other hand, realized that demand for lumber might not always be what it was today, and so decided to diversify. Accordingly, in 1927, James and Oscar purchased the dormitories on the other side of Baptist Bottom, and converted the buildings to a sash-door and window plant. Perdido's unemployment plummeted to nothing at all. The following year, a small veneer plant was added next to it, thus making it possible to utilize the bottomland hardwoods that did not otherwise provide profitable cutting.

Henry Turk laughed up his sleeve at the Caskeys, for these operations were patently not as profitable as the mere production of building lumber. The Caskeys were in debt for the capital they had needed to start up their new business, they had vastly larger payrolls, the demand for window sashes and hardwood veneers was troublesomely erratic and likely to remain so. The Caskeys ignored Henry Turk's laughter, and waited only for these new operations to become solvent before they established a plant to produce fence posts and utility poles.

It was Oscar's intention to appoint within the Caskey dominion a use for every part of a tree. Nothing should go to waste; everything should be turned to productiveness and value. Early Haskew was redesigning the town's steam plant so that it would run on the bark and dust that were a by-product of the cutting operations. Already the burning of waste was heating the kilns that dried the lumber and the pulp.

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Of equal importance to Oscar was the maintenance of the forests. He hired men from the Auburn forestry department to come down and talk to him. Under their guidance, he inst.i.tuted a system of selective cutting and intensive replanting. It was Oscar's goal-quickly achieved-to plant more trees than he cut down. He set up an experimental station near the ruins of Fort Mims, in hope of creating a more vigorous strain of yellow pine. He corresponded with agriculture departments all over the South, and at least once a year made inspection trips to other lumberyards from Texas to North Carolina.

Oscar's energy was surprising. He had certainly never done so much before. It was his work that had kept the mill going so well for the past decade, but all this extra business was something new. Perdido wasn't used to such quick expansion, such explosive innovation. Perdido tended to agree with Henry Turk, and considered that Oscar was spreading the mill and its resources too thin. Mary-Love occasionally complained to James that her son was running the mill into the ground, but James refused to interfere. Mary-Love wouldn't speak to her son directly about the family business because she knew that he would not heed her advice. She didn't want to put herself in the position of having any request refused.

As the years pa.s.sed, it became gradually known that Elinor Caskey was actually the force behind her husband's spirited plans. If she didn't actually make the suggestions herself, then she at least kept him firmly spurred in those general paths of diversification and innovation. It was Elinor who sent him off to Spartanburg, South Carolina, to look at the big mills there, and over to Little Rock to see the new wire-box factory. Why Elinor would cause her husband to expend so much energy in a concern by which he would personally gain so little was unknown. If the mill made a great deal of money, then 181.

all the profit would be divided between Oscar's mother and uncle. He still would get only his salary. Mary-Love was a hearty, strong woman, not likely to die soon, and at that, no one put it past her to leave all of her money to Sister and Early Haskew, in order to spite Elinor even from the grave.

Oscar was still very much in debt from the purchase of the DeBordenave land in 1924. He received money from the mill for trees harvested on his land, and this was used to pay the interest on the loan, but very little of the princ.i.p.al had yet been repaid, and what was left over from the lumber receipts kept his wife and daughter in decent clothes, but didn't pay for much else. He and Elinor were still very much in straitened circ.u.mstances.

"I sure do wish I could afford to take you to New York for a week or two," Oscar said to Elinor with a grimace.

"Don't even think about it, Oscar!" Elinor replied with unfeigned indifference. "You know we can't afford it, and besides, the Perdido River doesn't flow through New York, so why on earth would I want to go there?"

So long as she seemed a.s.sured of her husband's working hard and attempting to turn everything to advantage, Elinor was content. Mary-Love was always traveling to Mobile and Montgomery and New Orleans, buying dresses and lace tablecloths, when Elinor scarcely had an extra dime to replace the brown thread she had run out of. But Elinor did not complain. She sat in her house all day on the upstairs porch, rocking and sewing. She taught Frances, now five years old, to read and to write, so that she wouldn't have any difficulty when she began school. On most days, Elinor climbed up to the top of the levee, grasping the trunks of water oak saplings she had planted in its clayey sides, and strolled along 182.

the top, gazing in absorption into the red swirling water of the Perdido.

Frances could not remember a time when the sandy yard in back of the house led directly down to the river. She had known only the levee there, that thick sloping bank of red earth and clay, slowly covering itself in a mantle of water oak and kudzu. She wasn't allowed to climb it, unless her mother carried her up, and she wasn't allowed to stick her hand beneath the broad flat leaves of the rampaging kudzu, for snakes bred there in profusion. "And other things, too," Ivey Sapp claimed, "things just waiting to bite off a little white girl's hand." Frances was jealous of the children who were allowed to play on the.levee, like Malcolm Strickland, who was constantly riding his bike back and forth its entire length whenever he wasn't in school. Elinor took her daughter boating in Bray Sugarwhite's little green boat. Frances couldn't hear often enough about how her mother had been rescued out of the Osceola Hotel by Oscar and Bray and taken to safety in this very same boat with Bray plying these very same paddles. Frances was frightened whenever they approached the junction and always held on tight to the sides of the boat. She tried her best not to show her fear, for that was disrespectful of her mother, who Frances thought was capable of just about anything. Elinor was certainly capable of shooting past the junction without Bray's little green boat being sucked down to the bottom of the riverbed, and proved it to Frances many times.

There was something otherworldly about floating down the river between those manmade hills of red clay. Frances knew that the houses and shops and sidewalks of Perdido lay just on the other side, but gliding along, she wasn't able even to see the clock tower of the town hall, and got no sense of human 183.

life being so close. She and her mother were in a solemn wilderness as deep and sublime as if they had been a thousand miles away from anyone but each other. "Oh," Elinor sighed once, and Frances didn't know whether her mother spoke to her or mused only to herself, "I used to hate the levee, hate the very idea of it, but days like this I row down the river and I remember what it was like before there was a Perdido and sawmills and bridges and cars."

"You remember, Mama?"

Elinor laughed, and seemed drawn back. "No, darling, I just imagine it..."

The town intruded upon the peace of the river between the levees only at the bridge that crossed the Perdido below the Osceola Hotel. Cars pa.s.sed over the bridge now and then, and children on their bicycles, and there was almost always an old black woman, with a cane fishing pole and a cage of chirping crickets for bait, leaning on her elbows on the cement railing trying to save her husband the price of a slab of pork for supper.

Frances would have enjoyed these excursions except for a vague feeling she had that her mother expected her to say something or feel something that she neither said nor felt. Gazing into that swift-flowing water that was so muddy one couldn't even see a foot beneath the surface, Frances would have to shake her head no when her mother would say, "Don't you want to just dive right in?" Frances had learned to swim at Lake Pinchona, had taken readily to the clear artesian well water that filled the pool there, could dive and swim beneath the water and hold her breath longer than any of her friends. Her mother promised that if Frances ever wanted to swim in the Perdido she would protect her from the whirlpool at the junction, from the leeches along the banks, from the water moccasins, and from whatever else hid itself in the muddy current. "But you 184.

wouldn't even have to worry about those things," Elinor a.s.sured her daughter, "because you're my little girl. This river is like home to me. One of these days it'll be like home to you, too."

Elinor never pressured Frances to swim in the river, and Frances never told her mother that it wasn't fear that kept her from making the attempt, but rather the unsettling familiarity she felt with the Perdido. Not understanding that familiarity, she didn't want to pursue it. Frances may have been only five, but was already possessed of vague memories of a time that seemed impossibly earlier. The Perdido belonged to that time, as did a child-a little boy her cousin Grace's age-whom she sometimes remembered having played with in the linen pa.s.sage between the front room and her own. But so far as she knew, she had never swum in the Perdido, and the little boy ranged in her memory without a name.

Frances was a tender child, and not much given to complaining. She never compared her lot to others', never said to another little girl, "I hate doing this, don't you?" or "It makes me so mad when Mama says that to me." She imagined that every emotion that overtook her was peculiar to herself, could never be shared with anyone else, and certainly was never experienced by anyone else in Perdido. Thinking her own feelings of very little consequence, Frances never spoke them aloud, never sought to be praised or rea.s.sured or disabused or confirmed in anything she thought or felt.

Foremost among these rigidly maintained silences were Frances's thoughts concerning the house she lived in. She knew a little of its story: her grandmother had built it as a wedding gift for her mother and her father, but had refused to let them have possession of it for a long while. Then Miriam had been born, and Mary-Love had said, "Give me Miriam and you can move into the house." That was 185.

why Miriam lived with her grandmother, and that was why Frances was all alone.

In this story Frances saw nothing unusual, nothing cruel, nothing unfair. What concerned Frances was not the story of the bartering of Miriam for her parents' freedom, but rather what had happened in the house itself during the time that it lay empty. This concern was prompted by Ivey Sapp, Mary-Love's cook, who had told Frances the story in the first place one day while Frances was sitting in the kitchen of her grandmother's house.

Frances had been entranced by the idea of sheets placed over all the furniture.

"You mean," Frances had asked, "that my house just sat there all locked up and empty? That's funny."

"No, it ain't," returned Ivey. "Not funny one bit. Ain't no house that's empty. Something always moving in. You just got to make sure it's people that gets in there first."

"What you talking about, Ivey?"

"Nothing," replied Ivey. "What I'm saying is, child, is you cain't have a big house like that just sitting there with n.o.body in it, and all the furniture covered up in sheets and them little stickers still on the windowpanes and all the keys in the doors, and not have somebody move in it. And when I say somebody I don't necessary mean white folks and I don't necessary mean black folks."

"Indians?"

"Not Indians neither."

"Then what?"

Ivey paused, then said: "If you ain't seen 'em, then it don't matter, do it, child?"

"I haven't seen anybody there but Mama and Daddy and Zaddie and me. Who else lives there?"

They were interrupted by Frances's grandmother, who came in just then and remarked, "Does your 186.

mama let you gallivant all day long without supervision, child?"

Frances was sent home before she could discover who else might inhabit the house in which she lived.

Frances recalled that conversation for a long time, though she forgot completely why she had been in Mary-Love's kitchen when she was so rarely at her grandmother's house and almost never there alone. Sometimes she even thought it had been only a dream, it seemed so disconnected from any other memory. But she never could figure out whether Ivey's p.r.o.nouncements affected her att.i.tude toward her home or whether it only confirmed something she had already begun to feel.

Frances thought she ought to love the house. It was big-the biggest in town-and had many rooms. She had a room of her own and her own bath and her own closet. The hallways were wide and long. There was stained gla.s.s in all the outside doors and on the parlor windows, so that in the afternoon the sun painted all the floors in brilliant colors. If Frances sat in that colored light and held a mirror out in front of her, she herself was painted vermilion and cobalt and sea green. The house had more porches than any house in town. On the first floor there was an open porch in front, narrow and long, with green wicker rocking chairs and ferns. Above it was another porch, opening from the second-floor hallway, the same size, with more rocking chairs and a table with magazines. In back on the first floor was the kitchen porch, latticed over so that it remained cool in summer. On the second floor in the back was the biggest of all, the sleeping porch, screened, looking out at the levee and Miss Mary-Love's house, with swings and hammocks, ferns, hooked rugs, gliders, fringed standing lamps, and little tables. Frances's own bedroon had one window 187.

that looked out over her grandmother's house, and one that opened directly onto this screened porch. It was the most delicious feeling, Frances thought, to go to the window of her room and look out and see what was essentially another room. At night, when she went to sleep, she could turn in her bed and look out that window through soft gauze curtains and see the silhouettes of her mother and father, rocking slowly in the swing and speaking in soft voices so as not to disturb her. Sometimes Frances stood on the sleeping porch and looked through the window into her own room and was always astounded at how different it appeared from that perspective.

Outside, the house was painted a bright white, as were nearly all the houses in Perdido, but the interior was dim and dusky. The sunlight never penetrated far into the rooms. The paper on the walls was all in dark subtle patterns. On all the windows were amber canvas shades, Venetian blinds, gauze curtains, and then lined draperies. In the summer, all these were kept tightly drawn against the heat, and opened only at dusk. Moonlit nights frequently brought more natural light into the house than the brightest summer afternoons.

The house also had an odor that was peculiar to it, a mixture of the sun-bleached sand that surrounded the house, of the red clay of the levee, of the Perdido that flowed on the other side of the levee, of the mustiness of the dark walls and wide dark rooms, of Zaddie's cooking in the kitchen, and of something that had come with the emptiness of the house and never quite gone away. Even in months of drought, when the farmers' crops shriveled in the fields and the forests were so dry that a stroke of heat lightning could ignite whole acres within five minutes, the house had a slight odor of river water, so that the papered walls seemed damp to the touch and new envelopes stuck down and pie pastry didn't 188.

come out right. It could seem that the entire house was enveloped in an invisible mist that had risen from the Perdido.

These were Frances's princ.i.p.al perceptions of the house in which she lived, but there were impressions that were more obscure, less tangible, felt immediately upon waking and immediately lost, or fashioned in the last moment before sleep and never recalled, or sensed so fleetingly as never to be recovered whole. But a hundred of these impressions, added up and tied together with the string of Ivey's words and hints, left Frances with the distinct impression that she and her parents and Zaddie were not alone in the house.

Frances's fear of the house was confined to the front room-the bedroom at the front of the second floor. One window of this room overlooked her grandmother's house, and a second opened onto the narrow front porch. The room had been set aside for guests, but Frances's parents never had visitors who remained overnight. Between this room and Frances's was a small pa.s.sage with a door on either side fitted with cedar shelving for the storing of linens. It seemed to Frances that whatever was in the front room could come right through that pa.s.sage and open the door of hers without her parents-across the wide corridor-knowing anything of it. Every night before Frances would get into bed, she'd make certain that the door of that pa.s.sage was locked.

When Zaddie was cleaning the front room, Frances sometimes ventured in, despite her ravening fear. She'd hang about and in great dread search for evidence to confirm her fear that the room was inhabited. Even as she did this, Frances knew in her heart of hearts that whatever lived there lived not in the room proper, but in the closet of that room.

In the center of the back wall of the front room was a fireplace with black and cream tiles and a 189.

coal-burning grate. To the left of this was the door to the pa.s.sage that led to Frances's room and to the right of it was a small closet. Here were agglomerated Frances's first fears of the house. The door of that closet was the most frightening thing Frances could imagine existing anywhere. It was misshapen, smaller than any other door in the house, only about four and a half feet high, when all the others were at least seven. To Frances's emotional reasoning, it seemed that anything that hid in that closet must be smaller than anything that might wait for her beyond any other door, and she feared dreadfully that aberration of size. In this closet, Frances's mother kept the clothes she wore least, but still wanted to preserve: out-of-season dresses, overcoats, shoes, handbags, oversized hats. It smelled of naphtha, feathers, and fur. Opened, the closet presented one flat expanse of leather and cloth and dark spangles. Because there was no light in it, Frances had no idea how far it extended either to the sides or to the back. To her imagination, it had no firm dimensions at all, but expanded or contracted according to the whim of whatever creature took its shelter within.

Any house built on pilings, as all the Caskey houses were, is bound to shake a little under stray footfalls and other movements. Gla.s.s rattled in the dining room cabinets. Doors slipped on their latches. This Frances understood logically, but it still seemed to her that that closet was the echo point for all the vibrations in the house. That closet shook with every step that was taken. It treasured up stray noises. When it thought no one was paying attention, it inst.i.tuted the noises and the vibrations and the shakings itself.

All this Frances knew, and of all this Frances would say nothing to anyone.

However, when it appeared that she was to be left 190.

alone in the house, as sometimes happened in the afternoon, Frances made some excuse to visit Grace two houses down, or begged permission to walk over to the Stricklands. If permission was denied, or no excuse could be found to go away, Frances did not remain alone inside. She waited patiently on the front steps until someone returned. If it was raining, she sat on the front porch in the chair nearest the steps, so that if she heard something moving inside, she would have a clear exit out into the yard. At these unhappy times, Frances did not even turn and peer through the stained gla.s.s into the parlor windows, fearful of what might peer back at her. To the little girl the house seemed a gigantic head, and she only a morsel of meat conveniently positioned in its gaping mouth. The front porch was that grinning mouth, the white porch railing its lower teeth, the ornamental wooden frieze above its upper teeth, the painted wicker chair on which she perched its green wagging tongue. Frances sat and rocked and wondered when the jaws would clamp shut.

As soon as anyone returned, the house seemed for a time to lose all its threatening malevolence. Frances skipped blithely in behind Zaddie or behind her mother, and wondered at her own foolishness. In that first flush of bravery, Frances would run upstairs, fly to the door of the front room, peer in, and grin at the fact that there was nothing there at all. Sometimes she'd pull open a drawer of the dresser, and other times she'd drop to her knees and check under the bed-but she'd never go so far as to touch the k.n.o.b of the closet door.

END OF PART II.

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