Blackwater - The House Part 7

CHAPTER 36.

At the River's Source

In dealing with her son's request for a loan, Mary-Love had not understood that there are some acts that are unforgivable. Oscar had been only half right in telling his mother that she wanted him to go bankrupt to spite Elinor; she also wanted to make certain that her son would always remain dependent. If Mary-Love had realized that James would lend Oscar the money-and she should have realized that-then she would not have had a moment's hesitation in helping out her son. In that way, she also realized later, she might have maintained her position as the Caskey cornucopia.

When she had refused her son, Oscar went to James, who sold off a sheaf of bonds and handed the money over to Oscar without a murmur or a reproach. Half of Oscar's outstanding debt to the bank was immediately canceled, and his monthly payments on the remainder were consequently eased. He and Elinor were left with more than they had 91.had to get along with formerly. It was true that Oscar was now heavily indebted to his uncle, as well as to the bank, but James would rather have gone bankrupt himself than inconvenience his nephew by demanding repayment of this sum.

Oscar felt that Ke had outwitted his mother. Yet his victory did not make him forgiving toward her. He had told no one of her refusal to help him, but now he barely spoke to Mary-Love. When she lay in wait for him on her front porch, and beckoned to him as he got out of his automobile, he'd only reply, in his blandest voice, "Hey, Mama, sorry I cain't come over right now, got to go inside. Elinor wants me!" When she called him on the telephone he would politely answer any question she put to him, but would volunteer nothing more, and always rang off as quickly as possible with an unabashedly fabricated excuse. They would sit in the same pew at church- the Caskeys had always sat together-but Oscar called a halt to his attending Mary-Love's Sunday afternoon dinners. After services he and Elinor and Frances would usually drive to Pensacola for dinner at the Hotel Palafox.

Oscar's repudiation was particularly painful to Mary-Love because it wasn't public; she therefore couldn't represent herself as a martyr to Oscar's cruelty. She knew he never said a word against her. He was always polite when she spoke to him, but nothing on earth would persuade him to have anything to do with her. Mary-Love at last felt compelled to speak to Elinor. She knocked on the door of the big house next door one morning an hour or so before Oscar was expected home for the noon meal.

"I won't stay," Mary-Love a.s.sured her daughter-in-law. "I won't even come inside. But, Elinor, can you sit out here on the porch with me a minute?"

"Of course," said Elinor, and the two women placed themselves in facing rockers. Across the road from the Caskey houses was a large, fenced pecan orchard, 92.with a number of Holstein heifers grazing in it. No pair of those cows appeared more phlegmatic or imperturbable than Mary-Love Caskey and her daughter-in-law, as they sat on the porch and prepared to do battle.

"Elinor, you got to talk to Oscar."

"About what?"

"About the way he's treating me."

Elinor looked at her mother-in-law without expression. "I don't understand."

"You know what I'm talking about," Mary-Love continued, annoyed that her honesty should not be reciprocated.

"He hasn't been visiting you the way he used to," Elinor admitted. "I've noticed that."

"And he's told you why, hasn't he?"

"No," returned Elinor. "He hasn't said a word."

"Well, didn't you ask?"

"Whatever it is, it's between you and Oscar. I didn't think it was any of my business."

"Elinor, I came to ask you to help me patch things up. It hurts me the way he treats me. I'm embarra.s.sed for Oscar's sake. And I think you ought to speak to him about it."

"What do you want me to say?"

"Tell him that people see riow he treats me. And people think ill of him for it. If he doesn't watch out, people are going to turn on him for acting toward me the way he does. He should put things back the way they used to be."

"Why should he?" Elinor asked innocently. "I mean, what reason should I give him?"

"Because the whole town is talking, like I said!"

"You're telling me that you want Oscar to patch things up for his sake, not yours? That is, you don't care one way or the other?"

"No, that's not what I mean at all!" said Mary-Love. "I do care! Oscar hurts me, the way he treats me. We all used to be so happy!" she sighed.

93."Miss Mary-Love, I don't think I'd go so far as to say that! But I will speak to Oscar, I will tell him what you said, and I will tell him that he is injuring his reputation in town by his treatment of you."

"Elinor, what do you think about it?"

"I think it's between you and Oscar and that it's none of my business. I'll speak to Oscar purely as a favor to you."

Mary-Love Caskey loathed favors done her. She sought desperately for a device that would make Elinor see things differently and relieve her of any possible obligation to her daughter-in-law. "Yes, but wouldn't you like to see Oscar and me on good terms again? Things would be much easier for you then, too."

"Miss Mary-Love, it makes not one bit of difference in the world to me what goes on between you and your son. Oscar is a grown man, and Oscar can do exactly what he wants. I think that in the end that will be what Oscar does do about it: exactly what he wants."

"Elinor," said Mary-Love, halting the rocker and looking her daughter-in-law straight in the eye, "you sure you don't know what any of this is about?"

"I haven't the foggiest idea."

"Elinor, you can sit there and say that, but I'm just not so sure I can believe you."

"I have no reason to lie to you, Miss Mary-Love. I'll speak to Oscar." With this unsatisfactory a.s.surance, Mary-Love departed.

When Oscar came home for lunch, Elinor dutifully reported his mother's visit, pleas, and exhortations.

Oscar looked at his wife across the table, and said, "Elinor, Mama did something to me that I don't know if I can ever forgive her for. One thing sure, I haven't forgiven her yet. And it's not that I don't want to, because I do, it's that I just cain't. And that's what you can tell her."

94."Oscar, I refuse to act as a go-between. I wish you'd tell your mother that yourself."

"All right, I suppose I'll have to. Elinor, did Mama tell you what all this was about?"

"No, she didn't."

"Aren't you curious?"

"If you want to tell me, then tell me. If you don't want to tell me, then I don't intend to ask."

"Well, then," said Oscar, after a pause, "I guess I better go on and tell you." Oscar told his wife about Mary-Love's refusal to give him any money and about their confrontation. Elinor made no comment. "What are you thinking?" her husband asked.

"I'm thinking that it's a wonder you speak to her at all. It's one thing for her to hate me, but it's something else for her to injure herself and the entire family."

To this, her husband made rueful agreement. "Someday," he said sadly, "we are gone look out the dining room window and see the barnyard fowl lining up on Mama's rain gutter."

"What do you mean?"

"Someday," Oscar explained, "Mama's chickens are gone come home to roost."

Mary-Love intercepted her son as he left the house on his way back to work a half hour later. She had been sitting on her front porch, and she hurried over just as he was getting into his car.

"Oscar, did Elinor speak to you?"

"Yes, ma'am."

"Well? Did she tell you how you were being talked about all over town because of your treatment of me?"

Oscar put his hand on the hood of the car. "Mama," he said softly, "that's just like you."

"What is?"

"I think it would kill you just to come out and say, 'Oscar, what you're doing is hurting me.' Instead you're saying, 'Oscar, I don't care about me, but you're 95.hurting yourself.' You always have to be the one who does the favors. Well, Mama, if it's not hurting you, then that's fine. Go on back inside the house. Leave me alone."

During this unhappy time for Mary-Love and Oscar, James Caskey and Danjo Strickland were getting along wonderfully well. Now seven, Danjo felt secure in his position. His father was dead and unlikely to claim him again. His mother seemed content only to visit him, though this she did nearly every day. James had recently purchased a car, and Danjo had been staked as no part of that transaction. Grace returned from Vanderbilt for summers and holiday vacations. Twice James and Danjo had driven up to Nashville to visit her.

Grace loved the boy for James's sake, and whenever she saw him the first thing she invariably asked was, "Are you taking care of my daddy?"

Danjo always nodded vigorously and replied proudly, "He said he couldn't get along without me!"

"I don't think he could!" Grace always cried, hugging her father until the breath was nearly squeezed out of him.

It seemed that all had worked out for the best. Grace had abandoned her father, but James never tired of saying, "I was so lonesome when Grace left that I went down to the Ben Franklin and bought me a little boy. He cost me a dollar fifty-nine, but he's been worth every penny!"

Grace was happy at school. This was always evident to James when he and Danjo visited her in Nashville. Her room was crammed with furniture James had bought. She had pennants on the walls. Oriental parasols opened and suspended from the ceiling had electric light bulbs hidden behind them. There were layers of carpet on the floor and two palms and a Victrola sat in one corner.

James could also see that Grace was very popular.

96.Every time he walked into the room a bevy of young women who had been lounging there jumped up and shook his hand, hugged Danjo, and all cried out, "What'd you bring Grace this time, Mr. Caskey?" Besides the sheaf of five-dollar bills in the unmarked envelope, he usually had a vast package tied up in brown paper and string, sitting downstairs in the hallway. Grace would unwrap it, and a pleasant half hour was then spent in trying to find a place to put whatever it was James had brought. James always took Grace out to dinner alone on Friday night, but on Sat.u.r.day night, he treated almost the entire dormitory at a restaurant. n.o.body on earth was blessed with a sweeter father than Grace Caskey. No man's daughter was better loved than Grace Caskey.

"Have you made acquaintance with the man of your dreams?" was James's invariable question when he and Grace were alone together.

"Ugh!" Grace always cried. "Why should I want to do that?"

"So you can settle down and get married, that's why," James would return mildly.

"I don't want to get married, Daddy. I'm having a good time. I don't think I've let myself be introduced to one single man on this campus."

James would laugh. "Well, darling, if you don't even let 'em know your name, how are they supposed to propose to you?"

"I don't want them to! And I'll beat 'em over the head if they try."

This did not seem such an idle threat. At college, Grace Caskey had discovered the delights of physical culture, and she had a closetful of white tennis dresses, white boating clothes, white gymnasium pants, and white football sweaters. Her many handsome sporting outfits began to crowd out her regular wardrobe. Her favorite pastime was rowing, and she was unanimously elected captain of the girls' crew team when she was a junior. She also ran track and 97.played basketball, where the Caskey height stood her in good stead. In this rough-and-tumble atmosphere, Grace acquired a forthrightness and heartiness of demeanor that was shocking to those in Perdido who remembered her only as a slight, somewhat diffident, whiny child. Grace had become strong enough actually to lift her father bodily from the floor, and now whenever they met, she did it.

The summers of Grace's college years were particularly pleasant for James Caskey, for Grace returned at the beginning of June, and didn't leave again until the beginning of September. He always told her to go off and have a good time and not think about him, but Grace would only reply, "Daddy, I miss you so much up there, sometimes I think I ought to pack you in my trunk and keep you with me. You don't think I'm gone do anything in my summers but sit on your front porch and rock, do you?"

"Won't you be lonely?"

But Grace was hardly lonely during these summers, for she sent out invitations to all her friends to come and visit her in the pokiest town on earth, Perdido, Alabama. Evidently Grace herself was sufficient draw, because the girls came and stayed for .days or weeks. James's house was filled with young women and young women's clothing and young women's hearty voices and heartier laughter. When there wasn't any more room at James's, the girls stayed at Elinor's, or even at Queenie's. They never stayed at Mary-Love's, who disapproved of any member of the Caskey family maintaining a friends.h.i.+p. The girls rowed on the Perdido, took cooking lessons from Roxie, went in a bevy to the Ritz Theater, played boisterous tag among the water oaks, and visited Lake Pinchona relentlessly to swim, feed the alligator, and annoy the monkey. They made impromptu excursions to Mobile or down to the Pensacola beaches or up to Brewton to pick scup-pernongs. They would travel over to Fort Mims to 98.play hide-and-seek among the ruins of Alabama's first capital, have picnics in the green fields along the Alabama River, or make daring raft excursions down the turbulent Styx. Danjo was often picked up squealing and flung into the back of Grace's Pontiac with a cry of, "Danjo, we're kidnapping you and you're never gone see Mr. Caskey again!"

"Grace's girls," as they came quickly to be known around town, were a formidable bunch, certainly too much for the few college men that Perdido produced to handle. Young Perdido manhood found companions.h.i.+p with the girls occasionally on the dance floor at the lake, but was otherwise contemptuously ignored. The girls made much of James Caskey and Danjo Strickland, so that the boy and his uncle- accustomed to the winter quietness of Perdido and only each other for company-were always quite bewildered by the energy, the lightheartedness, and the noise of it all.

In the spring of 1933, Grace Caskey graduated from Vanderbilt with a degree in history, and five letters in women's athletics. Her father had never asked her what she intended to do after graduation, but once he had said, "Grace, if you ever decide on anything, let me know, will you?" With a particularly good friend, Grace applied for a position at a girl's school in Spartanburg, South Carolina, and was overjoyed that they were both offered jobs. Her friend was to teach English literature, and Grace was in charge of the gymnasium. Grace's girls came down to Perdido that summer as in the past, but the time was tinged with melancholy. Already some of the girls were engaged, and it was obvious to them all that these happy months of laughter and company could never be repeated. This summer, Grace's girls paid particular attention to Frances, who seemed frailer than ever, after her bout with arthritis two years before. The activity and the attention seemed to do much to lift the eleven-year-old's spirits. Mir- 99.iam tried to be contemptuous of the intimacy that Frances enjoyed with the co-eds; mostly, however, she was angry that she was so rarely asked to take part in their frequent excursions.

Melancholy seasons end quicker than happy ones, and Grace's girls broke up, never again to be joined together. Grace remained alone with her family another week before James would drive her up to Spar-tanburg and see her installed there.

On the second of September, 1933, the weather in Perdido was still brutally hot, but James Caskey was already pining beneath the weight of autumn when his daughter would leave him for good.

Grace said, "Daddy, why don't just you and I go out in the boat this afternoon? Let me take you for a ride up the Perdido."

"Who'll take care of Danjo?"

"Roxie's here."

"I mean, who'll take care of Danjo when you and I and that little green boat all get washed down to the junction?"

Grace laughed merrily. "Daddy, don't you realize that I'm strong enough to avoid the junction? Just like Elinor can. Besides, we won't even go that way, we'll go upstream."

"Darling, I tell you what-why don't you take Frances? She's gone miss you so much, and this way you can get to talk to her alone for a while."

Grace thought this a fine idea. Without a moment's hesitation she went over and stood underneath the screened porch and called up to Elinor.

"Mama's not here," said Frances, leaning on the rail and looking down.

"Where'd she go?"

"She went swimming, it was so hot."

"In the Perdido?" asked Grace.

"Uh-hunh."

"I didn't really want your mama anyway, Frances. I wanted to ask you if you wanted to take a little 100.ride in the boat. You think your mother would mind if I took you out on the water?"

"Not one bit! She's always wanting me to go out on the river!"

"Then come on down, and we'll see if we cain't sneak up on her and surprise her in the water."

Grace's boat was tied to a tree where the levee ended in a steep slope a hundred yards or so upstream. Grace shoved the boat halfway into the water and let Frances climb in so that she wouldn't have to wet her feet. Then she pushed the boat farther out and jumped in herself. The current immediately began dragging the boat downstream, and Frances nervously called out "Whoooa!"

Grace paddled hard against the current, and after only a few moments they were headed upstream. The Perdido was fed by many hundreds of tiny branches of water, most of which were so insubstantial and ephemeral they hadn't even the strength to dig channels for themselves across the floor of the forest. Along the course of the uninhabited upper river, these freshets slipped rapidly over beds of decaying pine needles and oak leaves and poured into the Perdido with low, furtive gurglings. As Grace and Frances ascended the river, this was the only sound to be heard. They might have been the water voices of small gilled creatures, stationed sentrylike along the banks of the ever-narrowing river, announcing the upstream progress of the young woman and the young girl in their boat.

"I don't see Mama," said Frances. "Maybe she went the other direction."

As they proceeded up the river, far past any point that was familiar to either Grace or Frances, the Perdido grew shallow and quiet. The freshets, like sentinels whose commander has been apprised of the approach of strangers, had now fallen silent. Once Grace raised her paddle high and brought it down swiftly on a water moccasin gliding past them. It 101.

was not because they were in danger, but she followed the general philosophy that poisonous things, like gentlemen who made proposals of marriage, ought to be beaten over the head.

"I've never been this far up," Frances remarked with wonder at the wildness of the country through which they were traveling. They seemed far from Perdido.

"Look," said Grace pointing upward, "those are wild orchids on the branches of those oaks. It's so lonely up here..."

"Have you ever been all the way up to the source?"

"No, I haven't. I've never even heard of anybody going all that way-I guess somebody must have, but n.o.body's ever told me. Frances, shall we try to find it?"