Blackwater - The Levee Part 4

Grace began to taunt the boy. John Robert didn't exactly understand taunts, but he could sense the contempt behind them. Grace would take candy from his pockets, shove it into his mouth, and force him to swallow it whole. She deliberately spilled milk and iced tea on his new clothes, and then cried, "You are so clumsy, John Robert DeBordenave!" If he broke any of her Ben Franklin treasures-as he tended to do if he so much as picked one up-Grace would s.n.a.t.c.h the pieces away from him and then fling them in his face. She would never say, It's all right, you couldn't help it, when he began to weep large silent tears. Grace ignored the infirmity that crippled the child and saw only his exasperating slowness. She took note only of his inhibiting pres- 77.ence, and thought of him only as the instrument by which Mary-Love sought to separate her and Zaddie. If Grace was ashamed of her cruelties at all, she laid the blame at Mary-Love's door.

One day when John Robert was standing in the open door of the lattice staring out at the Perdido, Grace, without a thought to the consequences, ran up from behind, and shoved him down the steps.

He tumbled over and over, banging his head on the sharp corner of the bottom step. When Grace ran down and lifted his head, blood dripped from the wound and filled a groove in the patterned sand below.

Elinor, alerted to the accident by Grace's hysterical screams, called Dr. Benquith. John Robert was brought back to consciousness, examined, bandaged, and carried home by Bray. Grace ran along behind Bray, explaining tearfully, "He fell. He fell down the back steps and rolled all the way to the bottom!"

Grace was certain everyone knew that she had pushed John Robert. But her aunt said only, "How could you have let it happen? Why weren't you watching? You know that boy doesn't have sense enough to come in out of the rain!"

At first, Grace was relieved that her culpability had not been found out; it was better to be charged merely with neglect of duty than with murder. But as the days pa.s.sed, Grace came to see that, because she had not been charged with the crime, she must bear all the guilt within herself. She was morose and downcast; her appet.i.te was gone and her sleep was racked with nightmares. James worried about her. Mary-Love said, "She ought to feel guilty-that boy could have died! How would she have felt then? How would we have felt?"

Elinor called Grace to her one afternoon. Elinor sat in a swing on the upstairs porch, stood Grace 78.before her, and said, "You feel real bad about John Robert, don't you?"

Grace nodded slowly. "Yes, ma'am. Is he gone die?"

"Of course not! Who told you that?"

"Aunt Mary-Love said he might. She said it would be my fault if he did!"

Elinor bit her lip for a moment, glanced over Grace's shoulder at Mary-Love's house, and then said, "John Robert is not going to die, and even if he did, it still wouldn't be your fault. You understand me, Grace?"

Grace trembled and bit her lip, then suddenly burst into tears and plunged her head into Elinor's lap. "It would be, it would be!" wailed Grace. "I pushed him!"

"Oh..." said Elinor slowly. "I see..."

Without removing Grace's head from her lap, Elinor moved the child around and drew her up into the swing beside her. Grace cried for a few minutes more, then sat up, red-eyed.

"All right, tell me what happened," said Elinor, and Grace told her.

"And you don't know why you did it?" Elinor asked when Grace had finished her description of the event.

"No, ma'am, 'cause I like old John Robert. I just didn't like having to take care of him all the time. Sometimes Zaddie and I just wanted to be by ourselves!"

Grace sat beside Elinor a long while, now feeling a great deal better for her confession. When at last Elinor drew apart and stood up, she said, "Grace, I'm going to speak to Caroline DeBordenave for a few minutes."

"You gone tell her I pushed John Robert?" cried Grace in a frenzy of terror and guilt.

"No," said Elinor. "I'm going to tell her that it was not your fault that John Robert fell down the back 79.steps, that we were all sorry it happened, but that you had no business being a nursemaid for John Robert for the entire summer. You are too young to have that kind of responsibility. If she had wanted John Robert watched every minute of the day, then she should have hired a colored girl to do it. That's what I will say, and I will tell her how bad you feel- even though it wasn't your fault-and that you want permission to go visit John Robert and ask him how he's feeling. You do, don't you?"

"Yes, ma'am!" cried Grace vehemently, and meant it.

Caroline DeBordenave understood all that Elinor said, and agreed with her. "Lord, Elinor, when Bray brought John Robert home and I saw all that blood I was just about out of my mind! I didn't mean to slam the door in poor old Grace's face, it's just that I wasn't thinking straight. John Robert means more to Tom and me than anything else in the world. If anything happened to that boy, I don't know what we'd do. I suppose we would pack up and move away. I don't think either one of us would have the heart to stay behind."

Grace and Zaddie were no longer forced to bear the company and responsibility of John Robert DeBordenave. Mary-Love's scheme, undermined by Elinor's interference, came to nothing.

CHAPTER 19.

The Heart, the Words, the Steel, and the Smoke

Sister wondered, that summer, how she could have been so foolish as to allow Ivey Sapp to cast a spell upon her and upon Early Haskew. Sister remembered with shuddering embarra.s.sment how she had walked around the kitchen table with a bleeding chicken heart in her hand, and how she had spoken words over it, how she had skewered it, how she had thrown it into the fire. She prayed no one ever found out how silly she had been. Now, when she brought that scene to mind, her recollection involuntarily saw a row of human heads in the window of the kitchen; the heads had eyes that watched her movements, ears that heard her words, and mouths that would spread the humiliating story all over town.

81.Yet nothing happened. Even her most suspicious inquiry could detect no knowledge of the business in the faces that pa.s.sed her on the street or in the voices that greeted her each day. The mound beside the back steps, beneath which the remains of the sacrificed chicken were buried, had been beaten down by the rain and one could no longer tell where it had been.

If Sister felt relief that her foolishness had not been discovered, she was also chagrined to find that the spell so far hadn't seemed to have had any effect. When she was alone in the house with Early, Sister sat in a good dress on the best sofa in the usually closed front parlor, conspicuously ready to accept a proposal of marriage. Early would only pa.s.s by and say, "Good Lord, Sister, aren't you burning up in there?"

Sister would sigh, get up from the sofa, and close the parlor doors, then go upstairs and change into something that was less appropriate for a proposal, but more comfortable for the weather. She decided, after several repet.i.tions of this, that a man as straightforward as Early Haskew wasn't to be caught only by spells and stratagems. Sister realized she could not just simply put herself in the way of being asked; she would have to press the matter. If she hadn't much experience in dealing with men, well then, Early Haskew-who had always lived with his mother-probably hadn't had much opportunity to deal with young women. She doubted whether he had ever proposed to anyone, and if he had not, why should she a.s.sume that he would recognize, when she displayed it, the proper att.i.tude of availability?

Thereafter, whenever Early was in his sitting room working on the plans for the levee Sister loitered there, and made no attempt to cover the fact that she was loitering. If Early went out to inspect a riverbank or talk to someone whose shed would be 82.moved or examine a vein of clay out in the forest, Sister begged permission to come along with him.

"It's just gone be boring, Sister!" he'd exclaim.

Sister would reply, without a trace of a simper, "Lord, Early, I just like being with you!"

This tactic began to work. Soon she didn't bother to ask. When she saw him going out the door and climbing into the automobile, she would hop right into the back seat and say, "Where we going today? Who we gone speak to, Early?"

If it happened that Sister was in another part of the house and didn't see him go out the door, Early would linger in front of the car, and when Sister appeared at a window he would call out: "Hey, Sister, you holding me up!"

"You are bothering Early, Sister," said Mary-Love every evening at the supper table, quite as if Early were not sitting at her right hand.

"If Early doesn't want me trailing along behind him," said Sister, "then Early ought to tell me to stay at home."

"Sister's good help to me, Miz Caskey."

"How? How? I'd like to know."

"Well, she writes down my figures for me. She carries along a little notebook, and that frees me up.' And she knows the people, too. Sister, I bet you know everybody in this town! We get over there in Baptist Bottom, I'm gone need some help. The way those colored people speak, hard sometimes for me to understand what they're talking about-in Pine Cone, colored people speak totally different-and I need Sister there to tell me what they've been saying to me."

"Sister is a drag on your work, Early," said Mary-Love, who had begun to see what was happening, and had set about to head it off before anything serious came of it.

83.So every evening Mary-Love objected to how much trouble Sister was for Early, and always dismissed his protestations to the contrary as mere politeness. And every evening she demanded that Sister leave the man alone for thirty minutes at least, but Sister merely shrugged and said, "Mama, I'm doing what I want to do because I'm happy doing it. So don't expect me to leave off just because it's what you want." Mary-Love thought about asking Early to leave the house altogether, but for several reasons she couldn't bring herself to do so. For one thing she had begged him to come, and the whole town knew it and he had probably even kept the two letters that she had written to him so she couldn't ask him to leave now without risking a severe ebbing of her reputation. He also remained a goad in the side of Elinor Caskey next door, and Mary-Love wouldn't have removed that goad for the world. At last she decided to give up any further subversion, trusting that Sister's b.u.mbling inexperience would soon sink this matter-of-fact romance. Still, Mary-Love had nagging worries that some kind of attachment might be growing between her daughter and the engineer.

And indeed the day soon came that Mary-Love had feared and Sister had hoped for-when Sister was proven to be right and Mary-Love was shown to be wrong.

It was a particularly hot day in August. Sister and Early had driven far out into the country, over toward Dixie Landing on the Alabama River to a clay quarry that was of interest to Early. He and Sister had left Bray with the automobile at the single store at Dixie Landing. With sandwiches and a bottle of milk in a basket, they set out along a faint track in the pine forest. They found the quarry, and as Sister sat on a tolerably clean outcropping of sand- 84.stone Early climbed all about the pit, getting himself quite red and dusty in the process. "It won't do," was his judgment.

After this inspection, instead of returning directly to the car, they climbed over the lip of the quarry and went down the other side to Brickyard Lake. This was a wide shallow depression of blue water in a vast green pasture in sight of the wide gray Alabama River. In contrast to the river they saw before them, and in contrast to the rivers that wound through Perdido, the water of Brickyard Lake was extraordinarily blue and beautiful. There was a solitary clump of cypress on the near margin of the lake, and as Sister and Early made their way down to it, intending to picnic in its shade, they discovered first that the ground was too soggy to allow pleasant picnicking, and second that there was a little boat, with two oars inside, tethered to a tree. As was the custom in that part of Alabama, they requisitioned the craft for their own pleasure.

"I made cookies, too," said Sister, as she climbed into the boat.

Early rowed out toward the center of the lake. A kingfisher screeched in the branches of the cypress, and then swooped down into the water not twenty feet from them.

"Do I snore?" asked Early suddenly, after they had glided along several minutes in silence.

"You sure do," replied Sister energetically.

"Mama used to say I did. Does it keep you awake, though?"

"Sometimes," said Sister. "But I don't mind. I can always take a nap if I'm tired in the afternoon."

"You're at the other end of the hall."

"Yes," said Sister, unwrapping a sandwich for him and reaching forward with it. "But, Early, once you get going, you are pretty loud."

He set the oars behind him and took the sandwich.

85.He ate it so quickly that he was finished before Sister had even taken the first bite out of hers.

"I was starved."

"You should have said something. We didn't have to wait."

"But what if you were in the same room?"

Sister's mouth was full. She c.o.c.ked her head, to indicate What?

"If we were in the same room," said Early, "you wouldn't be able to sleep at all because of my snoring." He seemed troubled by this thought.

Sister continued to eat her sandwich.

"So you wouldn't, would you?" asked Early, casting down his eyes.

"Wouldn't what?"

"Wouldn't want to get married?"

Sister gobbled up the last of her sandwich. "Early Haskew, is that what you have been going on about?"

"Yes, what'd you think?"

"I couldn't begin to imagine. Who cares if you snore? Daddy used to snore all the time. And he's been dead twenty years. What I mean is, it obviously didn't hurt Mama any, since she's outlived him that long."

"So you will think about marrying me? Sister, you got another sandwich?" Pleasure and happy expectation appeared to increase Early's appet.i.te.

Sister reached in her basket and brought out another. "On one condition," she said.

"What's that?"

"That we don't live with Mama."

"Is that why you would say yes to marrying me, to get away from Miss Mary-Love? Miss Mary-Love has been very good to me."

"Miss Mary-Love is not your mama. Early, I am gone marry you because I am in love with you, and for no other reason in the world. Except that it would 86.give me a good deal of satisfaction to leave Mama high and dry."

Early Haskew put the oars of the boat back in the water and rowed around the edge of Brickyard Lake three times. He would have done it again but Sister reminded him that Bray was probably starting to get nervous.

In the course of the walk from the lake back to Dixie Landing, Sister smiled a secret smile of pride that she had engineered the engagement herself, without the help of Ivey and Ivey's spell-casting. She regretted that she had ever so much doubted her own power as to have gone to Ivey in the first place.

Then her smile of pride faded. Sister saw that, after a manner, the spell had worked. Ivey had sacrificed a chicken and torn out its heart. Sister had spoken words over that heart, pierced it five times with steel, and had inhaled the smoke of its burning. Now she was engaged to Early Haskew. There was no way that she could bestow all the credit on herself.

It could have been the heart of that hen-and the steel and the words and the burning smoke-that accomplished the deed.

How could she ever know for certain?

CHAPTER 20.

Queenie

Early intended to tell Mary-Love Caskey that very evening of his engagement to her daughter, but Sister cautioned against this course. "Mama's gone make trouble, or at least she's gone try."

"Why?" asked Early simply. "I thought your mama liked me."

"Of course she does. But not in the person of a son-in-law. Mama wouldn't approve of my intended if he was the King of the Jews dropped down on the front steps with a s...o...b..x full of diamonds. Mama is not gone want to let me go, that's all."

"Sister, I don't mind trouble. I can stand up to your mama."

They were still making their way through the woods from Brickyard Lake toward the Landing, where Bray waited with the automobile. They had 89.spent hours on the water in their borrowed boat and now the sun was in its decline. The woods were shadowed, but the sunlight now and then broke through the tops of the trees and blinded them for a moment as they walked along hand in hand.

"Of course you can, Early. That's not the point. I'm thinking about the levee."

"How you mean?"

"I mean, I think you ought to finish off all your plans and get everything set before we tell Mama anything. 'Cause there's bound to be trouble, and if there's trouble, then you won't get your work done like you should. Besides, you couldn't rightly go away on a honeymoon with me if you hadn't finished what you had set out to do, could you?"

"I could not," said Early stoutly, proud that his fiancee should see the thing in so responsible, practical, and-when it came down to it-so masculine a perspective.

For a time nothing was said. Sister told Ivey of the engagement. To Sister's relief Ivey said only, "I'm so happy for you, Sister!" and made no mention of the buried chicken. Everything continued as before, except that Sister, having reached her goal, spent less time with Early. Mary-Love grew complacent, and imagined a cooling between the two. Sister, she thought, had at last been discouraged by Early's inattentiveness to her.

Early was working harder, knowing that when he had completed the plans he would have not only the cash bonus promised by James Caskey, but Sister's hand in marriage. From the back pages of a periodical he purchased at the pharmacy he cut out an advertis.e.m.e.nt and sent away for a patented guaranteed cure for snoring. Every day he expectantly awaited its arrival. He once had heard his mother say that she had almost abandoned his father on account of his nocturnal wheezings and snufflings, 90.and he had no wish to take any such chances with Sister when they should share the same bed.

Summer gradually and grudgingly gave way to autumn. Across the Caskey property the wind blew sometimes chill and damp across the Perdido, but the leathery leaves of the water oaks remained in place on the twigs and branches of the ever-taller trees. Moss grew on the trunks, and tiny stunted ferns sprouted in the crotches of the roots, and Zaddie in a long woolen sweater went out early every morning and raked patterns in the sand.

On an afternoon in the early part of October Bray appeared in James Caskey's office, and said, "Mr. James, Miss Mary-Love wants you home right now."

"Bray, I'm coming," said James, and he got up from his desk and walked out of the office without a moment's hesitation. The last time his presence had been so commanded was the afternoon that Elinor had sent his wife away to her death.

"What is it?" said James as he got into the car.