Blackwater - The Levee Part 9

Early was frustrated, and Morris Avant cursed a great deal. The levee-men became restless and anxious, acting as if there were something perhaps more supernatural than geological at work in the matter. Many of the men declared that they had heard about a lake being dredged over in Valdosta, and that the pay for unskilled workers was higher, so they left Perdido with what little money they had managed to put aside. Some of them actually did go to Valdosta, but others appeared to have wanted only to put Perdido behind them. The black men employed on the levee were suddenly overwhelmed by the necessity of putting new roofs on their Baptist Bottom homes. Others developed bad backs, or lost temporarily the use of their right or left arms. So while the work to be done had doubled in difficulty, Early's work force decreased by half. Sometimes it looked as if the levee behind the millowners' mansions never would be finished.

"I don't know," said Oscar to his wife one evening, as he stood on the screened porch staring out at the still distant limits of the levee construction, "if they are ever gone get up this far."

"They won't," said Elinor, matter-of-factly.

"What do you mean?"

"The river won't let them finish," explained Elinor, but for Oscar, that was no explanation at all.

"I still don't understand what you're trying to say, Elinor."

"I'm trying to say that the Perdido isn't going to allow the levee to be finished."

Oscar was perplexed. "Why not?" he asked, as if the question were sensible.

"Oscar, you know how I love that river-"

"I do!"

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"Well, this town belonged to that river, and the levees are taking it away, and the Perdido isn't getting anything in return."

"You think everybody should stand on the edge of the water and throw in hard cash or something?"

"You know," she said, "at Huntingdon I took cla.s.ses about the ancient civilizations, and what they used to do whenever they built something real big-like a temple or an aqueduct or a senate house or something-they would sacrifice somebody and bury him in the corner of it. They'd tear off his arms and his legs while he was still alive and pile all the pieces together and then cover it up with stones or bricks or whatever they were building with. The blood made the mortar hold together, everybody thought. And it was their way of dedicating it to the G.o.ds."

"Well," said Oscar, a little uncomfortably, "James is gone arrange the dedication ceremony when the levee finally does get finished, but I don't think he is planning anything along those lines. Is there maybe some other way to pay the river back that you can think of?"

Elinor shrugged. "I certainly have been wracking my brain trying to think of one."

A few days later, Queenie Strickland gave birth to a boy. The baby would not have lived had Roxie- in attendance with Elinor and Mary-Love-not unwrapped the umbilical cord from around the child's neck, where it was choking him. The night that her son was born, Queenie Strickland woke sweating from a nightmare in which her husband Carl was walking up and down on the front porch, seeking a way into the house. She swept her sleeping infant up into her arms and held him tightly against her breast, hoping to still the harsh beating there. Oscar had placed a loaded shotgun in the corner of the room, and the sheriff had promised to hang her hus- 159.

band on sight if he ever came to town again, but Queenie knew that one night she would hear those booted footsteps on the front porch in cold reality.

That same night, at the precise moment that Queenie Strickland woke from her nightmare and clutched her newborn child to her, John Robert DeBordenave awakened also. The unlighted room and the night outside were no darker perhaps than the inside of John Robert's mind; in fact, he scarcely knew that there was any difference to be drawn between the states of waking and sleep. Poor John Robert was now thirteen, and was to be advanced this coming autumn into the fourth grade, as little prepared for that promotion as to be instantly declared Under Secretary of the Interior in charge of water projects. Grace Caskey and numberless other children had left him behind, and the farther John Robert was left behind, the gloomier he became. It was no longer enough to be tickled in the ribs once a day as his pockets were rifled for candy; not enough to watch his cla.s.smates' mysterious games from the corner of the building where he rubbed his back ceaselessly against the rough bricks as an exercise in sensation. His sister Elizabeth Ann ignored him now, and seemed embarra.s.sed by his presence. His mother and father smiled at him and hugged him and shook him lovingly by the shoulders. All this was no longer enough for John Robert, and though he knew he wanted something more from life, he had no idea what that something more might be.

More candy. This thought now came from some dark corner of John Robert's half-mind.

More candy was not the answer, but John Robert's stunted brain couldn't conceive of anything better than that.

A ray of light from the setting moon was suddenly cast onto the floor of John Robert's room. He got up 160.

out of the bed and stood near that spot of light; he stuck his foot into it, knelt down and stuck his hand into it. Then, in that position, he gazed up and out the window at the moon itself. The moon was waning and gibbous, but John Robert had no more idea of the moon's periodic alteration of shape than the moon had of John Robert's vague desires for more candy. He went to the window and looked out over the lawn at the back of the house. The levee, despite all the problems, had been inexorably extended, and now the major part of the work had been done across the back of the DeBordenaves' property, and was just now beginning at the Caskeys', so directly before him and to the right rose its black bulk. Here and there a band of paint around the handle of a spade or perhaps the metal of the spade itself left by the workers glinted in the moonlight. And to the left of the construction he dimly saw the Perdido, with a single line of the moon's reflection quivering on its black surface. James Caskey's house, glowing a cool bluish-white in the moonlight, stood stolid and square in the plot of sand that began where the DeBordenaves' gra.s.s left off abruptly. And there in that sandy yard were the oak trees that John Robert loved so much-two in particular, that he could see if he leaned out a little farther. These were about four feet apart, and grew straight up to the sky. Between these two trees, some years before, Bray Sugarwhite had nailed a board to form a little bench, and John Robert had watched with wonder as the bark of the oak trees had grown around the ends of the boards, surrounding them and holding the board fast, as if the trees had laughed at Bray's nails and had said to each other, Hey, we're gone show Bray how to do this thing right. Sitting on that board day after day, coming inside only for meals, John Robert had watched the progress of the levee as it crept slowly toward him along the bank of the river.

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John Robert now leaned out the window, and saw, sitting on his favorite bench, Miss Elinor. She was wearing a dress that glowed the same bluish-white as James Caskey's house. She smiled and waved to him, and held her finger to her lips for silence.

Not knowing why, and never considering that perhaps he ought not, John Robert pushed a chair against the wall beneath his window, climbed onto it, unlatched the screen, wriggled out, and dropped into his mother's bearded-iris bed beneath, sc.r.a.ping himself against the side of the house in the process. The sharp leaves of the plants ripped his pajamas in two or three places, and underneath sliced his skin, but John Robert was so accustomed to small injuries that he scarcely noticed them. He picked himself up and ran barefoot through the dewy gra.s.s to the edge of his lawn.

Miss Elinor still sat upon the bench, though now she leaned against one of the trees and patted the seat beside her in invitation to John Robert to join her.

John Robert hesitated, then with no more concrete reason for going on than there had been for the hesitation, he lifted his foot from the dewy gra.s.s and placed it down on the raked sand.

The sand stuck to the soles of his feet as he made his way across the yard. He timidly seated himself by Miss Elinor and looked up into her face. He could no longer make out her expression, however, for the shadow of the tree trunk shaded it into blackness.

John Robert said nothing, but he hummed a blurred little tune and waved his short little legs beneath the wooden plank, kicking up sand. He felt Miss Elinor's arms comfortingly encircling his shoulders. He stared before him at the dark hulk of the levee, and continued to hum.

The boy perceived nothing strange in Miss Elinor's sitting on the bench at such an hour, in her 162.

beckoning him, in her silence, or in the tender grip with which she now embraced him. John Robert DeBordenave took notice and affection however and whenever it came, and never questioned its source or motive. He was content to sit and hum and kick his legs in and out of the shadows of the trees, so that now and then a spray of sand fell twinkling like a shower of minuscule stars. And when Miss Elinor rose from the seat beside him and with no apparent effort lifted him up and set him on his feet and pushed him in the direction of the levee, he did not resist her gentle urging for a moment. She walked behind him with her hands on his arms and directed him toward the most advanced point of the levee construction.

The levee-men on this day had upturned their carts of red clay, for the first time, onto Caskey land. Clods of clay had spilled out over Zaddie's rake designs and shone black now on top of the gray sand that gleamed in the moonlight. Tomorrow the men would begin in earnest, and within a week or so the river would no longer be visible from the windows of James Caskey's house. The generous grounds behind the houses would be narrower by twenty-five feet or so.

John Robert was not allowed this close to the river, and obedience being such a habit with him he was uneasy despite the presence of Miss Elinor behind him.

When John Robert stopped, instinctively knowing that he ought to go no farther, Miss Elinor's grip on his arms became suddenly tight and painful. He could no longer move either his arms or his body, so tight was Miss Elinor's hold. He twisted his head around and looked up at her in meek protest.

But it wasn't Miss Elinor's face that returned his gaze. He couldn't see much of it because the moon was hidden directly behind that head, but John Rob- 163.

ert could see that it was very flat and very wide and that two large bulbous eyes, glimmering and greenish, protruded from it. It stank of rank water and rotted vegetation and Perdido mud. The hands on John Robert's arms were no longer Miss Elinor's hands. They were much larger, and hadn't fingers or skin at all, but were no more than flat curving surfaces of rubbery webbing.

John Robert turned his face slowly and sadly back to the river. He stared before him at the levee construction and the muddy water that flowed silent and black behind it. What little mind and consciousness the child possessed was being burned away by Miss Elinor's betrayal, by her becoming something else, by her transformation into this terrible thing that held him in its grip. He began to weep, and his tears flowed softly down his cheeks,.

Behind him he heard a little hiss of wetness, as when the belly of a large and still-living fish is slit open with a knife. One of John Robert's arms was raised out from his body, and he continued ta weep.

There was a wrench and a tear, and a jab of pain so violent and strong that John Robert couldn't even identify it as pain. Then the child saw-but did not know what he saw-his own arm tumbling through the moonlight. It landed with a thump on the red clay at the very edge of the Caskey property. The moon shone down upon it, and ten feet away John Robert DeBordenave saw the fingers of his own disembodied hand grasp and squeeze the clods of clay that lay beneath it.

His other arm was raised and wrenched out of its socket. It, too, sailed through the air and landed across the other; this time the palm lay upward so that the clawing fingers clutched nothing but air.

John Robert now felt his body engulfed with warm liquid, and did not know that it was blood. Coherent thought had never come easily to John Robert, and 164.

now it had entirely forsaken him. He slumped to the ground, and one of those webby appendages that were not hands at all was pressed against his chest. With a splintering of bone, a stripping of tendon, and a tearing of flesh, first one leg and then the other was twisted all the way around in its socket. John Robert saw them arch through the air and fall twitching on top of his detached, crossed arms.

The last thing that John Robert DeBordenave perceived was the slight whistle of wind in his ears and a light breath of wind across his face as all that was left of him, his trunk and head, were picked up and hurled through the air. He turned and twisted, and saw his own blood streaming from the holes in his body, gleaming in thousands of black droplets in the moonlight. He jerked once when he fell atop the pile of his own limbs, and was conscious for one second more as he saw a sheet of clay and gravel from the top of the levee come sliding down on top of him. A small stone struck his right eye, bursting it open like a spoon plunged into the yolk of an egg. John Robert DeBordenave, his twisting head at last stilled beneath the small avalanche of pebbles and clay, knew no more.

CHAPTER 26.

The Dedication

Caroline DeBordenave was frantic for days after her son's disappearance. The noise of the levee-men, which had never bothered her before, seemed to drive directly through her skull now, and she demanded that her husband halt all the work until their boy had been returned to them.

No one had any idea where to begin to look for John Robert. The unlatched screen told how he had got out of the house. His missing pajamas told what he had been wearing, but of his disappearance no one could say more. Teenaged boys bearing stout sticks for defense against rattlesnakes walked through the woods and called his name. People in Baptist Bottom looked under broken-down wagons to see if the white boy had taken shelter there. The mayor 167.

of Perdido made a tour of inspection of the marble-floored room beneath the town hall clocks, but John Robert wasn't among the bats and bird-nests up there. Zaddie wriggled around in the crawl s.p.a.ces beneath the millowners' mansions, but found nothing but rodent nests and spider webs.

After ten days, Caroline DeBordenave had to accept what everyone else in Perdido had known from the beginning: John Robert had drowned in the Perdido. Children in town didn't get bitten by mad dogs or fall down empty well shafts or suffer fatal accidents while playing at. "barbershop" or discharge loaded pistols into their throats. In Perdido, unlucky children drowned in the river, and that was that. Except for the junction, the young members of Per-dido's population led a charmed life. But the river took its sacrifice frequently, and sometimes the bodies were recovered by a fisherman far downstream. Most of the time, even when the dying throes of the girl or boy were witnessed by a dozen little friends, the body was never found. The child was dragged down to the bed of the river and buried there beneath a coverlet of red mud, to sleep undisturbed until the Resurrection should rouse those tiny bare bones to partake in Glory.

The search for John Robert went on longer than any had before. The boy's dim intelligence might have led him someplace other than the Perdido, and Caroline DeBordenave cried out that her son would no more go near that river, having been warned against it all his life, that he would have driven a heated spike through his own hand. The De-Bordenaves, too, were millowners, and their son, feeble in mind and body though he might be, was a personage of importance. And his feebleness made John Robert an object of greater pity than if he had 168.

been a ruffian white boy whose father was a drunk, or some untraceable black girl who was only number three of her parents' eight children and had shown not the least apt.i.tude for cooking or laundry.

Despite the intensity of the search and despite Caroline's complaining, work on the levee did not halt. In fact, it hastened. Whatever it was that had held back work on the upper Perdido stopped on the day of John Robert's disappearance. Thereafter, the curtain of earth flew up, rod by rod, and before the Caskeys knew it, the view of the river from each of the three houses was blotted out. Even when Oscar stood on tiptoe on the sleeping porch he couldn't peer over the top of the levee to see the water on the other side. He could scarcely see the tops of the live oaks on the far bank of the Perdido.

Oscar had dreaded this moment, for he knew with what baleful foreboding Elinor had spoken of the time when the river should be obscured from their windows. Elinor surprised him; she hadn't complained, even of the noise and the litter of the workmen. In fact, she sent Zaddie and Roxie out with pitchers of iced tea and lemonade at noon. She hadn't been out of sorts at all. When she wasn't visiting with Queenie and her new little baby, Elinor sat on the porch and rocked in the swing and read magazines and only made little grimaces when occasionally some workman's blasphemy or obscenity sounded clear upon the breeze.

One Sunday afternoon when Oscar and Elinor were together on the upstairs porch, Oscar stood up, went over to the screen, and with a broad gesture pointed far to his left. "They gone take the levee about a hundred yards beyond the town line, just to make sure everything's all right. You never know, the town might grow in that direction and some-body'll want to build out there. But the way they 169.

going now, they gone be finished in another two or three weeks." He paused, turned, and looked at his wife, wondering if he had perhaps gone too far. But Elinor continued to rock with perfect placidity. Oscar ventured to remark, "You know, I really used to have the idea that you were gone be upset when the workmen got up this way."

"I thought I was, too," replied Elinor. "But it doesn't do any good to get upset, does it? I couldn't stop the levee all by myself, could I? And didn't you say that you would never get any money from the bank unless the levee was built?"

"That's right. We're all set now," replied Oscar.

Elinor said, with a small embarra.s.sed smile, "I guess I feel a little better about that old levee now."

"What made you change your mind?" Oscar asked curiously.

"I don't know. I guess I thought Early and Mr. Avant were going to cut down all my water oaks, but Early told Zaddie this morning that he would be able to leave every one of my trees standing."

"I don't suppose, though, I'll be able to persuade you to go to the dedication ceremony?"

"Oh, Lord, no!" Elinor laughed gaily. "Oscar, I've already had a little party for the levee."

The levee was finished, and the levee-men were paid off. They dispersed with such rapidity that the five colored women who worked in the kitchens were left with four hundred pounds of beef, and three hundred pounds of pork, and one thousand pounds of potatoes. Eventually, through the largess of the town council, that surplus found its way into the skillets and pots of Baptist Bottom. The dormitories in which the levee-men had lived for nearly two years were swept out, boarded over, and locked tight until some use could be found for the buildings. The 170.

last bits of work on the curtains of clay that now protected every square foot of built-up Perdido could easily be accomplished by the twenty black men who remained in Early Haskew's employ.

The two white women who lived in Baptist Bottom returned to Pensacola when their red-light custom evaporated. Lummie Purifoy's gambling hall closed, and his daughter Ruel took up candy-making. The Indians out on Little Turkey Creek closed down two of their five stills. And Perdido, in general, breathed a little easier.

The dedication ceremony, arranged by James Gas-key, was held in the field behind the town hall; a triangular podium had been built in the corner where the upper Perdido levee met the lower Perdido levee. James Caskey made the introductory speech, and the town of Perdido cheered him and the levee. Morris Avant rose and promised that he would sit down at a table and eat the Methodist Church steeple if one drop of riverwater ever appeared on the town side of the levee. Early Haskew got up and claimed that there wasn't a finer town or friendlier people to be found in all of Alabama, and just to prove it he had gone and married Sister Caskey and they were already happier than pigs in suns.h.i.+ne. Tom DeBordenave and Henry Turk and Oscar Caskey then each in turn stood and proclaimed an era of unmitigated prosperity for Perdido on account of the levee. As the audience bowed its head, and the preachers prayed their prayers of dedication to the G.o.d of the Methodists and the Baptists and the Presbyterians, the downspout in the center of the junction, directly behind the speaker's stand, but invisible to all because of the curtain of clay, swirled the red water of the Perdido and the blacker water of the Blackwater faster than ever, dragging down to the bed of the rivers more detritus, living and inanimate, than it 171.

usually did, as if it wished it might draw in the whole town of Perdido-industry and houses and inhabitants and all. But the combined power of those two rivers and the desperate strength of the maelstrom at their junction had no effect on the levees, and the waters flowed and plunged and swirled and eddied and glided on, seen only by those brave and mischievous children who played atop the levees and by those who glanced curiously down into the water from the safety of the bridge spanning the river below the Osceola Hotel.

Perdido was no longer the same town, so much of Elinor Caskey's prediction had proved true. Perdido no longer saw the rivers that had given the town much of its character, except when it promenaded along the levee or crossed from downtown over into Baptist Bottom. Now Perdido saw the levee, the newer parts of it still red, but the first-built parts now covered over with the dusty deep green of the kudzu vine.

During those speeches on the day of dedication, Perdido looked around at what had been built, and now, quite suddenly Perdido seemed to see the levee with strange eyes: it looked as if some unimaginably vast snake had slithered out of the pine forest and curled itself around the town, and now lay sleeping, an unwitting protector of those whose habitation was within its shadow.

Perdido looked around at the levee that lay coiled on every side, and at the end of James Caskey's ceremony, the applause perhaps wasn't as enthusiastic as it had been at the beginning.

One warm evening in September of 1924, about a week after the dedication of the levee, Tom De-Bordenave knocked on the door of Oscar Caskey's house. Zaddie let him in and showed him up to the 172.

screened porch on the second floor where Oscar and Elinor sat in the swing. Tom admired the baby in Elinor's arms; he admired the house he had walked through; he admired the view of the levee from the second floor of Oscar's house. Probably he would have gone on forever in admiration of something or other had not Elinor discreetly taken her leave and left him alone with Oscar.

"Oscar," Tom began, breaking off in the middle of an encomium upon the generous dimensions of the sleeping porch the moment it seemed Elinor was out of earshot, "we are in trouble." Not yet knowing whom "we" was intended to signify, Oscar said nothing. "The flood hurt us-real bad."

"It hurt everybody," agreed Oscar with cautious sympathy.

"It hurt us worst of all. I lost my records, I lost my inventory. If it could float, then it got washed away. If it could spoil, then it rotted away to nothing. If it could sink, then it sank, and I never saw it again."

"Tom, you've recovered," said Oscar kindly, confident that by "we," Tom referred only to the De-Bordenave mill. "You've got everything going again. Of course it takes time-"

"It takes money, Oscar. Money I haven't got."

"Well, now that the levee's built, you can borrow it from the Pensacola banks. Or the Mobile banks."

"Oscar, cain't you understand? I don't want to straighten things out. I want to get out of the business." He sighed. "I want to get out of Perdido."

Quietly, Oscar said, "Are you talking about John Robert?"

"Caroline won't even pick up the telephone when it rings. She thinks it's gone be some old fisherman saying he has caught John Robert on his hook and could we please come and pick him up. And I'm about as bad as she is. Poor old John Robert, I just know 173.

he drowned in the Perdido, but, Lord G.o.d! I wish we could find his poor old body so we could know for sure. It sure would be a comfort to put him in a decent grave. Oscar, Caroline is about to go out of her mind. Elizabeth Ann is away at school and I'm at the mill, and she's alone in that house all day. I just don't know what we're gone do. Except I do know we're gone get out of Perdido. Caroline has people up near Raleigh, and we're going there. Her brother has a tobacco concern, and I'm sure he'll find me something to do. We sure are gone miss this place, but, Lord G.o.d! we got to get away and stop thinking about poor old John Robert. So that's why I'm here, on account of John Robert. I came to see if you wanted to buy the mill."

Oscar whistled for a few moments, leaned forward and put his hands on his knees. Then he said, "Tom, listen, I'm not the man you should be coming to. You know that James and Mama are the only ones around here with money."

"I know that. I also know that you make the decisions. You know, Oscar, you may think Henry and I don't know what's going on, but I tell you we do. We know what's going on because Caroline and Manda have told us what is going on."

Oscar's brow was furrowed. "Elinor has been saying something?"

"Not much," aaid Tom. "But enough so that Caroline and Manda figured it out. Elinor thinks you don't have enough on your own. And Henry and I think that, too. That's why I am offering you the mill and that's why I am not offering it to James and Mary-Love."

The two men remained another couple of hours on the darkened porch. Their business, the most momentous deal that had ever been considered in the history of the town of Perdido, might have been about the price of a load of kindling, their voices 174.

were so soft and conversational. Real business in Alabama wasn't conducted in offices or in mill-yards or across store counters. It went on on porches, in swings, in the moonlight, or perhaps in the corner of the barbershop on the shoe-s.h.i.+ning perches or in the gra.s.sy plot behind the Methodist Church between Sunday school and morning service or in the quarter-hour that preceded Oscar's Wednesday night domino game.

" 'Course," said Tom DeBordenave, "the real question is, have you got the money?"

"Mama and James do. Or they could get it. I haven't got a penny except my salary and a little bit of stock."

"Borrow it from the bank. James will cosign even if Mary-Love won't. And I tell you what, you pay me half tomorrow, you can pay the rest over five years, ten years, that doesn't matter much. I'd like to be rid of it and I'd like it to go to you."

"Tom, something worries me."

"What?"

"Henry Turk worries me. Henry's not gone be happy if I suddenly buy you out and he's left sitting there in the Caskey shadow."

"Henry's in a little trouble, too," said Tom. "You know that. Henry couldn't afford to buy me out. There'd be no point in my even speaking to him."

"I don't like making Henry feel bad," said Oscar, shaking his head.