Blackwater - The War Part 4

Miriam pulled away and retreated once more to her bed. She dried her eyes on her handkerchief. "Why are you here?" she asked.

"We came to see if you were all right," said Grace, hopping up onto one of the desks and crossing her legs beneath her. "But I can see that you're not, are you?"

"I hate it here!"

"Why!" cried Sister. "Miriam, we didn't have any idea! Why didn't you just call me and tell me you were unhappy?"

" 'Cause you were so glad to get rid of me, that's why!"

"No, I wasn't! I didn't want you to leave me! I wanted to keep you with me forever and ever."

"n.o.body else wanted me there in Perdido," said Miriam.

"Everybody misses you a lot," said Sister rea.s.suringly. "Frances talks about you all the time. She is pining away."

"You were homesick, weren't you?" said Grace.

Miriam glanced at Grace sharply, then nodded her head. "Yes, very homesick."

"Then why in the world," said Sister, "didn't you come home?"

"n.o.body asked me."

"n.o.body had to ask you," cried Sister in exasperation. "Darling, that house is yours, and we're all your family. You could have come home every weekend, and we would always have been glad to see you. Ivey's dying to cook for you again. Your room is 59.always kept ready. In fact, n.o.body knows what to do without you."

"I hate this old place," repeated Miriam, glancing distastefully about her room.

"You don't like your roommates?" said Grace.

"I hate them, and they hate me."

"I bet they're real sweet," said Sister vaguely. "Hey, Miriam, why didn't you come home for Thanksgiving? We had an empty chair."

"n.o.body asked me."

"Lord G.o.d!" cried Sister. "What were we supposed to do, send a herald and an engraved invitation? Miriam, we are your family. Don't you know it?"

At last Miriam's eyes were dry. Now she was sullen.

After & few moments of glancing first at Miriam and then at Sister, Grace said energetically, "Miriam, when does your Christmas vacation begin?"

"Friday."

"All right then, Sister and I will be back then to get you. You are coming back to Perdido for the holidays-and not another word on the subject. If you have made other plans, then you break 'em, 'cause you're not getting out of this."

"A girl in my history cla.s.s had asked me to go home with her to New Orleans," said Miriam hesitantly.

"Don't you do it," said Grace sternly. "You're coming home with us. Sister and I will be here on Friday."

"I don't need you," said Miriam. "I've got my car. I'll be in Perdido by suppertime."

"Sister and I will come down anyway," said Grace. "We've got some Christmas shopping to do down here, and we'll drop by here to help you pack up."

To be thus taken in hand and ordered to come to Perdido seemed exactly what Miriam wanted. She ventured a smile, and said she was glad that Grace 60.and Sister had come to see her. She offered to show them around the campus, and after that brief tour she introduced her relatives to her roommates. There was some awkwardness in maintaining the deception of a dead relative in the light of Miriam's obviously improved temper. When questioned about this by one of the nuns, Grace explained boldly, "False alarm. It was just a stroke, and we hear that she's much better now."

That evening, Grace and Miriam and Sister went out to dinner together at the Government House in downtown Mobile, and there Miriam shamefacedly admitted the harrowing extent of her homesickness. "I cried every night before I went to bed, and I cried every morning when I got up. I never thought I could miss old Perdido so much, and everybody there. I used to daydream about walking along the levee, and buying bobby pins down at the Ben Franklin."

"Honey, I wish you'd called or written and told us how miserable you were," said Sister plaintively.

"She's just like Mary-Love," said Grace abruptly. "And it's always somebody else who has to make the first step. Miriam, you know that's how you are, and Mary-Love taught you some bad lessons. It's about time you got over a little of that."

Sister was certain that this straightforward talk would inflame Miriam, who was very touchy on the subject of her dead grandmother, but Miriam, apparently chastened by her unhappiness, only replied, "I sure will be glad to sleep in my own bed. I am sick to death of having to share everything. And after New Year's, I know I'm gone dread leaving Perdido again."

CHAPTER 47.

The Causeway

Miriam had learned a hard lesson during her three-month sojourn at Sacred Heart College. She had discovered that she was not as strong and independent as she had thought. From the first night she had been a.s.sailed by loneliness, homesickness, insecurity, and unhappiness. She had liked nothing about Sacred Heart: its buildings, its grounds, its teachers, its students. All were strange to her. The nuns were threatening. The girls in the dormitory all seemed privy to a secret about life that Miriam could not figure out. Despite what she told her family, she had decided against converting to Catholicism. The more she saw of that religion, the less it agreed with her. Though she never would have admitted it, even to herself, Miriam wasn't entirely sure why she had chosen Sacred Heart over any other school. Perhaps because it was so close to Perdido-even though she had left home with the intention of returning only infrequently. Perhaps because only women went 63.there-to prevent the family from having any satisfaction in imagining that she even remotely contemplated marriage. Perhaps only because, of all colleges, Sacred Heart had seemed unlikeliest fo her.

Even in her first days there, she missed Perdido. Often she thought of the house in which she had grown up. She thought about her room and Mary-Love's room and Sister's room. She thought of Ivey in the kitchen, and longed to hear Luvadia's rake scratching patterns in the sandy yard. She wanted to hear the creak of the rotting water oak limbs outside her window. She thought of the Perdido, flowing always swiftly, always turbulently behind its protective wall of red clay. She wanted, from the moment she set foot on the Sacred Heart campus, to be back in Perdido, to live as she had always lived. She was desperate for Sister's company, and she missed Oscar and Elinor and Frances on one side of the house, and James and Danjo on the other. Once, Miriam went downtown to one of the banks in Mobile, and opened her safety-deposit box and examined the diamonds and sapphires that were hidden within it, but the jewels proved of no comfort. She shut the box and returned to the dormitory to cry.

Miriam never even considered returning to Perdido for the weekend, even though Perdido was less than fifty miles away, no more than an hour and a half's drive in the roadster. Though she missed them woefully, and realized for the first time how much she loved them, Miriam still thought of her family as the enemy. This was her grandmother's teaching, and a lesson by which only Miriam suffered. She waited for some sign of capitulation: a telephone call from Sister to say she was desperately missed, a postcard from Frances to ask when she was coming home, a frantic telegram to demand her presence at Thanksgiving dinner, an ostensibly casual visit from 64.James and Queenie at the tag end of one of their Mobile shopping excursions. Hearing nothing, she concluded that her family had won, and that she had lost. Grace's visit seemed heaven-sent and Miriam prayed thanks to the G.o.d of her cla.s.smates.

In the last few days before Christmas vacation began, however, Miriam grew anxious. She perceived that she would be returning in a state of disgrace-and vulnerability. Grace would have told everyone that she had nearly collapsed beneath the weight of homesickness, that she had been desperate for news of home, that she had missed everyone- even her mother and father. Miriam declined Sister and Grace's offer to return to the college and a.s.sist her in packing. With great misgiving she drove back to Perdido through the gathering dusk.

She pulled up before the house, got out, carried her bag inside, and called Sister's name. No one was home.

At Sacred Heart, Miriam had suffered a nightmare. In her dream, she had given up her pride and returned to Perdido, only to find that her family had abandoned the three houses along the river and departed without leaving word of their whereabouts. In the gloom of twilight in the empty house the nightmare seemed to have become reality and Miriam trembled. She ran outside, out the back door, and stood dwarfed and trembling beneath the towering water oaks.

"Miriam!" Sister's voice came from above. Miriam looked up. Sister stood at the screens of Oscar and Elinor's upstairs porch. "Everybody's over here, darling!"

Thinking, They've won, they've won, Miriam entered her parents' house. Zaddie appeared as a dark shadow in the even darker hallway, and said, "Hey, Miss Miriam, how you?"

65."Fine, Zaddie. Just fine," she replied, and slowly climbed the stairs to the second floor.

Everyone was there on the screened porch: her parents, Sister, Frances, Danjo and James and Grace, Queenie and Lucille.

"Hey, y'all," said Miriam softly. "I'm back."

No one crowed triumph.

Her mother said quietly, "Miriam, Grace said you had an invitation to go off with one of your friends, but we are truly pleased that you decided to spend Christmas with us..."

"We are all having supper together over here... in your honor," said Oscar tentatively, " 'cause we are all so glad to see you again, darling."

No more was said about her return. No one pressed its ignominy back upon her; no one trod upon her prostrate spirit.

Miriam sat down in the swing beside Frances, who in a quick, apprehensive motion leaned over and hugged her. Miriam tried to gather her thoughts and think this thing out. She looked over at Grace.

Grace said, "Miriam, when I told everybody that you had decided to come back here for Christmas they were so excited, I cain't tell you!"

That was it then;-Grace and Sister had said nothing of her homesickness nor her dire unhappiness at Sacred Heart. She had been defeated by her own emotions and weakness, but no one except Grace and Sister knew it.

Queenie asked her how she liked Sacred Heart.

"It takes some... getting used to," replied Miriam carefully. "I never knew there were so many Catholics before. Some of the mill workers are Catholic- aren't they, Oscar?-but I wasn't used to everybody praying to the Virgin, and people telling rosary beads and tacking up little cards with pictures of the crucifixion on them. All of that makes me a little nervous. I'm still not used to it."

66.Miriam soon discovered that in her absence considerable changes had been wrought in the family. She found that she was expected to go to her parents' house every day for the midday meal, and that her former recalcitrance in the matter wasn't to be indulged. She bridled the first few days to think that she was to converse with her father and mother, with whom she had had almost nothing to do all of her life. But then she realized that they were treating her differently.

For the first time, suddenly and radically, Miriam was being regarded as an adult. She had an equal place with Sister, and a greater place, it seemed, than either Frances or Lucille.

Miriam wasn't certain how this promotion had come about.

What Miriam didn't suspect-and never found out-was that Grace and Sister had told the Caskeys everything. Everyone knew that Miriam had suffered badly with homesickness, had cried herself to sleep every night, had felt hatred for Sacred Heart and disgust with everything that was not of Perdido. The Caskeys were touched by the revelation. No one had suspected Miriam had such sensitivity; and when she returned for the Christmas holidays, no one threw it in her face.

By New Year's Miriam knew that in a week she must either return to Sacred Heart or declare her intention never to leave Perdido. So far as she knew, no one in her family knew her detestation of the place and her love for her home. She could not now suddenly say, I was miserable at Sacred Heart, and I don't want to go back. Her family wouldn't know what to think, but leaving Perdido again-when Perdido was sweeter than ever to her-seemed an equally impossible course.

Her father solved her problem. On New Year's 67.Day, as the plates of turkey and pheasant and ham were being pa.s.sed around the dinner table, Oscar said to his daughter, "Miriam, I wish to G.o.d you wouldn't leave us. I have never seen so much of you as in the past few weeks, and it's gone break my heart to see you go back to that college."

"I got to go, Oscar," replied Miriam weakly.

"Not if you don't want to," said Sister. "It's important these days for a girl to have a college education, n.o.body knows that better than I do, but I wish for once you'd give up your selfish ways and think of me, Miriam. I'm so lonely without you." Sister could now confidently speak of loneliness without anyone pointing out that she might, as a solution, return to her husband in Nashville.

Miriam didn't know what to say. Now that the way had been paved for her staying-now that her family had, in its way, capitulated and begged the mercy of her continued presence in their midst-it began to seem to Miriam that her months at Sacred Heart hadn't been so bad. She had been unhappy, she had cried herself to sleep and awoke each morning with dried tears welding shut her eyes; yet her grades hadn't suffered, and she had liked being so near to the amenities of Mobile. Only with her family asking her to remain in Perdido did returning to Sacred Heart become a possibility.

"Miriam, you remember how last summer we drove to Pensacola every morning?" said Frances tentatively.

"I remember," said Miriam absently.

"Well," Frances went on, "Mobile's not any farther away. Why don't you just drive down there every day? It only takes about an hour."

"It takes longer," said Miriam, looking up with interest now. " 'Cause Sacred Heart's on the far side of town."

"You could still do it," said Sister excitedly. "You 68.could live at home, drive down to Mobile every morning, and be back in time for supper. I could get Ivey to stay on later, and make you something hot."

"I could do that," said Ivey, coming in from the kitchen at that moment with a dish of creamed corn. "I'd be happy to cook for you, Miss Miriam."

Oscar said, "It's settled then. You're not gone leave us. You're gone drive down to school in the morning and come back in the evening. You will sleep in your own bed and you will keep us all happy."

"This is gone be a whole lot of trouble for me," said Miriam.

"We don't care one bit," said Sister. "You are gone let us impose on you, and we don't care how much trouble you're gone have to go through."

The administration of the college said no to Miriam's request to live at home. Miriam, desolate, went to her room and wept. She tearfully telephoned Sister to say that all was off.

Grace appeared at the college at eight o'clock the following morning and spoke to the provost. She told him that Miriam was needed at home in the evening to care for her aunt and, guardian who was ill-still recovering from her stroke-and would have no one but Miriam about her. Otherwise, for the sake of the aunt, Miriam would have to be withdrawn from the school. The provost gave in. Miriam packed her bags, shook hands with her roommates, and raced back to Perdido.

Every morning Miriam drove her roadster down to Mobile, attended her cla.s.ses, and returned home by four or five o'clock in the afternoon. Some days she was home in time for midday dinner. She never complained of the trip, though everyone thought she probably would soon get bored with it. Sometimes Grace or Sister or even her mother rode with her, and spent the day shopping in Mobile. Miriam, though 69.still often abrasive and short, became accustomed to being with her family, and could manage now to sit through a whole meal without growing huffy or taking offense at someone's innocent remark. Her dead grandmother's influence was waning.

She saw no reason to alter her situation during her soph.o.m.ore year at the college. One day she suggested to her sister Frances, then a senior in the Perdido high school, that she go to Sacred Heart as well. "As long as I'm driving down there every day, you might as well come too."

Frances was delighted with the offer. She had thought of the plan herself, but had not dared put the question to Miriam for fear of an abrupt refusal. Elinor and Oscar were pleased. They still thought of their daughter as frail and dependent. It would be a comfort to them to know that in her first difficult years at college Frances would have Miriam so near. Oscar was a little uneasy that Frances might not withstand conversion to Catholicism as Miriam had, but Elinor a.s.sured him that Frances would hold on staunchly to her Methodist principles. Frances applied to Sacred Heart and was accepted. In the autumn of 1940, the roadster's pa.s.senger seat was occupied each day by Frances.

It was odd to Frances that, while it was always over the same route, their journey to Mobile in the mornings should be so different from the late afternoon trip home. Leaving Perdido, the road first wound through pine forest-much of it owned by the Cas-keys themselves-and then into Bay Minette, the county seat of Baldwin County. The highway led on down to Pine Haven and Stapleton, bleak hamlets occupied mainly by pecan and potato farmers, and then across to Bridgehead. Then there was a won-drously long, straight causeway on either side of which lay marshes, rivers, and islands, all fading imperceptibly one into the other in the early morn- 70.ing light. Rivers were a mile wide here, their sources no more than ten miles upstream. There were vast islands of gra.s.s scarcely two feet above the level of the water, where fishermen often disappeared. On both sides of the blacktopped road were vistas of nothing but pink sky, blue water, and green marsh gra.s.s. The Blakeley River faded into Dacke Bay which in turn became the Apalachee River. The boundaries were nebulous between all these bodies of water- Chacaloochee Bay, the Tensaw River, Delvan Bay, and the Mobile River.

On those rides to Mobile, begun before either of the sisters was well awake, Frances stared at the water and the sky and the gra.s.s, and was reminded not only of the summer she and Miriam had spent on the beach at Pensacola, but of earlier times, hazy times in her past and in her childhood, and of times that, impossibly, lay even further back, before there was a Frances Caskey. The top of the car was always down, and the loud wind prevented conversation. The smell of the salt marsh, where all these rivers, estuaries, and streams emptied into the great maw of Mobile Bay, filled Frances's brain. Without actually sleeping, she seemed to dream. The pink sky was bright and empty. The water below was blue and torpid. The wind became a song, without notes or melody or words, but with pitches and rhythms that were wholly familiar to her.

In her dreams, Frances saw the secret things that swam out of sight below the surface of the bright water and stared greedily up at the automobile pa.s.sing along the causeway. Frances dreamed of what hid in the low gra.s.s of the insubstantial marshy islands, and what dead things lay twisted and broken in the ancient mud. She dreamed of what bones were buried in hummocks, saw what tore fishermen's nets, and understood why fishermen themselves sometimes disappeared.

71.She woke-or ceased to dream-when the roadster emerged from the tunnel that ran beneath the last tendril of the segmented Mobile River. She turned and smiled, and always said, "Oh, we're here already ..."

The return trip to Perdido late in the day was different. Clouds defiled the purity of the sky, already darkening in the east ahead of them. The marshes, bays, rivers, and hummocks of gra.s.s seemed dirty and sodden. The small towns of Baldwin County were crowded, noisy, and cra.s.s. Even the pine forest was dusty and wearying. On the trip home Frances never dreamed, and never remembered what she had dreamed in the morning.

In the evenings she always felt that something was missing, and she longed for the hours to pa.s.s, and for dawn to come again. Then in the morning, as Miriam drove over the causeway, Frances would again dream of what lay beneath the surface of the blue trembling water.

CHAPTER 48.

Mobilization

Perdido gave scant thought to the war in Europe; the town was for the Allies, against the Axis, and that was that. Perdido was preoccupied with the upward struggle from the severe and repeated a.s.saults of the Depression. Then, like the stunning surprise of a blow to the back of the head, the National Guard was mobilized in November of 1940. One hundred and seventeen young Perdido men were notified that they might be instantly called away. One of the old dormitories below Baptist Bottom that had been used to house levee workers was quickly converted into an armory, and those one hundred and seventeen mill workers, layabouts, and high school seniors congregated there every morning in expectation of marching orders. Christmas and New Year's pa.s.sed, but no orders came.

Oscar was grateful that no call for the men had yet come; he needed his workers. During the Depression he had provided employment in Perdido 73.that was far beyond the actual manpower needs of the Caskey mills and factories. In recent months, however, activity had picked up sharply. The War Department had placed orders for vast quant.i.ties of lumber and posts. Oscar learned that the new Camp Rucca was being built in the Alabama Wire-gra.s.s. He heard that Eglin Field, the air base over the Florida line, was tripling its size. Oscar placed notices in the Perdido Standard and in the newspapers of Atmore, Brewton, Bay Minette, Jay, Pen-sacola, and Mobile offering work to those men not yet put on active alert. Some came, but not as many as he had hoped. Many Baldwin and Escambia county boys had already been sent away. Every morning, as he was shaved in the barber's chair, Oscar considered what he could do: hire high school boys in the afternoon, employ women in the lighter jobs that before had been held by men, and promote colored men into jobs that were presently denied them. These strategies were not yet necessary, and only Oscar antic.i.p.ated a time when they would be required.

Oscar had lost some of his buoyancy. The death of Mary-Love and the retirement of James had placed the management of the mill squarely and exclusively upon his shoulders. He had at once to deal with an expanded operation and declining receipts. He was no longer youthful, for that matter, nearly forty-five now, with two daughters in college, and the responsibility for an industry on which the well-being of the entire town was dependent. He had settled into a narrow, strictured life, hemmed in by his family and by the mill. He loved his family, and he was proud of the mill, but sometimes he looked about and wondered. Sometimes his eyes fell upon his wife, and he thought, Who is she?

Elinor had changed, most noticeably since the death of Mary-Love. She was a good deal calmer now, 74.less p.r.o.ne to fits of anger; she seemed less dangerous. She hadn't the destructive instincts he had seen in her before. There had been times, Oscar knew, when his wife had been motivated by a kind of unselfish greed-that is, greed for his and Frances's sake, more than for her own. The wellsprings of that loving avarice seemed to have lost some of their strength recently. Oscar occasionally thought of the future of the mill as he and Elinor lay in bed at night, and he would ask Elinor's opinion. He wanted to know what she would do in his place; he wanted to hear what people in town thought about this and that. But Elinor's interest in such conversations had waned. In fact, her interest in nearly everything had diminished to such an extent that Oscar became alarmed, and he suggested that she visit Leo Ben-quith and get a prescription. He was certain that something was the matter with her.

"Elinor," he asked one night, turning toward her in the darkness. "Tell me something. How old are you?"

"You have never asked me that question before," returned Elinor. "Why are you asking me now?"

Oscar hesitated. "You've been acting so funny, I thought you were pregnant."

Elinor laughed, but her laugh was small and weak.

"I've been thinking," said Elinor.