Blackwater: The Complete Saga

by Michael McDowell

Oscar, in the front of the boat, wanted very much to find something to say to Miss Elinor Dammert, but could think of nothing at all—certainly no remark came to mind that would justify his turning right around in the boat and awkwardly speaking to her over his shoulder. Luckily, as he thought it, the carcass of a large raccoon suddenly bobbed to the surface of the oily black water when they had just passed the town hall, and Oscar explained that pigs, attempting to swim through the floodwater, had slashed their own throats with their forefeet. It was an undetermined point whether they all had drowned or bled to death. Miss Elinor smiled and nodded and said nothing. Oscar said nothing further, and did not turn around again until Bray was paddling past Oscar’s own house.

The members of the Perdido Hard-Shell congregation were known for three things: their benches, which were very hard; their sermons, which were very long; and their minister, a tiny woman with black hair and a shrill laugh, called Annie Bell Driver. Sometimes people put up with the backless benches and the three-hour sermons simply for the novelty of hearing a woman stand at the front of the church, behind a pulpit, and speak of sin, damnation, and the wrath of God. Annie Bell had an insignificant husband, three insignificant sons, and a girl called Ruthie who was going to grow up to be just like her.

Mary-Love looked uncertainly at her son—whose face was quite blandly pleasant—as if she were trying to determine whether or not he was playing a role, or whether he spoke—as men in Perdido, and probably men everywhere, tended to speak—without any regard for the effect of his words.

Queenie laughed, but the laugh faded quickly enough. “James Caskey,” she said, looking up at him and for the first time catching his eye, “I thought I was gone be happy the day I showed up in Perdido. I thought I was gone be happy for the rest of my life.” “Nobody’s happy for the rest of their lives, Queenie.”

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.

The rivalry that appeared to exist between the estranged sisters was emblematic of the much greater rivalry that had risen between Elinor Caskey and her mother-in-law, Mary-Love. Through those two little girls was played out, in distorting miniature, the passion that characterized the relationship of their mother and grandmother. Mary-Love was the undisputed head of the Caskey family, having acceded to that position upon the death of her husband many years before. No one had challenged her authority before the arrival in Perdido of Elinor Dammert. With single-minded energy that had matched Mary-Love’s own best weapons, Elinor had arranged to be courted by and married to Mary-Love’s only son, Oscar. The two women had quite different styles. Elinor didn’t have Mary-Love’s bluster; her ways were more insidious. Elinor bided her time; her strokes were quick, clean, and always unexpected. Mary-Love knew this, and in the last few years she had grown restive, as if waiting for the blow that would topple her. Mary-Love’s antipathy toward her daughter-in-law had grown strident and unbecoming. Perdido talked, and the talk was always against Mary-Love. It was one thing to disapprove of a son’s wife; it was another to make that dislike so widely known. Mary-Love eventually had come to see that it simply would not do to give Elinor battle directly. Elinor remained cool, always seeming to contemplate the skirmish beyond the one that hotly occupied Mary-Love. Elinor gave way strategicall...

“You see these quarters?” she asked. “I see ’em.” “They’re for you.” “Give ’em here, then.” He reached out for the coins, but Queenie snatched them away. “No. They’re special.” “How special?” “Ivey Sapp gave ’em to me when I was over at Mary-Love’s yesterday.” “That fat nigger girl? Why was she giving you money?” “She told me she got ’em special for me,” Queenie went on with a smile that was very rare to her since Carl had come back to town. “She told me to save these quarters for the ferryman.” “What ferryman?” “Ivey told me to always keep ’em with me. So when you’re laid out dead and cold, I’ve got these two silver quarters to close your eyes with. And that’s what you’ll have to buy your ticket to hell with.” Carl’s grin faded. He reached out and swiped for the coins, but wasn’t quick enough and Queenie dropped them, with a little metallic clatter, back into her pocket.

Unpremeditated assaults rarely occur in the morning. Violent passions are most often engendered by accumulated heat, by alcohol, by weariness of the body—elements whose effects are generally felt most strongly in the evening or late at night.

Perdido seemed to suffer less than many parts of the country. Or perhaps it just seemed that way; Perdido was, after all, accustomed to hardship. The prosperity of the twenties had made only mincing steps toward rural Alabama, and when she whirled about and fled with a flash of skirts from the rest of the country, Perdido had enjoyed so little of her company that it scarcely missed her.

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. Miriam 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.

“Then your answer is no?” “Of course it’s no! Did you actually expect me to say yes?” “No,” admitted Elinor. “I just wanted to give you one more chance.” “One more chance for what?” To this Elinor made no reply. She drank off the last of her nectar and put the glass on the table at the side of the swing. “Miss Mary-Love,” she replied, still unmoved, “think whatever you like about me. All I’ve said today is that I know what you’re up to. I’ve always known. And when the time comes when you have the leisure to think things over, just remember that I gave you one last chance.”

“You know what, Mama?” said Frances, when Elinor had begun washing her right leg. “What?” “It’s not even so much the business about killing Travis Gann . . .” “What is it, then?” “It’s how I did it.” “What do you mean how?’ “How?” repeated Frances. “I dragged him down to the bottom of the lake. And I bit off his arms. I got his arms inside my mouth and I bit them off. I ate both his arms.”

A female farmer was not unknown in these parts, for there had been a tradition, following each of the wars, for widows to take over the running of the farms, and Grace commanded respect on several counts: her success with the pecan harvest, her purchase of so much land with ready cash, and her determined demeanor. Southerners are an easygoing race when it comes to aberrations of conduct. They will react with anger if something out of the ordinary is presented as a possible future occurrence; but if an unusual circumstance is discovered to be an established fact, they will usually accept it without rancor or judgment as part of the normal order of things.

“I’d trust Miriam,” said Oscar, reassuring Grace. “If she says sign something, I’d go ahead and sign it. If she says, ‘Write me a check,’ then pull out your checkbook. She knows what she’s doing. Miriam doesn’t care about anything but making money, and it doesn’t matter to her if the money she makes goes into her account, or yours or mine or anybody else’s in the family. Nothing makes Miriam happier than adding up a column of figures every day, and seeing the total get higher and higher.”

“So I changed my mind, that’s all. I decided that if I was gone go to the trouble of marrying you—and Malcolm, there never was a man who was more trouble than you—then I might as well go on and do the other thing, too.” Yet no child came, and it began to look as if no child would. This irked Miriam. She didn’t like being thwarted, and that it was her own body that was proving recalcitrant was a double insult.

In the evenings after supper, Oscar went upstairs to his sitting room, closed the door, and turned on his radio. He listened to ball games in far-off places. Billy and Malcolm would often be next door, watching television together. Miriam and Elinor would be downstairs, lingering at the table. Oscar’s relish for company was weakening. There wasn’t anyone his own age, of his own generation, except for Elinor. James and Mary-Love were long dead, and he thought of them as dead. That is, he never expected either of those two to walk in the door and demand something of him. But Sister and Queenie were another matter. He frequently found himself straining to catch Queenie’s shrill laugh from the screened-in porch, or Sister’s loud complaints from next door. He turned up the radio louder at his side, as if its volume—rather than death—prevented him from hearing them when they called.

There had been a time when she had relied a great deal on Billy Bronze. When Miriam encountered executives who didn’t fancy dealing with a woman, Billy had been there to back her up. But now Miriam herself was well known, and even when she wasn’t, she had developed enough finesse to handle just about any situation. Also, on those occasions when she ran into an executive who just wouldn’t take her seriously because she was a woman, Miriam merely shrugged and walked out in the midst of the conversation, leaving the man to discover later what a foolish mistake he had made. She was rich enough to do that now.

All his little dreams as a young man—all those things he would get, and have, and be—were merely means to the end, and the end was personal happiness. Things hadn’t turned out the way he imagined they would, not at all, but he was, nonetheless, quite happy. He worried that he was fooling himself, that he was closing his eyes and declaring loudly that the bars that constrained him were not there at all. Perhaps they were there: were this house, and Elinor, and the pecan orchard across the way, and the levee and the river flowing behind the levee, Miriam making demands on him over the telephone on one side, and the dark pine forest on the other. If they were, though, he didn’t feel them. He honestly didn’t feel constrained; or if he did, then it was constraint itself that gave him pleasure.