Free Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga by Michael McDowell Page A

about Roxie and Roxie’s girl, Reta, and Roxie’s boy, Escue. Reta spent all day on her knees, scrubbing the floors. Escue painted everything that could be attacked with a brush. Elinor and Roxie sat on the front porch and sewed new curtains for every room in the house. James gave Elinor three hundred dollars and told her to go out and buy what she needed; one day Elinor and Escue drove a wagon ten miles over to Atmore and came back with a load of new linens. Everything that had been touched by the floodwater she threw out. Sooner than any other house in town, James Caskey’s—which had been the worst damaged—was in the best repair.
    Through means James never discovered, Elinor was able to save many of the fine pieces of furniture that had been thought lost to the floodwater. “I don’t know what she did, Oscar,” James said one morning at the mill, “but I got home last evening and there was Mama’s sofa—the one I was all ready to throw out the back door—bright as bright could be. The rosewood was all polished and every last carved medallion back on it—and I know two of ’em broke off and floated out the front door—and a kind of blue upholstery exactly like I remember from when I was just little . I’d forgot all about it till I walked in and saw it! I could have sat down and cried it made me think so much of Mama!”
    “James,” said Oscar, “are you working Miss Elinor too hard, you think?”
    “ I think I am,” replied James modestly, “but she doesn’t. That house is in as good a shape as when Mama was living in it and Daddy was dead and couldn’t mess it up. That’s what that house looks like now! And Grace! Have you seen Grace of late?”
    “I have,” said Oscar, and they paused to speak to a man who was about to go out of the lumberyard in a wagon.
    “But have you seen Grace’s dresses?” James went on when the wagon was rolling out the front gate. “Miss Elinor doesn’t think a thing in the world of sitting in the kitchen with Roxie and running up an outfit for Grace, while Grace is sitting under the table watching her do it! And with all this, Mary-Love is asking me to charge Miss Elinor room rent!”
    “Mama doesn’t know Miss Elinor, that’s all,” said Oscar.
    “Mary-Love doesn’t want to know her, that’s what it is! Oscar, you know how I love your mama, and you know your mama has always been right about everything, but I’ll tell you something, she is wrong about Miss Elinor. Grace loves her, and I think the world of her! Do you know,” said James in a low voice, tapping a bony finger in the air, “that she has polished all my silver and wrapped it up in yellow felt?”
    . . .
    Oscar Caskey was frustrated. The thing he wanted most in the world was the thing he could not have—and that was the opportunity to learn more about Miss Elinor Dammert. The exigencies of his work at the mill required that he be either in the office or off somewhere in the forest by seven o’clock every morning. He returned home at noontime, but could spare only half an hour to eat, and had to drink his second glass of iced tea on the way back to work. In the evening he might not get home until six or seven o’clock, and by then he was so weary it was all he could do to sit up straight at the supper table. And sometimes in the evening his presence was required at a meeting, the purpose of which was to plan the restoration and improvement of Perdido after the disaster of the Easter flood. He could scarcely do more than wave at Miss Elinor on the front porch of his uncle’s house as he rode past in his automobile, or call out, “How you, Miss Elinor?” as he trudged up the steps of his own home, to where his mother held open the door for him and shut it and hooked it as soon as he got inside.
    Mary-Love Caskey didn’t pretend to be able to control her son’s actions and emotions the way she could Sister’s. Mary-Love knew that Oscar liked that red-haired schoolteacher next door, and