Free BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family by Michael McDowell Page A

hell that her place in James's household had been usurped; and to have raised enmity in Mary-Love Caskey, a kind if slightly domineering woman, who had never before been known to dislike anyone who wasn't a thief or a drunk.
    Actually, it was thought that Miss Elinor didn't really take to life in Perdido. The common remark was that she looked peaked, almost as if she weren't used to the climate, though how that might be when she was from Fayette County, not all that far north, no one knew. Certainly during these summer months, Miss Elinor spent a great deal of time in the water, and the muscularity of her shoulders—a strange thing in an Alabama woman—was a frequently remarked upon fact. People also said that she looked as if she weren't getting enough to eat (or perhaps not enough of the right things), though since James kept an ample table and Roxie was one of the best cooks in town, people didn't see how this explanation of Elinor's condition could apply.
    Buster Sapp arrived at the Caskeys' one morning early, even before the sun was up. He had set out from his parents' home in the country and miscalculated the time needed for the journey into town. As he went around the back of the house, intending to nap for a bit on the back steps, he was startled to see someone standing on the mooring dock. It was Elinor Dammert, and her white shift gleamed in the light of the setting moon. She dived into the river. Buster ran down to the water's edge and watched her as she swam in easy strong strokes directly across to the other bank. The swift current didn't deflect her an inch. This astounded Buster, who knew with what difficulty strong-armed Bray paddled from one bank to the other.
    Before she had quite reached the other side, Elinor turned, and raised her head above the water. "I see you, Buster Sapp!" she cried out. The swift water flowed strongly past her, but Miss Elinor seemed immovably anchored.
    "I'm here, Miss El'nor!" Buster called back. He was already quite in awe of the woman, because of the water oaks she had planted. Buster, raking around their slender trunks each morning, noticed daily growth. Was that natural? His sister Ivey told him it was because the acorns had been planted at the dark of the moon, but even that seemed an insufficient explanation.
    "You come in here with me and we'll swim down to the junction!"
    "Current is too strong, Miss El'nor! And I don't know what's in that water at night! They was oncet a alligator up in the Blackwater Swamp—Ivey told me. She told me that alligator ate up three little baby girls and spit up their bones on a sandbar!"
    Grinning, Miss Elinor rose up straight in the early morning air until Buster could see her white bare feet shining beneath the surface of the black water. Then, in a graceful easy motion and without bending she toppled sideways into the current and began to slip gracefully downstream.
    Buster knew what the whirlpool was like at the confluence of the Perdido and the Blackwater no more than a quarter of a mile away. He feared that Miss Elinor would drown. Help couldn't come in time even if he called, however, so the black boy ran along the bank of the river, stumbling occasionally on the exposed roots of trees, following Miss Elinor's white shift glowing just below the surface of the water. As he scrambled through a little screening thicket of pin oaks and magnolias, his trouser leg caught on a thorn and he had to sit down and carefully free himself. Rushing on, he soon found himself in the empty field in back of the courthouse. Here before him was the junction, where the red water of the Perdido and the black water of the Blackwater met, fought, and then were both sucked into the swiftly revolving maelstrom at the center.
    Behind him the town hall clock began to toll five o'clock. He turned and stared a moment at its green-illuminated face. Miss Elinor ought to have got this far by now—she had been swimming fast, and Buster had been waylaid in the pin oak