"Blackwater - 04 - The War" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDowell Michael)

Our story 'til now...
In THE HOUSE, Volume III of the BLACKWATER saga, the Caskey sisters, Miriam and Frances, grow up as virtual strangers to each other. Miriam, spoiled and imperious, lives with her grandmother Mary-Love in the house next door to Frances and their parents, Elinor and Oscar. Frances, her mother's darling, is a timid and fearful child, afraid most of all of the very house in which she lives, and the strange presences she is certain inhabit it. Always sickly, she falls seriously ill after an expedition to the source of her mother's beloved Perdido River, and is confined to her bed for three years, where she is bathed twice daily by Elinor in Perdido water until she recovers.
Queenie Strickland, sister-in-law to the widowed James Caskey, peacefully raises her children Lucille, Malcolm and Danjo until her husband Carl returns and resumes his violent attacks. After his almost murderous spree against Queenie and against her own home, Elinor sees to it that Carl meets a grisly end in the Perdido.
Elinor's mother-in-law, Mary-Love, also meets an untimely end, and though she dies in her bed, she has the curious sensation during her last days that she is being slowly filled and drowned by the waters of the Perdido. After Mary-Love's death, Elinor becomes head of the Caskey family and its considerable fortune, which she will administer more generously and justly than Mary-Love ever did.

Perdido, Alabama
pop. 1,200 SITE OF LEVEE
1 OSCAR & ELINOR CASKEY S HOME
2. MARY-LOVE CASKEY'S HOME
3. JAMES CASKEY'S HOME
4 DeBORDENAVES HOME
5 TURK S HOME

CHAPTER 43
At the Beach
Mary-Love had been dead for two years. In the months following the funeral, the Caskeys were watchful for shifts and transformations that were bound to happen in the makeup of the family. Alterations were slow and subtle. Elinor and Oscar and Frances were little changed, although Elinor's demeanor seemed easier now that her chief rival and enemy had finally been defeated in death. Frances was sixteen, a sophomore in high school, and the three years that she had spent in a bed of arthritic pain were distant and dim and only occasionally disquieting.
Next door, Sister Haskew had not gone back to her husband, who dutifully turned up each Christmas, and perhaps once or twice in between. With every visit he and his wife seemed more distant. This break between them had never been acknowledged. Sister would say, "Early travels so doggone much. How am I supposed to keep up with him? I'd much rather stay here in Perdido with Miriam, who needs
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me." The last part of this statement wasn't quite true, for MiriamЧ-at eighteenЧconsidered that she needed no one. She saw herself as her grandmother's true heir. More important than her grandmother's money and bonds and stock, which had been divided equally between Sister and Oscar, Miriam had inherited Mary-Love's house andЧfilial considerations notwithstandingЧshe had been endowed with Mary-Love's enmity toward Elinor Caskey. Miriam would not speak to her mother when they passed on the street, or wave when they saw each other out of the windows of their houses. Miriam would nod grudgingly to her father Oscar, and never lacked a cruel word for her sister Frances, whom she encountered frequently in school.
Sister and her strong-willed niece Miriam formed an unhappy household, always on edge, cringing beneath the lowering cloud of their individual secrets. Sister would not admit, even to Miriam, that she no longer loved her husbandЧthat indeed she dreaded even his infrequent brief visits. Miriam would not declare open hostility toward her mother for fear that she would somehow be crushed by Elinor's superior knowledge of strategy and experience in combat.
In the house next door in the other direction, James Caskey had turned into an old man. Yet he was supremely happy in raising his nephew Danjo, now fourteen. Danjo loved James and never did anything that angered or disappointed his uncle. On the other hand, Danjo's older brother and sisterЧMalcolm and LucilleЧwere problems to Danjo's mother, Queenie Strickland. Malcolm was twenty and didn't seem able to do much of anything. He had once got a job in Cantonement, but had lost it after only a week. Another job down in Pensacola lasted even less time. When he returned to his mother in Perdido, Malcolm begged Queenie to find him a place at the lumber
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mill. Now Malcolm was in charge of a chipper, but due to his inattention was in constant danger of losing one arm or both in the claws of that great, explosive machine. At eighteen, Lucille still simpered and whined, but had grown pretty in a pasty sort of way. She exhibited her modest charms behind the candy counter in the Ben Franklin store and came home every day smelling of rancid popcorn oil. Both Lucille and Malcolm were concerned about the fact that they bore such menial positions. They were, after all, part of the all-powerful Caskey clan.
By owning the only industry in town, the Caskeys might have been considered to own the town itself. They didn't live as if this were the case, however. In delicate consideration of the straitened circumstances of those around them in Perdido, the Caskeys did not display the wealth they assuredly had accumulated. The worst part of the Depression was over, and they had come through it. To survive was to have done well, particularly in this distressed part of the country. The Turk and DeBordenave lumber mills, in operation for decades, had been shut down, and their machinery, land, and employees had been absorbed by the expanding Caskeys. After Mary-Love's death James had turned over the entire operation of the mill to his nephew Oscar. James no longer went to his office, but simply sat out on his porch all day long with his sister-in-law Queenie.
Oscar had played a close game with the mills in the past few years, taking careful advantage of the small opportunities that occasionally came his way. Every penny of the money he made was put back into the mills for expansion, modernization, or acquisition of forested land. By 1938, the Caskeys were rich in their holdings. Yet the mill, the window-and-sash plant, and the factory for the production offence posts, utility poles, and railroad tiesЧall in peak condition and possibly the most technologically ad-
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vanced in the countryЧwere operating at perhaps no more than a quarter of their capacity. Workers frequently were sent home at noon, but received a full day's pay. The Caskeys now owned nearly a third of a million acres of forest in five Alabama and Florida counties, but cutters never had to venture farther than five miles from town because orders were so few. Sister and James needed but little money to live on, for their lives were quiet. Yet even for that little they were forced to go to Oscar, who gave them what they needed in cash of small denominations. This arrangement seemed strange to Sister and James, for the Caskey households had never been restricted in such a manner. James finally asked Oscar if he was sure that he was pursuing the right course with their money and their mill holdings, to which Oscar replied, "Every penny is invested."
Sister said: "I know that, Oscar, but shouldn't we have a little in reserve?"
"We cain't afford to right now," replied Oscar. "We've got to make sure that when this country is on its feet again, we're right up there and ready to get going too."
"Oscar," said James firmly, "this country's been down for almost ten years. What you think's gone get it back up again? Now, I'm not worried for my sake, 'cause I know I can always get along. I just want to make sure that everything's gone be all right for Elinor and Frances and Sister and Miriam. What would happen to Danjo and Queenie and her children if anything happened to me?"
"Don't y'all trust me?" cried Oscar. "Don't y'all know what I'm trying to do?"
"No," said Sister. "I don't think James and I do know."
"I don't," agreed James.
"I'm trying to make us rich," Oscar announced.
"What for?" asked Sister. "Five years ago, when
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things were so bad for everybody, we had all the money in the world anybody could possibly want that was in his right mind. Now you say we're doing all right, but when I want to send Ivey out for a bottle of milk I've got to go over to the mill and break into petty cash."
"That's just for the time being," said Oscar. "And you know it's not that bad, Sister."
"What if it all goes bust?" asked James. "What do we do then?"
"It's not all gone go bust. Y'all just leave me alone for a little while and let me work this thing through. Y'all don't see it, but we're in a very good position."
James and Sister didn't see it, but with some misgivings they decided to trust Oscar. "After all," James pointed out to Sister later, "what else can we do?"
If James and Sister had their doubts and gave Oscar no support in matters pertaining to the running of the Caskey mill, Oscar could always count on the trust and confidence of his wife. Elinor invariably said, "Oscar, I know you, and I know you're doing it right."
All the Caskeys attended the ceremonies marking the end of Miriam's high school career. They had discovered from the Perdido Standard that Miriam had attained valedictory status in her graduating class. She had said nothing of this, as if in an attempt to deny her family the pleasure of pride in her accomplishment. In her speech, faultlessly delivered, Miriam likened life to a nest of Chinese boxes, and mystified everyone. After the presentation of the graduation certificates, Miriam allowed herself to be kissed by everyoneЧeven her mother, father, and sister. Miriam understood that on such an occasion she must submit to formalized indignities. The afternoon was brutally hot, and the high school seniors, in white gowns and tasseled mortarboards, wan-
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dered aimlessly over the football field with their families, as if all had been afflicted with heat fever. Oscar remarked to his daughter, as if he might have been speaking to one of Miriam's classmates whom he had never met, "You think you might be going on to college?"
Miriam paused before answering. "I'm thinking of it," she said at last.
"Where are you thinking of?" asked Elinor, taking advantage of the occasion to speak to her daughter directly and to the point.
"I'm not sure," replied Miriam hastily, glancing around and then running off to hug a detested classmate.
Sister later asked Miriam the same question, but not even she got a straight answer. James said to Sister, "We're not gone find out until the day Miriam takes offЧif she does decide to do it."