BLACKWATER.

RAIN.

by Michael McDowell.

CHAPTER 72.

The Engagement.

Perhaps they were only that: two old women gossiping, gossiping forever in a back bedroom of an old house in a remote corner of Alabama. In 1958 Sister Haskew was sixty-four-years-old, crippled, bed-ridden, querulous, weak, dependent, and demanding. Queenie Strickland was sixty-six, fat, happy, bustling, devoted, and cheerful. Both women were immensely rich, and neither one of them ever gave a second thought to the money they possessed. Queenie was Sister's slave and spy. Queenie fetched and carried. Queenie left her own house, next door, promptly at six fifty-five in order to bring Sister's breakfast tray to her at seven o'clock every morning, and at seven o'clock every evening, Queenie carried Sister's supper tray down to Ivey's darkened kitchen, and dropped the dishes on the counter with a clatter and a sigh. Sister would never have allowed Queenie away from her beside at all had it not been for Sister's insatiable curiosity about the goings-on of the town, the mill, and her own family. Queenie was allowed to play bridge, go shopping, drive out to her daughter Lucille's farm, and eat dinner next door at Elinor's, only because when she returned to Sister's musty, close, cluttered bedroom, she would be able to relate to Sister all that had been done and everything that had been said. Sister would take these random bits of information and draw wild conclusions and predictions, and invariably Queenie said, "Sister, you are wrong, that's not gone happen." And indeed, Sister's predictions never did come true, not 9.a single one of them. Sister had been so long removed from society that she had almost forgot how it worked. Queenie was a faithful reporter, but Sister's a.n.a.lysis was never correct.

The house in which Sister and Miriam lived had altered its whole character in the past dozen years. When Mary-Love was alive, and during Miriam's adolescence, the place had seemed suffused with a kind of vitality bred-some would say-of meanness, but perhaps really only of energetic purpose. It had firmly stood its ground between Elinor's much larger residence on one side, and James Caskey's more genteel home on the other. Now something in its aspect, with the porches and all the first-floor windows hidden behind azaleas and camellias that had been allowed to grow unchecked, suggested that the house was drawing in upon itself, that it no longer set itself up in any sort of compet.i.tion with its neighbors, that it wished to retire from the fray. Inside it smelled of age. The furniture was still exactly as it had been on the day of Mary-Love Caskey's death twenty-two years before. This was not out of reverence for the dead woman, but because for one thing Miriam didn't care enough to want to change it, and for another, Sister liked to be reminded as often as possible-although she would never admit it, even to herself-that Mary-Love was, after all, dead. Ivey Sapp was an old woman, too, as old as Queenie, and she had buried Bray in the spring of 1957. She now had Melva, a granddaughter of James's cook, Roxie, to help her. Ivey was fatter even than Queenie, and did nothing but sit in the kitchen all day listening to the radio and giving directions to Melva; she would bestir herself only to cook the few dishes that Sister would eat.

Sister had lain so many years in bed that the entire house smelled of her and her infirmity, a pale powdery lavender sweetness like the herbs used by the Egyptians to fill the cavity of an eviscerated corpse. A person of delicate temperament might have 10.gone mad in that place without ever realizing why. Miriam Caskey, thirty-seven now, was of a temperament robust enough to withstand the fragility of the atmosphere in which she slept every night, though perhaps the air in her room, the door of which she made sure was kept carefully shut all day, was not so sickly.

Though Early Haskew had never returned for Sister, she declared that she could not rest comfortably at night until Miriam had double-checked the locks on all the downstairs doors and windows. "That man will climb through to get at me," Sister constantly declaimed. "That man will raise ladders against the side of the house and peer at me through the window." Miriam had given up arguing that Early, wherever he was, was sixty-four years old, probably very fat, and unlikely to be inclined toward feats of athletic prowess.

Sister and Miriam weren't close. Miriam could not forget that Sister's infirmity, though real enough now, had begun in fakery. After her fall down the stairs, occasioned by her temporary blindness, Sister had taken to bed on account of a supposed weakness in her legs. And in order to avoid her husband, she had kept to that bed, willing her legs to wither so that Early would never have the opportunity to spirit her away from her cherished home. Miriam could not bring herself to cater to a woman who had deliberately crippled herself. And Sister, for her part, felt that Miriam spent too much time with the mill and the Caskey oil business and not enough time with her. Sister said to Queenie, "I'm rich, you know that? I've got so much money I don't have the first idea what to do with it. And you know who it's going to? Every penny goes to Miriam. I've told her so. And how does Miriam treat me? She treats me like I'm a poor cousin."

"I used to be a poor cousin," Queenie pointed out.

"Exactly," said Sister, nodding her head, "and Miriam treats me the way that Mama and everybody 11.else in the family used to treat you. Like I was a no-cla.s.s, no-account sponger."

This speech startled Queenie, not because it was rude-which it certainly was-but rather because it sounded very much like something Mary-Love Caskey herself might have said. It set Queenie to thinking, and she told herself that she would pay more attention to Sister's manner in the future. Queenie watched, and Queenie listened, and Queenie concluded that Sister was growing more and more like her dead mother.

One day after church, in early fall of 1958, Queenie stopped Miriam outside in the yard, and said, "Miriam, have you noticed something about Sister?"

"You mean that she gets more demanding every day?" The Alabama summer still lingered, and Miriam stripped off her gloves with relief. She unpinned her hat, and shook out her hair.

"No," said Queenie with a little frown. "I mean the fact that she's getting more and more like Mary-Love every day."

Miriam smiled. "Haven't you realized before this? Haven't you seen the way she signs checks?"

"'Elvennia Haskew.' How else would she sign checks?" Queenie returned, surprised.

"No," said Miriam. She turned and went up the steps onto the porch and sat down in a wicker rocker; Queenie did the same. "About a year ago," Miriam continued, "I got called down to the bank because they said somebody was forging Sister's checks. So I went down there, and looked at the checks that had come in. There was 'Elvennia Haskew" all right- but it was in Grandmama's handwriting." Miriam laughed. "My heart jumped, and I thought, 'Lord G.o.d, she's come back from the grave, and what are we gone do?' The n's were the same, and the a at the end of the word. Just like Grandmama's. I came back here, and I said, 'Sister, why are you playing games with your signature? You are upsetting the people down at the bank.' And Sister didn't even know what 12.I was talking about. So I showed her her old signature, and then I showed her the one she had just put on that check, and she said, 'I don't see any difference.' I didn't say anything else. But you look sometime, get her to write something out for you- the handwriting is Grandmama's, stroke for stroke."

"You loved your grandmama," remarked Queenie, though the spirit of Miriam's remarks had suggested otherwise.

"I did," said Miriam. '1 loved her very, very much. I've never loved anybody as much as I loved her. But thank G.o.d she's dead, and thank G.o.d she's never coming back. She ruled the roost back then. And right now I rule the roost. So it's just as well that she and I don't have to fight it out."

"If Mary-Love were alive," said Queenie, "she wouldn't be fighting with you. She'd still be fighting with Elinor. She'd leave you alone."

"Nope," said Miriam. "She'd think I was uppity, and she'd try to keep me down. Just like Sister is now. Sister thinks I'm uppity, running the mill the way I do. Never mind that I'm making money for all of us, I'm not paying enough attention to her. Not waiting on her hand and foot the way you do."

"I don't mind," said Queenie.

"I know you don't, but I would. And I'd never do it, either. Sister brought all this on herself, Queenie, you know she did. Sister fell down the stairs eleven years ago. She could have been up and around in a few weeks, but all these years later she is still making people wait on her, people that have better things to do with their lives. I love Sister. I was brought up to love Sister. I will love her until the minute she sinks down dead in those five feather mattresses and those seven d.a.m.ned pillows. But I'm never gone say, 'Sister, I'm sorry you're crippled,' or 'Sister, I'm sorry you're lonely up here.' And she knows better than to ask me."

Just then Lilah wandered over from the next door. 13 Miriam smiled and held out her hands to her eleven-year-old niece. Lilah came up the steps.

"Grandmama says dinner will be ready in fifteen minutes and come on over when you want."

Queenie, whose appet.i.te had never faltered in all her gathering years, stood up immediately. "Coming?" she asked Miriam.

Lilah said quickly, "Miriam, will you take me upstairs and let me see your jewelry?"

"I'll show you some," said Miriam. "And I'll let you try on a few things, too." So Miriam and Lilah went into the house and Queenie walked across the sandy yard to Elinor's, hoping to find something to nibble in the kitchen before they all sat down.

"Who's that?" cried Sister, hearing the sound of footsteps coming up the stairs.

"It's me!" called Miriam. "And Lilah!"

"Lilah, come speak to me!"

Lilah ran down the hall, leaned into Sister's room, and impatiently cried, "Not yet! Miriam's gone let me try on some of her jewelry."

"You try it on and then you come down here and show it to me."

Lilah hurried back to Miriam's room. She feared she had missed what for her was the best part, the opening of the drawer, but she hadn't. Miriam just stood before the dresser, smiling. "I'll let you do it today," she said to Lilah.

Lilah dropped to her knees and reverently pulled out the bottom drawer of the old dresser. In it were stacked nine jewelry boxes, each one of a different size, each of a different age, each of a different texture. To Lilah, they were as dissimilar as any nine persons waiting in line at the bank. And each one was filled with treasure.

"Which one do you want to look in?" asked Miriam.

Lilah pointed to the middle box in the right-hand stack. "This one," she said.

14.Miriam took a small key from her pocket, and went to a peculiar little chest in the corner of the room. It was as tall as she and as narrow, and had a mirror on the door. Lilah loved this upright chest, for she had never seen one that was anything like it. Inside were a dozen narrow shelves, and on those shelves Miriam kept things no one else was allowed to see. On the top shelf were nothing but keys, hundreds and hundreds of keys that opened G.o.d and Miriam only knew what locks. Without hesitation Miriam withdrew a ring of tiny keys from the back, and unerringly inserted one into the lock of the chest that Lilah had chosen. The case opened instantly.

Inside were earrings, jumbled together: bobs in emeralds and bobs in rubies and diamonds; pearl drops in gold settings; tiny golden studs delicately fashioned in the shape of stars, and ships, and horses; fancy antique drops, the like of which Lilah had never known existed, ma.s.sive with filigreed metalwork and a variety of stones; chaste modern work of single black pearls. Pressing her hands into the box, she was stung with sharp clasps and pins and facets- but she felt a thrill to such pain. It seemed impossible that each piece she picked up had its mate somewhere in the welter of gems, but Miriam a.s.sured her that it was so. "I don't buy single pieces," Miriam said, "and I never lose anything, so they're all there somewhere."

"Don't you want me to match them up for you?"

"Why bother?" asked Miriam. "We'd just put them right back in the box and they'd all get mixed together again. Besides, Queenie's probably about to starve to death. Pick out a pair and try them on."

Lilah's ears weren't pierced, so she had to find bobs. She found one of a square-cut ma.s.sive red stone. "What is this?"

"Rhodolite. It's from South Africa. I bought those on Fifth Avenue in New York in 1953."

Miriam thrust her hand into the box, and in another second she was holding its mate. Lilah wasn't 15.even certain that Miriam had looked. She seemed to have found it by its feel. Miriam clapped the bobs on her niece's ears. They were absurdly heavy, and dragged at the child's lobes.

"How do they look?" cried Lilah, peering into the mirror.

"Very silly," said Miriam. "Now go show Sister- and hurry! My stomach was growling all the way through the sermon this morning."

"I know," said Lilah, scampering out of the door. "I heard it."

Lilah ran down the hall again and entered Sister's room. She went up to Sister's bedside and turned her head this way and that for the jewels to be admired.

"They are precious," said Sister, "and so are you, darling."

"Thank you."

"Miriam never lets anybody but you try on her jewelry."

"She's got so much!" whispered Lilah.

"It's a wonder we can afford to eat in this house," said Sister severely, "with what Miriam spends on that junk."

"It's not junk!"

"It is when she doesn't wear it! That's probably the first time those things have ever been worn since she bought them."

"I have to take them off," said Lilah with a sigh.

"Lilah!" Miriam called from the hall. "We got to get going!"

Lilah started to turn away, but Sister's hand shot out from beneath the light coverlet and grabbed her arm.

"Your daddy's lonely," Sister said in a low voice.

"Ma'am?"

"Your daddy's lonely since your mama got drowned in the Perdido."

'Tes, ma'am..." agreed Lilah tentatively, also in a low voice.

16."That was two years ago, wasn't it? Two years ago last May."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm surprised he's not married yet."

"Married? Who would Daddy get married to?" asked Lilah in all surprise.

Sister looked closely at Lilah, and then looked significantly at the door.

Lilah followed that gaze uncomprehendingly.

"Who?" she asked again.

Sister nodded, but wouldn't speak.

"You mean Daddy might marry Miriam?"

"Who else?"

"Daddy's not gone marry Miriam," exclaimed Lilah. "Who told you that?"

"n.o.body told me. n.o.body had to tell me. Y'all think just because I'm confined to my bed of pain that I don't know anything, that I don't see anything. Well, I do. Queenie tells me everything I need to hear. I have visitors. I have my own eyes, looking out this window. And I have the leisure to figure things out. I am gone be real surprised if you don't have a new mama before long."

"Sister," said Lilah, "I cain't believe it. I'm gone ask Miriam."

"If you do, she'll deny it. She won't give me the satisfaction of saying I was right. But one of these days you're gone walk in from the school, and your Daddy is gone say, 'Lilah, honey, Miriam and I have just run off and gotten ourselves married.' You see if he doesn't."

"I still don't think so."

"Don't you want those earrings?" Sister flicked a bony finger against the bob on Lilah's left ear. Lilah winced.

"Yes, ma'am. Course I do."

"If Miriam becomes your mama, you'll get those when she dies. You'll be heiress to a fortune in gems."

Lilah looked very doubtful about Sister's predictions. Miriam called out again.

17."I got to go," said Lilah, pulling away.

Sister smiled knowingly and let go of Lilah's arm. Lilah ran out of the room. Miriam waited in the hallway and s.n.a.t.c.hed the bobs from Lilah's ears and dropped them into her pocket. "Elinor's gone kill us," she said to Lilah, "so let's get a move on."

In Perdido's opinion, Billy Bronze had insufficiently mourned the death of his wife. Frances Caskey drowned in the Perdido one stormy night in the spring of 1956. Billy had been away at the time. Desultorily, the Perdido was dragged, above and below the junction, but Frances's body was not recovered. Elinor had told Billy of her daughter Frances's death: "She went out, Billy, the way she always did. But this time she just didn't come back."

Billy said, "It certainly wasn't like Frances to go off and drown herself. I never knew anybody who could swim better than she could. It stormed that night, you said. Maybe she got hit by lightning."

Billy's grief was quiet. He went to work as usual, his routines were unaltered, his appet.i.te was unaffected, he never seemed distracted at odd moments. He slept alone at night now, and that seemed the main difference in his life. Perdido saw this apparent unfeelingness in Billy, and thought ill of him for it. Yet the Caskeys stood up for Billy. With a quiet word or two here and there, Elinor and Queenie reminded the town just how distant Frances had been in the last few years of her life, how she had begun to ignore both husband and daughter, how she had seemed to care for nothing but the river.

Billy, though he may have been alienated from his wife, certainly remained on good terms with the rest of the family. That relationship was unchanged by his wife's death. He remained in the house with his mother- and father-in-law, Elinor and Oscar, and gave no thought to moving anywhere else. When Oscar pointed out that some trouble might arise from 18.the problem of Frances's body never having been found, Billy only asked, "What sort of trouble?"

"Well," said Oscar uncomfortably, "in case you wanted to get married again..."

"Married!" laughed Billy. "Who on earth am I supposed to get married to, Oscar?"

"I don't know," said Oscar, "but there might be somebody, someday. I don't see it, I admit, but it might come about. Someday."

Billy laughed again. "Elinor wouldn't let me." And he shrugged an intelligible shrug, signifying, and I wouldn't want her to, either.

Billy's relationship with Miriam in these first two years of his widowerhood was the same as it always had been. They were as friendly, as intimate, and as businesslike as ever. It had never occurred to anyone, until it occurred to Sister, that there might be the possibility of a marriage between Billy Bronze and his sister-in-law. Lilah had no strong feelings about what the consequences of such a union might be, but had vague thoughts that they might be bad. So she went to her grandmother, and said, "Is Daddy gone marry Miriam? And if he marries her, does that mean I automatically get her jewels when she dies?"

"Where on earth did you get such an idea?" Elinor asked her granddaughter.

"From Sister. Sister says it's just a matter of time before Daddy and Miriam run off together. Are they gone live over here, or are they gone live next door?"

Elinor said, "I don't want to hear another word about this. It's not polite."