Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga Read Online Free PDF

Grace Church and the Driver house, crossed the Old Federal Road, and ended three miles farther on in a sugarcane camp run by a black family called Sapp.
    Oscar Caskey was the first gentleman of Perdido; even in a town so small, that distinction goes for something. He was first gentleman not only by right of birth—being the acknowledged heir of the Caskeys—but also by his appearance and his natural bearing. He was tall and angular, like all the Caskeys, but his movements were looser and more graceful than those of either his sister or his mother. His features were fine and mobile, his speech was careful and elegantly facetious. There was a brightness in his blue eyes, and he seemed always to be suppressing a smile. He had a courtly kind of manner that did not alter according to whom he spoke—he was as courteous to Bray’s common-law wife as he was to the rich manufacturer from Boston who had come to inspect the Caskey lumberyard.
    On Easter morning, as Oscar and Elinor walked along, the sun behind them shone through the top branches of the pines. Steam rose out of the dew on the underlying carpet of pine needles, and billowed around them. Great sheets of water, still and steaming, lay now and then in slight depressions on either side of the track where the water table had risen above the level of the ground.
    “That’s not river water, that’s groundwater,” Oscar pointed out. “You could get down on your hands and knees like a dog and lap it.” He stiffened suddenly, with the fear that this had perhaps been an impolite suggestion. To cover up the possible awkwardness, he turned to Miss Elinor and asked, “What did you drink in the Osceola? I believe, Miss Elinor, that it’s just not possible to drink floodwater without dying on the spot.”
    “I didn’t have anything to drink at all,” replied Elinor. She didn’t seem to care that she mystified him.
    “Miss Elinor, you went thirsty for four days?”
    “I don’t go thirsty,” said Elinor, smiling. “But I do go hungry.” She rubbed her stomach as if to soothe rumblings there, though Oscar had heard none and Miss Elinor certainly did not give the appearance of having gone four days without food. They continued some yards in silence.
    “Why were you here?” Oscar asked politely.
    “In Perdido? I came for work.”
    “And what is it you do?”
    “I’m a teacher.”
    “My uncle is on the board,” said Oscar eagerly. “Maybe he can get you a job. Why did you come to Perdido? Perdido is out of the way. Perdido is at the end of the earth. Who comes to Perdido except to write me a check for lumber?”
    “I guess the flood brought me,” Elinor laughed.
    “Have you experienced a flood before this?”
    “Lots,” she replied. “Lots and lots...”
    Oscar Caskey sighed. Elinor Dammert was, in some obscure manner, laughing at him. He reflected that she would fit in well in Perdido, if indeed his uncle did find her a job at the school. In Perdido all the women made fun of all the men. Those Yankee drummers coming in and staying at the Osceola talked to the men who ran the mills, and shopped in the stores where the men of Perdido stood behind the counters, and had their hair cut—by a man—while they talked to the men who loafed about the barbershop all morning and afternoon long, but they never once suspected that it was really the women who ran Perdido. Oscar wondered if that were the case in other towns of Alabama. It might, he thought, suddenly and terribly, be true everywhere. But men, when they got together, never talked about their powerlessness, nor was it written about in the paper, nor did senators make speeches about it on the floor of Congress—and yet, as he walked beside her through the damp pine forest, Oscar Caskey suspected that if Elinor Dammert was representative of the women of other places (for she must have come from some where), then it was likely that men were powerless in towns other than Perdido as well.
    “Where are you