Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga Read Online Free PDF Page B

from?” he asked, a question which followed naturally in the train of his thought.
    “North.”
    “You’re not Yankee!” he exclaimed. Elinor’s accent didn’t grate like a Northerner’s, certainly, for it had Southern rhythms and its vowels were sufficiently liquid for Oscar’s ear. But there was something strange about it nonetheless, as though Elinor were more accustomed to some other language—not English at all. He had a sudden mental picture, as strong as it was improbable, of Elinor lying on the bed in the Osceola, listening to the voices of men in the rooms all up and down the hallway, imitating their patterns and storing their vocabularies.
    “North Alabama, I mean,” she said.
    “What town? Do I know it?”
    “Wade.”
    “I do not know it.”
    “Fayette County.”
    “Did you go to school?”
    “Huntingdon. And I have a certificate to teach. It’s in my bag that Bray’s getting. I hope he won’t let anything happen to my bags. I’ve got all my credentials in one of ’em.” She spoke her concern a little absently—not as if she really cared what happened to the bags, but as if she had suddenly remembered that she ought to care.
    “Bray is a colored gentleman with a large bump of responsibility,” said Oscar, touching his forehead as if to point out where that bump might have raised itself upon Bray’s head. “As a younger man, he was apt to shirk his duties, but I beat him over the head with a two-by-four, raised a welt in the proper place, and he’s never failed me since.” As he spoke these words Oscar suddenly decided, in another part of his brain, that he might charitably and conveniently attribute all Miss Elinor’s mysteriousness to mental confusion brought on by four days spent alone in a flooded hotel. “But I still don’t understand why you came to Perdido ,” he persisted.
    A veil of mist blew away before them and they were suddenly within sight of the church. His sister stood on the front steps, evidently watching out for him.
    “Because,” said Elinor with a smile, “I heard there was something here for me.”  
    . . .
    Oscar introduced Elinor Dammert to his mother, his sister, and to the female preacher of the Zion Grace Church.
    “No sunrise service this year,” said Annie Bell Driver. “There’s too much trouble in the town. If people can sleep knowing their houses and their chattels are underwater, I say let ’em sleep.”
    “Miss Elinor came to Perdido looking for a job in the school for next fall,” said Oscar, “and she got caught in the Osceola when the water started to rise. Bray and I just now found her.”
    “Where are your clothes? Where are your things, Miss Elinor?” cried Sister in sympathetic alarm.
    “You must have lost everything,” said Mary-Love, staring at Elinor’s hair. “Floodwater takes everything. I’m surprised you got away with your life.”
    “I’ve got nothing at all,” said Elinor with a smile that was neither brave resignation nor studied indifference, but a smile that seemed to mock credence.
    “Where were you coming from?” asked Annie Bell Driver. One of the children, a colored one, had awakened inside the church and now peered sleepily out the front door.
    “I graduated from Huntingdon,” said Elinor Dammert. “I came to teach in the school here.”
    “The schoolhouse is underwater,” said Oscar with a sad shaking of his head. “A school of bream have the run of it.”
    “I saw two desks floating down Palafox Street,” said Sister Caskey.
    “Only thing the teachers saved was their grade books,” said Mary-Love.
    “Have you got anything to eat?” asked Elinor. “I’ve been sitting on the side of a bed in the Osceola Hotel for four days watching the water rise. I had one tin of salmon and a box of crackers and I am fainting on my feet.”
    “Carry Miss Elinor inside!” cried Annie Bell Driver.
    Sister took Elinor’s hand and led her up to the steps of the church. “Bray got some tins out of Mr.