BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family Read Free Page B

unpleasant adventure safely, that Bray noticed what he had not seen before: the sunlight shining through the window now illuminated the high-water mark on the dark-papered walls. It was two feet higher than the head of Elinor Dammert's carefully made bed. If the water had risen so high as that, how had the woman survived?
    CHAPTER I
The Ladies of Perdido
    The Zion Grace Baptist Church was situated on the Old Federal Road about a mile and a half outside Perdido. Its congregation was Hard-Shell, so the church was about the most uncomfortable sort of structure imaginable: a single whitewashed room with a vaulted ceiling that trapped the heat in the summer and the cold in February; that housed boisterous crickets in winter and flying cockroaches in July. It was an old building, raised on brick pilings some years before the Civil War, and beneath it, in the dark sand, lived sometimes polecats and sometimes rattlesnakes.
    The members of the Perdido Hard-Shell congregation were known for three things: their benches, which were very hard; their sermons, which were very long; and their minister, a tiny woman with black hair and a shrill laugh, called Annie Bell Driver. Sometimes people put up with the backless benches and the three-hour sermons simply for the novelty of hearing a woman stand at the front of the church, behind a pulpit, and speak of sin, damnation, and the wrath of God. Annie Bell had an insignificant husband, three insignificant sons, and a girl called Ruthie who was going to grow up to be just like her.
    When the waters of the rivers began to rise, Annie Bell Driver threw open the doors of the Zion Grace Church to house any who might be driven from their homes. As it happened, the first to be driven from their homes on that side of town were the three richest families of Perdido—the Caskeys, the Turks, and the DeBordenaves. These three families owned the three sawmills and lumberyards in town, and lumber comprised the whole of Perdido's industry.
    So, as the waters of the muddy red Perdido rose over their back lawns, the three rich families of Perdido got wagons and mules from their mills and backed them up to the front porches of their fine houses and filled them with trunks and barrels and crates of food and clothing and valuables. What couldn't be taken away was carried to the tops of the houses. Only the heaviest furniture was allowed to remain on the lower floors, as it was thought that these pieces would survive high water.
    The wagons were covered with tarpaulin and driven up through the forest to the church. The families followed in their automobiles and the servants came on foot. Despite the tarpaulins, despite the canvas covering on the automobiles, despite the umbrellas and the newspapers that the servants held atop their heads, despite even the thick canopy of the pine forest itself, everyone and everything arrived soaked with rainwater.
    The benches had been moved out of the way and mattresses were brought in and laid out over the floor of the church. The white women got one corner, the black servants got another, the children a third, and the fourth was reserved for the preparation of food. This refuge was an expediency only for the women and children—all the men stayed in town, preserving what they could at the sawmills, helping the merchants raise their wares from the lower shelves to the upper, removing the infirm and persuading the recalcitrant to move to higher ground. When the town was finally abandoned to the waters, the Caskey, Turk, and DeBordenave men and male servants slept in the Driver house, a hundred yards up the road from the church. The children looked on all this business rather as an adventure; the servants looked on it as greater and less pleasant work than they were used to; the rich wives, mothers, and daughters of the millowners said nothing of difficulty and inconvenience, did not mourn their homes and their belongings, smiled for the children and the servants and themselves,