Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga Read online

  Contents

  The Whirlpool, An Introduction by John Langan

  BLACKWATER: The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  Map

  Author’s Note

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Prologue

  I: The Flood

  Chapter 1 - The Ladies of Perdido

  Chapter 2 - The Waters Recede

  Chapter 3 - Water Oak

  Chapter 4 - The Junction

  Chapter 5 - Courtship

  Chapter 6 - Oscar’s Retaliation

  Chapter 7 - Genevieve

  Chapter 8 - The Wedding Gift

  Chapter 9 - The Road to Atmore

  Chapter 10 - The Caskey Jewels

  Chapter 11 - Elinor’s News

  Chapter 12 - The Hostage

  II: The Levee

  Chapter 13 - The Engineer

  Chapter 14 - Plans and Predictions

  Chapter 15 - The Baptism

  Chapter 16 - Father, Son, and Holy Ghost

  Chapter 17 - Dominoes

  Chapter 18 - Summer

  Chapter 19 - The Heart, the Words, the Steel, and the Smoke

  Chapter 20 - Queenie

  Chapter 21 - Christmas

  Chapter 22 - The Spy

  Chapter 23 - Queenie's Visitor

  Chapter 24 - Queenie and James

  Chapter 25 - Laying the Cornerstone

  Chapter 26 - The Dedication

  Chapter 27 - The Closet

  III: The House

  Chapter 28 - Miriam and Frances

  Chapter 29 - The Coins in Queenie’s Pocket

  Chapter 30 - Danjo

  Chapter 31 - Displacements

  Chapter 32 - Locked or Unlocked

  Chapter 33 - The Croker Sack

  Chapter 34 - The Caskey Conscience

  Chapter 35 - The Test

  Chapter 36 - At the River’s Source

  Chapter 37 - Upstairs

  Chapter 38 - Nectar

  Chapter 39 - The Closet Door Opens

  Chapter 40 - The Wreath

  Chapter 41 - Mary-Love’s Heir

  Chapter 42 - The Linen Closet

  IV: The War

  Chapter 43 - At the Beach

  Chapter 44 - Creosote

  Chapter 45 - Dollie Faye

  Chapter 46 - Sacred Heart

  Chapter 47 - The Causeway

  Chapter 48 - Mobilization

  Chapter 49 - Rationing

  Chapter 50 - Billy Bronze

  Chapter 51 - The Proposal

  Chapter 52 - Lake Pinchona

  Chapter 53 - Mother and Daughter

  Chapter 54 - Lucille and Grace

  Chapter 55 - Tommy Lee Burgess

  Chapter 56 - Lazarus

  Chapter 57 - The Flight

  V: The Fortune

  Chapter 58 - Assessment

  Chapter 59 - What Billy Did

  Chapter 60 - Ivey’s Blue Bottle

  Chapter 61 - Early’s Promise

  Chapter 62 - The Swamp

  Chapter 63 - Twins

  Chapter 64 - Billy’s Family

  Chapter 65 - Silver

  Chapter 66 - Nerita

  Chapter 67 - The Prodigal

  Chapter 68 - New Year’s

  Chapter 69 - Billy’s Armor

  Chapter 70 - The Fortune

  Chapter 71 - Legacies

  VI: Rain

  Chapter 72 - The Engagement

  Chapter 73 - Put It Off

  Chapter 74 - The Wedding Party

  Chapter 75 - Queenie Alone

  Chapter 76 - The Caskey Children

  Chapter 77 - The Song of the Shepherdess

  Chapter 78 - College

  Chapter 79 - Oscar and Elinor

  Chapter 80 - Oscar’s Pajamas

  Chapter 81 - Footsteps

  Chapter 82 - Mrs. Woskoboinikow

  Chapter 83 - Champagne Toasts

  Chapter 84 - The Nest

  Chapter 85 - Rain

  About Michael McDowell

  About Tough Times Publishing

  BLACKWATER:

  The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  by

  Michael McDowell

  Tough Times Publishing

  Minneapolis, Minnesota

  Blackwater © 1983 by Michael McDowell

  Introduction © 2014 by John Langan

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce any portion of this work in any form, except for brief quotations used in articles or reviews. Please contact [email protected] for additional information.

  First E-book Edition

  If you find an error in this e-book, please notify [email protected]

  The Whirlpool:

  With Howard and Eudora

  on the Banks of the Perdido

  by John Langan

  John Langan is the author of two collections of stories, The Wide, Carnivorous Sky and Other Monstrous Geographies (Hippocampus 2013) and Mr. Gaunt and Other Uneasy Encounters (Prime 2008), and a novel, House of Windows (Night Shade 2009). With Paul Tremblay, he co-edited Creatures: Thirty Years of Monsters (Prime 2011). He lives with his family in upstate New York.

  Readers new to Blackwater should note that this

  introduction reveals elements of the plot.

  In January of 1983, Michael McDowell, a thirty-two year old writer, published a somewhat short novel of supernatural horror titled The Flood. Set in the small, southeast Alabama town of Perdido, the narrative begins at dawn, on Easter Sunday morning of 1919, with the town in flood. While reconnoitering Perdido’s flooded streets via rowboat, Oscar Caskey, son of an influential local family, discovers a mysterious woman sheltering in a second-story room of the town’s hotel. Despite the cautions of Bray Sugarwhite, the family servant who is manning the oars, Oscar rescues Elinor Dammert. The novel spares little time in justifying Bray’s concerns. Elinor is not completely human; at times, when submerged in water, she transforms into a kind of monstrous amphibian.*

  In her human form, however, Elinor is completely charming, and Oscar is soon smitten with her. His mother, Mary-Love, is certain that this was Elinor’s goal all along, and she sets herself against the other woman. Elinor reciprocates Oscar’s feelings, and in short order—despite Mary-Love’s best efforts—the two are wed. The remainder of the novel relates the couple’s efforts to establish their own household, removed from Mary-Love’s sway, and the dramatic sacrifice they must make in order to do so. It also shows us the terrible fate suffered by those unlucky enough to encounter the changed Elinor.

  A month later, McDowell followed The Flood with a second volume, The Levee, which picks up the narrative of Elinor and Oscar and the other members of the Caskey family and carries it forward in time, as the inhabitants of Perdido construct a series of levees to prevent a recurrence of the flood from the first book, an enterprise whose success demands a secret, bloody offering. In March, April, and May, McDowell released The House, The War, and The Fortune, respectively, each of which advances the story still further, as the Great Depression yields to the Second World War, and the Caskeys, increasingly under Elinor’s guidance, gain in wealth and power. Finally, in June, came Rain, which concludes the story of Elinor Dammert’s relationship with the Caskey family and the town of Perdido. Collectively, the six-part saga would be known as Blackwater. Borrowing a page from the great serial writers of the mid- to late-nineteenth century, McDowell had published what was in fact a substantial horror novel. For anyone familiar with the particulars of McDowell’s life, his use of the serial form was perhaps not that surprising: he had earned a Ph.D. from Brandeis in the literature of the nineteenth centu
ry.

  In its method of publication, Blackwater was ambitious. It was no less so in its narrative design. Previously, McDowell had authored a number of well-received horror novels—Cold Moon Over Babylon (1980) and The Elementals (1981) among the best of them—which had identified him as one of the bright lights in a constellation of writers that included Stephen King, Peter Straub, and Ramsey Campbell. Together, this group of writers was engaged in renovating the horror novel, doing so by bringing together the stuff of traditional horror with techniques drawn from the literary mainstream. Thus, King mixed the tentacular cosmicism of Lovecraft with the blunt naturalism of Norris and Dreiser, while Straub blended the atavistic mysticism of Machen with the mannerism of Henry James, and Campbell combined Lovecraft with the linguistic paranoia of Nabokov. This cross-pollination allowed the horror novel to develop in new directions. The form moved towards a deeper engagement with the world into which its horrific elements intrude. It traced with greater precision the emotional and intellectual responses of its characters to that intrusion. It evoked more of the ways in which the horror’s disruption might be made manifest.

  In his interview with Douglas Winter for Faces of Fear (1985), McDowell described his own writing as the confluence of two writers, specifically of Lovecraft with Eudora Welty’s understated Modernism. As is the case with King et al., to mention Lovecraft’s gelatinous monstrosities in the same breath as Welty’s small-town eccentrics sounds like the start of a joke, possibly a very bad one. Yet it is almost surprisingly easy to identify points of convergence between their respective bodies of work. Both Lovecraft and Welty are writers of place, interested in small, carefully-rendered communities. Within those settings, they are drawn to old families, particularly as they represent the persistence of the past into the present. In their different ways, Lovecraft and Welty address the intersection of the mundane and the numinous: Lovecraft in most of his longer fiction; Welty in her short novel, The Robber Bridegroom (1942), and the linked stories that comprise The Golden Apples (1949). McDowell also drew attention to Welty’s gift for rendering her characters’ speech, especially at length, which is a recurrent feature of Blackwater. Given that McDowell was raised in Geneva and Brewton, a pair of towns in southeastern Alabama, it is not a great leap in critical biography to say that Welty’s work gave him a means to make use of his experience of the American south in his fiction.

  This McDowell does to great effect in Blackwater. While Elinor Dammert, later Caskey, is never far from the events of the ongoing narrative, the book is quite happy to wander into the lives of its ever-expanding cast of characters, from Mary-Love Caskey and her brother, James; to Oscar’s sister, Elvennia (known throughout, somewhat dismissively, as merely “Sister”); to James’s estranged wife, Genevieve, and her sister, Queenie; to the African-American servants who work for the Caskeys, Bray and Ivey Sapp and Ivey’s sister, Zaddie; to the children of the Caskeys, Miriam and Frances; to a host of secondary figures. Indeed, at moments, the narrative perspective approaches that of the town, itself. His attention to setting aligns McDowell with contemporaries such as Stephen King and Charles Grant, each of whom also exploited the possibilities of an extensively-imagined small town to lend the supernatural threat to it more heft. (Given that Grant’s Oxrun Station novels and stories revisit the community at various moments throughout its history, his use of setting is in some ways closer to McDowell’s.) Of course, all three writers are indebted to the examples of Lovecraft and Faulkner, both of whom fictionalized the places familiar to them, then joined the narratives they set in them through a variety of means ranging from recurring characters to shared themes; Lovecraft and Faulkner, in turn, derive from Balzac, who arranged his fictional oeuvre into a vast, inter-related network whose whole is greater than the sum of its parts—which is the ultimate aim of and justification for any such enterprise. It is to McDowell’s credit that, with Blackwater, he succeeds in creating such a structure.**

  McDowell also employs literary techniques that would be at home in the fiction of Balzac, Faulkner, or Welty. Elinor Dammert’s name, for example, is weighted with significance. Elinor, a variant of Eleanor, means foreign, alien, while Dammert is the third person present-tense form of the German verb “dämmern,” whose meanings encompass the coming of dawn or dusk, as well as the figurative dawning of an individual’s understanding. Elinor Dammert is thus the dawning of the other, the alien. Her name coincides with her discovery by Oscar Caskey at dawn on the day commemorating the rising of the resurrected Christ. At the same time, she is found amidst a watery landscape that recalls the dawn of creation at the beginning of the Book of Genesis, when all is water.

  Water is one of the novel’s two major symbols; indeed, so important is the substance to the novel’s design that, McDowell tells us in his “Author’s Note,” he altered the courses of the Perdido and Blackwater Rivers to bring them together above the town. A look at the map that follows that note in the original Avon paperbacks reveals the reason for such a shift. With the “Grove of Live Oaks” positioned at their junction, the intersection of the rivers suggests the mons veneris, the female body written onto the very landscape. It is another way the novel associates water with the feminine, with Elinor. At the place where the rivers come together, there is a whirlpool, dangerous to even the most experienced boaters and swimmers. The swirling together of the red Perdido and the dark Blackwater presents an image of the cyclical, which finds embodiment in the plot, where events repeat themselves in the lives of successive characters, and where the very end of the novel wheels around to its beginning. The blending of the rivers also suggests the merging of Elinor with the Caskey family, as well as more abstract combinations, such as the joining of the female and the male, the supernatural and the natural, the Freudian eros and thanatos.

  The other major symbol in the novel is that of the house, particularly a house within which a character senses something wrong. In his interview with Douglas Winter, McDowell discussed his childhood sense of his grandmother’s house as somehow a bad place, an impression he later found was shared by the rest of his family. He decided to incorporate his memory into Blackwater, where it becomes a leitmotif linking the experiences of a number of different characters. Time and again, a character is alone in a room and aware of a disturbance in the surrounding house, a series of sounds or lights or smells of inexplicable origin. Since the definition of house encompasses family, the disturbed house becomes a symbol for the intrusion of the supernatural into the Caskey line.

  After Blackwater, Michael McDowell would not release another novel of supernatural horror until Toplin appeared via small press in 1985. He had lost his editor at Avon books, which had published Blackwater, and that change coincided with McDowell writing an increasing number of scripts for television and film—most famously, an early draft of what would become Tim Burton’s Beetlejuice (1988). Considering the accomplishment of Blackwater, not to mention his other books, it is hard not to wish he had written more novels before his untimely death in 1999. The body of work he left behind, however, remains and endures. Now that her story is once again available to a wider audience, Elinor Caskey, née Dammert, steps out of the red waters of the Perdido River, her eyes keen. Waiting for her on the shore, Howard Lovecraft and Eudora Welty take her hands and guide her towards the waiting reader.

  Notes:

  * Exactly what Elinor becomes is never made clear. The strength and savagery she displays when transformed suggest an alligator, but while she possesses a tail in her changed form, the other details of her appearance do not suggest the crocodilian. If anything, she calls to mind the Gill-Man from the 1954 film, The Creature from the Black Lagoon.

  Editor’s note: Physical transformation aside, McDowell begins the series with an epigraph referencing a maenad, perhaps suggesting a thematic link between Elinor and the “raving women” of Greek mythology, followers of Dionysus known for tearing animals and people to pieces…and sometimes eating them.

  ** In fact, near the e
nd of The War, McDowell speaks of two of his characters watching the “cold moon over Babylon,” thus inserting a reference to one of his other novels as well.

  BLACKWATER:

  The Complete Caskey Family Saga

  Perdido, Alabama

  pop. 1,200 SITE OF LEVEE WA

  1. OSCAR & ELINOR CASKEY'S HOME

  2. MARY-LOVE CASKEY'S HOME

  3. JAMES CASKEY'S HOME

  4. DeBORDENAVES HOME

  5. TURK'S HOME

  TO GULF OF MEXICO

  Author’s Note

  Perdido, Alabama, does indeed exist, and in the place I have put it. Yet it does not now, nor ever did possess the buildings, geography, or population I ascribe to it. The Perdido and Blackwater rivers, moreover, have no junction at all. Yet the landscapes and persons I describe, I venture to say, are not wholly imaginary.

  For Mama El

  The maenad loves—and furiously defends herself against love’s importunity. She loves—and kills. From the depths of sex, from the dark, primeval past of the battles of the sexes arise this splitting and bifurcating of the female soul, wherein woman first finds the wholeness and primal integrity of her feminine consciousness. So tragedy is born of the female essence’s assertion of itself as a dyad.

  Vyacheslav Ivanov, “The Essence of Tragedy”

  Translated by Laurence Senelick

  I will spunge out the sweetness of my heart,

  And suck up horror; Love, woman’s thoughts, I’ll kill,

  And leave their bodies rotting in my mind,