Blackwater: The Complete Caskey Family Saga by Michael McDowell Page B

written on the kitchen table directly after his noontime meal. Miss Elinor would read the note and write another in reply. Zaddie would take this note to the mill and walk straight into Mr. Oscar’s office. Everybody in the school and everybody in the mill knew what Zaddie was doing, who had written the notes, and to whom they were directed.
    Zaddie began to get to know Miss Elinor’s students by name, and once, when she got there just at recess, she had even jumped rope and was able to teach the little white girls a rhyme they had never heard before.
Elinor Trimble Toe, she’s a good fisherman She catches fish and puts them in a pan Some fry up and some fry down Wire and bar and limber lock Clock fell down and mouse ran round To my dying grandma’s house With the old dirty dishrag in her mouth
    Zaddie was proud of her daily errands, and didn’t care a bit if Miss Mary-Love wouldn’t speak to her anymore because of her services in the courtship of Miss Elinor and Mr. Oscar.
    Because their big meal of the day was at noon and supper consisted of leftovers, Mary-Love found it difficult to complain when Oscar said he was going over to eat at James’s where the food was hot. “You are bothering James,” Mary-Love ventured to object, when she could refrain from objection no longer. “You are running up his food bill.”
    Oscar shrugged and replied only, “Mama, James eats dinner with us over here every day and you don’t charge him a penny. He can afford to have me for supper once in a while.”
    “Every night!”
    “He asks you and Sister to come too.”
    “It would drive poor Roxie into the ground if all of us went over there all the time.”
    “No, it wouldn’t. Roxie doesn’t have to cook during the day. And she told me she didn’t see why you and Sister ate cold food when you could have hot.”
    Mary-Love wouldn’t reply, for she wouldn’t bring herself to admit that she refused to sit at the same table with Elinor Dammert. War, it should be understood, remained officially undeclared. Sister wasn’t allowed to go next door either, and at home she just picked at her cold plate and wished she knew what they were talking about over at James’s.
    No mother and daughter in Perdido were closer than Mary-Love Caskey and Sister, but it was not to be supposed that either told the other everything she thought or knew. In fact, each of them liked to keep little secrets from the other, secrets which could be sprung at some opportune moment to produce a grand effect—rather in the manner of a little boy tossing lighted firecrackers beneath his sister’s bed while she napped on a hot summer afternoon.
    What Sister was holding back just now was not exactly a secret so much as it was an opinion, and that opinion had to do with Elinor Dammert. It was Sister’s belief that Elinor was a powerful young woman, and that the power she wielded was exactly the sort to which Mary-Love herself had become accustomed. Elinor Dammert put things in place. She set things up. She set things right. She picked up people and she put them down again where she wanted them as a child might arrange the figures in a wooden Noah’s ark. Sister even had a mental image of James Caskey as a wooden figure. In her mind he was on a round base and a single stem represented his legs. Grace was a much smaller such figure. Zaddie was painted black and Oscar had the biggest smile. And Elinor Dammert, in Sister’s imaginings, threw her arms about the waists of those figures and lifted them up and carried them where she wanted them to be and put them down again. The figures wobbled a little, but they stayed in place.
    Mary-Love, by contrast, wheedled. She set up psychological stratagems by which her will was accomplished. Elinor was more powerful of the two, Sister suspected. Mary-Love only sometimes seemed so, because Elinor was holding back. While it was perfectly within Elinor’s power to pick Oscar up and put him where she wanted him, she wanted