BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family by Michael McDowell Page B

what kind of thing makes James happy? Buying silver. I have seen him do it. He sees a cake knife he doesn't have, his face shines. A fish slicer?—the same thing, a shining face. Now, with all that, not to mention the mill to keep him busy and raising a little girl, what on earth does he need a wife for?"
    It was a peculiar thing that no scandal was breathed in the length and width of Perdido over the fact that James Caskey, a well-off man who was mercifully separated from his wife, had invited a very pretty, unattached, and penniless young woman to share his home. The people of Perdido looked at it this way: here was a teacher come to town, whose money and certificates and clothing had been lost in the flood. She needed a place to stay until she got on her feet. James Caskey had this big house with at least two extra bedrooms in it and he had a little girl who could use a woman around to teach her manners, and with his wife off in Nashville doing nobody-dared-suggest-what, James himself needed somebody to talk to at supper. At the same time, everybody whistled and wondered what Genevieve would say, if only Genevieve knew. Elinor Dammert was smart; people could tell that just by looking at her. And Elinor Dammert probably had a temper; anybody with hair that color had a temper. But whether Elinor Dammert could stand up to Gene-vieve Caskey was a question charitable people hoped would never be put to the test.
    The damage inflicted by the floodwaters had not been confined to animals and man-made objects. Flowers, shrubs, and trees had perished by the thousands, and the whole town had to be replanted. The most extensive damage had been to the Caskey grounds. All the trees had been uprooted. There were no more crape myrtles or roses, no more beds of day lilies, bearded irises, and King Alfreds, no more hedges of oleander and ligustrum, no more specimens of hawthorne or Japanese magnolia. The azaleas remained in their beds around the house, but they were dead. The camellias looked dead, but Bray said they had survived and Mary-Love accepted his opinion—at any rate, she did not demand that they be dug up. And certainly there was no more grass. The river had deposited over the ground half a foot or more of sopping red mud. Every day, Mary-Love and Sister watched for blades of grass to sprout through the red soil, but every day they watched in vain.
    The DeBordenave and Turk yards, which had suffered equally, had been dug up and reseeded, and the mud from the Perdido seemed to have brought with it a great number of nutrients, for their lawns sprang up sudden, green, and splendid, growing more lushly and certainly faster than ever before. But next door at James Caskey's, the yard was a flat expanse of dark mud. And at Mary-Love's place it was the same. After a few weeks the sun dried out that dark river soil and left a layer of gray sand two inches deep, with the reddish river soil packed beneath that. Sister picked up a fistful of this sand and let it drift through her fingers. Mixed in with the sand were the desiccated grass seeds that Bray broadcast every Friday afternoon. The destruction of the Caskey lawns was a subject for comment in Perdido, for the little plague of sterility was confined only to the Caskey lots. The DeBordenaves were not affected at all, the sand stopping in a straight line at the end of the Caskey property and the grass beginning immediately on the other side. The sand continued to the edge of Mary-Love's deeded property, at the town limit, where the pine forest began with its dense and prickly underbrush. By the end of June, Mary-Love and James had given up hope of ever growing grass again, and Mary-Love hired little Buster Sapp to come every morning at six-thirty and rake patterns in the sand with a leaf broom. By the end of the day most of Buster's careful work had been obliterated by footsteps of servants and visitors and the inhabitants of the houses, but Buster was always there first thing the