"Blackwater - 01 - The Flood" - читать интересную книгу автора (McDowell Michael)

Without thinking, he leaned inside the window and peered all along the outer wall. His fear had been subsumed by curiosity.
"Lord have mercy," he murmured. "Mr. Oscar," he said to himself, rehearsing the speech that would procure pardon for his failure to bring back both bags, "I look all over that room, and it just not there. Would have gone but not no place to tie the boat to, I—"
But there was—a little tongue of painted metal around which the cord of the Venetian blind had been wound. Bray cursed his own eyes for picking that out. He knew he couldn't lie to Mr. Oscar, no matter what his fear now, and still cursing his eyes and his inability to tell Mr. Oscar anything but gospel truth, he tied the slender mooring rope of the boat around that tongue of painted metal. When the boat was tethered to the window he carefully raised one foot onto the casement, and in a single slow bound found himself inside the hotel room.
The carpet was sopping wet. Foul floodwater was squeezed from beneath his boots. The morning sunlight poured into the room through the window in the eastern wall. Bray approached the bed where Mr. Oscar had seen Miss Elinor sitting. Experimentally, he pressed a finger against the spread. It too was sopping—and coated with a black grime. Though he had pressed lightly, foul water formed a dank pool
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around that finger. "It wasn't there," said Bray aloud, still rehearsing the conversation he would have with Mr. Oscar. Why didn't you look under the bed? demanded Mr. Oscar in Bray's voice.
Bray leaned down. Black grimy water dripped from the fringe of the spread all around. Beneath the bed was a grimy black pool of stinking water. "Lord my Lord! Where'd that white woman sleep?" cried Bray in a whisper. He turned around quickly. No suitcase. He went to the chifforobe and opened it. Nothing was in it but an inch of water in each of the drawers on the left-hand side. There wasn't a closet in the room or anywhere else for the case to have been hidden—even supposing Miss Elinor had wanted to keep him from finding it, and Miss Elinor had particularly wanted him to fetch it. "Lord, Mr. Oscar! Somebody come and done stole it!"
Bray was already headed back to the window, but Mr. Oscar, in Bray's voice, demanded now, Well, Bray, why didn't you look out in the hall?
" 'Cause," whispered Bray, "that old room was bad enough..."
The hallway door was closed, but there was a key in the lock. Bray moved over to the door and tried the handle. The door was locked, so he turned the key. The key itself was grimy and black. Bray pulled the door open.
He looked down the long uncarpeted hallway. There was no case. He saw nothing. He paused a moment, waiting for Mr. Oscar's voice to demand that he go farther. But no voice came. Bray breathed relief, and eased the door closed. He returned to the window and climbed carefully out into the boat. It was while he untied the tethering rope slowly, savoring the notion of his having come through this unpleasant adventure safely, that Bray noticed what he had not seen before: the sunlight shining through the window now illuminated the high-water mark
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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?
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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
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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
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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, and made quite a pet of little Ruthie Driver. The Zion Grace Church had been their home five days.
On Easter Sunday morning, Mary-Love Caskey and her daughter, Sister, sat with Annie Bell Driver in the corner of the church. They were the only ones awake in the large room. Caroline DeBordenave and Manda Turk lay closest to them on adjoining mattresses; they were turned toward each other and snoring lightly. The servants lay with their children in the far corner, now and then stirring, or crying out softly at a dream of high water or water moccasins, or raising a head and looking blearily about for a moment before falling asleep again.
"Stand outside the door," said Mary-Love quietly to Sister, "and see if you see Bray and your brother coming up the road."
Sister rose obediently. She was thin and angular, like her widowed mother. Her hair was the usual Caskey hair: fine and strong, but of no particular color, and therefore undistinguished. She was only twenty-seven, but every woman in Perdido—white
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or black, rich or poor—knew that Sister Caskey would never marry or leave home.
The wagons with all the Caskey, Turk, and DeBordenave goods had been drawn up before the church and were guarded day and night by one or another of the servants with a loaded shotgun. The DeBordenaves' driver sat sleeping now on the buck-board of the wagon nearest the road, and Sister walked quietly so as not to disturb him. She peered down the wagon track through the pine forest in the direction of Perdido. The sun was just rising over the tall pines and shined in her eyes, but the light in the forest was still dim and green and morning-misty. She craned her head this way and that. The driver stirred on the buckboard, and said, "That you, Miz Caskey?"
"Have you seen Bray and my brother?"
"Haven't seen 'em, Miz Caskey."
"Go on back to sleep then. It's Easter morning."
"The Lord is risen!" the driver cried softly, and lowered his head to his chest.
Sister Caskey shaded her eyes from the watery morning sun that was the color of cheap country butter. A man and a woman stepped through a veil of mist in the forest and paused in the wagon track.
"Where'd your girl go?" asked Annie Bell Driver.
"Well," said Mary-Love, craning her head, "I told her to walk outside and see if she could see Oscar and Bray. They went into town to see what the damage was. I didn't want them to, Miz Driver. I didn't want them in a rowboat. Oscar since he was little was always trailing his fingers in the water, not thinking about it. There's nothing in the water but water moccasins and leeches, I know it for a fact, so I told Bray to watch out for him. But Bray doesn't pay any attention," Mary Love finished with a rueful sigh.
Sister appeared in the doorway.
"You see them, Sister?" demanded Mary-Love.
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"I see Oscar," said Sister with hesitation.
"Is Bray with him?" asked Mary-Love.
"I didn't see Bray."
"I want to speak to Oscar," said Mary-Love, rising.
"Mama," said Sister. "Oscar's got somebody with him."
"Who is it?"
"It's a lady."
"What lady?" Mary-Love Caskey went to the open door of the church and peered out. She saw her son, a hundred feet away in the track-road, standing talking with a woman who was thinner and more angular than Mary-Love herself.