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

"Who is it, Mama? She's got red hair."
"Sister, I don't know."
Annie Bell Driver stood behind Mary-Love and Sister. "Is she from Perdido?" the preacher asked.
"No!" cried Mary-Love definitely. "Nobody in Perdido has hair that color!"
From the live oak where Bray Sugarwhite deposited Oscar Caskey and the rescued Elinor Dammert a wagon track ran through the pine forest. It went past the Zion Grace Church and the Driver house, crossed the Old Federal Road, and ended three miles farther on in a sugarcane camp run by a black family called Sapp.
Oscar Caskey was the first gentleman of Perdido; even in a town so small, that distinction goes for something. He was first gentleman not only by right of birth—being the acknowledged heir of the Cas-keys—but also by his appearance and his natural bearing. He was tall and angular, like all the Caa-keys, but his movements were looser and more graceful than those of either his sister or his mother. His features were fine and mobile, his speech was careful and elegantly facetious. There was a brightness in his blue eyes, and he seemed always to be suppressing a smile. He had a courtly kind of manner that
29
did not alter according to whom he spoke—he was as courteous to Bray's common-law wife as he was to the rich manufacturer from Boston who had come to inspect the Caskey lumberyard.
On Easter morning, as Oscar and Elinor walked along, the sun behind them shone through the top branches of the pines. Steam rose out of the dew on the underlying carpet of pine needles, and billowed around them. Great sheets of water, still and steaming, lay now and then in slight depressions on either side of the track where the water table had risen above the level of the ground.
"That's not river water, that's groundwater," Oscar pointed out. "You could get down on your hands and knees like a dog and lap it." He stiffened suddenly, with the fear that this had perhaps been an impolite suggestion. To cover up the possible awkwardness, he turned to Miss Elinor and asked, "What did you drink in the Osceola? I believe, Miss Elinor, that it's just not possible to drink floodwater without dying on the spot."
"I didn't have anything to drink at all," replied Elinor. She didn't seem to care that she mystified him.
"Miss Elinor, you went thirsty for four days?"
"I don't go thirsty," said Elinor, smiling. "But I do go hungry." She rubbed her stomach as if to soothe rumblings there, though Oscar had heard none and Miss Elinor certainly did not give the appearance of having gone four days without food. They continued some yards in silence.
"Why were you here?" Oscar asked politely.
"In Perdido? I came for work."
"And what is it you do?"
"I'm a teacher."
"My uncle is on the board," said Oscar eagerly. "Maybe he can get you a job. Why did you come to Perdido? Perdido is out of the way. Perdido is at the
30
end of the earth. Who comes to Perdido except to write me a check for lumber?"
"I guess the flood brought me," Elinor laughed.
"Have you experienced a flood before this?"
"Lots," she replied. "Lots and lots..."
Oscar Caskey sighed. Elinor Dammert was, in some obscure manner, laughing at him. He reflected that she would fit in well in Perdido, if indeed his uncle did find her a job at the school. In Perdido all the women made fun of all the men. Those Yankee drummers coming in and staying at the Osceola talked to the men who ran the mills, and shopped in the stores where the men of Perdido stood behind the counters, and had their hair cut—by a man— while they talked to the men who loafed about the barbershop all morning and afternoon long, but they never once suspected that it was really the women who ran Perdido. Oscar wondered if that were the case in other towns of Alabama. It might, he thought suddenly and terribly, be true everywhere. But men, when they got together, never talked about their powerlessness, nor was it written about in the paper, nor did senators make speeches about it on the floor of Congress—and yet, as he walked beside her through the damp pine forest, Oscar Caskey suspected that if Elinor Dammert was representative of the women of other places (for she must have come from somewhere), then it was likely that men were powerless in towns other than Perdido as well.
"Where are you from?" he asked, a question which followed naturally in the train of his thought.
"North."
"You're not Yankee!" he exclaimed. Elinor's accent didn't grate like a Northerner's, certainly, for it had Southern rhythms and its vowels were sufficiently liquid for Oscar's ear. But there was something strange about it nonetheless, as though Elinor were more accustomed to some other language—not English at all. He had a sudden mental picture, as
31
strong as it was improbable, of Elinor lying on the bed in the Osceola, listening to the voices of men in the rooms all up and down the hallway, imitating their patterns and storing their vocabularies.
"North Alabama, I mean," she said.
"What town? Do I know it?"
"Wade."
"I do not know it."
"Fayette County."
"Did you go to school?"
"Huntingdon. And I have a certificate to teach. It's in my bag that Bray's getting. I hope he won't let anything happen to my bags. I've got all my credentials in one of'em." She spoke her concern a little absently—not as if she really cared what happened to the bags, but as if she had suddenly remembered that she ought to care.
"Bray is a colored gentleman with a large bump of responsibility," said Oscar, touching his forehead as if to point out where that bump might have raised itself upon Bray's head. "As a younger man, he was apt to shirk his duties, but I beat him over the head with a two-by-four, raised a welt in the proper place, and he's never failed me since." As he spoke these words Oscar suddenly decided, in another part of his brain, that he might charitably and conveniently attribute all Miss Elinor's mysteriousness to mental confusion brought on by four days spent alone in a flooded hotel. "But I still don't understand why you came to Perdido," he persisted.
A veil of mist blew away before them and they were suddenly within sight of the church. His sister stood on the front steps, evidently watching out for him.
"Because," said Elinor with a smile, "I heard there was something here for me."
Oscar introduced Elinor Dammert to his mother, his sister, and to the female preacher of the Zion Grace Church.
32
"No sunrise service this year," said Annie Bell Driver. "There's too much trouble in the town. If people can sleep knowing their houses and their chattels are underwater, I say let 'em sleep."
"Miss Elinor came to Perdido looking for a job in the school for next fall," said Oscar, "and she got caught in the Osceola when the water started to rise. Bray and I just now found her."
"Where are your clothes? Where are your things, Miss Elinor?" cried Sister in sympathetic alarm.
"You must have lost everything," said Mary-Love, staring at Elinor's hair. "Floodwater takes everything. I'm surprised you got away with your life."
"I've got nothing at all," said Elinor with a smile that was neither brave resignation nor studied indifference, but a smile that seemed to mock credence.
"Where were you coming from?" asked Annie Bell Driver. One of the children, a colored one, had awakened inside the church and now peered sleepily out the front door.
"I graduated from Huntingdon," said Elinor Dammert. "I came to teach in the school here."
"The schoolhouse is underwater," said Oscar with a sad shaking of his head. "A school of bream have the run of it."
"I saw two desks floating down Palafox Street," said Sister Caskey.