BLACKWATER:The Mysterious Saga of the Caskey Family (66 page)

CHAPTER 50
BILLY BRONZE

Every Saturday and Sunday throughout the duration of the war, Perdido was flooded with soldiers on leave from Eglin Air Base. Some of these men wanted to attend church and others wanted to find a local girl to take to the dance hall built on stilts out over Lake Pinchona. These soldiers were eagerly taken in by Perdido families, given massive plates of fish on Saturday night, hams and racks of ribs on Sunday after church, and entertained on the front porch afterward. The servicemen were admitted free to the Ritz Theater and lent automobiles for drives to the lake. In return, the people of Perdido got extra ration coupons, smuggled tires, and food no longer available in the stores. Perdido remembered how the town had been changed by the influx of levee workers back in '22, and this wasn't all that different, except that the men were in uniform, came from all parts of the country, and were—thank God!—much more polite. At the end of every Sunday church service, the congregation sang all four verses of "God Bless America" from an insert glued in the front of their hymnals. During this patriotic song, Elinor always looked about at the congregation, and would pick out the three or four or five soldiers she would ask home that day. During the postlude she would point out her choices to Queenie and Sister, and all three would hurry off to capture the men before anyone else got to them. For soldiers, Zaddie, Ivey, and Roxie fixed dinner and supper. Alone, the Caskeys had always got by with just dinner. Every Sunday, Elinor's dining room was crowded with family and the visitors in uniform. Some of the men from Eglin came only once, but most returned two or three times. Those particularly favored by the family visited the Caskeys at every conceivable opportunity. The family had never been so social or garrulous. There was always an Air Corps man worrying the cooks in the kitchen, sitting with Elinor on the porch upstairs, or waiting on the front steps for Frances and Miriam to return from Mobile late in the afternoon.

Occasionally colored servicemen came and lounged on the lattice or in the back yard, much to the delight of Zaddie and Luvadia.

Sometimes, at meals, their numbers were so large that the dining room would not hold them, and the food was served on a buffet set out on the upstairs porch. They flirted with Sister, who was older than the mothers of most of them; they treated James and Oscar with deference. They were in awe of Elinor, and studiously polite around Frances and Miriam and Lucille as if to show the complete innocence of their intentions. They tried to take Danjo hunting, and they challenged Grace to increasingly more strenuous bouts of athletic prowess.

Most of these uniformed visitors were never around long enough to form really intimate ties with the family. After a certain amount of training they were shipped out to Europe or the South Pacific. The Cas-keys received a postcard or two, sometimes censored, but soon communication usually ceased.

The single exception to this transience on the part of Elinor's multitude of guests was a corporal from the North Carolina mountains. His name was Billy Bronze. He was an instructor in radio mechanics and permanently stationed at Eglin for the training of recent enlistees. He was strikingly handsome, with dark blond hair, gray eyes, and a jaw blue-shadowed with beard. His manner was reserved but self-assured. He was twenty-seven, and since most of Elinor's guests were no more than nineteen or twenty, he seemed mature in comparison. He once put a stop to some rowdiness in the back yard between white and colored soldiers and for his welcome intervention he was remembered and particularly asked back again. He came the next day, and the day after that. One weekend, he was asked to stay in one of the guest rooms if his leave and commanding officer permitted. He did so the following Saturday night. Elinor came to rely on Corporal Bronze to keep all the boys in order, to weed out troublemakers, and to recommend those lonely men at Eglin who were most likely to benefit from the Caskeys' hospitality.

Billy, in most circumstances, was straightforward and friendly; with Frances, however, he seemed shy. Despite this shyness, and Frances's natural diffidence, they sought each other's company. And there were many opportunities for them to be together. Billy came to Perdido at least two evenings a week and sometimes more often. He spent every other weekend there, sleeping in the front room. In a house bustling with family, servants, and guests, however, the two young people rarely found themselves alone.

Oscar said to his wife one Saturday night as they lay in bed after the house was quiet at last, "Corporal Bronze is paying a lot of attention to our little girl."

"Yes, I believe he is," replied Elinor.

"What do you think of that?"

"I think Billy's a fine young man."

"Is he good enough for Frances?"

"Nobody is good enough for our Frances, but she's bound to get married sometime, and Billy wouldn't be nearly as bad as some of the boys who have come through here. But it's one thing to feed them at the dinner table, and it's another to have them marry our daughter."

"Do you think we should say anything to Frances?" Oscar asked.

Elinor shook her head. "Frances will have decisions to make sometime or other. She's only twenty. Maybe she can put them off."

"Elinor, what sort of decisions are you talking about? You mean getting married?"

"No... not that," murmured Elinor vaguely. "Oscar, let's go to sleep. With these boys around, my days are always long..."

The Caskeys saw the incipient romance between Frances and Billy Bronze, but they were more curious to see how Elinor would react to it than they were to watch the actual progress of this tentative courtship. They all still remembered how Mary-Love, dead for five years now, had discouraged all relationships outside the family; she would have had everyone remain unmarried and dependent upon her if she had had her way. Elinor had taken Mary-Love's place in the family, and it seemed to them that in that role she would react just as her mother-in-law had. But Elinor did not. She made no objection. In fact, she encouraged Billy's visits warmly, saying, "Frances enjoys having you around so much. The rest of us do, too." Late on Saturday nights, after all the other boys had returned to Eglin and only Billy remained, Elinor took her husband off to bed and left Frances and Billy alone on the screened porch.

On one such night, after they had been thus thoughtfully abandoned, Billy and Frances sat next to each other in the swing, rocking slowly and fanning themselves with paper fans. The hot night wind blew through the high branches of the water oaks, and the kudzu rustled on the bank of the levee. By the hundreds, moths anchored themselves to the screens, attracted to the low lights on the porch. Frances talked about Sacred Heart, and Billy spoke of Eglin. That night he kissed her.

The following night he kissed her twice.

"Who's your family?" Frances asked.

"I just have my father," he said. "And he's old and mean. Got money, though," laughed Billy.

"Your mania's dead?"

"He killed her."

"Killed her!"

"Talked mean to her for twenty-five years, until it just wore her out. He started talking mean to me at the funeral—because she wasn't around—so I joined the Air Corps. He said, 'Don't do it, Billy, I need me somebody to talk to.' I said, 'You talk to the walls and your empty bed. Goodbye.'"

"You shouldn't have spoken to your daddy like that," said Frances reprovingly.

"He killed my mother," returned Billy simply. "It was either join the Air Corps or end up beating him over the head with a two-by-four. I would have done it, too, if he had been talking mean to me for another two minutes."

"I'm sorry you don't get along."

"I am too. That's why I like coming around here."

"Why?" asked Frances.

"Because you're such a happy family."

Frances gave a little laugh.

Danjo was seventeen and in his junior year in high school when war was declared. James Caskey prayed God every night that Danjo might not be influenced by Elinor's visiting servicemen to enlist on the day that he turned eighteen. James would have been as forlorn without Danjo as Queenie was without Malcolm—who didn't even bother to write to his mother.

"You don't want to leave me, do you, darling?" said James. They were having breakfast one morning before Danjo went to school. Grace had left an hour earlier for an early morning swim at Lake Pin-chona.

" 'Course not," replied Danjo. "But probably I got to, James, unless they call off the war."

"They're not gone do that, I'm afraid. No, sir."

"I've been talking to Billy—"

"Don't you talk to those boys, Danjo, not even Billy Bronze!" cried James. "They're gone want you to join up. Bad enough they're always wanting to put a gun in your hands. Haven't Queenie and I taught you better than that? You remember what happened to your daddy and how he died. You remember what your brother did to poor old Dollie Faye Crawford. You think about that next time somebody puts a gun in your hands."

"I hate guns!" cried Danjo vehemently.

"You're my precious boy!" said James, and squeezed Danjo's hand across the table.

"Still, I was talking to Billy..." Danjo resumed tentatively.

"And?"

"James, you know I got to sign up next year sometime, I just got to."

"It's gone kill me if you do! I suppose you have to do it. This country has been so good to us, and now I guess it's time for us to be good to it. But I don't want you picking up a gun unless you are planning to shoot Adolf Hitler himself."

"I won't," promised Danjo. "Let me finish, will you? Billy said if I signed up now—"

"No!"

"—if I signed up now," repeated Danjo deliberately, "I could sort of have my choice. And what he said was I could join the Air Corps and he'd talk to people and try to get me stationed over at Eglin. I could get in the Radio Corps, and Billy would take care of me for as long as he could. See, that's all I was trying to say, James, and you wouldn't let me finish!"

"Does Billy really think he could get you stationed over at Eglin?"

"He says he could try."

James nodded slowly. "Then the next time I see him I'll speak to him about it. Maybe if you were over at Eglin, Danjo, it wouldn't kill me to have you gone."

"You'll have Grace here," Danjo pointed out.

"Grace will not make up for the loss of my little boy. Danjo, I just don't know what I'm gone do without you! I'm such an old man—I'm an old gray mare— and there's no more children around for me to steal and bring up like they were my own."

"Maybe Grace'll get married and have children, and you can take one of hers," suggested Danjo brightly.

"Grace is already an old bachelor," sighed James. "She's not gone get married. That's fine, 'cause she's pretty happy staying here with me, but I'm not gone get any grandchildren out of her."

"You want me to get married then?"

"I most certainly do not! You are too young to even think about that! I haven't even told you yet..."

"Told me what?"

James shrugged, embarrassed. "How babies get born."

"I know that!" laughed Danjo. "James, I'm seventeen, 'course I know that!"

"Who told you?"

"Grace."

James shook his head slowly. "She would have."

"Grace tells all the girls, and one day she told me, too. She's got these pictures, James, you ought to see them—"

"Don't talk about this to me at the breakfast table, Danjo. I don't want to hear it! If you know all about it already, then we don't ever have to mention it again."

"No, sir!" laughed Danjo.

Following Billy's suggestions, and with James's reluctant assent, Danjo joined the Air Corps in September of 1942, though he would not be formally inducted until the following June, when he had turned eighteen and graduated from high school. Nothing could be certain in this war, but Billy provided tentative assurances that Danjo, after three months of basic training, would find his way back to Eglin. James could not be happy, however, and thought only of the scant nine months that remained for Danjo to be at home with him.

He sighed to Grace one afternoon, "Every morning I get up and I say to myself, "There's one less day Danjo's gone be around.'"

Grace always took the forthright and practical view of any matter. "You've still got more than half a year of him. Enjoy that, Daddy. Don't ruin it by always thinking of when he's going away. And just remember, he'll be headed back to Eglin before you know it. Two years from then he'll be a civilian again, and he'll come back here and things will be just like they always were."

"He could get killed. He could get his legs shot off. I may be dead," protested James Caskey. "Things are never 'just like they always were' again."

Grace slapped a magazine against the arm of the glider with a crack. "Daddy," she said, "you have got to be the silliest man I ever met in my life. I don't know what I'm going to do with you for the rest of this war."

The efforts of Billy Bronze in the cause of keeping Danjo Strickland and James Caskey together were fully appreciated by the Caskeys. They not only liked Billy, they were now indebted to him. Elinor no longer extended invitations to him, because he only had to appear to be welcomed. He was regarded as one of the family to such an extent that his presence never restrained them from talking about private family matters. He heard details of old family enmities, and new family finances that no one in Perdido knew about. Short, testy arguments exploded in his presence, and little moments of affection were exhibited before him. He became another Caskey son, brother, uncle, and cousin.

The corporal was a favorite also of his commanding officer. He was allowed, so long as he did not abuse the privilege, of sleeping over at the Caskeys on some week nights as well as every other weekend. Oscar lent him one of their automobiles, saying that with gas rationing they had no use for it anyway. Billy Bronze came and went with ever-increasing frequency; the front room was always ready for him. Elinor, trusting both Billy and Frances implicitly, did not even bother locking the linen corridor that connected the two rooms.