Candles Burning (15 page)

“Calley and I will share,” Mama said.

“No,” the woman said pleasantly, “the little girl gets one of her own.”

She held out the limp pages and I took one. Not from the top and not from the bottom, but from somewhere in the middle of the limp stack. Typical of the mimeograph process, the words were smeary, and the greasy state of my lenses did not help me in making out the words. The gloves on my hands made holding the sheet difficult as well.

These were hymn sheets. As they were passed out to all the Dakins, a preacher—not the one from St. John's but a rotund lay preacher with mail-order dentures and a shiny-seated suit—recited the verses about
To Everything There Is a Season
. It is very popular at funerals, presumably comforting to the mourners, but in this instance, I realized when I was some years older, it was grotesquely inappropriate.

When the preacher was through, the woman with the marcelled orange hair raised up her hand as if everyone had been talking and she wanted silence, though no one was doing anything at that point but clearing throats, blowing noses, and shuffling from one foot to another.

She shut her lips tight and hummed a note.

Then all the Dakins began to sing.

 
I sang the way Daddy did. Mama sang very loudly, to drown me out. Ford stepped on the side of my foot, which only made me sing louder. None of the Dakins seemed the least surprised that I could sing like Daddy. We all sang the word
there
to rhyme with
afar,
which made Mama cast her eyes heavenward very briefly. No archangel of proper pronunciation saw fit to punish us with a lightning strike, however.

 
It was on the chorus after this second verse that I got into trouble. The words on my mimeographed sheet were different from everybody else's.

Everybody else had the chorus just as it was before. But the words I sang were just for me:

 
Uuuuhk
shrieked the crow in the raggedy pine.

As soon as we had finished the chorus and all the Dakins were starting on the fourth verse, Mama grabbed the mimeographed page out of my hand and hissed at me, “Calley, what in the hell are you doing?”

 
I tried to get the page back from her—the mimeographed page that I had chosen from out of the limp stack that the woman with the orange marcelled hair had offered to me. The page I had chosen the way a volunteer from the audience chooses a card from the magician's proffered deck. The page that had a message on it meant just for me.

But Mama threw it into the hole under Daddy's coffin in the ground. It fluttered down like Betsy McCall's head when I sliced it off. Then the Uncles Dakin lowered Daddy's coffin into the crumbling pebbly earth on top of it. It seemed to me less that they were interring Daddy than that they were making certain I could not retrieve the ripe-pear-smelling mimeograph.

I threw myself onto the coffin, only to be snatched out by the long arms of an uncle. I struggled wildly in the tightening enclosure of those strong arms.

“ ‘You are my sunshine,' ”
I sang out,
“ ‘you make me happy when skies are grey.' ”

Hushing and shushing me, Uncle Billy Cane Dakin carried me away.

THE funeral reception for Daddy was at Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin's house—a big old place in the backside-of-the-moon country outside of Montgomery. When I saw the place, I realized that Mamadee must have won this battle too.

Uncle Jimmy Cane's house was sided in wide weather-beaten unpainted boards. It had narrow doors, narrow short windows with only a couple of panes each, and three or four dormers indicating a warren of half-story rooms that were surely as frigid in the brief Alabama winter as they were sweltering the other ten months of the year. A wide, dusty porch undulated three-quarters of the way around the house. The whole thing stood raised up on stacks of brick five feet high, with cool dark sand beneath where snakes made swirled patterns and raised miniature dunes. A dusty field that in another season would be scabby with a failing crop of some unpalatable vegetable planted by Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin, his wife, Gerry, and their pack of boy Dakins surrounded the house.

Mama had no intentions of going inside. She parked the Edsel a few yards from the house. Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin brung an old twig chair down from the porch and arranged it next to the car for Mama. There she smiled a sad smile and spoke a few soft words from behind her veil to various Dakins when they approached her with their halting condolences.

Ford took off his tie and stuffed it into his jacket pocket. He refused even to look around but slumped into the backseat with his hat yanked down to cover most of his face.

Mama said, “Calley, go inside and see if you can find me something to drink with ice in it. And wash the dead bugs out of the glass before you pour anything into it, you hear me?”

Mama said this last just loudly enough to be overheard by a Dakin or two, and just softly enough that they might think she had not so intended.

The Uncles and Aunts and Cousins Dakin parted before me, creating a winding path that led up to the creaking wooden steps. They murmured and cooed at me soothingly.

The screened door opened before I touched the handle. The woman with the marcelled orange hair, the very one who had played the organ at St. John's and passed out the hymn sheets at the Promised Land graveyard, beckoned me inside.

I had visited Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin's house half a dozen times with Daddy but this visit—final, though I did not know it—is what I remember of it. In the Edsel, I had made a surreptitious effort to clear the lenses of my glasses with the hem of my dress without significantly improving their clarity, so I continued to see everything in a haze. The rooms were square and high-ceilinged. The sun had bleached the chintz curtains in the windows almost colorless. Long dried-out wallpaper with patterns faded past comprehension blistered and peeled on the plastered wall. The linoleum on the floor buckled like the coverlet on a slatternly made bed. The kitchen sink wore a homemade skirt made of a worn-out checkered tablecloth, while there were no proper kitchen cupboards, only open shelves on iron brackets. Aunt Gerry cooked on a wood-fired black-iron range, ironed with the flat-iron on the shelf above the burners, and stored perishables in an icebox. The kitchen smelled strongly of the beagles that slept behind the stove.

I kept looking through the open doorways for a glimpse of Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin or Aunt Gerry, or Aunt Jude or Uncle Billy Cane—anyone at all would do, so long as it was not this woman I did not know, who had given me that mimeographed sheet of pear-smelling paper in the graveyard. My stomach roiled with uneasiness.

“I am not
really
a Dakin,” the woman confided in me, as she drew me deeper into the house. “My half-sister's niece by marriage married one of Jimmy Cane Dakin's grown-up boys, but he was killed when his pickup ran into a five-point deer on the Montgomery highway, and later she died giving birth to triplet sons. Only one of the boys survived but he was never right in the haid. So I am not a Dakin, like you are, but I am connected to the family, so I guess I am connected to you.”

I nodded in mute agreement.

“How is Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin taking it? The death of your daddy, I mean?”

It seemed odd how she called Mama
Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin
instead of
your mama
. The oddity made me cautious how I answered.

“Everybody says it is hard on her.”

“That's right,” said the woman with the orange marcelled hair—as if her question had been
What is the capital of North Dakota?
and my answer had been
Bismarck.

“And by the way,” she said, as if this were my reward for having given the right answer, “my name is Fennie.”

“Fennie what?”

“Fennie Verlow. I have already prepared a glass of sweet tea for Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, who must be exhausted with holding up in the face of her desolation and grief. Just let me add some ice and you can take it out to her.”

Fennie came up with a handful of ice cubes from a cooler on the kitchen table, and dropped them one by one into the tall glass of sugared tea.

“Take it to Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, honey.” As I took the glass from her hand, she added, “And you can tell her that I washed all the bugs out the glass before I poured the tea.”

When I repeated Miz Verlow's message, Mama's eyes widened behind her veil as if she had seen a ghost. Her fingers failed to grip the glass and the iced tea spilled out onto the crumbling track the front tire had made in the bright sandy earth. Mama swooned, seeming to melt right there in the twig chair. Aunt Jude and Aunt Doris and Aunt Gerry hurried over. One of them lifted her veil back over her hat so they could pat Mama's cheeks, daub her temples with dampened hankies, and coo comfort at her.

Mama came around long enough to whisper weakly, “Today had more hours in it than I expected.”

Then Mama's eyes rolled up in her head. She would have slipped right out the chair if Miz Verlow had not suddenly been there to help the aunts. The four of them gently lifted her into the front passenger seat of the Edsel.

Miz Verlow whispered in Mama's ear. Nobody was close enough to hear but me and Ford, who had dropped his hat and leaned forward in the backseat.

“You caint drive this car, Miz Dakin. You are a desolate widow with two orphan children and no man to guide you or provide for you or side with you against the world. So ride soft and ride safe and let me take you home. You sleep cool and cushioned and dream of Joe Cane Dakin like he was still alive. I will drive you safe home.”

At first, I took it that Mama was unconscious again and did not hear any of Miz Verlow's soothing instructions. But I was wrong.

Mama heard enough to murmur, “You drive. I just want to close my eyes. Don't let Calley talk.”

The Aunts Dakin finished loading up the trunk of the Edsel with the funeral baked meats, jars of soup, covered casseroles, foil-covered tins containing things that were baked in layers, wrapped-up cakes, pies with crusts that floated like scum over chunks of unknown fruit in dark syrup, and Nehi drink bottles filled with dense, sugary liquids and stoppered with saturated corks. And all these foods smelled of burned dyes, warping linoleum, unwashed bodies, and the spattered residue of rendered fat.

Ford and I sat silently in the backseat, both of us tensely aware of Mama's condition. Mama breathed slowly, unmoving as Miz Verlow adjusted the visor against the sun.

As we passed a Tallassee town line sign, Mama's eyes fluttered. A moment later, she stretched and yawned and began to grope for her Kools in her brown Hermès Kelly bag.

“Calley,” she said, “show this nice lady—whoever she is, and it does not seem to me that she could possibly be a Dakin—show this nice lady the way to Rosetta's. We are going to leave all that food at her house. It was very nice of the Dakins to go to all that trouble. But I will not—and you will not—we will never—eat anything that was cooked by a white woman who cannot write her own name.”

“Aunt Jude can write her own name,” I volunteered. “Daddy says she gone all the way to the tenth grade.”

Ford said, “Shut up.”

“Amen,” said Mama.

“I already know the way to Rosetta's,” said Miz Verlow. “And by the way, my name is Fennie Verlow.”

Mama spoke around lighting the cigarette between her lips. “Pleased to make your acquaintance.”

I said, “And she is not a Dakin either.”

Ford whipped his tie out of his jacket pocket and snapped it at me.

“You think I would have said what I said if she had been?” asked Mama.

Mama and Fennie Verlow laughed together.

Rosetta's girls unpacked all the food and carried it inside her house. Before the trunk had been even half emptied, children and neighborhood mothers were clustering at the back door. When all that was done, Miz Verlow drove us to Ramparts.

“Calley, Ford, help Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin inside the house,” Miz Verlow instructed us. “She is still far from completely herself.”

Ford and I helped Mama up the steps—she was indeed still somewhat shaky—and we beat on the front door until Mamadee came herself to open it.

The instant Mamadee saw me, she said, “Somebody
else
better be dead, Calley Dakin, because there is no other excuse for you making a racket like that!”

Mama swayed just then, and it looked to me like it might be Mama who was the somebody else dead. But Mamadee did not want to believe that Mama wasn't carrying on.

“Roberta Ann Carroll,” she scolded. “Get your head up and stand up straight and breathe.”

Tansy arrived, still wiping her hands on her apron, and took Mama's arm. With Ford on her other side, they set out to help Mama upstairs. Mamadee followed them, ragging at Mama the whole way, accusing her of carrying on to get sympathy.