Candles Burning (23 page)

She followed Mama up the stairs.

TO give the two women time to reach Mama's room, I sat on the floor and worked at nonexistent knots in my laces. Then, leaving my tennies at the door, I went barefoot up the stairs.

They were above me, barely inside Mama's room. To my dismay, they gave no sign of moving. I was expecting them to go in and close the door. But they just stood there, not even talking. When I reached the top of the stairs, Mama and Miz Verlow were in Mama's bedroom's open doorway, staring at me. Somehow they must have heard my creeping progress up the stairs.

I bolted for the bathroom. When the doorknob would not turn for me and I realized that it was occupied, I turned back to Mama and Miz Verlow, the panic on my face more genuine than it might otherwise have been.

Miz Verlow pointed down the stairwell. “Under the stairs.”

I whirled and raced down the stairs.

Behind me, Mama said, “I caint tell you how many times I've told that child not to wait until the last minute, Miz Verlow.”

I had little choice but to follow through with my feint and hie for the WC under the stairs. It was an unavoidably dark little room with a steeply rising ceiling and at that moment, unoccupied. I spent a few minutes closeted there. I decided I might as well, so I did. It was worth noting just how much I would be able to hear from that location. On exiting, I was careful to give the door a little more force than it needed to close, so that it would be heard upstairs. Going through the foyer to the screened door onto the porch, I opened it and then let it slap shut, as if a kid had run outside.

I crept up the stairs again. Mama's bedroom door was closed.

I studied on my options. Ear to the keyhole was a ridiculously exposed position. There were doors up and down the hallway and on either side of Mama's bedroom. Most of them opened on other bedrooms, or even small suites, as I would discover soon enough. I sidled along the wall, testing door-knobs as silently as I could, and preparing myself to explain to some adult that I was lost and could not remember which room was Mama's. One after another doorknob proved unmovable.

Reaching Mama's door, I held my breath past it. I turned the hall corner. The hall ended on the landing of the backstairs that went down to the kitchen. Only one full-height door broke the blankness of the wall. A small metal door was set in the wall at waist height. It had to be the laundry chute, the source of the
whumps
I had heard. When I tried the knob of the full-height door, I discovered a walk-in linen closet. Quick as a single beat of my heart, I was inside it, with the door closed behind me. Mama's voice in relentless low complaint helped me locate the best listening post, the wall that the closet shared with our bedroom.

The closet walls were lined with cupboards below and open shelves above. On the open shelves were ribbon-tied stacks of towels. I used the cupboard counter to heist myself onto a shelf about six feet from the floor. A layer of towels softened the hard wood of the shelf, and stacks of them gathered around myself masked me from inadvertent discovery—so I hoped. In my pocket Betsy Cane McCall made an uncomfortable lump, so I extracted her and tucked her among the layered towels. Then I could open my ears completely.

“I know what was in my vehicle,” Mama said, her voice all sharp cutting edges. “Explain, if you please, why everything is not here.”

“But everything is, Miz Dakin.” Miz Verlow did not sound at all threatened.

Mama stamped her foot. “I will not be robbed again!”

Miz Verlow paused briefly and said, “I have heard it said that a thief cannot be robbed.”

“Just what's that supposed to mean?”

“It means that I have given you refuge in my home as a favor to my sister, Fennie. This favor is not without its costs to me, Miz Dakin, as you can easily understand. You have very little means, and I am aware of no prospect of future income. You have a choice. You can accept my terms or you can go elsewhere.”

Mama tore a match across a matchbook with savage intensity, a flame popped and sizzled, and she drew on a cigarette. “Even if everything you just said was true, I don't even know what your terms are!”

Miz Verlow told her.

Cleonie padded softly down the hall.

I held my breath again in the hope that she would pass by. The door open; she entered. She began to take linen from a cupboard. Then she turned to the towels. All at once she paused. She lifted the towels behind which I was hiding with Betsy Cane McCall. Cleonie hooked up an eyebrow at the sight of me.

I held my finger to my lips pleadingly.

Like a bird, she cocked her head and caught Miz Verlow's deadly calm murmuring. Cleonie's lips pursed in disapproval. She dropped the towels down in front of me again and picked up another stack. The door closed behind her.

Even a dunce could see that my luck was clinging to a cliff edge by its fingernails. I crept out of the linen closet half a minute after Cleonie left it. Before the second half of that minute had passed, I had hustled myself and Betsy Cane McCall right out of that house.

Beyond the first great dune and the raggedy parade of tall grasses, the water of the Gulf of Mexico worked quietly upon the sand. Morning light and low tide cast the beach as wide as a desert; there was no end to it in either direction. Breathless from my escape, I paused at the top of the dune to look all around.

Behind me, Merrymeeting stood high and alone. Nowhere could I see any other houses, only swales of sand and the strange greenery.

I wasn't particularly interested in the house. Big as it was, I was no stranger to big houses. Unlike other houses though, this one stood on what seemed to seven-year-old me to be tip-toes. In this, it was more like Uncle Jimmy Cane Dakin's house on its brick piers than Ramparts or our house in Montgomery, which had actual stone-wall foundations and underground cellars. Piecrust lattice skirted the verandahs, hiding a considerable space beneath the house. Scribbles of evergreen shrubs sprawled low along the bottom edge of the latticework. Whatever color the structure had once been, the weather had beaten every bit of it out of the wood, shingles and brick, so the house seemed oddly insubstantial. An insistently real television antenna poked above one of the roofs. It made me think of the stave on which music is written. The antenna meant that Miz Verlow did not think that television was a passing fad. I had not heard a television yet but that only meant that it was off.

In the near-enough future, I would learn Miz Verlow's rules about use of the radio-hi-fi-phonograph console and the black-and-white Zenith television that squatted in the small parlor. Guests might listen to radio, either the Stromberg Carlson in the library or one brought with them, but must mind the volume in deference to their fellow guests. The television set was available for a very limited time each evening, with majority rule in choice of programming.

A drapery twitched. Miz Verlow looked out at me from Mama's window.

Spinning about, I raced down the dune toward the beach. Some of the allegedly Yankee guests had also come out to play. A few were already settled on wooden and canvas chairs brought from the verandah to the beach. Another few tramped along the beach.

Scurries of little birds rushed the negligible waves in retreat and were immediately routed in peeping frantic flutters by the incoming wave. I hunkered down at the edge of the water to watch and listen to them. Their names as yet unknown to me, their voices were enthralling. I became aware too of the squeak of the clams under the sand. The water dampened my tennies but I wouldn't melt.

After some time, I straightened up and used my toes against the opposite heel to kick off my tennies. If Mamadee had seen me do it, I'd have gotten a hiding for sure.
Lazy and careless of expensive footwear, two evidences of degeneracy at once.
I picked my tennies out of the water and flung them toward the dunes.

The shore seemed to go on forever. I started to run through the water where it sloshed upon the sand. I had no destination nor any desire to ever stop. I just ran. It was a glorious feeling to be moving barefoot through the shallow of the water at the greatest speed I could summon from myself. The long day's travel in the car must have wound me up like a spring. Of course I was nearly always wound up like a spring. Nothing more or less than the violent energy of childhood, as uncomplicated and irrational as the very elements themselves, propelled me.

When my side finally stitched and I slowed, I was out of sight of the house and of a single soul. On one side of me sparkled the restless water of the Gulf. On the other, a wilderness of dunes dozed in the sun. Behind me and before me, the sand stretched down the middle. As I turned back in the direction from which I had come and moved higher on the beach, out of the shallows and onto the wet sand, I left behind me the only footprints on the beach. I jumped high, twitching myself into a half-turn, and came down facing the other way, so that I could walk backward for a while, amusing myself with my false trail.

Distantly, a pickup truck or small van worked along the dirt road beyond the dunes. From its open windows came a faint but steadily strengthening female voice, with an accent like Desi Arnaz:

 
I went back to the top of the dune, where I could see the road. A small, shabby van rolled at no great pace toward the house, its windows down. On its side were the words:

 
The driver of the
ATOMIC LAUNDRY
van wore his black hair in a crew cut. As I ran closer, I saw that he was Chinese. Or Japanese. I was ignorant of the fact that there were any other varieties of Asians. Ford had once informed me that Japanese could be distinguished from Chinese by the direction, up or down, of the slant of their eyes, but I could not remember whether it was up for Japanese, down for Chinese, or topsy-turvy. In any case, I assumed that Ford was lying, as usual, so it didn't matter.

The
ATOMIC LAUNDRY
van driver waved at me as he rounded the side of the house toward the kitchen. I raced down the dune and after him, arriving in time to see Cleonie lean out an open window on the second floor.

Chiquita's song had given way to a Bosco ad:

 
The van's driver killed his radio.

Leaning out the window of his van, he called out, “Yoo-hoo, Missus Cleonie Huggins!”

Cleonie waved and disappeared into the house.

The van man began unloading wicker baskets of ironed and folded bed linen, and of towels. He was a small, neat man, in white trousers and a white jacket of a uniform kind. His shoes were brown and very polished. He looked young to me—by which I mean that his skin was unwrinkled and that he had no white hair—but otherwise he was one more adult in a world full of them.

By way of the door with the ramp, Cleonie emerged carrying a wicker basket of unlaundered linen and exchanged it for one of the clean ones. The van man remarked that it was a nice day; Cleonie agreed. Going in and out of the house, she made the exchange of baskets several times. I tried to help but the basket was too heavy for me.

“You too small,” the van man told me, as if it were news to me.

The discovery that Cleonie might change the beds and clean the bathrooms but that she did not launder the linen was momentarily interesting. Investigation (I asked Miz Verlow) revealed that the water from the well was too precious to use for laundry, so all the linen and clothing went off to the
ATOMIC LAUNDRY
in Pensacola.

Over the next few days, I discovered that Merrymeeting depended upon the services of many tradespeople. A milk truck delivered milk, cream, ice cream, butter and eggs and, most of the time, the newspaper. If the newspapers missed the milk truck, they might arrive with the mail lady, who in those golden days came twice a day and once on Saturday—or with one of the other deliveries. Local fishermen—one of them Perdita's husband—brought fish and shellfish to the back door for Perdita's perusal. Miz Verlow ordered what Perdita wanted by way of meat from a superior butcher in Pensacola, who subsequently delivered it. Groceries were also delivered. Local people often knocked at the back door with some seasonal delicacy. And while all this busyness was going on, Miz Verlow's house ran smoothly, by and large, so her guests hardly knew how much went into it.

I stumbled after Cleonie up the ramp and into the house.

“Cleonie, where's the laundry chute?”

“Rat 'ere.” She tipped her chin straight ahead of us.

We were in the back hall behind the kitchen, at the bottom of the back stairway that rose to the landing where the linen closet was. The backstairs allowed Cleonie and Perdita and Miz Verlow to move about the house without being underfoot of the guests. A small high door like the one that I had seen up the backstairs was set into the wall we faced. The bottom edge of it was at my eye-level. The wooden knob was an easy reach and immediately I pulled it open. Inside was an empty tin-lined cylinder of space. On tiptoe, I stuck my head in and looked up the tube rising to the higher floors. That inspection completed, I bounded up the stairway. Cleonie came hurrying after me.

The door to the laundry chute on the landing was closed. Just beyond Cleonie's grasp, I yanked it open and, letting out a rebel yell, dove into it headfirst.

My stomach felt like it was falling faster than the rest of me but I barely had time to notice it before I was spilling out the open laundry chute door on the first floor. My face met the floor and the rest of me was right behind, on top of it. The impact was briefly stunning, as if I had run into a wall, before the blood started to spurt from my nose. My glasses fell off my face as I curled like a possum.