Candles Burning (38 page)

Around the edges of the draperies, I could see that the dark had thinned enough to see through. Christmas Day was at hand.

AT the first mechanical
caw-caw!
of the doorbell, I nearly fell out of the chair. My sudden movement sent the flame of the taper wavering, at which violent anxiety froze me in place. I could not breathe again until the flame stood up straight again. The only time that I had ever heard the doorbell previously was when I was playing with it. It was one of those old brass bells that made a charming metallic
caw-caw!
when its exterior wingish keys were turned. Due to the constant exposure to salt, this particular bell was rather hoarse in its chime. I remember the odd seawater taste of it very well. All one morning I had studied the mechanism, and Mama caught me licking it. She advised me that I was never to touch the doorbell again, on pain of having my hands chopped off, let alone lick it, which would cause my tongue to be cut off. Miz Verlow and Cleonie and Perdita never complained at all; indeed, I thought that they seemed to be amused, at least until Mama threatened to cut off my tongue.

The doorbell ground out its salty
caw-caw!
again. Upstairs, sleepers began to stir in response.

With my finger burnt, finding a way to pick up the candlestick with my dominant hand required considerable caution and effort. The actual gripping of the candlestick intensified the hurt. Fortunately, I was only steps from the door.

I turned the key in its keyhole with the weaker grip of my other hand. The innards of the lock fell over; I tried the knob. It yielded slowly. I thought surely the bell would chime again, angry as the screeching pain at the tip of my finger. The door creaked on its hinges. I peered out at our first caller of the day.

In the cold wind off the Gulf, a woman hunched shivering, her hands shoved into the pockets of a thin Windbreaker. Her face looked frozen—carved of some semitranslucent plastic, like the glow-in-the-dark Virgin Mary on the dashboard of Mr. Quigley's Chevy Bel Air. Through thick glasses rimmed with frost, her unblinking eyes seemed more like eyes frozen in ice cubes than those of a living person. The thickly glossed lipstick around her mouth made a caricature of lips. A fancy gauzy scarf with sequins on it circled her throat. She wore tennis shoes with the rubber toes separating from the dirty canvas fabric.

I let the door fall open and thrust the candlestick at her.

She took her left hand from its sheltering pocket and grasped it. Instantly the candle's flame guttered and died. Her gaze met mine and her head dipped slightly. Her knuckles were reddened and chapped from the cold, her fingernails blue with it. Like her face, her hands might have been made of holy-mother plastic.

“Merry Christmas,” I blurted.

In a throaty rasp that I only understood because she spoke slowly, she said
Oh, is it? Is this
—
Merrymeeting?

I nodded numbly. She had been heralded by my dead great-grandmama. Like Mamadee, she was uncertain about her location. But I hardly needed to deduce that she was some kind of ghost, as I heard it in her voice. After all, I had been listening to the voices of the dead since birth and it would be peculiar if every passing day did not sharpen my sense of distinction between those voices and the voices of the living.

I am Tallulah Jordan,
she said.

I stepped aside; she entered. I closed the door behind her against the wind.

“No one but me is up yet,” I told her. “I'm going to make some fresh coffee.”

I'd like that,
she said.

She was either a coffee-drinking ghost or approved of my making it.

In the kitchen, I gestured toward Cleonie and Perdita's little table. Tallulah Jordan placed the candlestick on it. She scraped a chair away from the table and turned it around and sat in it backward, watching me as I prepared coffee.

“I can do tea, if you'd rather,” I said.

No, no, coffee's the thing for me
. She took off her glasses and polished and dried them on a linen napkin, before putting them back on again.

I prepared the coffee with one hand tucked into my armpit. Awkward as it was, I was less likely to drop something if I didn't use the hand with the burnt finger. While the coffee brewed, I toasted and buttered some bread. When I put the plate on the table in front of her, she tucked away the toast as if she had not eaten for a week. Or years. She licked her lips. I poured her orange juice to follow her toast. She reached eagerly for the mug of coffee when I offered it.

I took the opportunity to study her while I could. By the noises above us, I knew that we would be interrupted very soon.

Bony chapped wrists and fingers, bony frozen face, her chinos belted with worn woven leather, she looked like death on a bad day. Tallulah Jordan wasn't just underfed, she was emaciated. Frail. Her hair was stiff and frosted with salt blown off the Gulf. It was black hair, that solid black that shouts dye.

I poured her a second mug, aware of her studying me as I had her.

What's your name?
she asked.
What's wrong with your hand?

“Calliope Carroll Dakin. I'm more Dakin than Carroll.” I didn't answer the second question.

She almost smiled. She held out her hand and I put my own hand, the one with the burnt finger, in her palm. She kissed my finger. All at once, the pain was gone. She released my hand and I stepped back from her slowly, staring at my finger, and then at her, and again at my finger. The burn was still there but there was no pain.

When I looked up from it again, the candle on the table was burning once more.

I heard Miz Verlow's step on the backstairs. My gaze was drawn toward the door that she would come through and I tensed like a guy wire.

A cold, bony hand grasped my wrist. I nearly jumped out of my skin. If I had been sitting in that chair by the window again, I
would
have fallen out of it.

Tallulah Jordan stared at me intently as she gripped my wrist.

Listen to the book,
she said in her sandpapery voice.

The door to the backstairs opened at the very instant that my hand fell loose from that grip.

Miz Verlow stopped abruptly in the doorway. Her face drained of color, and she sniffed the air as if she smelled smoke.

“I burned the toast,” I said.

Miz Verlow frowned disbelievingly at me.

I moved toward her, intending to get away and upstairs as fast as I could. She seized my wrist as I passed her, and let go as if she had burned her hand on me, and looked at her palm as if I had burnt her.

“The doorbell,” she said.

There was no question in her voice but I responded as if there were.

“It was me,” I confessed. “I'm sorry.”

She knew that I was lying. I didn't want to find out what else she knew. Or did not know. She was seething with anger and, more interestingly, fear.

“You let the candle go out,” she said.

“No, ma'am.”

The “ma'am” did not mollify her. “Who was here, Calley?”

I yawned and fidgeted. “Nobody.”

She looked disgusted with me, and I had no doubt that she knew that when I used the word
nobody
that I was only telling the technical, literal truth.

“Get out of my sight, Calley Dakin,” Miz Verlow said, “and the next time I see you, I want the truth.”

I lunged for the backstairs.

I looked back to make sure that Miz Verlow was not watching me, and slipped into the linen closet, closing the door behind me as silently as I could, in case Miz Verlow was listening.

In a moment my eyes adjusted to the darkness and I could make out the darker dangle of the chain pull with its white ceramic knob at the end that turned on the light inside the closet. I gave it a yank. Both knob and chain felt creepily colder than they should have. I usually enjoyed pulling a light chain, feeling the catch when it was at its full length, and then slowly releasing it, waiting for the instant that the bulb lit, or went dark. In that instant of electric light, I saw where I was and where I wanted to go, and yanked the chain a second time to return the closet to darkness. No line of light would be showing at the bottom edge of the door.

Dropping to my knees, I crept to my shelf of books.

How could I be certain that Tallulah Jordan meant one of these books when she told me to
listen to the book
? Some people called the Bible The Book. She had said
listen,
not
read
.

I ran my fingers across the row of spines. As I touched the
Audubon Bird Guide,
the finger burnt in the candle flame instantly hurt again, hurt as bad as when it was actually in the flame. Reflexively I jerked it back. And it stopped hurting. Stopped burning. I braced myself, and gingerly touched it to the spine of the bird guide again. This time there was no pain.

And a voice said.
This one
.

It was not the voice of Tallulah Jordan, or my great-grandmama or Mamadee. It was the voice of Ida Mae Oakes, the mellifluous, comforting voice of Ida Mae Oakes. My eyes welled and I nearly blubbered. I tugged the book from the shelf and hugged it tight.

I had been up all night. I climbed to my favorite shelf and settled into a comfortable nest of toweling and feather pillows and tucked the book under the pillow for my head. I didn't think of pajamas or brushing teeth or any of the everyday going-to-bed routine. Dr. Keeling's odd prayer came to mind. I heard my great-grandmama Cosima speaking again:

I could hear the water clearly, rushing in and out, and it sighed like great wings 
all around me.

THE clock seemed to have stopped that Christmas, for when I came downstairs again in the early afternoon, after dinner, the stockings still hung from their hooks and none of the gifts under the fake tree had been opened. It was the first time that I realized that grown-ups did not have to struggle to postpone opening their presents. Such an indifference to the excitement of Christmas morning shocked me, and made me feel sorry for them to have it mean so little to them. It seemed to me in that instant of realization that this was the clear dividing line between being a child and being an adult. Adults were people who had lost the innocent greedy joy of Christmas morning.

Still wearing the previous day's clothing, and looking like an unmade bed, I'm sure, I was fortunately disinclined to mourn my future, thanks to the hunger of a healthy growing child unfed since Christmas Eve's supper. I rummaged myself a bellyful in the kitchen and then wandered to the parlor, where the tree stood forlornly, its odd and gaudy fruit strewn meagerly about it.

Father Valentine sat alone in his favorite chair, wearing his blind-man's dark glasses, and doing nothing. He heard me enter, of course, and grinned.

“Is it Rip Van Calley?” He cackled. “I thought you'd be sitting here with everything all opened when I came down this morning.”

“Merry Christmas,” I said.

“And to you,” he replied. “It had ought to be merrier, really, in
Merry
Verlow's house. I believe I like the smell of the smoke from this wood fire as much as I do the warmth from it. Nostalgic.”

“What's that? Nostalgic.” I twiddled my sock dangling from its hook under the mantel.

“The way you wish it once was, but of course it wasn't. Bring me my stocking, Calley. I'm tired of waiting for it.”

Father Valentine never hesitated to play at being childish, and when he did there was a quaver in his voice that was as good as a wink. It was a relief to have a grown-up at least willing to fake a little Christmas excitement.

Using a hassock as a step stool to reach it, I unhooked his stocking. It was mysteriously lumpy but even though the fabric was stretched thin to near transparency, I could not make out what was in it.

He took it eagerly and ostentatiously felt it all over.

“Grand,” he said. “Just what I wanted. So thoughtful.”

As if at a signal, the rest of the household began to filter into the parlor, greeting me with Merry Christmases and joshing about Father Valentine and me getting the jump on the presents.

Dr. Keeling paused by her chair to ask, “What do you have there?”

“Mine to know and yours to find out,” said Father Valentine. His hands clenched around his stocking. “It's mine and you can't have it.”

“Don't want it,” Dr. Keeling answered, “but I'd take it if I did.”

“No squabbling, you two,” Mr. Quigley said. “Not today.” He took down my sock and gave it to me.

Miz Verlow and Mama arrived lastly, after the Slaters.

I squatted on the turkey rug with my sock at my feet. There was a rectangular box in it, the corners catching in the fabric, requiring me to work it out a snag at a time. I had it in the grasp of thumb and forefinger when Miz Verlow walked in. She paused to flip a switch and the lights on the aluminum tree bloomed like a dozen candle flames. The cranes on the tree wavered slightly as if on a passing air, but it might have been an illusion caused by the sudden multiple sources of light on the highly reflective tree.

The sock clung to the rectangular box, which was about the size of a pack of cigarettes. Miz Verlow stooped over me to seize the toe of the sock, and the box slipped out into my hand.