Candles Burning (43 page)

“I'm filthy,” I said. “Miz Verlow sees me like this, she'll wan know why.”

I had an idea that I was going to go downstairs and clean up. But when I started to get up, I had to sit back down again.

Roger said, “Uh-oh.”

“Tight?” asked Grady.

“Am not,” I insisted.

“Better stay sat down then,” Grady advised.

“I'm gone melt,” I said. I leaned forward to blow out my candle.

The boys weren't expecting the sudden darkness around me. They jumped and then snickered to hide their momentary alarm.

I drank the last of the tea. Queasy, dizzy—I closed my eyes.

Grady and Roger got their hands under my elbows and guided me toward the stairs.

They told me where to put my feet. “Down. Now the other.”

“Here's the bathroom,” said Grady. “Maybe you better stop here and pour some water over your head.”

They walked me in and I sank to my knees. Grady pushed my head over the side of the bathtub. Roger turned on the shower tap. Water spurted over my head and down my back. The ends of the gauze scarf dripped down my face and into the bathtub.

The water stopped, one of the boys wrapped a towel over my head, and they sat me down next to the toilet.

“What are we gone do with her?” Grady asked Roger.

“Caint leave her,” said Roger.

Between the two of them they half carried me out of the house and out onto the beach and walked me into the Gulf up to my waist. They held me up like bookends. The light outside was a blinding glare. My eyes were running water and everything was blurry.

“One, two, three,” the boys counted and they pushed me down under the water. I heard Grady say, “I baptize thee in the name of the Lord.” Roger laughed. They hauled me up like a dead fish. I leaned over their arms and vomited into the sea.

“There,” said Grady, “reckon you feel better.”

They let me down among the tall grasses. Roger squatted next to me, holding one hand, cooing at me.

Grady came back in a few moments with a jug of water, some aspirin and towels.

I was shivering. They wrapped me up and administered the aspirin and water. Grady made a chair of himself for me, holding me between his legs, letting my head rest on his shoulder.

I closed my eyes.

I listened to the Gulf. The nearly ever-present wind. A pulse, a breathing. The more intently I listened, the more I heard “You Are My Sunshine,” from the multiple brass throats of a calliope.

MIZ Verlow was not deluded that I was sunstruck, nor poisoned by a bad oyster.

“I've heard the lie about the bad oyster already,” she told Grady.

“Yes'm,” he agreed.

I could hear them outside my room, where Grady and Roger had finally deposited me, in all my ludicrous glory.

Some inchoate impulse to help Grady out moved me just then to fall off the bed and crawl under it. Miz Verlow and Grady lunged back through the door that they had just exited.

Just too dumb and too sweet to leave me, Grady had been sitting at my bedside when Miz Verlow and Mama returned from the Fiesta. Mama's feet hurt so it fell to Miz Verlow to find out what Grady Driver was doing sitting in my room, and what I was doing, sprawled like a wino on my sweat-drenched sheets.

Once I was back in bed, Miz Verlow sent Grady on his way. She sat on the edge of the bed and studied the knot in the gauze scarf. Patiently, she picked it out. My head immediately felt less constricted.

From beneath my eyelids, I spied upon Miz Verlow's brief examination of the scarf itself. She made a little face, one of distaste, before she dropped it in the ragged little basket that I used for a trash can. A question struggled to form itself in my head.

“How much bourbon do you owe me for?” she asked.

“A pint.”

“You must have gotten most of it.” She spoke with real satisfaction. “I caint get you out of doing your mama's feet. Try not to throw up on her.”

“Yes'm.”

“Take a bath now, and try not to drown. Drink a lot of water though. Grady said that he gave you aspirin.”

“Yes'm.”

Miz Verlow stood and moved to the door. She looked back at me.

“Was Grady a gentleman?”

I moaned. “What's that mean?”

“You know what that means.”

“Are you inquirin' about the purity of Southern womanhood?” I asked in Mama's voice.

“How very amusing,” said Miz Verlow, in a tone that made it perfectly clear that she did not find it the least bit so.

“Grady's too dumb to cop a feel, if that's what you mean. Or anything else. Look at me, for crying out loud. I'm ugly.”

“So's Grady,” said Miz Verlow. “Ugly never stopped sex yet.”

“Ha-ha. Roger was there. He chaperoned.”

That made Miz Verlow really angry.

“Funny, ha-ha,” she said.

If cold were ice cubes, her words could have chilled a nice glass of water for me.

She came back to my bedside and bent over me to say, “I never want to hear of you hanging around with Roger Huggins again, with or without Grady Driver. Do you want to get the boy strung up from the nearest tree? Think of his mama, if you can think of anything but yourself.”

She slammed out, leaving me to think about it. I heard her going up the stairs to the attic, and then moving around above my head.

In 1955, a gang of white-sheeted bastards had murdered a fifteen-year-old kid named Emmett Till for whistling at a white woman. It's entirely probable that Emmett Till did not in fact whistle at that woman, or make an outrageous remark, or any thing of the kind.

I might have been only thirteen but I could not claim ignorance of that horror story. Roger had showed me the copy of
Life
magazine with the pictures in it, that his daddy had tucked away trying to keep it from him. Nathan Huggins didn't buy that copy at any newsstand. If that issue was sold in any newsstand in Pensacola, it was unlikely that it was sold to any colored man who asked for it. Mr. Huggins's copy came to him by way of a cousin in Chicago. Roger had found it by accident. His daddy found him crying over it, and they had a long talk.

I was chastened. I made myself get up and go to the bathroom to bathe. Lolling in the bathtub, I wanted to sink beneath the water and not come back up.

I made my way to Mama's room and did her feet while she told me all about her day at the Fiesta. Of course it had all been terribly hard on her poor feet. Even as Mama nattered, I found myself longing to crawl into the bed next to her and listen to her heartbeat and the breath going in and out of her lungs, and go to sleep.

Mama stopped talking suddenly. She jammed the butt of her cigarette into her ashtray.

“Calley, baby,” she said, “you look like hell. Got your period? You just crawl up here and into this bed.”

She slipped between the sheets too, and tucked them up around me. It was too hot for blankets; sheets were only bearable because the punkah fan turned steadily overhead.

Mama began to snore gently. Her pulse fell into a counterpoint with the fan. Seventy beats a minute, I thought. Her lungs were a little cloudy but had been a long time. It didn't seem to be getting worse. She had gotten bonier, I thought. No, her flesh was slacker.

I was overwhelmed with how much I loved her. How much I needed a Mama to love.

Though we no longer slept in the same room, I had gone on, as I had as long as I could remember, massaging Mama's feet.

And frequently Mama would come to my room late at night, shake me awake as roughly as if the house were afire, and demand to know what opinion I had on the subject of Adele Starret and the probability of her contesting Mamadee's last will and testament. She feared that if Adele Starret moved too aggressively against Mamadee's estate, Lawyer Weems would make it seem to Ford that his mother was trying to defraud him of his rightful inheritance. What then if she lost the suit? She would also be forfeiting her son's love and would end up with exactly nothing, exactly less than nothing. I told myself that I couldn't
know
that she had already lost Ford's love, if she had ever had it, but at my angriest, I was unable to be cruel enough to her to tell her so.

Mama was privately relieved that we heard so infrequently from Adele Starret. Mama convinced herself that the minute my brother, Ford, reached his majority, all the world would be put right again. Once he was out from under the legal authority of that
thief,
that
liar,
that
salt-scum
lawyer Winston Weems, then Ford would take control of whatever was left of the family fortune, and he would raise Mama back to her rightful place in society.

Ford was still alive, I had no doubt. I had not heard his voice among the voices the Gulf waters brought me.

Nightmares wracked my sleep. They were not new ones, which made them all the scarier, for I knew where they were going and still could not escape. On waking in the morning, though, with the
caw-caw
of the old doorbell loud in my ears, the memory was clear in my mind of opening the door to the ghost who called herself Tallulah Jordan, who had worn the scarf that I had found in the attic.

MERRY Verlow began to keep close track of the key to the attic. When I had something to take up or retrieve, she made sure to be there. She allowed me no loitering time there to find the framed poster again. There was always another and urgent chore to be done. Trying hard to get back into her good graces, I promised myself that I would find it later, and let later become a lot later.

The high school I attended was something of an odd place—newly built, for one, and so lacking both history and cohesion. At least half the students were service brats, which meant the student population was in constant flux. Of the locals, none of us were as well-heeled, as well-traveled or as well-spoken as the children of the military. Our focus was hardly ever really on school, but on our families, on jobs that we had in the mornings before our first classes or that we had to leave for, early in the afternoon.

My courses and classes were arranged so that I could leave each day at two. Grady left at two as well; he did a full day's work plumbing before and after school.

Grady lived with his daddy, next door to his granddaddy and right behind his five uncles. His daddy and uncles shared a couple of chronically broken-down boats from which they derived occasional income. They each had their own chronically malfunctioning pickup trucks, out of which they would sell small quantities of fish or shellfish by the side of the road, to people who didn't know them and wouldn't be able to find them if the fish made them sick. They were all divorced, widowed or abandoned, or some combination thereof.

Having lived so long in a woman-run household, what little I knew about the way men thought, reacted and behaved, I had had to glean from our male guests. Grady and his family were another tribe altogether. They brought to mind my half-forgotten Uncles Dakin. I could not remember any of my uncles being divorced or widowed but they had all been known to drink, get into fights, get arrested, have car wrecks, go bankrupt, do the occasional weekend in the county lockup, and find Jesus during every tent revival that came their way. The power of their wives—short of teeth and hard-worn—had been just as real as Cleonie's power over Nathan Huggins, or Perdita's over her Joe Mooney.

One Saturday night in the summer between sophomore and junior year, Grady and I got high on a six pack of Straight Eight. The beach was the perfect place to hoot and holler and crow. Jokes and teasing and handholding turned to grab-ass and went on from there. Of course we were clumsy and ignorant and made a mess the first time but our randiness sufficed, as it commonly does, to overcome our embarrassment.

We were grateful to each other, oh yes—Grady because of his extreme shyness and me because I was too young to realize that being goofy-looking is no bar to sexual activity. Miz Verlow was right. Our friendship allowed us the candor to admit that
truelove
was not a factor. I wasn't Grady's girlfriend, I just had the basic girlfriend equipment, and he wasn't my boyfriend, just had the basic, etc. We were horny and curious and that was good enough for both of us.

That first time—idiot kids that we were—we took our chances and consequentially did some educational suffering, and got clean away with it. After that, Grady pilfered condoms from his father and uncles, so we didn't worry about that little awkwardness, except for the times when one broke and another one slipped off, and we went through the sweet-jesus-spare-us again, just like everyone who has ever depended upon what, back then, we called safes.

Mama and I were incapable of maintaining a truce for more than a few hours. The only reason we didn't kill each other was because I avoided her as much as I could. At first she didn't realize it and when she did, she got on her very highest horse. After that she tried playing martyr about it. None of it got her anywhere with me. By then, my heart was entombed in Alabama marble.

Mama's pretense that I was not her child occurred more often after I began my periods and intensified when she had become interested in some man. After Gus O'Hare, I recall her dating a wildlife photographer, then a former Navy flyboy come back to revisit his glory days in Pensacola, and then a radio engineer, Ray Pinette. I learned something from each of them, especially Ray. I tried to find something in each of them to like. And I tried to stay out of her limelight.

Mama went to the dog-track, the pictures, out to dinner, off on long romantic rides in her boyfriends' cars. She smoked all she wanted, and drank a lot of expensive booze. She was only unhappy when she wasn't getting her way, and that was going to happen with or without boyfriends. Sooner or later, the real Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin showed up to slap any infatuation across the face, and sink a stiletto heel into its foot.