Candles Burning (46 page)

Like a punishment for my petty larceny, any hope of quick contact with one or another uncle, who might know where Ford was, died aborning; not one of them was listed in Birmingham, Montgomery, or Mobile, or in the respective counties of those towns. And in those towns, the Ford agencies—no longer Joe Cane Dakin's Ford-Lincoln-Mercury—had no one working for them named Dakin, and no one able to check any records that might have existed since the agencies changed hands, but somebody “might get back to me when they had the chance.”

No Adele Starret or Fennie Verlow was listed in Montgomery or Tallassee. Dr. Evarts was not listed in Tallassee either as regards his office or his residence and there was no office number for Mr. Weems, only a residential one. I supposed Dr. Evarts might have unlisted his home telephone number, and perhaps joined a practice with other doctors, but the directory assistance could not tell me if that was so. Lawyer Weems, old as he was when I last saw him, might very well have retired.

School let out, and a few days later, Colonel Beddoes took Mama to the airport. Within five minutes of seeing the tail end of his MG scoot down the road, I locked myself in Mama's bedroom and went through every last inch of her space and all her hidey-holes. It had been a while since I had bothered with a complete search of her things. I had thought that I knew them so well, they were boring.

The only address book that I found, at the back of a drawer, was one that I had given her for Christmas in 1962: still blank, every page of it, with not even her own name written in the front. In the tin-lined pot chamber of her nightstand were all her papers having to do with Adele Starret's contest of Mamadee's will, including a copy of the document itself. As I read through them all, it was apparent to me that their real purpose had been bamboozling Mama into thinking that something was happening. I copied the return address and office telephone number from one letter with some excitement. When I studied on the will, Mamadee's naming of herself as Deirdre Carroll stood out as odd in a way that it had not when I was a little girl. She wasn't born a Carroll. She should have had a maiden name in the middle. Unless she was a Carroll cousin of sufficient distance to avoid incest. Or not. Maybe incest didn't apply to Carrolls, the way it didn't to Egyptian pharaohs. More rummage turned up Mama and Daddy's wedding certificate, then my birth certificate. But not Ford's. Had Mama destroyed it in a fit of pique or frustration? Just as likely it was in some file somewhere with the papers that concerned his legal custody.

About Daddy, there was nothing else—no death certificate, copies of his obituary, personal papers or love letters. And of evidence of the existence of any other Dakins, there was none either.

The only photographs were two that Mama had brought from Ramparts: a school photo of Ford at eleven, and of herself, sitting on the railing in her shorts. No wedding photos, no baby photos, no family photos.

Satisfied that there was nothing more to glean from Mama's room, I tidied it up, but with no attempt to make it appear untouched. Mama would think that Cleonie had cleaned it. If she noticed anything out of place, she would blame Cleonie. Any guilt that I felt at Cleonie catching blame, I assuaged with the likelihood that in the chaos of her belongings in which Mama lived, she would not in fact notice at all.

Cleonie was more than able to defend herself. Mama had blamed Cleonie for something nearly every day of our lives at Merrymeeting. Cleonie unhesitatingly met Mama eye to eye and with imperturbable calm, rendering untenable the accusation of the day. The most revenge Cleonie ever took that I could identify as such was in serving me the best portions of whatever was going and of treating me better than Mama did.

Roger told me that his mama looked on my mama as a different species, Mama's insults and idiocies as the natural nastiness of Mama's kind. A cat
will
claw a wicker chair. Beyond a quick squirt of water to drive it temporarily away from its mischief, little could be done but accept cat-clawed wicker. Mama and cats were one of those mysterious ways Cleonie's AME Christian God moved his wonders to perform. I was pleased to think that Cleonie did not allow Mama to be more than the most minor irritant in her life.

One afternoon, Miz Verlow went to the dentist in Pensacola to have a root canal done. I took the key to the attic from her office.

I still hoped to find an old address book, a family Bible, a photo album, a shoebox of photographs, a cardboard box of personal papers. The framed poster. As I groped my way among the litter of objects, many of them shrouded, I thought it unlikely I would ever be able to find anything that Mama had brought with us.

Something fluttered. I paused briefly and the flutter erupted again, out of the dark, an oilier feathered darkness that coalesced into a fish crow, setting gently onto an object nearby. I held still, so as not to frighten the bird, and out of my own animal caution in any new situation.

The crow perched there blinking at me. We studied each other a moment, and then it began to preen itself, darting its sharp beak into its own feathers, looking for whatever itched it. It was a letdown to have bored it so quickly.

Just as abruptly as it had settled, the crow rose suddenly with a loud
uhhhk
. It brushed one of the bulbs in passing, and for half a moment, the light was querulous and confused, showing one thing and then another. I glimpsed a collection of umbrella stands: The handles and shanks rose up from the open tops as if someone had stuffed dozens of flamingos and herons and ibises upside down into the stands.

In another direction, the moving light caught the dusty drops and pendants of a chandelier hanging, lopsided, from a rafter over the coarse-woven shape of a grand piano. The shroud turned the piano into its own ghost. On its back it bore a collection of candlesticks and candelabra and wee-willie-winkies, some of them with the stubs of tapers sagging in them, melted not just by fire but by the heat in the attic.

In yet another pass of the light was a blur of clock faces. All stopped, I knew by their silence, even as I cringed and crouched, to duck the swaying bulb that might hit me. Or light me up for something to see.

The light steadied, still weak and dirty. I put my hand out to help me rise to my feet again and touched rivets and metal. Starting, I lost my balance and landed on my backside on the dry splintery planks of the attic floor.

The thing that I had touched was a metal footlocker. As my eyes adjusted to the dimness again, I was quite sure that it was green and black. My throat closed with panic. I scrabbled backward, hands and heels to the floor, backside lifted enough to avoid friction with the planks. Out of the darkness came a mocking
uuuhhk!

If my throat had not been so dry, I might have cried out, but I was spitless.

I came up into a hunker again. I hugged myself and stared at the locker. The dull clasp poked through the tongue of the locker's catch but there was no padlock. I was mesmerized by that loose hanging metal tongue pierced by the clasp; it seemed an emblem of torture, inhuman torture. I felt a little dizzy: torture. Inhuman torture. Not inhumane; how silly would it sound to speak of humane torture. The screams would be of laughter. Inhuman. A cat playing with a bird, a rotten kid sticking a firecracker into a croaker's hind end.

It was another
uhhk
and a rush of wings that broke the trance. I could not make out the crow in the darkness but I knew that it was there, its eyes fixed on me, mockingly. I was not to be allowed to flee the attic until I opened the footlocker.

My approach on my hands and knees bare on the planks was slow and painful, but I wanted to feel that discomfort, to help divert some of the fear, the terror, of what I was about to do. Too quickly, I was kneeling next to the footlocker. I touched the loose hanging tongue in slow motion. It was cool—no, cold—to the touch, under the eaves of that oven of an attic in Florida in May. Hinges creaked as I lifted it, reluctance balled up in an ache in my stomach. The lid rose
screakity screak
.

The locker held only emptiness but it was bottomless. Perhaps it was not a locker at all, but a hatchway to somewhere else. It seemed to me that there were stains on the walls inside and that it gave off an ancient dead-meat smell. Daddy's first coffin, that we had left behind in the Hotel Osceola in Elba, Alabama—now it was here, and had been all the years that we lived under this roof, under this attic. It had sat there above us, waiting for me to find it.

Carefully I waggled fingers over the top edge and then over the opened locker. Slowly I lowered them, steadily waggling, into the emptiness of the locker. That emptiness was very cold. My fingers seemed to darken and then disappear into the icy darkness inside the locker. I tried to pull my hand out but it did not respond. Again panic rose in my throat and my heartbeat lunged into a violent gallop, but even as I yanked uselessly, I felt my hand again, responding.

Unbalanced again, I fell backward onto my backside once more, my right hand coming after me. For an instant it seemed as if my arm was elongating, and then it was normal and my fingers were closed around something disgusting that I flung back toward the locker. It hit the front of the locker. The impact shivered the locker. The lid dropped down like a mouth full of teeth taking an enormous bite.

Splayed on the planks, I stared through my knees at the thing that I had pulled from the locker. It was doll-sized, not the small kind that my Betsy Cane McCall had been, but baby-doll sized, large enough to fill a little girl's arms for rocking.
Ida Mae, the baby doll I never had
. It was loosely bundled in yellow rags, and its face was wax, droopy pallid yellow dirty wax that looked like a face falling off. Around the misshapen skull was a tangle of colorless hair tied into two ponytails, over knobs of wax like wings that might have been, before the wax softened, overlarge ears. Behind the pink plastic-rimmed glasses, mended across the nose with a cruddy knot of tape, the eyes were sharp metal buttons.

Shaking, I drew myself up and poked the thing with the toe of one sandal. It was soft. Stuffed. A weird rag doll, its body and limbs sewn of cotton scraps. I recognized the scraps; I used to have a pair of overalls and a shirt very like them. I nudged the weird rag doll again and it fell over. The head wobbled as if in a panic and fell off. At its lumpy wax feet, the face, such as it was, looked up at the eaves. The glasses did not fall off; they appeared to be stuck in the bridge of the nose.

As if a string had been pulled to unravel it, the doll's arms dropped away from the torso. The legs twitched once, splaying as the torso sank between them. Even as the rag doll collapsed into its component parts, the yellow rags fell too, forming a nest for the parts. But the strangest thing was between the rag doll's splayed legs: Betsy Cane McCall. Almost naked, shaved bald, and looking—well, parboiled. Her nudity was emphasized by the rigging of straps around her torso. It looked like an old braided silk belt and suspenders—very like the bird harness that I found in the drawer of the semanier that day with Roger and Grady, but without the egg. And stranger yet, she was all tucked up, her head down, her arms and hands crossed over her chest, her knees bent and tucked up to her belly. Like the drawing in the
Encyclopaedia
in the public library, I saw, like a fetus.

 
Listenlistenlistenlistenlisten

 
Someone hovered over me.

A rackety little fan stirred the air. The smell of the sea wafted in through an open window.

I was on my own bed in my crooked little room. The someone hovering was Cleonie. Her hand closed around mine on the sheet.

I didn't want to open my eyes yet. I wanted to take an inventory of myself, to see if I were all in one piece, and not bleeding, not bone-broke, not dismembered. I wanted to be sure of what I would see: Cleonie, my room.

One cool drop, two drops, fell upon my lips, from the warmth of Cleonie's other hand, close above my face. Two more drops of water: my lips unstuck. Her hand let go of mine and burrowed under the nape of my neck to lift my head a little and then there was the cool mineral edge of a glass, a sip of iced water.

She let me back down. I peeked quickly from under my eyelids. The reassurance in her eyes relieved me; I took a good breath and let my eyes open up. Cleonie sat on the edge of the bed next to me, a tumbler of water in one hand.
Whumpet whumpet whumpet
: So quoth the little electric fan on my dresser.

She shook her head in slow amazement. “Jesus save us.”

Miz Verlow was coming down the hall. I closed my eyes, was afraid to see her. She tapped softly at the door and opened it to look in.

“She be restin',” Cleonie told her.

I stopped myself groaning. Why couldn't Cleonie have told Miz Verlow that I was asleep again?

Cleonie got up and Miz Verlow took her place on the edge of the bed, Miz Verlow's cool hand coming to rest gently on my head.

“Perdita says Roger found her on the beach?”

“We figgered for sure she be sunstruckt, drown and daid.”

“But you're still in this world, aren't you, Calley.” Miz Verlow lifted her hand. “Open your eyes. I want to see your pupils.” To Cleonie, she said, “Did you check her pupils?”