Candles Burning (50 page)

On the shelf over my bed, the hallucinatory bird book had reverted to being an old edition of the
National Audubon Society Field Guide to Eastern Land Birds
. I put it in my overalls pocket again, along with my oyster knife, before going downstairs and helping myself to a key to the attic from Miz Verlow's key safe. Though she was in the kitchen with Perdita and might emerge at any time, I did not fear her surprising me, nor her anger if and when she discovered that I had taken the key.

When I turned the knob of the door to the attic, experimentally, though, it gave easily: It was unlocked. I dropped the key back into my overalls pocket. Once through the door, I closed it behind as quietly as I could.

I stood in the dark, waiting for my night sight. The whispers and shuffles of the small dark lives of the critters that lived in the attic reassured me. I felt more than a little bit like one of them, just trying to survive in a predatory world. And in the dark. The bird guide, my oyster knife and the egg locket weighted one of my pockets. If the critters did not frighten me, that thing in the trunk had, not so very long ago. Whether an oyster knife, a bird guide or the egg locket would be any protection was questionable, but they were what I had.

When I could see enough of the steps, I moved up them cautiously until I found the light chain and its cool white ceramic knob, seemingly hanging there waiting for me. A tug shed the filthy light of the row of bulbs above over the shrouded, secretive, and unreadable shapes crowding the nearly full space.

The snick of a key engaging the lock of the door at the bottom of the attic steps reached my ears. I heard no one. Mrs. Mank might be able to move without my hearing her, but no one else ever had. And she was not in residence. What noiseless someone or something had locked the door behind me?

Whatever the answer to that weird little mystery, I had a key in my pocket.

Slowly I began to explore the attic again. There was no way to do it systematically. Despite all the efforts that Roger and I had made over the years to store like with like and make everything accessible, it was almost as if someone came up and disorganized whatever we did—or else the miscellany rearranged itself.

The lights went out. I stood rigidly still in the dark instant. For all the light to go out, either someone or something had pulled the chain, which I had not heard, or had removed the fuse. I didn't have a spare fuse in my pocket, nevermind the fuse box was in the pantry. Again my vision adjusted, so I was not totally blind, and the light of day leaked in at the portholes in the eaves.

I groped my way to the one where the tarp that Roger and Grady and I had used was still spread out. The candle stubs we had abandoned had long since melted in the heat to an amorphous puddle, staining the tarp underneath. The wicks made black hyphens in the yellowed wax. I had no lighter or matches, nor had I planned well enough to bring a flashlight. I crouched over the melted wax and flattened it as best I could with my palm. Rolled into a crude cylinder around the longest piece of wick, it would have to pass for a candle. It only stood up because it was not tall enough to fall over.

Taking it with me, in hope of discovering a way to light it, I continued my exploration. The candle comforted me. I might be able to use it or not. But I had it. It might even light if I could find a lighter or matches. In the meantime, I wanted to find the old trunk, the scary one.

Stubbing my toe hard on the cast-iron base of an old sewing machine, I staggered against it. The thing was so heavy as to be unmovable and to my relief, held me up enough to avoid going flat on my face. My looks would not be improved with a Singer treadle pattern on my face, to say nothing of putting an eye out on the projecting ironwork.
Don't run with a cast-iron sewing machine stand in your hand, Calley; you could poke your eye out
. The ludicrous thought made me snicker.

Balance regained, I slid along the edges of dressers and tables, grasped the ears of chair backs, and fetched up finally near another of the portholes in the eaves. It was fabulously webbed and filthy, but I was not much cleaner by then, so I patted the screen in the porthole with the palms of my hands gently, to shake loose some of the accumulated grime. A clearer air wafted in, and I breathed of it gladly, even as it emphasized just how thick and dusty the air that I had been breathing really was.

I rested there a moment, savoring the hardly perceptible surcease of heat, and the access to the salt-tinged air. Reluctantly I moved on, promptly barking my shins on a crate, using a standing lamp to steady myself, and stumbling about until I was face-to-face with the totemic face of the old semanier. Something, at last, that I recognized. Recalling that I had not tried all the drawers, I began opening them from the bottom. Crap galore in them, from Masonic jewelry to a nice selection of little silk shorts—underpants, I realized as I handled them with my dirty fingers, from the twenties. Step-ins, Perdita called them. I dropped them back into their drawer and rummaged behind them. The rigid edge my fingertips stubbed up against proved to be a rusty little tin box, with a matchbook in it.

Fire! My heart leapt as if I were a caveman coming on a lightning-struck mammoth, split open to give me access to rare meat and steaming offal.

Soon I had my crude candle burning. I held it carefully, while peering around for something to put it in. It was frustrating to see nothing, not even an old ashtray that might be useful, when I had seen so many candleholders and candlesticks on previous visits. I considered the little tin box, but it was flimsy and rusty and might get hot to hold. Surely I could do better.

And I did. Gyrating slowly, holding the candle high to cast its light over the greatest area, I caught a glimpse of purple-blue glass on an open shelf of a shabby curio cabinet that had had the glass of its door broken right out. I reached careful past the shards still in the frame of the door, and brought out the cobalt-blue glass candleholder that Mama had bought in New Orleans, in the ticking antique shop.
Prop: Mr. Rideaux. The bell on the door jingling. The woman who looked at me. A wall of clocks lying about the time. Mama's lost Hermès Kelly bag that wasn't lost at all.

Despite the nonstandard chubbiness of my candle, the glass candleholder married my candle as if the two objects were made for each other.

Holding it high again, moving carefully so as not to bang myself up any more, or inadvertently light up something flammable, I made better progress in my exploration. I was running sweat as if instead of the burning candle, I was doing the melting. My overalls and the man's undershirt that I wore underneath it stuck to me as wet pages stick to one another.

The thought reminded me of the bird guide. I touched it to reassure myself. It occurred to me that I ought to look at it, to see what state it was in—steady-state National Audubon Society Field Guide, or nutty oddybone.

I drew it out, picked out a nearby rug-covered chest with an end table next to it, and sat down. I put the candlestick on the table. Held in both my hands, the spine of the book read

 
The Odderbone Field Guide to Calley Dakin

I expected it to flop open but nothing happened. When I tried to open it, it seemed to be as firmly stuck closed as it had been for Mrs. Mank.

An insubstantial and mildly impatient voice said, enunciating each word clearly:

 
I stopped trying to open the book. I knew that voice. It was Ida Mae Oakes's. Tears welled over my lower lashes and I blubbered.

“I'm all ears,” I said in a whisper. “Ida Mae, I've listened for you particularly. I wish you wasn't dead.”

Me too,
Ida Mae said.
If it wasn't for the Peace That Surpasseth All Understanding, I'd rather be alive. You stop your blubbering now. I had a nice easy passage, which is more than a lot of folks get. Closed my eyes for a minute during the second Sunday service, and woke up hovering over my own daid old carcass, and nobody even noticing, they was so many of them nodded off. It was a hot day and Brother Truman would drone, no matter how much the amen corner tried to work up a momentum. And I was so young. I wasn't but fifty-six. My mama is still alive, with sugar, cataracts, not a tooth in her head and don't know her own name most days. She married her third husband when she was fifty-six, and raised up three of his children that had run wild since their mama passed of a sudden. She earned a crown doing that, I am sure, but she's been in no hurry to claim it. She asks for me all the time, thinking I am still alive. I hear her, “Where my Ida Mae? Why don' she come see her mama?”

“I missed you,” I told her. “Missed you terrible.”

I know,
she said, in her old gentle way.
I held my tongue all this time for a penance for being put out with passing so all-of-a-sudden, but I would have spoke if needed. I kep my eye on you, darlin'. You don' know how many souls are keeping their eyes on you. Well, mayhap you do.

“Daddy?”

“Tell me why he died—”

Hush, now. It was his time
—

“No it wasn't!” I cried.

The candle wavered as if I had struck it.

“Revenge is mine, saith
—
”

“Yeah, you bet,” I retorted.

Mind your manners,
Ida Mae said sharply.
I'll hear no
blasphemy from a child that still has breath in her lungs for to be grateful.

“I want some answers,” I said. No, I didn't say it. I shouted.

Ida Mae made a very odd laugh.
People in Hell want sweet tea, Calley Dakin
.

“I believe I
am
in Hell,” was my retort.

Gotta be a lot worse than you have been yet to get there.
Ida Mae hummed briefly as if she were about to sing.
Listen to the book,
she sang softly, to the tune of “I See the Moon.”
Listen to the book
.

The book fell open in my lap, to the flyleaf. It was inscribed:
Calley Dakin
, in my own handwriting.

Unlock the footlocker,
the book said in my voice, with a little flutter of its fine thin pages.

“I don't know where it is.”

Ida Mae's voice came out of the nowhere again.
You're sitting on it.

I jumped off and spun about, losing my grasp on the field guide and worse, nearly knocking over the candle. I dropped the book and used both hands to secure the candle. A fearful sweat was running from my hairline in rivulets, and from every pore, or so it seemed. I was breathless and my belly was knotted up like a fist.

With the candle safe and steady on the end table, I drew the rug away from the chest, and sure enough, it was not really a chest, but a military footlocker. Green and black. Padlocked. No key in sight. I sniffed the air but detected no odor of the abattoir.

The guidebook lay on the dusty wooden floor. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, and when I did, my fingertips encountered the key to the attic.

I drew it out and studied at it. It was a door key, the old-fashioned long-barreled kind, not the stubby key that a padlock would have. I pulled out my oyster knife. One of them was going to open that padlock, or else. I didn't know what the
else
might be, but I knew that I was serious about it.

I made a try with the door key. And, of course, it worked. It slid into that padlock like water down a thirsty throat. And I was thinking about water; I was thirsty by then. I turned the key and the padlock let go.

If I failed to actually open the footlocker, Ida Mae was going to speak up or use the guidebook for a megaphone—oh, how stupid I had been; of course that was exactly what the guidebook was, a ghost megaphone.

I bent my knees, unhooked the padlock from the metal tongues of the footlocker, and put my back behind my lifting of the lid of the chest. There was no resistance, only the unhappy shriek of its disused hinges, as it rose and then fell away with my immediate push. I looked down into the trunk, which was filled with neatly banded bundles of money. Sitting on top of the paper money was a silver dollar. Not a bill in a bundle would be dated later than 1958, I was immediately sure: It was the ransom that had not saved Daddy's life, and the silver dollar appeared to be my very own.

I put my silver dollar in my pocket. Seeing an old wicker laundry basket not far out of reach, I fetched it to the footlocker and emptied the ransom money into it. The hamper was less bulky, less heavy, and I could push it toward the steps, where there was luggage close at hand. After I had done just that, I went back for the candle, my oyster knife, and my guidebook.

By the light of the candle, I filled a well-used good-sized canvas suitcase with the money. I did it without excitement or anxiety. A million dollars was a lot of money back in 1968. Finding the silver dollar on top of it all seemed like a signal that the paper money was mine to dispose of as I wished. It was freedom; I could buy my own education and shed Mrs. Mank, Miz Verlow, and Mama, all in one go.

I closed the suitcase,
click-click,
and repressed a chortle. Whatever part of me was true-blue Carroll was deeply satisfied for the first time in my life. I felt for the door key. And did not have it, for it was on the floor by the footlocker, still in the open padlock.

Taking my rapidly diminishing candle with me, I turned to go back to the footlocker.

The heat was getting to me. Sweat set on my upper lip and my tongue could not keep up with licking it off. But I did lick at it reflexively, for it wet my mouth and throat. In a few steps, I doubted my direction. It occurred to me that I could die here in the attic, die of thirst or starvation or the heat. But, of course, I would cry out first and be heard. It was only being wrung out by the heat that even made it seem possible. The hell with the key, I told myself, I still had my oyster knife. I would find my way back to the steps and the suitcase.