Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  The footlocker of ransom money was in our coach. Mama made me sit with my feet up on it all the way back from New Orleans. Perhaps she thought no one would suspect that a stupid-looking little girl with overly large ears and clutching a Betsy McCall doll in one fist could possibly have a footlocker full of money under her Mary Janes, or the key to it on a red silk string around her neck. And I was indeed stupid, thanks to the hotel doctor’s tranquilizers still lingering in my small child’s body. Mama’s well-developed facility for believing what she wanted to believe allowed her to pretend that despite the weeklong coverage in newsprint and on the airwaves, the passengers sharing the car were totally unaware of the kidnapping and murder of Joe Cane Dakin. Murder was even then no rarity in New Orleans but the murder of a rich white man is always news anywhere.

  Mama had no appropriate widow’s weeds with her but while waiting for the coroner’s release of The Remains and the departure of the next available train, she had obtained an off-the-rack black suit, black pumps and a veiled hat. She had to lift the veil from time to time to have a cigarette. Her makeup only seemed to make her complexion more pale, and her eyes more bruised and swollen with tears. When she spoke, her voice was thick and shaky and distant.

  Ford kept his face turned to the window. He wore a new black tie with his navy gabardine Sunday church suit. He had not cried when we were given the bad news but his fingernails were chewed to the quick. Every chance he had he punched, tripped or gooched me. At one point, he backed me into a corner away from the adults and told me that Daddy had been slaughtered like a hog and butchered. That the two women who did it had intended to cook and eat Daddy. That they had collected his blood to make blood sausage. The excessive detail only convinced me that he was lying, as usual. I wriggled free and escaped to the safety of Aunt Jude’s skirts. I almost knocked her over, hugging her.

  All the black in my entire wardrobe was on me, in the form of my black Mary Janes and black patent leather belt. Some mothers dress up their little girls like dolls. If Mama ever had done it, she had given up on it by the time I was able to dress myself.

  All my dresses, skirts and blouses had the cookie-cutter, ageless, sturdy look of a school uniform. For this return trip, I wore the grey dress with the white Peter Pan collar under my navy wool coat. The red silk string was long enough to hang unseen beneath the dress. The dress and coat were the clothes I had worn on our shopping trip in the rain. Mamadee had sent them out to be pressed on the Monday after Daddy disappeared. I have wondered since if Judy DeLucca had pressed my coat and dress. Certainly they had been returned to the closet with Hotel Pontchartrain paper capes over their shoulders.

  As we rode into Alabama, I stared out the window too, but no snow remained to be seen. Try as I might, I could not grasp the magnitude of the calamity that had befallen us. I hardly comprehended what death was. Whatever it was, it happened mostly to old people. I had seen them. Mama and Mamadee shared the conviction that a child was never too young to drag to a funeral parlor or a funeral. I could not recall the specific occasions, only the old people asleep on their satin pillows in their ponderous beds. I do remember that I had felt no fear, no revulsion, and certainly no grief.

  But my daddy had not grown grey and wrinkled and shrunken. He had simply gone out and not come back. Everyone insisted that he was not going to come back. I knew that it was childish, so I hid it, but I still clung to the fantasy that he would. I was exhausted with the ceaseless tension of listening constantly for his step.

  A porter came with a hand truck to take the footlocker off the train for us. He was a balding middle-aged man with black-framed glasses, arms powerful with the burden of his work, and a uniform worn with pride. He winked at me and gave me a hand up to sit on the footlocker as he trundled it

  after Mama and Ford. Mama didn’t notice. To be fair, she did have a lot on her mind at the time, but it was also simple fact that she usually looked right through colored people. Ford was pretending that he was alone in the universe or else waiting for everyone to fall down on their knees and beg his pardon for existing.

  takatakataka

  “Did you know my daddy?” I asked the porter.

  He blinked and tilted his head at me questioningly. I guess he saw in my face some answer to his unspoken question because then he smiled and nodded.

  “Not personal, Miss. I am sorry for your loss, though. I hear tell Mr. Dakin was an honest man in his dealings.” He spoke so softly that Mama could not hear.

  “Thank you,” I said and repeated the formula that I had heard at wakes and funerals: “I am gone miss him.”

  I might have asked him if he knew Ida Mae Oakes but Mamadee was in sight, waiting for us near the exit from the lobby. As soon as we were informed that Daddy was deceased, she hastened back to Alabama before us. It was almost as if she were squeamish in the face of the worst. It had fallen to Uncle Billy Cane Dakin to accompany Mama to identify The Remains. Mr. Weems had lingered another day to help make arrangements and then hightailed it after Mamadee.

  “Calley Dakin, get down off that thing right this minute,” Mamadee cried. “What are you, a little heathen? Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, you might have had the decency to buy the man a coffin!”

  Mamadee thought anything that I was doing was bad so I wasn’t surprised to be found in the wrong yet again. I didn’t understand the rest of it because I was still ignorant of Judy and Janice’s footlocker.

  Mama’s black veil hid her face but did not muffle or disguise the fury in her voice. “Mama, I am ashamed of you. You might have had the decency to spare me your ridiculous remarks. You know perfectly well that Joseph is in a mahogany coffin in the baggage car.”

  Mamadee did. She just wanted to be sure that no one in the station was unaware of the notorious Widow Dakin and her children.

  “You might try to act like a grieving widow, Roberta Ann,” Mamadee scolded.

  “What would you know about that, Mama?”

  Mamadee seemed to grow taller, like clouds rushing to build up to a tornado. I thought for an instant that she might change into something else, like the archangel driving Adam and Eve from Eden that I had seen once in a picture in a Bible. But she allowed herself to be distracted, pretending that it was necessary for her to oversee the stowing of our luggage in her Cadillac at the curb outside the train station.

  A man in a black suit and white gloves, the mortician, was at the curb too, with a hearse backed up and open. He was someone I had seen before, amid the flowers and polish and the whispering of his funeral parlor.

  The mortician hurried to Mama’s side, to press her hand between his and murmur consolations. We waited on the sidewalk while solemn porters wheeled out Daddy’s coffin on a metal flatbed rack. The metal device was all hinges and could be raised and lowered, so the coffin could be slid smoothly into the back of the hearse. Observing it,

  as it was moved, helped me avoid thinking about what was left of Daddy being jostled and disturbed inside the coffin. I didn’t really believe there was anything in it at all. The porters removed their hats to Mama and the mortician.

  creaketycrumpetythumpety

  The mortician again pressed Mama’s hand and bowed his head to Mamadee before he replaced his hat and hurried to take his place in the front seat of the hearse. A uniformed chauffeur, an elderly colored man who had been hauling white people to their white morgue and then to their white graveyard since Moses was bawling in the rushes, drove the hearse. He was a fixture, like so many of the colored people in our lives, indiscernible from his function.

  Mamadee would drive only a white Cadillac, replacing it every three years. Mama had never said anything to her nor had Daddy ever remarked upon Mamadee’s automotive disloyalty but we were all aware of it. Her Cadillac always had standard shift because it was gospel that a standard saved gas. Driving a standard was just one of the ways Mamadee informed the rest of the world that she knew what was what. The only problem was that she had never really mastered it.

 
; Once we were all in the Cadillac, Mama in the passenger seat and Ford and I in the backseat with the footlocker between us, Mamadee

  grrrrreech

  turned the key andunk

  jerked at the shift and stamped her feet on both the gas and brake pedals. The gears shrieked and the car jumped where it stood. Continued assault on the gearshift finally produced forward motion,screepped

  up over the curb andunnka

  down againbunk

  and onto the street.

  “I have found this whole dreadful business humiliating in the extreme,” Mamadee said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to the Carrolls. How could you let it happen?”

  We were already well versed in the indelible stain upon the Carroll reputation as Mamadee had expressed the same feelings repeatedly while she was in New Orleans with us. This time, Mama did not take it lying down. She had been waiting and scheming the whole time to get her own back someplace where nobody who mattered might be listening. Mama and Mamadee were in most ways just alike. Like magnets with the same polarities pointed at each other, they forced each other away.

  “I did not let anything happen,” said Mama, each word slow and distinct. “Nobody asked me if they could kidnap Joseph, torture him, murder him, and then try to fit him in a footlocker that wasn’t big enough to hold him.”

  This was the first mention of the other footlocker in my presence. Immediately I glanced at Ford. He was rigid, his face white—all the proof I needed that whatever she meant by torture and fitting Daddy into the footlocker was true. Ford had claimed earlier that Daddy had been butchered. Just the thought of the two women cutting off Daddy’s head and his limbs stunned me.

  Before that moment, for me, torture meant talking when someone had a headache. Whenever Mama had a headache and I said two words within range of her hearing, she would cry out, “Calliope Carroll Dakin, you are torturing your mama!”

  Because I had not known Daddy’s torso had been fitted somehow into a footlocker, I had no idea until then that it was identical to the one that contained the ransom. My imagination, however, was entirely adequate to the image of Daddy’s torso being crammed into the ransom footlocker. I could see myself crammed into a commensurately small space, immobilized, without light or air. An instant’s terror struck me breathless: Mama had made me sit with my feet up on that footlocker, with the key on the silk string around my neck, all the way back from New Orleans. But there was the unclaimed ransom, the coffin and the hearse, and Mama’s explicit statement to Mamadee that Daddy was in the coffin. And, of course, I was used to the outrageous assertions that were Mamadee’s stock in trade.

  Mamadee barged right on. “If I had known this was going to happen, I would never have allowed you to marry that man. People are laughing, Roberta Ann, they are laughing, and it is hard for me not to laugh right along with them. To think that Joe Cane Dakin was murdered by the Fat Lady in the Circus.”

  Mama was silent for a moment. She must have had thoughts along this line even before Mamadee brought it up. Forever after, for Mama, the dreadfulness of the business seemed to condense in that one peculiarity.

  Calley, she’d say in that despairing tone that made you want to kill yourself and take a few close friends along with you, you know what the worst thing was? The worst thing was that woman weighed three hundred and ninety-seven pounds.

  “You did not let me marry Joseph,” Mama said.

  “I did my best to stop you.”

  “I clearly remember you saying, ‘Roberta Ann, if you do not hog-tie Joe Cane Dakin, I will.’ ”

  “Roberta Ann! That is a falsehood! I would never be so vulgar!”

  “You always thought he was a country fool.”

  “I never!”

  “You kept right on buying Cadillacs. It was a deliberate insult to my late husband and I! Do you think either one of us mistook it for anything else?”

  “You are distraught, Roberta Ann.” Mamadee spoke then in the reasonable tone she always took when she had driven someone to shrieking. “I am gone ignore every silly thing you have said.” Having arrived at a position of virtue, she changed the subject. “You have made plans for the funeral of course?”

  “I thought I might be able to get out of these shoes first,” snapped Mama.

  “Really, Roberta Ann, how coarse of you. Your son is listening. You ought to have the funeral somewhere near Joe Cane Dakin’s people.”

  “Why?” Mama’s tone made it clear that she did not give a candle stub what the answer was.

  “Because there won’t be as many people coming to gawk!” cried Mamadee. “Because you know what will happen if you have it here in Montgomery or in Tallassee? You might as well rent a circus tent! And all those Dakins will turn up and remind the whole world how low you married!”

  “Mama,” Mama said in a suffering voice, “Joseph’s funeral will be at St. John’s. The governor and his wife and a director of the Ford Motor Company will be in attendance. And so will a whole gaggle of Dakins and the only thing to do is pretend that they are as good as anybody else. Did you ever hear that some mothers actually try to comfort their children in their times of need?”

  “I’ve heard some children speak with respect and gratitude to their mother,” Mamadee retorted.

  Mama tossed back her veil, opened her pocketbook—the brown Hermès Kelly bag—poked around in it, fished out her cigarettes and lighter and lit up. The smoke exited her tremulous nostrils in a furious stream.

  From time to time I glanced across the footlocker at Ford. He stuck his tongue out at me once. Another time he put his hands up to the sides of his head as if they were ears, to flap at me. Then he turned his face to stare blindly out the window. When I saw his reflection in the window, I realized he was looking at himself.

  Mamadee ground the Cadillac up the driveway of our home and clashed to a halt in the turnaround. A silence settled on us as we looked at the house. It was a fine Big House, one of the best in Montgomery, Mama always said. I remember enormous trees, tall pillars, deep porches and inside, rooms with high ceilings and sun-struck chandeliers.

  A sawhorse stood at the bottom of the front steps, with a sign on it.

  NO ENTRY

  The words at the bottom said something about by order of somebody or someone.

  An orange garland of tape hung around the pillars and there was another sign on the front door. I could make out the letters of POLICE LINE repeated on the tape, just like decorations I had seen repeating HAPPY BIRTHDAY or MERRY CHRISTMAS.

  “Why did you bring me here?” Mama asked in a choked voice. “You should have told me!”

  “You think I knew?” Mamadee said. “I would hardly drive out of my way, would I?”

  None of us believed her. Nothing was more characteristic of Mamadee than driving out of her way to kick someone near and dear in the gut.

  “I caint believe the police have searched my home. Or was it the FBI?”

  “Both. You caint stay here.” The note of triumph in Mamadee’s voice was barely repressed. “You will have to come stay with me at Ramparts.”

  Mama sank back in the seat and lowered the veil over her face.

  “Yes, Mama. Yes, Mama. Yes, Mama. Yes, Mama. Are you satisfied?”

  Mamadee turned to her. “Why, Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, whatever do you mean? How could I possibly derive satisfaction from the plight of my widowed child and her orphaned children?”

  Mama made no answer. I could see that she had decided she was not gone talk to Mamadee any more, at least for a while.

  “What about Portia and Minnie and Clint?” I asked.

  Portia was our cook, Minnie cleaned the house, and Clint did the chores.

  “Be quiet, Calley Dakin,” Mamadee snapped. “The help is none of your business. I am certain sure, however, that given the way colored people gossip, they knew before you did that Joe Cane Dakin was dead. I fired the lot of them as soon as I got back from New Orleans!”

  Mama’s cigarette smoke spurt
ed even more violently at Mamadee’s high-handedness.

  I knew, of course, that the colored servants had nothing more important to do than gossip about their white employers—it was a very popular topic with Mamadee, Mama, and all their female friends. The ladies were all still seething about the bus strike when the colored help all walked to work rather than take the bus on account of Miss Rosa Parks. Miss Parks refused to ride in the back, for which she was arrested and all the colored people threw a hissy fit. Most of the maids and cooks and chauffeurs and yardmen were late to work every day for months and talked back something terrible whenever they were chastised. Now they could all ride in the front of the bus, but everybody was still riled and hardly speaking.

  I remembered what Daddy said to Mama’s lamentations when it started: “Well, darling, that egg’s cracked, and the chick’s not gone get back into it.”

  I remembered what Daddy said because Mama fired Ida Mae Oakes the very next day.

  Twelve

  RAMPARTS loomed over the small town of Tallassee from nearly its highest point. The house was surrounded by several acres of big old live oaks festooned with Spanish moss. For all intents and purposes, Ramparts was the Carroll Museum, dedicated to the eternal glorification of the Carrolls. There was hardly a wall without a portrait of some Carroll or other, or Carrolls in multiples: Judges Carroll, State Senators Carroll, State Representatives Carroll, a U.S. Congressman Carroll, a Lieutenant Governor Carroll, a State Attorney General Carroll, a General Carroll and three Captains Carroll.

  I expect all those old Carrolls were like other people, each a mix of good and bad, of strength and weakness. For a fact, most of them had owned slaves and all of them had been good segregationists—the sort of moneyed white who secretly supported or ignored the Klan and its terrorism. They were hypocrites, I mean, like most of us.