Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  There was no room for my things in the trunk. Mama even had luggage filling the backseat. I tried to fit my record player in.

  Mama hissed. She reached past me, yanked out the record player and dropped it on the driveway. The impact popped open the lid, spilling the records inside onto the gravel. Mama snatched up my suitcase, gasped at its unexpected and unbalanced weight and dumped it onto the floor of the shotgun seat. She picked me up bodily, slung me into the Edsel and slammed the door.

  Frantic to recover my record player, I scrabbled at the handle. Mama dove into the driver’s seat to reach over me and lock me in. Then she slapped me hard, making full contact with my left ear. My head rang with the pain.

  As Mama turned the key in the ignition, Mamadee appeared on the verandah. Mamadee was still in her nightgown, silk kimono, and kidskin mules, with her silvery hair up in pink rollers. Greasy white cream covered her face. The flush from the powder room or the slam of the car door must have wakened her, or else some instinct that Mama was stealing her blind. Clutching her kimono over her bosom with one hand, Mamadee hurried to the driver’s side of the Edsel to rap sharply at the window.

  Mama yanked out the cigarette lighter, jammed her cigarette onto its red ring, and put the gears in reverse. Then she rolled her window slowly down. Her cigarette smoke rushed out into Mamadee’s face.

  Mamadee coughed as she tried to speak. “I caint believe you are leaving without saying a word! Not a word about where! Those FBI men are gone want an address and the papers for Ford’s custody have to be—”

  Mamadee never got another word in.

  Mama glanced quickly over her shoulder and punched the accelerator. Mamadee almost fell down. I was thrown forward into the dash, bumped my face, and bounced back into the edge of the seat. My record player crunched like the glorified cardboard box that it was under the Edsel’s wheels. Mama wheeled the car into a turn that took it off the gravel, over the grass, and then back onto the driveway. My scramble to gain some purchase left me hugging the back of the seat. The tires of the Edsel spewed gravel against the parlor windows as Mama floored it in drive.

  Behind us, Mamadee ducked, holding up her hands against the pebbles and dust that peppered her. In the filtered light of the sun on the horizon, she was whitened from head to toe like a ghost. I never saw her again, in life, but we heard from her, Mama and me, and by then she was a ghost for real.

  Twenty-two

  ROBBED of breath to speak, let alone to cry out in protest, I wanted to snatch the wheel and send the Edsel smack into the nearest tree. An equally violent fear possessed me that she would dump me out on the side of the road and drive away. Or, as now seemed entirely possible, she might back over me deliberately as she had my record player.

  My ear still stung and ached. Huddled in the seat, I wanted my daddy back with a greater desperation than ever before.

  On a red dirt country road out of Tallassee, Mama put on her sunglasses against the sun rising into a clean blue sky. If the maps in Captain Senior’s library were still correct, east would take us to Georgia. Pensacola was nearly due south. Mama must not know where we were going. Why else would we be driving east?

  The road passed through already dusty fields and stands of scrub oak and by abandoned houses overrun with kudzu. Mama lowered the windows, so the smell of the unwashed, uncombed countryside swept through the Edsel. Dogs chained to trees slept in farmyards, where raggedy chickens pecked the dirt apathetically. Mosquitoes were already swarming blindly out of the sharp gullies on either side of the road. My daddy once told me that water moccasins nursed their young in those gullies.

  The familiarity of sitting in the shotgun seat as I had when I had traveled with Daddy comforted me. That was what he called it: the shotgun seat. Every passing mile took us farther from Mamadee. My record player was as busted as Humpty Dumpty. I would not give Mama the satisfaction of grieving openly for it. My fists uncurled, my jaw relaxed, as the Edsel rolled onward. Mamadee was behind us. A blessing worth the loss of my record player.

  We arrived at a crossroads where there was no sign or marker, and no view of house, store, man or cur. Not so much as a red cloud of dirt to show a vehicle had passed there recently. Not a blackbird in the sky, not a grackle, not a starling, nor rusty blackbird, nor crow of any kind, fish or common—and in Alabama, there are always blackbirds in the sky.

  Mama stopped the Edsel in the middle of the intersection. She turned off the ignition.

  “What am I going to do? My place in the world, my darling son, my husband, have all been taken from me.”

  Her voice shook. She actually did feel victimized. Her conviction of it was enough to make me believe that somehow she had been.

  “You still have me,” I reminded her.

  The cynical look she gave me was about what I expected for my sycophancy.

  “I promised your daddy,” she said impatiently, and looked one way and then the other. “We could turn right, or we could turn left. Or we could go straight ahead and see where this red dirt road takes us.”

  I wanted to know what she promised my daddy. I looked every which way, as she had, and then upward. Still no blackbird in the sky, nor anything else.

  “Let’s go ri—” I began, then instantly amended. “No, I mean, let’s go left, Mama. I want to go left.”

  Suddenly a flock of blackbirds came wheeling overhead.

  “Count the crows,” Mama said.

  “One for sorrow,” I chanted, “two for go, three go left, four turn right, five stop now and stay the night—”

  “Oh shut up,” exclaimed Mama. “I didn’t mean literally. Calliope Carroll Dakin, I swear you are retarded. You’ve got it all wrong anyway. You’re always getting things wrong. I thought I was going to die of embarrassment when you sang the wrong words at that god-awful cemetery.”

  Mama looked to the left. She sighed as if she saw the Emerald Towers of Oz there. Then she looked at me, smiled crookedly, and shook her head, as if to advise me that the Emerald Towers of Oz were a mirage and a betrayal. She gave a quick glance to the right and rejected that way too.

  “I want to try straight ahead.”

  I pretended to think about it for a bit. “We caint go left?”

  “Not today.” Mama turned on the ignition.

  The Edsel leapt forward, raising red dust on both sides of the car.

  I opened the glove compartment and took out the road maps. Mama immediately held out her right hand. In my road trips with Daddy, I had studied his maps all I wanted. Mama snapped her fingers impatiently. I gave up the maps. She transferred them to her left hand and tossed them out the window one by one. I turned around in my seat to watch them flying away behind us, map-birds in the wake of the Edsel, flapping paper wings all barred with roads.

  The glove compartment still held a manual and a pencil stub. I took them out and wrote on the back of the manual the road signs as we passed them:

  Carrville, Milstead Goodwins, LaPlace, Hardaway, Thompson, Hector, High Ridge, Postoak, Omega, Sand-field, Catalpa, Banks.

  It would be years before I would see them again, except in an atlas of the states.

  Outside of Banks, Mama pulled over to the side of the road. We made water in a little pinewood. On such empty roads, our modesty was at little risk. We had tissues for blotting but I thought it wiser not to remark upon the absence of a place to wash our hands.

  Then Mama sat behind the wheel and stared down the road toward Banks. She touched up her lipstick in the mirror. She yanked out the ashtray and emptied it out the window onto the side of the road. She lit a new cigarette. When she started the Edsel again, she made a U-turn away from Banks. We passed through Troy and into Elba.

  We had driven over one hundred and twenty miles. I longed to have the maps back. I was almost certain that the route we had taken to Elba was easily twice as long as it needed to be, in part because of the detour in the direction of Banks. I had no idea why Banks was of any interest to Mama.

  Mama see
med uncertain where to go next. She seized upon the fact that it was past time for dinner—the midday meal in Alabama—and declared that if she did not eat soon, she would faint. In fact, she was more than hungry; she was exhausted.

  Elba is a small place in Coffee County. The best thing about it, Mama said, was that we knew nobody there and nobody knew us. She was wrong about that. The best thing about Elba to me was that it was south of Montgomery, the worst was that it was nowhere near far enough south.

  No doubt things have changed since those days, and Elba sports a Holiday Inn or a Motel 6, or even something as grand as a Marriott Courtyard, but then, the choice was between the Hotel Osceola, Slattery’s—which was locally called Sluttery’s for its fleas, Mama told me—or a boardinghouse. Mama would sleep in the Edsel before she would stay at a boardinghouse. She explained that everything and everyone in a boardinghouse was so ashamed of themselves that the blinds were always drawn, that the mattresses had all been died on, by somebody or other, and that everyone used the same bathroom, which with the awful food, created a universal constipation, which was all anyone in a boardinghouse ever talked about: being bound up. Impactions, Mama said.

  The Hotel Osceola lacked the grandeur of the Hotel Pontchartrain by a country mile. To my surprise, when we entered it, Mama went straight to the desk and asked for the best room. The best room was on the third floor and it was the only room in the whole hotel that had a bathroom to itself. Mama went back to the Edsel with the fat man behind the desk and had him bring in some of our luggage—a suitcase of hers, my little red one, and the footlocker. Mama left me in the lobby while she accompanied the man with the luggage up to the room she had taken, as if she expected to spend the night there. I was disappointed and worried. What if Mama changed her mind and turned around and took us back to Ramparts?

  She came down again and we had dinner—in the dining room downstairs, where we could look out at Elba’s Main Street, and speculate on which of the old men sitting, chins on their chests, in the rocking chairs on the verandah of a general store across the street, might actually be dead. At two o’clock, we were the last to be served and all by ourselves. Mama guzzled glass after glass of unsweetened iced coffee and kept complaining to me of the heat, though it was not hot, not at all.

  I remember thinking even then, it is a good thing Mama doesn’t worry about me. Because if she thought she was responsible for me too, she would be even worse off in her mind.

  “It’s a good thing we have that footlocker upstairs, isn’t it, Calley? Maybe it failed to save your daddy’s life, but it sure as hell is gone save ours.”

  That’s how upset Mama was—she said “hell” in a public place. She said “ours” too, reassuring me a little.

  Upstairs in the best room, she got way more upset. For the first time since she had tied it on me, she undid from around my neck the silk string with its pair of keys. The one key, of course, was to her cedar chest back in Ramparts; she tossed it onto the counterpane of the bed. Then she knelt by the footlocker to unlock it.

  It was empty.

  Except for the dark stains of Daddy’s blood.

  All color drained from her face. She rocked on her heels and staggered to her feet.

  “Oh Jesus God! Jesus God!” she cried, and bolted to the bathroom.

  Of course I followed and saw her kneeling at the commode, vomiting the iced coffee-black contents of her stomach.

  When she pushed herself back onto her haunches, I dampened a washrag at the basin and gave it to her to wipe her mouth. Then I dampened another and bathed her face as she raised it to me. Her shivering and shuddering and shaking alarmed me. I wanted to run to the telephone and call the desk for a doctor.

  She grabbed my wrist and pleaded with me. “It was there this morning, Calley! You saw it! It was there when we got up this morning and it weighed so much, we could hardly move it. The only key was on the string you had around your neck and you never took it off, did you?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Did you?”

  I had not. But I believed at once that the money had not been stolen from the trunk, not at all.

  After we had gotten it out of Ramparts and into the Edsel, and Mama and I had gone back into the house, someone had simply taken the trunk with the money in it and in its place had left the identical trunk, which had once contained Daddy’s dismembered torso. At seven, I had yet to watch enough television or see enough movies to understand that the bloody footlocker should have been in an evidence room in New Orleans. In the end, I picked up that information from police procedural paperback novels, sometime in my early teens. If I had known, I probably would have figured that if Mamadee could fix judges in Alabama, she could fix cops in New Orleans, Louisiana. I still believe it.

  Mama began to recover herself, allowing me to help her to her feet and to the bed. She flinched away from the footlocker and closed her eyes so that she would not see it. Once she was off her feet, I went back to the bathroom to wet one of the washrags again with cool water. I folded it over her closed eyes and sat down next to her to take one hand in mine.

  “Get that thing out of my sight!” Mama’s words came from between her gritted teeth, behind the mask of the washrag on her eyes.

  I was able to shove and drag the footlocker into a closet and close the door. It smelled. It reeked of old blood, like the butcher’s shop. The odor was so foul, I could not understand why we had not smelled it instantly upon entering the room, or how Mama and the man who brought it up could not have noticed.

  “What are we gone do?” Mama asked me in a despairing voice.

  “What about Fennie?” It was the question Mama expected to hear from me, I think.

  “What could Fennie do? We don’t even know her name.”

  But Mama got Fennie’s name right this time. By saying we don’t know her name, Mama implied it would be all right if I could provide Fennie’s surname, and furthermore some way of getting a signal of distress to her.

  “It’s Verrill,” I said. Mama didn’t care for me to read her too closely. “Verrill. No, that’s not right. Verlow. It’s Verlow.”

  “Does that do us any good?”

  I shook my head.

  “For some reason,” Mama said, “I have the feeling that Fennie Verlow doesn’t live in Tallassee.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Me either, Calley,” Mama corrected me. “Wherever that woman does make her humble abode, she might have a phone, but we don’t have the number, do we?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Well then, I suppose if you want to be any good to me at all, you had better go downstairs and find your mama aspirin for her throbbing head.”

  “I need some money.”

  “Go downstairs and beg for it, darling.”

  I just stood there, hornswoggled.

  “Might as well get in practice, because from now on, we’ll be begging something from somebody every day of our lives. Today is just begging two dimes for a tin of aspirin from the first kind-looking gentleman you run across in the lobby. Don’t ask a lady, darling, because she’ll give you twenty cents, but afterward she will dig till she finds out exactly whose little girl you are.”

  Mama lied. O my did Mama lie. We were not yet paupers. She had not mentioned her jewelry or any of the valuable items she had taken from Ramparts, nor her secret store of cash, very possibly including my silver dollar. And we had the Edsel. She could sell it. I knew what it sold for—an amount that was a fortune indistinguishable from the missing million-dollar ransom to a seven-year-old.

  As I closed the door, the telephone rang in our room. That brrrring of the telephone in a hotel room in Elba, Alabama, where no one knew we were, let me breathe again.

  It was Fennie, of course: no need to linger to be sure of it.

  Mama said, “Hello,” in her sweetest voice—always reserved for strangers.

  I ran down the corridor so that I would not hear any more.

  Downstairs, I did not beg
for twenty cents for Mama’s BC. I went up to the lady at the tiny counter just inside the front door of the hotel. She sold Chiclets, Tiparillos, and the Dothan Eagle.

  Wrinkling my brow, making sure my glasses were a little crooked, I said, “My mama has a throbbing headache and she sent me down for some BC but she did not give me any money. She said I could charge it to our room like we did in New Orleans one time—”

  The counter lady was a young woman, hardly more than a girl. She might have cooed over an infant but ambulatory children were of little interest to her. Presented with a lump of a girl child of questionable intelligence, she wanted to get rid of me more than she wanted to confirm that I was, in fact, the child of a registered guest. She slipped the BC across her counter as she smiled artificially at someplace over my head.

  Mama never asked me where I got the money for the BC. She had other things on her mind. She had to figure out how to leave the Hotel Osceola with the grandeur befitting her station at the same time she skipped on the bill.

  “We are going to meet your friend Fennie’s sister in Pensacola Beach,” Mama said. “When I mentioned that you had never seen the Gulf of Mexico or played in white sand, your friend Fennie would not hear the end of it. So, because of you, I suppose we have to leave this place and go to that place.”

  Mama was appropriating what Fennie Verlow must have asked, I knew.

  “Oh, we can stay here, Mama.”

  “No we can’t. If we stay here we will run up a bill. We go to your friend Fennie’s sister’s in Pensacola Beach or else you go back downstairs and start begging a good deal more than twenty cents for a pack of BC tablets.”

  “How did Fennie know we were here?”

  “She has relatives here in Elba”—so much for no one in Elba knowing us—“or that’s what she said. Maybe one of them works in the hotel kitchen. Or is a chambermaid. Or runs the telephone exchange.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “So maybe we could just get in the car and drive off like we were gone to visit somebody and leave everything here and that way nobody knows we have left and Fennie’s relatives can take care of everything when the people downstairs are not looking.”