Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  Mama looked at me with thoughtful amusement.

  “I know what happened. I must have been walking alongside the gutter one day and a little baby reached up and grabbed the hem of my skirt and that little baby was you. Because no real daughter of mine would counsel theft and deception.”

  “I am sorry, Mama.”

  “And you are deeply ashamed too, I hope, as befits a proper young girl.”

  “Yes ma’am.”

  That’s exactly what we did.

  No one stopped us when we drove away from the hotel without baggage or receipt. And the luggage was waiting for us when we arrived at Fennie’s sister’s house.

  Twenty-three

  THE drive south from Elba to Pensacola is a little less than two hundred miles, though it does not look nearly that far on a map. I had time to wonder why Mama’s first thought had been of Fennie. I watched Mama closely. I listened to everything she said. It was the gas gauge that convinced me that Mama had no idea what was going on, after all.

  We left the hotel by the front entrance—to go in any other fashion would have been tantamount (to Mama, at least) to be branded with a P for pauper. On our grand parade through the dinky lobby of the hotel and out to the Edsel, parked in one of the spaces in front of the dining room, Mama indulged in a running verbal debate with herself about whether we really wanted to visit our (imaginary) aunt Tallulah out on the Opp Road. I wished that I had an aunt Tallulah, just to have an aunt of that name. For a wild instant, I wondered if my real aunts, Faith and Hope, lived on the Opp Road, under the name of Tallulah. Faith and Hope Tallulah, secondhand clothes.

  No one paid any attention to Mama’s performance.

  I knew no one would stop us and that we would get to Pensacola Beach. I expected Fennie’s sister to be like Fennie. I even expected that Fennie herself would be there to greet us.

  Mama was still sighing with the effort of the earth-shaking decision when she settled behind the wheel and fiddled the key into the ignition. She looked in the rearview mirror as she backed out and kept checking it. From long experience, she managed to pop in the cigarette lighter and light a cigarette, using both hands, as the ungrand Hotel Osceola shrank in the mirror and fell away behind us. She held the cigarette between two fingers as she blew smoke.

  “Look out the back for the sheriff and bend your ear for the cock of a rifle, baby. Because you have to tell your mama when to duck,” she said.

  Hanging over the backseat, I pretended to watch for the sheriff. Oddly enough, a sheriff’s car appeared just as we were leaving Elba. I did not draw Mama’s attention to it. The sheriff was not after us. I had seen enough television to know that sheriffs do not shoot just anybody for minor things like speeding or skipping a hotel bill. And if we did get stopped, no mere deputy, let alone a sheriff, would have a chance against Mama. What she had done to those FBI agents, she could do to any mere man. And to the best of my observation at that time, any man was mere.

  “We have crossed the border into Florida,” Mama said about an hour later. “You can sit down and rest your eyes, Calley.”

  As I sat down, I happened to glance at the gas gauge. I took a second look. It read empty.

  I might have mentioned it to Mama. Likely she would say, Well, it’s a good deed of you to point out that little fact to me, and I suppose we should stop at the nearest filling station, but who do you suppose is gone pay for the gas when I ask the nice man to fill up the tank of this gas-hog Edsel your daddy wished on me?

  Somehow it would be my fault that the tank was empty. She could pretend that we had no money to refill it.

  And that was why I said nothing. When the Edsel finally stopped running on fumes, she would have to cough up some of her secret stash of cash to buy some. I might even get a glimpse of my silver dollar.

  I wrote Florida on the manual and then under it, the first town name I saw: Prosperity. My daddy had told me “prosperity” meant livin’ high off the hog. Funny if we were to run out of gas in Prosperity. And then Prosperity was behind us, in every sense. We came to Ponce de Leon, and turned west toward the sun.

  That sinking sun seemed to set fire to the tall pines on the west side of the highway. Except for that little bit of time outside of Banks and a little bit more in Elba, in that one day we had driven from sunrise to sunset. And now the gas gauge read one-quarter full. Something must be wrong with it.

  “What’s Ponce de Leon?” I asked Mama.

  She flicked a cigarette butt out the open window. “Some historical Spanish fairy. What do I look like, the Encyclopaedia Britannica?”

  I tried to imagine how a Spanish fairy might be different from an American fairy. It had never crossed my mind that fairies might have nationalities.

  Argyle. Defuniak Springs.

  Argyle I knew: It was a pattern for a sweater or socks.

  “What’s ‘Defuniak’ mean?” I asked Mama.

  “Throwing a kid out the car window for asking too many questions,” she answered.

  The gauge crept down toward empty again. As close as I watched it, Mama never looked down at it. The sun disappeared behind the jaggedy pines and then it set beyond the horizon that Mama and I could not see.

  Mama turned on the headlights. The gas gauge tank showed just a little more than half full.

  Crestview, Milligan, Galliver, Holt. Harold, Milton, Pace, Gull Pt.

  I didn’t have any questions about those places. Crestview and Gull Pt. were names about the places themselves, where you could stand on a crest of land and see some kind of view, or someplace pointy where there were a lot of gulls. The others were places named after people and I did not know a one of them, though there was a kid at school named Jerry White, and I knew of a man called Milt who once worked for my daddy at the Montgomery dealership. He didn’t work out. By Gull Pt., the needle on the gauge had again dropped almost to E.

  “Mama.”

  She didn’t answer.

  “Mama, do you know who Mamadee gave your sisters to?”

  Mama shot a furious glare at me. Her jaw worked.

  “I wish I did,” Mama lied. “I’d put you on the next train, plane or automobile, right to ’em. Mail you COD if I had an address.”

  Having driven more than a hundred miles from Elba, we reached Pensacola a little past nine o’clock. I ached to pee again. Mama drove around downtown Pensacola, up and down its streets—Zaragoza, Palafox, Jefferson, Tarragona, Garden, Spring, Barrancas, Alcaniz—and back again. Some blocks looked a lot like the French Quarter. All the stores were closed and even at the hotels most of the lights were out. A clock outside a bank read nearly ten o’clock. Eventually we found our way to the waterfront.

  Mama stopped.

  “It’s a snipe hunt. To humiliate me, because I am your mother and your friend Fennie Verlow is jealous of the hold I have over you.”

  I felt then what I could hardly have articulated at seven—that, if true, it would be the first time she would ever care enough to want a hold on me. I sat up and looked around, making a show of how far I turned my head and how long I hung out the window.

  “You said Fennie said her sister’s place was at Pensacola Beach. This is all docks. I don’t see a beach nowhere.”

  “Anywhere,” said Mama. She gunned the engine. “I’d forgotten—she did say Pensacola Beach.”

  She made a U-turn right in front of a Pensacola police car.

  “That damned beach better be close because we are almost out of gas,” she said.

  The police car burped at us.

  Mama moaned but pulled over immediately.

  The police car parked in front of us, a policeman climbed out, and presently looked in the open window at Mama and me. He had a broad face, and when he removed his hat, he exposed a receding hairline. He beamed at Mama with a full-moon jolliness.

  “Good evening, ladies,” he said. “I believe that you must be lost.”

  Mama smiled the way she did at a man when she wanted something from him.

  �
��We are,” I piped up. “We’re supposed to go to Pensacola Beach.”

  “Hush,” Mama told me with none of her usual irritation. “My baby is so tired, Officer, she has forgotten her manners. She is correct, however. We seek Pensacola Beach.”

  The policeman gave me an indulgent look. “I see she is a tired lil gal. You want to take the next right and then two lefts. That will take you back to the Scenic Highway—you’ve noticed the signs?”

  Mama nodded.

  “You turn right onto the Scenic Highway and it’ll take you straight across the Causeway to Gulf Breeze, and there’s no place else to go but straight ahead over one more itty-bitty bridge, and there you’ll be, Pensacola Beach.”

  “Oh my,” Mama said. “It’s a different place than Pensacola. No wonder we couldn’t find it.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the policeman agreed. “Now you best go along and put that tired lil gal to bed. My sister Jolene’s got one like her. They sweet lil things, no trouble to nobody.”

  Mama fluttered her eyelashes. The policeman grinned even wider as he stepped back.

  “Good night, ladies,” he said, with a nod of his head.

  He put his hat back on and stood by the side of the road and watched as we drove away.

  “I thought he was gone give me a ticket for sure,” Mama said, as she glanced up at the rearview. “The end to a perfect day.”

  We turned again onto the road—the Scenic Highway—that had brought us into Pensacola. We could see black water with a shiver of moonlight on it. The road brought us to a long bridge arcing over the water to another shoreline. The Causeway.

  “Thank you, Mr. Policeman,” Mama said, and laughed.

  As we crossed that Causeway bridge, the cipher of the moon hung over us, in the night sky.

  I see the moon

  And the moon sees me

  If the moon was seeing me, it was by sneaky-peek, for the leak of its light was no more than that from a twitched drapery.

  On the other side was a sign that said Gulf Breeze, and then quickly the second itty-bitty bridge the policeman had mentioned, on the far side of which huddled a few dark buildings of indiscernible purpose. This was Pensacola Beach. Straight ahead was black water. The fragile horns of the moon pointed right.

  “Right!” I blurted to Mama. “This is where we turn right.”

  This time Mama offered no argument. She made the turn and drove on. The pavement came to a quick end. The road became steadily narrower, the gravel looser, till on either side, there was black water that smelled of brine and bad shrimp. The unpaved road snaked between moon-pale sand and coarse, black high grass. The rind of moon was directly above. I could see it only when I pushed my whole body out the window and looked straight up into the sky. There was no sign of where we were, or of what was ahead.

  And at last the Edsel chuffed and shuddered. Mama jerked me back inside. The Edsel gave another shudder, and then stood motionless in its tracks. Its lights quivered like a guttering candle flame.

  “Out of gas on a dirt road in the middle of the night,” Mama said. “And who has brought us here except you and your friend Fennie?”

  “Sorry, Mama.”

  “You should be. She might have had the courtesy to tell us that Pensacola Beach isn’t the same as Pensacola, and it’s on an island, across two damned bridges, one long and one itty-bitty. If I’d known that, I might have stopped for gas.”

  “I see a light.”

  “Where?”

  I pointed.

  “I don’t see it.”

  Mama turned the key in the ignition. The weak light from the headlights wavered and winked out. She pushed the button to turn them off with a sigh. “There goes the damned battery.”

  We were in near-total darkness.

  “I still don’t see it,” she said.

  “I do.”

  I pushed the car door open and—quite unintentionally—fell out into the pallid sand.

  “Don’t hurt yourself,” said Mama. “I do not need an injured child to add to my troubles.”

  I pushed the car door closed. “It’s a house, Mama.”

  In fact I had seen neither house nor light.

  “Knock loud because they might be asleep.”

  I trudged off through the sand. It sank in over my tennies and over the tops of my socks. My feet itched. They were tender and painful from the morning’s battering with the footlocker.

  Amid the shadowy tall grass, I squatted to relieve myself. Then I climbed to the crest of the dune, where I saw the light that I had lied that I had already seen. The light in the window of the house that I knew belonged to Fennie’s sister.

  The scene was one-dimensional, no more substantial than a childish collage of pieces of dark construction paper. Sparse vegetation, dune and sand, sickly moonlight on panes of glass, verandahs up and down, were all mere raggedy fragments overlaid on the rough dark. The cloud passing over the moon made it wink slyly.

  The light in the window went out. The sudden loss stunned me in place, but then, on a lower floor, a new light in the shape of a warped door opened. A core of darkness split the light instantly, like an iris opening; a crooked silhouette waved to me.

  A voice called, “I see you, Calley Dakin! Bring your mama to me now, child!”

  Twenty-four

  “You are moonstruck and delirious,” Mama said.

  Dismiss the message she might, but she slipped off her driving shoes all the same. She collected her pumps but did not put them on. Barefoot, clutching her Hermès bag to her bosom with one hand, she paused to lock the car before she took my hand and let me lead her. A cloud eclipsed our pitiful slice of moon and we flailed onward, every step potentially off the edge of the earth.

  “Scorpions hide in the sand,” said Mama. “This grass is a mecca for fleas. I’m gone break a leg, stumbling around in the dark on these dunes. If I don’t die of a scorpion sting infecting a broken leg, it will be a miracle. You’ll be an orphan then, a pitiful orphan. You’ll be in an orphanage until you’re old enough to fend for yourself because you won’t stand a chigger’s chance in a hurricane of getting adopted. Jesus God, what was that? A buzzard? That looked big enough to carry off a grown man.”

  I took it for her way of whistling past the graveyard.

  But when we reached the top of the dune, Mama ceased her ranting.

  The moon reappeared in the sky to spill its narrow measure of light upon the breakers and silver the beautiful shore.

  SsssssssSSSSSSssssssssSSSSSSsssssssss

  I was struck silent as Mama was.

  Before I had seen only the dunes and the house on the dunes, the light in the window and then the door, and the silhouette of the woman who had called to me. Not the Gulf of Mexico directly behind it, not the water

  on the sand. I had not heard the Gulf of Mexico—I mean the greatest part of its noise, that of the water reaching the sand, the sand releasing the water. Before, I realized, the only sounds had been my own, and the natural twitching and sighing of the vegetation. This is not childhood memory refocused and refined. I had not heard the Gulf. It must have been silent. There could have been no waves at work upon the beach, for at the distance from the house I would never have been able to hear Fennie’s sister calling to me.

  ssssssssSSSSSSSSsssssssSSSSSSssssss

  Mama was struck silent for a different reason.

  “Oh, Calley,” she whispered.

  She was all atremble. I squeezed her hand hard but it still shook.

  “Mama, what’s wrong?”

  “Nothing, nothing’s wrong, baby. But that’s not Fennie’s sister’s house.”

  “Yes it is, Mama. She called to me.”

  “It’s my house, Calley. It’s my grandmama’s house. I lived there all the time that Mama and I were not getting along. That’s where I was happy, Calley, the only place I was ever really happy. I loved my grandmama. I loved her so much, Calley. I loved her more than you love me.”

  Mama had never before mentione
d her grandmama. Nor had I known that Mama and Mamadee had lived apart before Mama married Daddy, except for the semester Mama had spent at college. The information was so startling that it smothered any resentment over Mama’s claim that she could have loved her grandmama more than I loved her.

  “You lived here before?”

  Mama laughed. “Of course not. Grandmama’s house was in Banks. Grandmama died when that house burned down.”

  Mama started down the dune. I had to run and skid down the declivity to keep up with her. I had never seen her move so fast when not going from one expensive shop to another.

  “Oh look, Calley!” Mama pointed at the yellow light that suddenly glowed in the same upstairs window as before. “Fennie’s sister is going to put me back in my old room!”

  The front door stood ajar across the weathered planks of the deep verandah. A white-haired woman peered out at us from the doorway. It was she who had called to me from the open doorway of the house on the very edge of the Gulf of Mexico.

  Where the waves had been silent so I would be able to hear her voice.

  “Stamp your feet,” the woman instructed.

  Mama pounded up and down on the floor mat, shaking the sand loose from her bare feet.

  I had never seen Mama obey so short and sharp a command—and one from a stranger too—with such immediacy and willingness. I stamped my feet like a little echo.

  “I’m Roberta Carroll Dakin,” Mama said, trying to peer over the woman’s shoulder into the interior of the house. “You must be Calley’s friend Fennie’s sister.”

  “I am Merry Verlow.” The woman placed a gentle emphasis on the am.

  “You call her Miz Verlow.” Mama swatted the back of my head lightly.

  As if I didn’t know that “Miz” was how you addressed all women, single or married.

  “Welcome to Merrymeeting.”

  Mama started. “Merrymeeting?”

  Miz Verlow gestured inclusively. “My home.”