Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  Is mighty good for me

  The van’s driver killed his radio.

  Leaning out the window of his van, he called out, “Yoo-hoo, Missus Cleonie Huggins!”

  Cleonie waved and disappeared into the house.

  The van man began unloading wicker baskets of ironed and folded bed linen, and of towels. He was a small, neat man, in white trousers and a white jacket of a uniform kind. His shoes were brown and very polished. He looked young to me—by which I mean that his skin was unwrinkled and that he had no white hair—but otherwise he was one more adult in a world full of them.

  By way of the door with the ramp, Cleonie emerged carrying a wicker basket of unlaundered linen and exchanged it for one of the clean ones. The van man remarked that it was a nice day; Cleonie agreed. Going in and out of the house, she made the exchange of baskets several times. I tried to help but the basket was too heavy for me.

  “You too small,” the van man told me, as if it were news to me.

  The discovery that Cleonie might change the beds and clean the bathrooms but that she did not launder the linen was momentarily interesting. Investigation (I asked Miz Verlow) revealed that the water from the well was too precious to use for laundry, so all the linen and clothing went off to the ATOMIC LAUNDRY in Pensacola.

  Over the next few days, I discovered that Merrymeeting depended upon the services of many tradespeople. A milk truck delivered milk, cream, ice cream, butter and eggs and, most of the time, the newspaper. If the newspapers missed the milk truck, they might arrive with the mail lady, who in those golden days came twice a day and once on Saturday—or with one of the other deliveries. Local fishermen—one of them Perdita’s husband—brought fish and shellfish to the back door for Perdita’s perusal. Miz Verlow ordered what Perdita wanted by way of meat from a superior butcher in Pensacola, who subsequently delivered it. Groceries were also delivered. Local people often knocked at the back door with some seasonal delicacy. And while all this busyness was going on, Miz Verlow’s house ran smoothly, by and large, so her guests hardly knew how much went into it.

  I stumbled after Cleonie up the ramp and into the house.

  “Cleonie, where’s the laundry chute?”

  “Rat ’ere.” She tipped her chin straight ahead of us.

  We were in the back hall behind the kitchen, at the bottom of the back stairway that rose to the landing where the linen closet was. The backstairs allowed Cleonie and Perdita and Miz Verlow to move about the house without being underfoot of the guests. A small high door like the one that I had seen up the backstairs was set into the wall we faced. The bottom edge of it was at my eye-level. The wooden knob was an easy reach and immediately I pulled it open. Inside was an empty tin-lined cylinder of space. On tiptoe, I stuck my head in and looked up the tube rising to the higher floors. That inspection completed, I bounded up the stairway. Cleonie came hurrying after me.

  The door to the laundry chute on the landing was closed. Just beyond Cleonie’s grasp, I yanked it open and, letting out a rebel yell, dove into it headfirst.

  My stomach felt like it was falling faster than the rest of me but I barely had time to notice it before I was spilling out the open laundry chute door on the first floor. My face met the floor and the rest of me was right behind, on top of it. The impact was briefly stunning, as if I had run into a wall, before the blood started to spurt from my nose. My glasses fell off my face as I curled like a possum.

  Cleonie and Perdita arrived from different directions.

  “Hit jez jump,” Cleonie told Perdita. “Whump!”

  My eyes were blurry but I could still see the disbelief on Perdita’s face.

  “An natchell,” she muttered. And then said clearly, “You be’s an natchell,” to me.

  “Azz,” she told Cleonie, who rushed away

  When Cleonie clamped a dish towel packed with ice on my face, I realized that Perdita had, in fact, said, “Ice.”

  Miz Verlow came down the backstairs and took in the situation with a quick glance. Seizing my hand and pulling me to my feet, she plucked my glasses from the floor with her free hand. She nudged me toward the stairs.

  “That was very noisy,” she told me as she followed me upstairs. “If anyone had been trying to sleep, the poor soul would thought the roof had blown off.”

  “Yes’m,” I agreed, from behind the muffle of ice pack and swelling face.

  “Thoughtless of you,” Miz Verlow continued. “I would have expected it from a boy.”

  “I wisht I was a boy,” I mumbled.

  “Well, you’re not and a good thing too. I cannot abide boys. Let’s get this straight, Calliope Dakin.” Miz Verlow spoke without any apparent anger. “You are not going to become the house hellion. You will not behave as if you are a satanic familiar or some motherless child or any of the other roles that you may have adopted in the past. In this house, you are going to become the Calliope Dakin you will be for the rest of your born days, and that Calliope Dakin”—she paused on the second-floor landing and closed the laundry chute door—“that Calliope Dakin is going to know how to behave.”

  I snuffled. “I should have waited until there was laundry at the bottom of the chute.”

  She looked down at me. “Exactly.” Then she gave me my glasses. The plastic frame was broken across the nose. The glass parts were all smeary.

  “Miz Verlow, what’s ‘an natchell’?”

  “ ‘An natchell’?”

  “Perdita called me ‘an natchell.’”

  Miz Verlow smiled thinly. “A natural. Some poor soul who is feebleminded.”

  I was severely let down. I had been hoping that an natchell meant pirate or daredevil, or something wild and brave.

  We arrived at Mama’s bedroom door. Miz Verlow knocked lightly with her knuckles.

  On opening the door, Mama’s unnaturally sweet smile vanished at the sight of me, to be replaced with a look of triumph.

  “I take it,” she said to Miz Verlow, “that Calley has succeeded in changing your mind on the subject of corporal punishment.”

  “Not really.” Miz Verlow pushed me toward Mama. “I fear that I overestimated the ability of a child of her age to go without maternal supervision.”

  With that swift turn of the knife, Miz Verlow left me to Mama’s mercies.

  Mama closed the door after her.

  “Well,” said Mama, “it certainly is remarkable how the childless always know everything there is to know about child rearing.”

  She looked around. “Where’s your suitcase? Get yourself some clean clothes and go sit in the tub, Calley, so you don’t bleed on anything but that towel and your clothes. When you’ve stopped, take a bath.”

  I crouched over my suitcase, cast into a shadowy corner of the room. I had two clean pairs of underpants and a clean pair of overalls cushioning the books from Junior’s shelf, and a bunch of Betsy Cane McCall’s clothes—more of hers than mine.

  Mama looked down over my shoulder for a few seconds and then smacked me on the back of the head.

  “That’s what you packed?” She slapped my face. “Do I look like a department store to you?” She snapped her fingers. “I can just replace your clothes like that? Clothes cost money, Calley, a lot of money and we are dirt poor now. Dirt. Poor.”

  I pulled at the lobe of my left ear and stared at her defiantly.

  “We,” I said. “Are. Not. Dirt. Poor.”

  She slapped me again. “I should buy you a red jacket and a fez and let you pass for an organ grinder’s monkey. At least you might come home with a few pennies in your hat. Get out of my sight.”

  Twenty-seven

  WHILE I bathed, I contemplated Miz Verlow’s terms and Mama’s reactions, which had been almost more interesting than the terms.

  You reside here at my pleasure.

  You will obey my rules.

  Your room and board I will take in barter from those goods that came with you. Or you can choose to work, but only here on this island and with my consent or a
pproval.

  You will attempt no communications with anyone without my foreknowledge and consent.

  You will make no contracts nor incur any debt without my foreknowledge and consent.

  You will not leave the island without intent to return, nor travel more than fifty miles away without my foreknowledge and consent.

  You will not abandon the child here. Understand that she is all that stands between you and a fate worse than the one that befell your late husband.

  The child will go to school.

  The reach of your enemies is long and their enmity persistent. If you cannot agree to this, you will imperil your life and freedom.

  There is no negotiation of these terms.

  The choice is entirely your own.

  Mama had begun disdainful, she had sniffed and snorted, but at the end, she had been trembling with anger and fear.

  Nothing that I could imagine was more appealing to me than staying where we were. Since I had feared all along that Mama would abandon me, it was no shock to find out that Miz Verlow suspected it of Mama as well. The talk of peril and enemies and enmity was uniquely satisfying. Not only did it confirm my own sense of precariousness, it did so in the guise of a fairy-tale stricture: Break a rule as simple as speaking to a stranger, and be punished with a hundred years of naptime. The relief to me of having Mama firmly tethered to me, and to this place, was immense. The nature of the perils, of the enemies and their grudges, did not need to be elaborated. My daddy was in bloody pieces. Somebody, something, had done us a terrible turn. It was only wise to reckon they might not be done with us. A seven-year-old does not normally or naturally think very far beyond the moment, but raw fear forced it on me.

  Having bathed and washed my hair, I swished the two pieces of my glasses through the soapy water. I dried them and put them, with Betsy Cane McCall, in the pocket of my clean overalls.

  Miz Verlow caught me on the backstairs landing again, putting my bloodied towels and clothing in the laundry chute.

  “Child, I’ve seen bramble bushes with birds caught in them that were still neater than your hair,” she said. “Get your mama to comb it and tie it up for you.”

  Mama’s door was closed and locked. I had tried it already. My face hurt. My head hurt. I realized that the throbbing in my head was what Mama meant by a headache. I could not think what to do next.

  Miz Verlow’s voice softened. “You need an aspirin, Calley.”

  She drew me along with her, through a door and into an ell of the house and down a hallway and into a bedroom. I was surprised to see her open a door into another bathroom. This bedroom—hers, it came to me—had its own private bath. She came out of the bath with a damp washrag, a glass of water and a small orange pill.

  The little orange pill may have been the first aspirin I ever had. Certainly I have no memory of such a thing even existing in the house in Montgomery. This aspirin was not only orange in color; it had a tang of orange and grittiness on my tongue that raised goose bumps on my arms.

  She picked up a small bottle from the dresser and poured a few pearly drops into one palm. After rubbing her palms together, she very gently worked the stuff from the bottle through my hair. She massaged my scalp the way I did Mama’s feet at night. The pain in my head began to fade. Then she combed my hair and tied up my ponytails. It didn’t hurt a bit.

  “How about some ribbons?”

  One second, one long piece of yellow ribbon draped her fingers and the next, there were two, flickering away from the blades of the shears with a cool faint whisper. The shears were very sharp, sharp enough to take off a finger or a foot, and well oiled too, for the pivot of the blades moved with only the slightest of sounds. The whole ribbon fell hypnotically into two perfectly equal parts between the flash of the two blades.

  “Who was the lady who left this morning?”

  “I thought you would never ask. Why do you think that she was wearing her hat to obscure her face?”

  “So I would ask who she was.”

  Miz Verlow laughed softly. “You are sharp as the blades of my shears, Calley Dakin.”

  My tongue was suddenly thick in my heavy head, my eyelids impossible to lift.

  THE sound of the dinner bell woke me. I had no memory of falling asleep. My neck was stiff and damp and I was hungry. It seemed to me that the dinner bell was my hunger, ringing right inside my head and in my stomach.

  Now warmed by my body heat, the damp washrag sat like a deflated old toad on my forehead: I flung it off. The pillow was damp from my wet hair. So heavy had my sleep been that I had drooled a little. My earlobes and behind my ears and my neck were crusty with the tracks of it.

  I slipped off the bed and went into the bathroom to pee and wash my face. A small high window was propped open to the salt air and the intricate conversation of birds and sea and wind. The room itself was imbued with a complex aroma, something like a spice cupboard all mixed up with a medicine cabinet.

  The yellow ribbons around my ponytails shone back at me in the mirror over the basin. My swollen face was muddy with bruises. The yellow of the ribbon was exactly the wrong color; it made my hair more colorless, my skin hectic, the discoloration of the bruises violent. My head hurt again just looking at myself. When I felt in my pocket for my broken glasses and Betsy Cane McCall, I found nothing.

  But I was so hungry, I was hollow clean through.

  I found my way back to the foyer and the dining room and would have gone onto the kitchen but Miz Verlow was there at the table, with Mama and the guests who wanted dinner, and she stopped me with a commanding look.

  “Miss Calley Dakin,” she said, “you are late. Beg pardon, please, and take your seat.”

  She indicated a chair with the slightest of gestures of her head.

  “Beg pardon,” I tried to say but it came out all thick and clogged as if I had a cold.

  Mama snickered.

  No one else did.

  I fell on my dinner as the wolves on the Assyrians—at least that’s the way I remember it, wolves on Assyrians—ate everything on the plate Cleonie put down in front of me: ham steak and red-eyed gravy and cornbread, and creamed corn and scallop potatoes and green beans cooked with side meat, and bread-and-rice pudding with whipped cream. I drank three whole glasses of sweetened lemonade. To the consternation of the guests, to Mama’s horror and humiliation, to Cleonie’s wrinkled nose, and to Miz Verlow’s apparent indifference, I finally slid woozily off that chair and vomited on the turkey rug.

  “Concussion,” said Miz Verlow shortly. “Put the child to bed.”

  Twenty-eight

  WHEN the first morning birds woke me, I was tangled in a coverlet on the floor. Mama was asleep in the bed. Horrid dreams had fevered my night. I did not want to recall any detail. When I finally did, I wished heartily that I had not.

  My first concern was thirst. At that very early hour, I had the use without challenge of the bathroom we shared with other guests. I gulped from the tap like the barely domesticated little animal that I was. And then I did the opposite and relieved myself.

  I became aware of feeling a little less substantial, a little lighter on my feet. After splashing my face and head, I brushed the sick taste of my nightmares from my mouth. A few strands of my hair fell into the basin, into the foam of toothpaste spat.

  My hair was loose, the ribbons and rubber bands left on Mama’s dresser, along with the gap-toothed comb that she had assigned me since I had lost mine. My scalp felt lighter than usual. I was a fright, of course: my eyes half-closed with swelling, my nose like a moldy potato. I made a face in the mirror and stuck out my tongue at myself.

  When I crept back into the bedroom, intent on getting my clothes and scooting out again, Mama was just stirring. She opened one eye, saw me, moaned, and turned over, yanking a pillow over her head.

  I dressed as swiftly and quietly as I could. The rubber bands, the yellow ribbons, the comb, all waited on the dresser. It felt as if they were watching me: the rubber bands ga
sping, the comb gnashing its uneven teeth, the ribbons flickering like snakes’ tongues that would burn when they bit. I slipped out without touching them and with an intense sense of having escaped.

  Cleonie and Perdita were in the kitchen already, Miz Verlow in conversation with them, so I was able to creep out of doors unseen and unheard.

  The light edging over the eastern horizon brightened the foam on the breakers in the west to a dazzling pure white. A fleet of pelicans flying parallel to the shore passed almost silently over my head, throwing their huge shadows over me and onto the white sand. They seemed very close and very large. My relative small size enlarged them to enormity.

  Up and down the beach, at watch in the swash, stood solitary herons—harrings. Suddenly I understood Cleonie’s pronunciation. As I approached the nearest, it seemed entirely indifferent to me and yet was aware of me; I saw it in its eyes and heard its heartbeat surge. It too was a large bird, taller than I was, but its legs were stilts, its long neck as thin as my wrist, its head no bigger than my fist. A long, thin inky slash of droopy feathers atop its skull, and the long feathers on its chest, ruffled in the breeze.

  A law firm of birds waded in the swash or near it: sander-ling, dunlin, dowitcher, sandpiper, willet, stilt and avocet. Pelicans, skimmers, terns and gulls hunted just offshore.

  As I squatted barefoot on the beach, a breeze ruffled my hair, and took away a strand. And then another.

  A fish crow screeched a loud awk and hurtled toward me. It passed over my head with its claws outreached, snagged lightly, and was gone. I did not need to see the strands in its claws to know that it had taken some of my hair. The interesting sensation was the absence of resistance from the hair. It was painless. The hair went quite willingly where it was tugged. It no longer felt rooted or connected to me in any way.

  I made an uhhk at the fish crow. In a black vortex, a dozen or more fish crows hovered over me, diving toward me, skimming away a few strands of hair at a time, rising away again. My scalp felt more and more naked. The sea breeze passed as a cool ruffling through thinner and thinner locks. The birds played around my head acrobatically, teasingly, and their wings fanned me from every direction until I heard nothing else. Some of their cries sounded like questions—uhuh-uhuh? Others like answers—brruhk. My throat grew dry from conversing with them, and then they were gone.