Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  I could hear other things again: the other birds, the tall, swaying grass on the dunes, the slosh and splosh and sigh of the water, the swift scuttle of ghost crabs emerging from their holes in the sand, the wet breathing of the clams under the sand. And then the raucous mirth of a laughing gull.

  The beach and the birds enthralled me to the extent that if awakening hunger had not brought me back to the house, I might have stayed there all day. I had yet to understand how much sustenance was all around me.

  Mama was again at the table in the dining room, with the guests and Miz Verlow.

  Mama’s eyes widened at the sight of me. She gasped as if she were choking on a fishbone. Miz Verlow handed her a glass of water. Mama got her tubes cleared, patted her mouth with her napkin, and recovered her poise. The guests, after initial murmurs of alarm, maintained an uneasy attentiveness to their breakfasts.

  I took my place at the table and thanked Cleonie when she put a plate down in front of me.

  “What is the meaning of this, Calliope Carroll Dakin?” Mama’s voice was half-strangled and very low.

  “The meaning of what?” My mouth was full of warm fresh-baked buttery biscuit.

  Mama took a deep breath. She wore only lipstick at this hour of the morning, so the reddening of her face was undisguised. Everyone else concentrated on his or her meals. The table could have easily been a refectory in some monastery under vow of silence—not that I knew at the time that there were such things as refectories, or monasteries, or vows of silence.

  “Leave the table,” Mama said.

  I placed my fork neatly on my scrambled eggs, slid from my chair, took my plate and made for the kitchen. I helped wash up the dishes.

  No one said a word about the fact that my scalp was hairless. As I was drying my hands, Perdita summoned me with the crook of a finger. She whipped a linen napkin around my head in complicated folds and secured it with a small tight knot high on one side. She left my ears exposed. Then she twitched the cloth on either side and the folds bloused out and covered my ears.

  On the wall next to the door to the butler’s pantry was a small mirror that Miz Verlow, Perdita and Cleonie checked nearly every time they left the kitchen. From the way she invariably rolled back her lips to check her teeth, Miz Verlow had a horror of having spinach or lipstick on them. Cleonie and Perdita were just vain—vain as peacocks. They always smiled at what they saw. Their pleasure in their own looks made me think of them with awe as about the most beautiful people in the world. Perdita placed the step stool under the mirror so I could climb up and see myself. The napkin was snowy white, and with my blacked eyes and swollen face, I looked like an odd sort of white-capped owlet.

  Mama was madder than a nest of paper wasps busted open with a hickory stick. I know because I did that once, when I was too young to know better, and got stung so many times, I wet my pants. But I was fearless. What could she do to me? Make me wet my pants? Black my eyes? Scalp me bald? Tear me limb from limb?

  Miz Verlow was in the upstairs hall when Mama marched me toward our room.

  “Miz Dakin, I beg your pardon,” said Miz Verlow. “I forgot to mention that I do not allow corporal punishment in this house.”

  “I beg your pardon, Miz Verlow.” Mama’s every word cutting as Miz Verlow’s own shears. “Calley is mine and I shall raise her as I see fit.”

  Miz Verlow shook her head. “I remind you, Miz Dakin, of our agreement.”

  Mama paled. Her hand fluttered to her throat. “You cannot be serious. You must be mad.”

  “Loretta Young again? Please don’t waste your acting talent on me, my dear. You will not use any form of corporal punish on Calley under my roof. Is that understood?”

  Mama went all Mamadee-rigid. Her fingers twitched, yearning for something to throw, eyes to scratch out.

  Miz Verlow seemed hardly to notice. Wishing Mama good morning, she turned away.

  Mama stalked past me into our room and slammed the door.

  Miz Verlow paused, her hand hovering suddenly over the folds of the scarf around my head as if to pet me, but she did not actually touch me.

  I let myself into the room, still dark against the sun. Mama was sitting at the vanity, tucking up loose strands of hair. In the mirror, Mama narrowed her eyes spitefully at me.

  “Want me to rub your feet, Mama?”

  She kicked off her shoes and flung herself onto the bed. “Don’t think your Merry Verlow is putting anything over on me, Calley Dakin. Don’t think you are either. I know a game when I see one.”

  I hesitated.

  “Rub my feet, Calley,” Mama said impatiently. “The least you can do is make yourself useful.”

  That, at least, was a well-established principle.

  After a while Mama was calm enough to talk again normally and reverted to her favorite subject, herself. “I have been so distraught that I forgot that you were skipping school.” As if I were deliberately doing it. She went on, “When it starts up again, you are going to school. You may not learn anything but at least you won’t be under my feet all the time.”

  I liked school—the learning part of it anyway, and the being out from under Mama’s feet. In the meantime, I was caught up in exploring the island.

  As soon as I was out again, I ventured across the road and all the way to the other side of Santa Rosa Island. Miz Verlow’s house stood at a narrow waist of the narrow island, but that side of the road was nonetheless different in striking ways from the Gulf side. On the bay side, the sand mounded up chaotically, as if the dunes had been tied in knots. Sand pines and shrubs crowned the high places and other kinds of trees and shrubs grew in the low places. Some of the low places were wet, at least some of the time, and had their own kinds of plants and critters. The old deranged dunes nestled areas of salt marsh. What beach there was, was narrower and less cool, as the body of the island and the vegetation gave it some protection from the winds off the Gulf. Between the island and the mainland was the quieter water of Pensacola Bay, with more boat traffic. On the nether shore Pensacola was laid out before me like a toy town.

  The sight of Pensacola reminded me of our journey from Tallassee and of Mamadee and Ford. I did not want to be reminded. Nor did I want to remember losing Daddy in New Orleans or our life before that loss. More than anything else, I wanted to hold on to Daddy alive. I spoke to myself in his voice, repeating things that he had said to me. He was still with me; I still heard his voice, even if I had to make it myself. I hardly needed the obvious reasons for protecting myself from the loss and the trauma and the grief. As any child does, I lived far more in the moment than most adults do.

  My trek across the road had inspired me to inquire of Miz Verlow if she had a map of the island. Indeed she did. In her tiny office just inside the foyer—it looked as if it had once been a coat closet—she had her desk and chair and file cabinet. The file cabinet stored numerous folders to answer the questions of her guests: local maps, restaurants, events, churches, and so on.

  The map she gave me was a simple one, but could not be otherwise: Santa Rosa Island is a strip of sand, miles long and, at that time, with one main road more or less down the middle. The west end of the road is called Fort Pickens Road, and the other, the Avenue de la Luna. At the west end were the abandoned Civil War fortifications of Fort Pickens, and facilities for camping; the eastern end of Santa Rosa Island was part of Eglin Air Force Base. Of course I had heard airplanes, jets and props both, but had given them no particular thought: Pensacola presumably had an airport. There were bridges at three points on the island, with clusters of small businesses, hotels and motels, and residences at the island end of them. The short westernmost bridge connected a small intervening island, where a village had named itself Gulf Breeze. From it, the long Causeway reached to Pensacola.

  The physical divide of the island from the mainland was one kind of safety. I would have erased that Causeway from the map if I could, but at least the bay it crossed constituted something of a moat. Mamadee did
not know we were here. The crazy maid and the crazy cook from the Hotel Pontchartrain would never be able to find us here. Miz Verlow was another kind of safety, less obvious and of untested reliability, but a fallback position to Mama without a question.

  Still, when I asked Miz Verlow if she had seen my broken glasses or my Betsy Cane McCall, she surprised me.

  “I am not responsible for your belongings, Miss Calliope Dakin,” she said, very severely. “They are entirely your own responsibility.”

  Of course she was correct. It seemed to me that I saw well enough without my glasses, and Betsy Cane McCall, well—I hardly missed her. I forgot the paper dolls and Rosetta’s shears in their shoebox. Santa Rosa Island was a better toy than I had ever had. Or would.

  A day or so later, when I wanted clean clothes, I noticed that the bloodied clothes and towels that I had thrown down the laundry chute had not been returned to me. When I inquired of Cleonie if she knew where they were, she frowned and said that she had never seen them at all. She would have remembered them because of the blood, she said, which she would have soaked in cold water before sending them out to be laundered. I looked frantically but was unable to avoid Mama’s wrath that I had managed to lose one of the few changes of clothing that I owned, to say nothing of Miz Verlow’s towels. Mama made me sleep on the floor for a month.

  Twenty-nine

  THOUGH the very young heal quickly by nature, the salve Miz Verlow gave me for it hastened the process. What it was, I do not know. Like all her nostrums, it came unmarked in a little glass jar or bottle. They all smelled of some flower or herb.

  Rarely was there any more in the jar or bottle than was needed, the most immediate exception being Mama’s pale green foot balm, which Miz Verlow provided in cylindrical milk glass containers like short fat candles. The contents would last a week. The fragrance was a new one to me, but not to Mama.

  Mama declared that she had been looking for just that balm for years. It was the one that her beloved grandmama had used. It must be an old recipe, she advised me, for her grandmama’s foot balm had been made up at the local pharmacy. Either Miz Verlow had had the recipe herself or a source in some pharmacy that still had the recipe; the important thing was that Miz Verlow deserved as little credit for the superior foot balm as Mama could give her. On occasion though, when it suited Mama, she would praise Miz Verlow’s foot balm extravagantly, and speculate that it would make a fortune if it were made commercially available.

  Merrymeeting had two parlors. The small parlor—relatively smaller—was, as I have said, home to the television set and the radio-phonograph console. Miz Verlow’s collection of LPs included commonplace classical music, musicals and film soundtracks. She allowed me to use the turntable in the late afternoon, before supper. The Zenith television in the opposite corner remained of only minor interest to me. Pensacola only had one television station, WEAR, and the offerings were limited. I knew how to operate the Zenith and how to adjust the rabbit ears, and did so for the guests who on occasion wanted to watch some particular program in the early evening.

  The large parlor boasted the biggest bookcase in the house. On leaving, guests often abandoned books. The left-behind volumes found a new home in the big bookcase in the large parlor, or in other smaller bookcases around the house. Miz Verlow had been shelving or reshelving the books when I arrived, but before I went back to school, I took over the job. In those first few days, I thumbed through the slew of books on birds and shells and native plants.

  Miz Verlow happened on me studying on one of them, on the floor behind a big wing-backed chair, so as not to be underfoot or bother anyone. She told me that I could keep the ones that I was studying in Mama’s room, unless a guest asked for it. I added them to the books that I had stolen from my dead uncle. In the room that Mama and I shared, I had a bottom drawer in a dresser for my clothes. My books fitted under my clothes well enough, at least for a while.

  Later, Miz Verlow took me with her on long walks to gather herbs and bark used in her medicinals. One of these plants was the shrub that grew up against the skirts of the house. As soon as I smelled it, I recognized it as one of the ingredients in Mama’s foot balm. Miz Verlow said its common name was Candle Bush, after its yellow flower spikes. Perdita and Cleonie called it Burnin’ Candles.

  For a week, Miz Verlow sent a nightcap up to Mama every evening. Mama slept late in the mornings and arose in a cheerful mood. I was able to slip out each day without disturbing her.

  When I was rubbing her feet at bedtime, Mama would bemoan her woes and then swear that she would get Ford back and the money and see her mama in hell. Those goals required a lawyer, of course; she complained bitterly to me that she had no money for a lawyer. She could not hire a Florida lawyer anyway, because Florida lawyers couldn’t practice law in Alabama. She knew that for a fact because she had called a firm of lawyers in Pensacola, right out of the phone book. She consoled herself with the conviction that the lawyers in Pensacola were likely all drunks anyway, or profoundly incompetent in the protection of widows and orphans.

  Mama was so gracious and sweet to Miz Verlow that no guest would ever suspect that Mama hated her. Mama had spent her life at war with Mamadee. What could be easier or more convenient than to replace Mamadee with Miz Verlow. Mama could never admit to herself that she did not, in fact, signify all that much to Miz Verlow.

  Mama played Southern lady of the house to the guests when they were around. She did not speak of what had happened to Daddy nor did she hasten to reveal that I was her child. Miz Verlow introduced me merely as “Little Calley.” Some of the guests concluded that I was some foundling benefiting from Miz Verlow’s conscientious charity. Others hardly noticed that I existed, which was fine with me.

  I never minded the chores that structured the day. They made me feel as if I belonged. After I washed up after each meal, Miz Verlow showed me the page of a notebook on which she kept the record of each nickel that I earned. Until my bruises healed—only a few days—I ate in the kitchen.

  Miz Verlow’s guests most commonly departed on Saturday, new ones arriving on Sunday evening. Taxis summoned from town took away the guests who had not come in their own vehicles, and the parking lot emptied of everything but Miz Verlow’s Country Squire and the Edsel.

  By one-thirty in the afternoon, Cleonie and I had the customary Saturday dinner buffet cleared away and the table reset for the supper that Perdita was preparing. Miz Verlow would serve it, allowing Perdita and Cleonie to take their leave. By three, the beds were stripped and remade, the bathrooms cleaned and restocked with the necessities. Thereupon, the colored taxi came to drive Cleonie and Perdita to the lives they lived in Pensacola. They would return Sunday evening by nine P.M. The other six nights of the week, they slept in a room behind the kitchen. It had its own little closet with a basin and a toilet.

  On the shabby old dresser that the two women shared were family photographs that I had not yet had sufficient opportunity to study. Perdita and Cleonie were respectable AME church ladies and worshipped as conscientiously as they worked for Miz Verlow.

  Their AME church was not included, of course, in the listing of local churches and their schedules that Miz Verlow provided for her guests. The most exotic church on that list was St. Michael’s Roman Catholic in Pensacola. Jews, Baha’is, Mormons and Muslims never did get any listings, nor did any snake-handlers or Holy Rollers. Pensacola certainly had some of each and no doubt they all had their places of worship. Pensacola had then and has now as many churches as any other town, so about anyone not a total heathen could and can find their own brand. Heathens, of course, have nothing to complain about.

  In her defense, Miz Verlow expressed absolutely no interest in the religious affiliations or practices of her guests. If she knew that some of them were Catholics or Jews or Buddhists who practiced their religions anonymously, it did not stop her letting them her rooms. I am confident that she would have found a means of turning away a suspected snake-handler, not because she had
any particular feelings about snake-handling but to spare her other guests being proselytized. She had a great feeling for the privacy of her guests that she observed by her own idiosyncratic set of rules. And she was quite willing to drive them back and forth to the place of worship of their choosing.

  That very first Sunday we did not attend church at all.

  Mama said, “I cannot take you out in public looking such a fright. I don’t suppose the inconvenience to me entered your calculations, did it?”

  “I ain’t got a dress anyway,” I said, “or a hat or coat or gloves.”

  Reminded that I had arrived at Merrymeeting with little more than a couple of changes of clothes in my suitcase and had lost one change, Mama glared at me.

  “I was nearly growed out of the grey dress anyway,” I pointed out.

  She pursed her lips. “I suppose you think good clothes grow on trees? Stop saying ‘ain’t’ and ‘growed.’ You’ve been raised to know better. I swear the Dakin in you has destroyed all the Carroll.”

  Mama slept in until noon that Sunday and then spent the afternoon on the beach. It was scarcely warm enough yet for sunbathing but Mama had decided that she was sickly pale, due to pining away in widowhood and having lost a child and all the other terrible shocks of recent months, and so she shivered on a chaise in her sunsuit. I was in charge of fetching her coffee or another magazine from the house. Sadly for her, I was also her only audience.

  Mama explained to Miz Verlow the necessity to go into Pensacola to buy me a dress. On Tuesday, with her guests all settled, Miz Verlow drove us to town in her Country Squire. Miz Verlow knew where the best store was, she assured us, which happened to be having a sale on children’s clothing. Between flattery and pointing out all the bargains to be had, Miz Verlow baited Mama into buying me not only these new dresses, but a new coat, new Mary Janes, new socks and a hat, another straw boater that fit over the napkin on my head, new underpants, new pajamas, and new overalls and shirts. Each piece of clothing fit me, but it was all in colors that made me look half dead. I was indifferent. I never had had any pretty clothing and didn’t expect any. The whole collection really came surprisingly cheap, which pleased Mama intensely. Of course, after all that shopping, I had to massage her feet for an extra-long time that night.