Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  Mama was forced to give me a few inches of closet space to hang my three dresses, but she made me unload the books from my clothes drawer to accommodate the rest of my new clothing. She threatened to throw the books out. My wails brought Miz Verlow, who saved my books by granting me the lowest, least used shelf in the linen closet.

  The following Sunday, the first in May, Miz Verlow very kindly chauffeured Mama and me to Christ Episcopal. A blind fog obscured our passage on and off the island as thoroughly as the dark of night had on our arrival, yet Miz Verlow always seemed to know where she was.

  My appearance with the napkin around my head under my new boater caused a little flutter in the church. Mama wore black, including her veil. When we left the church, the pastor took Mama’s hand in his at the door. I thrust myself between them and stepped on the toes of the pastor’s well-shined shoes, producing a satisfactory wince and the release of Mama’s hand.

  On our return, the mist so blurred Miz Verlow’s house, it appeared to be abandoned. The lights were all out; the power, off. Inside, the house felt empty as an old barn. The diffuse, feeble light of the dark day did not penetrate the darker corners of the house, while the cold damp pierced us all to our marrow.

  Miz Verlow sent me to the kitchen to fetch the cold plates Perdita had left for us. We ate in the dining room, by the light of a single yellow candle in a silver candlestick that had come from Mamadee’s house. I was not so foolish as to mention that I recognized it. What interested me more was that the candle was obviously homemade—not crudely either, but with skill. As it burned, it gave off a tarry but not offensive odor that made me think of Mama’s foot balm.

  Little as I wanted to think about Miz Verlow’s terms, I was not enough Mama’s child to be able to exclude from my thoughts that which was—unpleasant. On the contrary, the more I wish not to think of something, the more I do. I have learned to think what I have to think when I have to think it. Naturally, unwelcome thoughts return but they do so less annoyingly.

  Once dinner was out of the way, Miz Verlow suggested cards.

  Though Mama’s first reaction to the suggestion of Sunday card playing was a scandalized hitch of one eyebrow, she realized immediately that her outrage was wasted without an audience. She sat down to the card table with a coy lack of enthusiasm. Mama always loved cards. She played the worst and had the worst luck of anyone I ever knew. In Mama’s world though, she was a sharp, a player without equal. Presented with an opportunity to exercise her skills, she seized upon it. Quite aside from anything else, cards might very well provide her with leverage over Merry Verlow.

  Mama and Miz Verlow and I sat down in the large parlor to play Hearts. My card playing skills at that time were very basic but I already knew enough to let Mama win. Rather than open new, we played with an old deck of cards, a red one with the initials CCD on the back. My initials—though the cards were at least twenty years old, and truly unfit for anything but cheating at Solitaire. The parlor was as quiet as it could be with the three of us in it, speaking as little as possible, concentrating on the cards. Our only light was the candle that Miz Verlow brought with her from the dining room. Its light was magnified by the parlor’s enormous mirror, hanging opposite me and the fireplace behind me. The small flame burned intently, the burnt wick collapsing sadly into the pooled melted beeswax. In the mirror, it appeared as a tongue of fire, kindled out of the depthless shadows in the reflected fireplace. The scent of the burning candle reminded me of the church service we had attended, and of my daddy’s funeral.

  It won’t make any difference.

  “What won’t?” Mama responded tersely, glaring at her exposed cards in hope of defying Miz Verlow’s unexpected gibe.

  “Pardon me?” said Miz Verlow.

  Miz Verlow and Mama then looked at me, though the voice that had spoken possessed neither the scale nor timbre of a seven-year-old girl child.

  Miz Verlow passed the question on to me. “What won’t make any difference, Calley?”

  It won’t make any difference to me simply because I am dead.

  We were at that moment all looking at one another. None of us had spoken.

  So who had?

  We were alone, the three of us, in that isolated house.

  Mama was stricken pale. Even Miz Verlow looked distressed. It fell to my lot to deal with the matter. And to me, Calliope Carroll Dakin, whose initials were on the deck of playing cards on the little triangular table before us, it was perfectly obvious whose voice had sounded in the stifling front parlor. I looked in the mirror. Her face looked out, not at us, but as if through a window. Her eyes were wide and teary with terror.

  “Mamadee, is that you?” I asked.

  It is, and it isn’t.

  “Shut up!” Mama snapped at me.

  I kept my eyes fixed on the mirror but before I could tell Mama to look into it, Mamadee’s voice spoke again:

  You don’t have to be rude, Roberta Ann.

  Mama jumped up and strode toward the door, preparing to fling it open—even though she knew as well as I that the voice was not coming from the hallway or from any other part of the house.

  I am not out there, Roberta Ann.

  Mama stopped with her hands reaching for the door. Then she took a step backward as if the door itself had spoken.

  Miz Verlow rose. “Are you in here?”

  She was like a miner, digging deep to rescue a child tumbled down a disused shaft. Breaking open a crumbling wall, she softly questions the dead, soft darkness, Are you in there?

  I understood then that neither Miz Verlow nor Mama saw Mamadee in the mirror.

  I don’t know. I don’t know where I am. But I know I see who killed me—

  “She’s lying. Mama’s not dead.” Mama looked at me hard. “If my mama were dead, we would know about it.”

  “Are you dead?” I asked aloud.

  Mama grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard. “Stop pretending to be Mama!”

  Then she looked around her, as if something were hiding behind her back. Eyes wide as ever I had seen them, she was visibly shaking.

  “Mama!” she wailed. “You caint be dead!”

  Suddenly the room was colder, as if someone had opened a window. The candle flickered and went out. Thin threads of white smoke rose from its wick.

  The voice exclaimed in outrage: Roberta Ann Carroll, that is my candlestick on that table!

  Mama was not to be diverted by mere issues of ownership.

  “You want to make me feel bad!” she cried. “Well you caint make me feel bad because number one I did not kill you, and number two I never even knew you were dead, and number three, I don’t believe you are my mama because we don’t have ghosts in our family! There are no Carroll ghosts!”

  The ghost—or whatever it was—had no response to Mama’s barrage of illogic. Mama dug her fingers out of my shoulders. Miz Verlow started to move toward the door. She was going to try to get us out of there before anything else—and anything worse—happened.

  Then, abruptly, Mamadee spoke again, asking a confused, tentative question: Roberta Ann, where on earth are you?

  “What does she mean?” Mama whispered to me.

  I replied in the voice that seven-year-old girls use when reciting an Easter verse at the front of the church: “We are in Pensacola, Florida, Mamadee. In Miz Verlow’s house. She is distant kin to the Dakins but not related to them by blood.”

  Again the voice came, soft and fumbling, addressing Mama and ignoring my reply and me.

  I am looking at a chair, Roberta Ann, that chair right behind you—my mama did the bargello on that chair. So where on earth did you get it? Because I know that chair burned up. It burned up in 1942. Are you in Mama’s house again, Roberta Ann?

  “No!” Mama cried, “It’s 1958 and this is Pensacola Beach!”

  It’s Banks, said Mamadee’s voice, and this is a house that burned down, due to your carelessness with candles, before Calley was born. So if you are here, then you are dead�
�both of you—and I’m glad. . . .

  “She doesn’t mean that,” Mama whispered hotly in my ear. “She doesn’t wish we were dead.”

  “Why are you glad we’re dead?” I asked Mamadee.

  Because then, Calley, you wicked wicked little witch—Mamadee laughed, the same laugh she used to laugh when she read in the morning paper that someone she did not like had died before she had—because then, Calley, I will not have to warn you about what’s going to happen to you. So now maybe they will let me go back. So maybe—

  I guess “they” did let Mamadee go “back,” because she left right then in the middle of her thought, and we never heard her voice again.

  Thirty

  MAMA’S mind fastened not on what had happened but on what it might mean to her. If it had truly been Mamadee’s ghost who had spoken, then Mamadee was dead. The idea of Mamadee dead and gone threw Mama into unbearable panic; it meant that the rope she had been hauling on all her life was all at once loose at the other end. The reality of Mamadee’s death could hardly be countenanced; it stuck in her craw like a mouse in a snake’s belly. Before she could digest it, she had to figure out why she had been informed of the fact—if it were a fact—by such extraordinary means.

  If that were not enough, Mamadee’s cryptic remark, I won’t have to warn you about what’s going to happen to you, was guaranteed to unsettle us. Mama had to find an interpretation of that sibylline pronouncement that was not a portent of evil.

  I was willing to say it had been Mamadee’s voice, simply because, if it were, Mamadee might very well be dead. I certainly hoped so, with all my heathen heart, and was only disappointed that she had not complained of the singe and stink of hellfire. I could think of no reason that Mamadee should tell the truth just because she happened to be deceased. To this day I have found no reason to believe that the human soul, duplicitous to its core, suddenly becomes truthful just because it comes to be divorced from a corporeal form. I knew that I had held a conversation with Mamadee. I held my tongue, awaiting further developments. Waiting for Mama to realize the obvious.

  Miz Verlow quietly collected our scattered cards and dropped them into a wastebasket. She picked up the candlestick.

  “Lordy, I am cold,” she said. “I believe I will indulge myself in some hot tea. If you should like to join me, I am sure the kitchen will be more comfortable than this ever-so-depressing dark room.”

  With this very reasonable excuse to escape the parlor, we repaired to the kitchen. It might have been the one time in her life that Mama went into a kitchen eagerly. The sudden conviction seized me that Mamadee had spoken not to inform us of her death and not to give Mama or me a warning but because I was in the room with Mama and Miz Verlow. From beyond the grave, she was pointing one of her knotty, meticulously manicured fingers at me. She wanted Mama and perhaps Miz Verlow to believe that I was either the source of a deception—or else her killer. Or both.

  Miz Verlow settled the candlestick on the table. “Do sit down, Miz Dakin. I am going to fetch a shawl against the chill while the kettle boils. Would you like me to bring you a shawl or a sweater? One for Calley?”

  Mama nodded.

  Miz Verlow filled the kettle and lit the gas under it, then left us alone for a few minutes.

  I busied myself fetching cups and saucers, teaspoons, a teapot, sugar and a cream jug from the butler’s pantry, as I had been so recently trained.

  The kettle shrieked as if to herald Miz Verlow’s return. She smiled at me when she saw how busy I had been. Around her shoulders she had drawn a very fine soft wool shawl of a slate color.

  For Mama she had brought Mama’s own black cashmere sweater, and for me, a sweater of coarser wool. It was not my sweater. I did not own one anymore. The sweater Miz Verlow fetched for me was pilled and clearly hard-worn, with red blobs on a yellow background that were both busy and ugly. The sweater smelled too, of long storage in mothballs, and of something else, a rank mucky smell that reminded me distinctly of an outhouse. Mama shrugged quickly into her sweater without remarking upon the fact that Miz Verlow must have entered Mama’s room and opened Mama’s closet to obtain it.

  I stuffed my hands through the sleeves of the yellow sweater with its peculiar red motif, and with considerable effort, forced the sharp-edged buttons through the too-tight buttonholes. The sweater did not make me warmer. If anything, I felt colder. The wool prickled my skin. It was badly knitted too, lumpy in some places, loose to the point of gaping in others, and so tight around my armpits that it cut into my skin. Once it was on me, I was instantly convinced that it had belonged to a child now dead. I could hear that child choking in the waves, and the water drawing it relentlessly down. When I tried to unbutton it to get out of it, my fingers were too cold to manipulate the buttons through the buttonholes again.

  Miz Verlow hummed while she made the tea and poured it. I recognized the tune.

  “You are my sunshine,” I sang in my own voice, “my only sunshine.”

  “Stop it, Calley!” Mama cried. “My head’s killing me.”

  Miz Verlow leaned over Mama. She took one of Mama’s unresisting hands and then the other and wrapped them around a teacup.

  “Hold the warmth, Roberta Ann. Drink it up. It will help your poor head.”

  Mama wanted to believe Miz Verlow; I saw it in her face.

  Miz Verlow sat on one side of Mama while I wriggled into the chair on the other side.

  The candle flame reflected darkly in my tea; it looked as if it were burning inside the liquid. The tea burned my mouth, and all the way down my throat. It was Lapsang souchong, its normal flavor adulterated by the taste of wax and charred wick. The surface of the tea in the cup settled and I stared again at the candle flame in it; my head felt heavy, my eyes strained. My scalp felt as if it were bleeding from thousands of pinpricks; I could feel the stubble poking through the follicles.

  Mama put down her empty cup and Miz Verlow refilled it.

  Mama looked at me.

  “Calley,” she said, in a flat, ugly voice, “you were making that voice, I know you were. Mocking me! Mocking my poor darling mama!”

  With a slow shake of my head, I denied it silently.

  A mild, amused speculation danced in Miz Verlow’s eyes as she looked from one to the other of us.

  “Do it,” Mama said, “Say ‘It won’t make any difference,’ in Mamadee’s voice.”

  I looked at Miz Verlow and shrugged.

  Miz Verlow seemed unsurprised and very interested.

  “Don’t you call me a liar,” Mama said. “Don’t you make me look crazy, Calley!”

  Miz Verlow reached out and touched my wrist but she spoke to Mama. “Miz Dakin, we have had a shock. I take it from what you say that the voice we heard was that of your mama. Why ever do you think that Calley was somehow speaking in that voice? We were both looking right at her. I did not see her lips move except when she asked The Voice a question.”

  Mama ignored her. Mama said my name angrily. “Calley!”

  “Uh-uh, Mama, I caint make Mamadee’s voice without moving my lips.”

  Miz Verlow’s fingers around my wrist tightened. “But you can mimic your grandmama’s voice.”

  “ ‘Roberta,’ ” I said in Mamadee’s voice, “ ‘where on earth are you?’ ”

  Mama shuddered.

  “Is that your mama’s voice?” Miz Verlow asked her.

  “Yes,” Mama whispered. “To the life.”

  “I have to move my lips though,” I pointed out. “And I ain’t makin’ mock.”

  “Say something in my voice,” Miz Verlow told me.

  So I did. “ ‘Say something in my voice.’ ”

  In the silence that followed, I took a big gulp of the tea in my cup. Speaking in someone else’s voice made me dry. The tea scorched my throat without relieving my thirst.

  “I should have taken Ford and left her,” said Mama. “I believe she is possessed.”

  I ignored the gibe about my being possessed. I had h
eard it before; it meant nothing much to me.

  “Ford did not want to go,” I reminded her. “He wanted to stay with his color TV. And Mamadee.”

  “Ford.” Mama’s voice rose with excitement as she finally realized what the first consequence of Mamadee’s passing was. “I’m going to get back my baby boy!”

  Just then the lights flickered on and off, and then steadied in the fullness of the electrical power restored. The flame of the candle seemed to shrink.

  Miz Verlow reached across the table to pinch it out.

  Black smoke like fleeing souls writhed from the wick. The odor of the burnt wax hung in the air; the taste of it in my mouth, charred and greasy. The odor and the taste and the tea leaves in my cup seemed to be all that remained of the visitation. It struck me that the leaves at the bottom of my cup made a pattern like the ugly red blobs on the sweater Miz Verlow had fetched me. Never before had I seen such a strange design. Polka dots most often keep their distance from one another but these not only stood alone but made short lines and angles and yet there was no symmetry to them. Some of them looked like spots of dried blood.

  Mama reached into a skirt pocket for her pack of Kools. Crumpled and wrapped around its meager bouquet of three butts, it was no wider than the packet of matches tucked between its cellophane and foil. She was rationing her cigarettes against the chance of bumming some from one or more of the newly arriving guests, and tomorrow morning’s walk to the gas station at Pensacola Beach for more. She began poking around the kitchen, hunting an ashtray.