Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  The verandah went almost entirely around the house, from the kitchen at the back to the seaward front and on around the nether side. Disappointingly, Mama and Mrs. Mank had taken chairs next to each other and sat there silently gazing out at the guests who were wandering to the beach to see where they had come, or just to shake out the stiffness of their various journeys.

  “There is no china or silver on the verandah,” Mrs. Mank said, without looking at me. “Take your very large ears, Calley Dakin, and find Merry Verlow, who undoubtedly has means to occupy your small hands, if not your nose.”

  Mama snickered. It sounded just like one of Ford’s noises.

  Angry at being caught out, I blurted, “It’s not fair that everybody can tell me what to do.”

  Mrs. Mank laughed rudely. “Next you’ll want the vote.”

  The heat rose in my face. My transparent skin unfailingly betrays me.

  “My daddy told me that people that step on other people,” I said slowly, “are liable to get their ankles bit.”

  Mama sat up straight. “He never! You are a wicked little liar, Calley Dakin!”

  I curtsied mockingly and sailed away. Behind me, Mama could not apologize sufficiently for my outrageous behavior. Fine by me.

  In the kitchen I climbed my step stool and washed the dishes. I was very thorough and dried everything carefully, and set it all out again in the pantry to do double-duty after supper. As tired as I was already, the supper dishes, in their settings on the dining table, were yet to be dirtied.

  I went upstairs to the linen closet. There I made myself a nest, within reach of my half dozen books. No one would know where I was; no one could command my services, such as they were. Why I was so convinced that a windowless cupboard deep in a big house must be safe from ghostly voices and apparitions, I could not have explained. It just seemed logical. As if I were tuning a radio, I tuned my ears to the sounds of the Gulf. The sloshing susurrations, so like a heartbeat, let me down gently into sleep.

  Thirty-two

  NO more than a couple of hours after the Edsel spat gravel at her, Mamadee drove her Cadillac the three and a half blocks to downtown Tallassee. She parked in front of Mrs. Weaver’s dress shop. There, she went inside and announced that she was going to buy every umbrella on the premises. When Mrs. Weaver reacted with understandable surprise, Mamadee only replied imperiously that she had her reasons for the purchase. Mrs. Weaver then apologized that she had only five umbrellas for sale, but added that she would be happy to relinquish her own umbrella at an appropriate discount.

  “Why in the hell would I want your old umbrella?” Mamadee replied.

  Mrs. Weaver sniffed discreetly, sure that Deirdre Carroll had been drinking and before the noon hour, but she was disappointed. Only momentarily however, for in a quarter of an hour, she had convinced herself that she had indeed smelled bourbon on Deirdre Carroll’s breath.

  Mamadee deposited the five umbrellas in the trunk of her Cadillac and then went to Chapman’s Department Store, where she bought every umbrella for sale in the ladies’ department, every umbrella for sale in the men’s department, and the one undersized frilled parasol that was for sale in the children’s department. She gave her car keys to a salesman and told him to just put all her purchases—the umbrellas—in the trunk of her Cadillac, and that she would be back in a while to retrieve the keys. While the salesman was stowing the umbrellas in the trunk of the Cadillac, Mrs. Weaver came to the door of her shop and shared her belief with him that Deirdre Carroll had been drinking before noon. The salesman observed that he wouldn’t be the least surprised.

  Half an hour later, Mamadee returned to the department store with a little colored boy in tow. The child was burdened with five brown paper parcels, each with one or more umbrella handles sticking out of it. Mamadee had gone to every store and every shop and demanded to purchase every umbrella in current inventory. At the Ben Franklin Five and Dime, she had procured seven, two at the Harvester’s Seed and Feed, three at Bartlett’s Hardware, two at Durlie’s Dollar Store, and one at the Piggly Wiggly—the tail end of a Morton Salt promotion. She had found none for sale at Dooling’s Barber Shop, the Tastee Freez, the Alabama Power Company, Ranston Insurance, Smart’s Jewelry, or at Quantrill’s Lighting, Plumbing and Gas Fixture Supply Company, but she certainly had inquired.

  Retrieving her car keys, Mamadee led the little colored boy with the fifteen umbrellas to the Cadillac. When he had shut the trunk, Mamadee carefully counted out not the promised twenty-five cents, but thirty-three dollars and thirty-two cents. Handing it over, she told the boy to come round to the house later so that she could make up the penny shortfall.

  When the little colored boy had wandered off in the stupor of his unanticipated wealth, Mamadee entered Boyer’s Drugstore, the only retail establishment in downtown Tallassee she had not yet visited. Here, however, she did not ask for umbrellas but rather marched directly to the pharmacy counter, and impatiently placed herself behind an elderly farmer whose deafness was severely slowing his purchase of a proprietary senna preparation for his even more elderly mother.

  The pharmacist, Mr. Boyer, was surprised to see Mamadee at his counter. She always sent a maid if she needed a prescription filled or wanted an illegal refill of her blue paregoric bottle. She almost never came herself.

  Having dealt with the deaf old farmer, Mr. Boyer steeled himself, smiled obsequiously and asked, “Miz Carroll, what can I do for you?”

  Mamadee lifted her chin high into the air, to show its soft underside.

  “Look at this place,” she demanded. Place was the word used to refer to a small bruise, blemish, or wound of indeterminate origin.

  “I caint see anything from here,” puzzled Mr. Boyer. “Maybe I better come around.”

  The pharmacist came round and closely peered beneath Mamadee’s chin. “I still don’t see anything, Miz Carroll.”

  “Well, it’s there! I can feel it!”

  By this time everybody at the fountain counter in front of the drugstore had turned to watch and listen.

  Mr. Boyer started to press his index finger against the underside of Mamadee’s chin, but she jerked back in alarm.

  “Don’t touch it! Just give me something to make it go away.”

  Mr. Boyer was at a loss. His wife left her station behind the counter and came to the back of the store.

  “Is it a blister, Miz Carroll?” Mrs. Boyer asked.

  “It is not a blister,” Mamadee retorted. “It is a boil. I know it is a boil.”

  “I caint see anything either,” Mrs. Boyer said gingerly, trying not to give offense.

  “Do I care a hoot in hell if you can see it or not? It itches and I want to pick at it but you don’t pick at a boil. So all I need from you is something to put on it so I don’t pick at it and get it infected.”

  “Give her something,” Mrs. Boyer muttered to Mr. Boyer.

  Mr. Boyer hardly needed prompting. He mixed up a quantity of cold cream, cod liver oil, diaper-rash cream, and calamine, and filled a squat glass jar with it, typed out a label instructing Apply As Warranted, and handed it over to Mamadee. “I’m not supposed to give you this without a doctor’s prescription, so I could get in real trouble. It’s two seventy-five; I’ll just put it on your bill.”

  By noon, all of Tallassee knew that Roberta Carroll Dakin had fled Ramparts. By four o’clock that afternoon, all of Tallassee knew of Deirdre Carroll’s peculiar behavior downtown and in Boyer’s Drugstore. Dr. Evarts therefore was not surprised when Mamadee called him up and told him to get over to her house right then.

  “I have five people in my waiting room and all five of them have appointments,” he told her.

  Dr. Evarts intended to judge by her response to this refusal just how dire she felt her case to be.

  “If I have to come over there,” Mamadee replied, “those people in your waiting room won’t be alive long enough to get cured. Do you hear me?”

  Dr. Evarts had heard about Roberta Ann Carrol
l Dakin’s departure with her odd little girl but without her son, and about Deirdre Carroll and the umbrellas. Dr. Evarts perceived gossip as an integral part of the life of the town, amusing and informing him, but on which he need not necessarily act. However, once he had arrived at Ramparts, Dr. Evarts realized that the tales he had heard had not been exaggerated. He found the front door open and when he called out for Tansy, there was no answer. The door was open, Dr. Evarts noted, and a sick woman lay within.

  He found every door open, and opened umbrellas in every room.

  Open umbrellas were propped in chairs, open umbrellas depended from the chandeliers, an open umbrella was planted in the deep pocket of a fox-fur coat in an open closet. An open umbrella filled the horn of the gramophone in Captain Senior’s library. A small, open, frilled child’s parasol—the kind of thing a six-year-old future beauty queen would brace on her shoulder at an Easter parade—was hooked over the ceiling molding on the staircase landing.

  Upstairs, opened umbrellas like enormous black bats squatted on beds, snagged on curtain rods, or kept the rain out of commodes. Dr. Evarts paused to peek into Roberta Ann’s bedroom. It appeared Roberta Ann had rummaged her own room like a thief. He peered around; the photograph of Roberta Ann showing off her legs in her shorts was gone. That bothered him more than he would have expected. He had always enjoyed looking at that photograph. Joe Cane Dakin, while he lived, had enjoyed the favors of a very beautiful woman. On the other hand, Joe Cane Dakin’s fate was unenviable, to say the least.

  Distracted already, he hardly glanced into the next open bedroom door and so passed it before what he saw registered. He took three steps backward and looked again.

  The boy, Ford, sat on the edge of the bed. He wore a suit and tie. His hair was damp from a recent combing. A suitcase shared the counterpane with him. He looked bored. Dr. Evarts could not help reflecting what a handsome boy he was, blessed if blessing it was, with his mother’s beauty and grace, and with her and Deirdre’s willfulness, almost certainly no blessing.

  “Took your time.” Ford came to his feet. “The old witch has gone batty.”

  “Thank you for your diagnosis,” Dr. Evarts said.

  “You’re welcome.” Ford came to the door. He nodded down the hall toward Deirdre’s room. “Well?”

  Deirdre’s bedroom door was closed. The keyhole was jammed with the ferrule of an umbrella—a small red and yellow affair with a long stem, meant to be raised over the seat of a tractor.

  “Deirdre!” Dr. Evarts called at the door.

  He tried to pull the umbrella out of the lock, but the point broke off.

  He knocked. “It’s Dr. Evarts! Are you in there, Deirdre?”

  Ford leaned against the wall a yard away, his face impassive.

  Though Dr. Evarts heard nothing, he had no doubt that Deirdre Carroll was on the other side of the door. He twisted the doorknob, pressed his shoulder against the panels, tried to twist the broken point out of the keyhole, all in vain. He looked round, stalked down the hall, and snagged the open umbrella that had been hooked over the stem of a gas sconce. It was large and unadorned, with an ebony handle, cold steel ribs, and black silk as thin as crepe. He positioned the steel ferrule against the floor, forcefully pressed his foot against the ribs of the umbrella, warping and then snapping them, straining and then ripping the dyed canvas, until nothing was left but the handle, the stem, a tiny halo of broken ribs, and the ferrule—all that he needed.

  Squeezing the ferrule into the keyhole alongside the other, broken spike, Dr. Evarts twisted and pushed and pulled, lifted and jerked down and jerked out and shoved in, until he heard the sound of the entire mechanism of the lock breaking. The knob turned freely in his hand.

  The ferrule that had been embedded in the keyhole fell out. It was red, as if it had been heated, and it smoked, singeing the hall carpet.

  Ford applauded for a few slow sardonic claps.

  Dr. Evarts glanced back at Ford. If Deirdre Carroll were indeed on the other side of the door, someone else must have jammed the umbrella in the keyhole, someone who meant to lock Deirdre in that bedroom.

  “Where’s Tansy?”

  Ford shrugged. “Run off.”

  As Dr. Evarts had been quite sure, Deirdre Carroll was in the room. Even before he saw her, he heard her breath—soft, labored, stertorous. She lay motionless on her bed, her head turned slightly toward him in the doorway. When the doctor entered the room, Deirdre Carroll didn’t speak. Very possibly she couldn’t, owing to the boil beneath her chin.

  It was nearly round, larger than a softball, and in color a dull black like the soot coating the walls of a fireplace where only the cheapest grade of coal ever burned. Whatever its origin, whatever purulence festered inside it, the black boil was larger and more obscenely bloated than the worst cancerous growth that Dr. Evarts had ever seen. Deirdre Carroll’s head tilted back. The glistening black boil was so engorged, it pressed on her lungs below and pressed her jaw shut. It was little wonder she breathed only with difficulty, it was no wonder at all she had not responded to his calls.

  Deirdre’s eyes rolled in her head as she strained to see him. Avoiding eye contact, Dr. Evarts approached the bed. The surface of the boil was sooty black but it was definitely skin—the charred black skin of burn victims who had to sleep sitting up because it was less painful than lying down. Yet the boil glistened in places—shone with a lick of purple. Realizing his mouth had twisted in disgust, he tried a smile. The attempt failed.

  “You should have called me sooner,” he said, reaching a finger to touch the black boil. She winced away. He was unable to avoid the panic in her eyes: Please don’t touch it! The same panic most people had of the needle, of the knife, of the cold steel forceps.

  “It’s all right, Deirdre, you’re just going to feel a little pressure,” he said, lightly pressing his index finger against the boil’s black burned skin.

  It exploded.

  Thirty-three

  EVEN as I sweated through that nightmare, I realized that I had dreamt and forgotten it several times. But this time, I woke with the conviction that Mamadee was indeed dead.

  The napkin around my head had come loose. As soon as the soles of my feet slapped onto the floor, it fell away. I paid no mind. All I wanted to do was get out of the dark closet and wash my face.

  When I did, what I saw in the bathroom mirror startled me. The hair growing on my head was not my old dull sandy hair. Its color was very like Miz Verlow’s. It was very fine, though, finer than hers, and snarly. Hillbilly tow, I thought: Mama’s gone be wild. All I needed was pink eyes. My new hair was still very short, just enough to wind around my forefinger, but that seemed like a remarkable length considering how short a time it been growing. My ears looked very naked. I thought that I looked quite a lot like a blonde monkey.

  Downstairs, Mama was charming the guests at supper.

  Miz Verlow came up the backstairs. I kept the bathroom door closed until she passed by and then peeked out. She bore a tray. At the door of Mrs. Mank’s suite, she stopped, knocked lightly, and was admitted.

  I slipped down the backstairs into the kitchen. Cleonie and Perdita had not yet returned. Remembering my little bundle, I hastened to their room to retrieve it. It was gone. The inexplicable absence frightened me more when I was already skittish. I tried to reassure myself that nobody in the house except myself would bother to sneak into Cleonie and Perdita’s room. They had nothing to steal and besides, nobody would want to know what a cramped dingy little space they were accorded.

  Miz Verlow was in the kitchen doorway from the back hall when I turned around, having closed the door to Cleonie and Perdita’s room with exaggerated caution.

  Miz Verlow smiled at me. “Is that Calley Dakin creeping underneath that bird’s nest of hair? Or is that some new little girl come to take her place?” She ruffled my hair softly, not so much with admiration as with satisfaction. “My Lord, it makes me think of my hair when I was a child. I believe it’s a touch li
ghter than mine. Someday it will be quite beautiful, even if you never are. Well, Roberta Ann Dakin is not gone care for it one bit. You best take your supper here. Then you shoo back upstairs to your mama’s room. My guests get an eyeful of you, they’ll think the place must be an orphanage for albino monkeys. Oh, and I left you some shampoo in the bathroom.”

  She made no remark at all about catching me closing the door to Perdita and Cleonie’s room.

  For once Mama’s door was unlocked, and so while everyone else was still occupied with supper, I was able to wash my hair and bathe and put on my pajamas. I worked a comb through my tangles and managed to stick most of my hair damply to my skull. I could tell it was going to snarl up again the minute it was dry.

  I was on my stomach on the bed, studying on a bird guide, when Mama stuck her key in the lock and then yanked it out. She jerked the door open one-handed.

  “I left this door locked! How’d you get in?” she demanded, even as she registered my hair. She slammed the door closed behind her without spilling a drop of the drink in her hand. “Jesus God!”

  I resisted the impulse to say He ain’t here. Instead I suggested, “Maybe you didn’t turn the key all the way.”

  Miz Verlow must have unlocked it for me. I was not about to give her away to Mama.

  “You didn’t creep in under the door?”

  Mama put her drink down and patted a pocket in her skirt. With an air of secretive triumph, she drew a nearly full pack of Kools from it. I would not give her the satisfaction of asking her where or how she had obtained them. She was dying to tell but she wasn’t going to do it unless I asked. She smoked three of them, one after the other, while I did her feet.

  “That woman bleached your hair right out and you never so much as said no please, did you? You caint be expecting me to claim you, can you?”

  Falsely meek, I said, “No, ma’am.”

  “Damn right,” declared Mama. “I swear. Nobody with eyes in their head will ever mistake you for anything but a Dakin now.”