Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  Cold mashed potatoes, gelid gravy and warm fried chicken absorbed my total attention for some time, until people began to push back their chairs and take their coffee or tea to a parlor or the verandah.

  I caught Mrs. Mank’s gesture to Mama, who hurriedly rose to follow her. The four women carried their coffee to the verandah in polite silence.

  Curious as I was, I started from my chair, only to have Cleonie take a firm grip on my shoulder.

  “Not so fast,” she said. “Who be’s washin’ up?”

  Then she laughed at my expression and pinched my cheek. She handed me a tray, with a fresh carafe of coffee and cream and sugar on it. “Gone, now. Miz Verlow be’s wantin’ this.”

  Miz Verlow evidently wanted me to follow. I made haste and found the ladies settling into chairs circled in a quiet alcove, at a discreet distance from a few other guests also enjoying the spring evening on the verandah.

  At this narrow waist of the island, and at an angle to the house, the alcove provided a view from bayside to Gulf. The moon, just off the full, was close to rising; its light was already glowing toward the east, at the lumpy horizon of bay and hummock. That skim-milk luminescence diluted the darkness of the night and picked out ghostly curds of foam on the black water of the Gulf.

  “Calley,” Miz Verlow said as I hove into sight, “come put that down right here.”

  I placed the tray on the small table at the center of the group.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Miz Verlow said. “Now scoot. Those dishes in the kitchen won’t wash themselves.”

  Furious with frustration, I raced back through the house, through the dining room and butler’s pantry to the kitchen. My step stool was drawn up at the sink that Cleonie had already filled. She and Perdita were seated at their little table, absorbed in their own suppers. I shot past them and out the kitchen door. The startlement in their faces gave me an unexpected kick.

  Their chairs scraped as they jumped up but before they could look out the door, or come out onto the kitchen porch, I was under the lattice skirt of the verandah. I scooted along in a crouch toward the alcove but stopped short of it, to catch my breath. Creeping the last few yards, I curled up under the floor of the alcove.

  Mama was sitting forward intently in her chair. Alone of the four women, she wore high-heeled pumps, to show off her ankles. To be sure, Miz Verlow, Mrs. Mank and the stranger, not a one of them, could show off their ankles to any advantage. I peered up through the gaps in the wood at Mama’s pointy soles.

  “Do you know, Miz Starret, if my darling mama is still alive?” Mama said, all solemn and hushed as if she were at a funeral.

  “I am sorry to have to tell you that she is deceased,” the strange woman who must be Miz Starret said. She didn’t sound particularly sorry.

  Mama jumped up. “Miz Verlow, I must have the keys to my car. If I leave now, I can lay flowers on my mama’s grave at dawn!”

  Miz Verlow said nothing. Mrs. Mank sniffed.

  “All right,” said Miz Starret. “Before you go, would like to hear how your mother died and why you weren’t told anything about it?”

  Mama had expected someone to try to talk her out of her resolve. Her sails suddenly slack, she paused uncertainly.

  “You might also want to know where she’s buried,” Miz Starret went on, “otherwise you will be running from pillar to post all over Tallassee.”

  Mama was rocked. “Why? She must be in the family plot. In the Tallassee cemetery. We’ve always been buried there—the Carrolls I mean. Are you saying Mama wasn’t buried there?”

  Miz Starret shifted in her chair; she was reaching into the pocket of her tight dress.

  With some difficulty, Miz Starret withdrew a folded sheaf of tiny lined note pages.

  “Your mother,” she said, flipping open the notebook as if to consult notes, “was buried in the Last Times Upon Us Church Cemetery.”

  Mama shrieked in rage. Then she remembered her role, and sank back into her chair in more genteel shock.

  “Forgive me, this is such a dreadful surprise.”

  I had to repress a snicker. Mama was telling the truth for once.

  She covered the unfamiliar crisis by groping for her handkerchief.

  “My poor mama is surely spinning in her grave. Why was my mama buried in a snake-handlers’ cemetery?”

  “It’s the only place that would have her.” Miz Starret’s voice was distinctly flavored with the moldy taste of smuggery. “Even at that, Mr. Weems had to pay twice the usual fee to the Last Times Upon Us Church. The elders said the Lord enjoined them as Christians to judge not, so they would provide Mrs. Carroll with a plot, but it would cost them some to conduct special rituals to keep their own hallowed dead safe from any demons that the corpse might yet be hosting.”

  Mama gave a little moan and shudder at the thought of being lorded over by snake-handlers.

  And then Adele Starret told her, in outline, of my very dream of Mamadee’s death.

  Thirty-seven

  THE business of the umbrellas made it nearly impossible to find a place to bury Deirdre Carroll. Her behavior downtown on that Thursday morning, buying up every umbrella that could be bought, taking them home, and opening them all over the house was a much more disturbing phenomenon to Tallassee than the fear of contagion from the strange, rapid, and fatal ailment that had laid her low. Deirdre Carroll, it judged, had gone insane. Practically, it was a mercy that her end came so quickly as it did. That sudden, intense insanity shut the gates of every graveyard within the town limits.

  Adele Starret did not tell Mama but I knew what happened next. Never mind that I had dreamed it; any half-wit seven-year-old could have predicted it.

  Leonard and Tansy refused ever to set foot in Ramparts again. No other sensible colored person would consider it, never mind the foolish ones. Of the whites, both sensible and idiot, only five could be found willing to enter the house. Dr. Evarts had and would, and no one thought the less of him for it, for his fundamental Yankeeness protected him in some indefinable way from the evil in Ramparts, and he was, after all, a Man of Science. My brother, Ford, would, but of course he thought there might be something in it for him, and, after all, it was his family estate. And Winston Weems would, for the same reason of self-interest, and also to protect his reputation as a hardheaded Man of Bidness. Men like Dr. Evarts and Mr. Weems could not believe in haunts or curses or hoodoos, for such things must necessarily be beyond their purchase or control. Mr. Weems hired two white men who would do anything for a jug, but who were not yet too debilitated by their vices to do the heavy lifting.

  Ramparts was emptied in one weekend of almost everything perishable, usable or saleable (out of town, where its provenance was unknown), under the direction of Mr. Weems, Dr. Evarts, and my brother, Ford.

  A single piece of furniture was abandoned: Mamadee’s bed, its bloody sheets already rotting, still stood in her bedroom.

  And the umbrellas. Eccentric currents of air native to the house itself rolled the open umbrellas this way and that in the empty rooms. The tips of the ribs of the umbrellas tapped the floors and walls tick-tick-tick, as regularly and syncopated as clocks all set to different times. The rustling, the snicking and clicking, the faint thuds, all echoed through the house, along with its own creaks and groans.

  That Ramparts was haunted, there was no doubt. Outside it, the live oaks shuddered, the rags of their Spanish moss twisting and flapping like grave clothes on a revenant mummy. Children dared one another to creep up on to the verandah and stare through the dusty windows. The glass under their palms was so cold that they snatched their hands away. One or more of the opened umbrellas, upside down and right side up, and sideways in every room would move, and the children would run away shrieking. Few returned for a second peek.

  Thirty-eight

  TO Mama, knowing whether Mamadee was alive or not was minor compared to the reassurance that Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin could not be blamed for whatever it was that had happened in
Tallassee. The death certificate signed by Dr. Evarts gave the cause of Mamadee’s death as exsanguination caused by a tumor of the throat. The usually discreet doctor’s hints that Mamadee’s sudden dementia had been caused by a brain-storm brought on by hypoxia, from the tumor cutting off her oxygen, were eagerly retailed around Tallassee. Deirdre Carroll had never been beloved of the town, and her gaudy death, entertaining as it was, had shifted the town’s sympathies back to Mama. In hindsight, Roberta Ann must have witnessed the first sign of her mother’s dementia and sensibly fled, even though it would have been only the second sensible thing that Mama had ever done, the first being marriage to Joe Cane Dakin, and look how that turned out. Even the fact that Roberta Ann and her pathetic child had not returned to attend the brief funeral was not condemned, as no one else had either, aside from Ford and Dr. Evarts and Mr. Weems. Mrs. Weems and Mrs. Evarts had both vehemently refused, on the grounds of declining to be hypocrites. It must have been the only shining moment of nonhypocrisy in either of those two matrons’ existence, but was consistent with their parsimonious practice of charity.

  “Oh, it’s terrible, it’s all so terrible I can’t even bear to think of it,” Mama said.

  Of course not.

  Adele Starret asked Mama slyly if she was getting up her strength for the drive up to Tallassee.

  Mama came right back at her. “I will go, but in the morning, when I have had sufficient time to recover myself a little. Since I have already been deprived of the comfort of being at my mama’s deathbed and holding her hand at the moment she passed over—since I was not allowed to weep at her funeral—since I was prevented from seeing her casket lowered into the earth of a snake-handler’s cemetery, there is nobody who is going to keep me from at least being there when poor Mama’s will is read! Nobody, do you hear me?”

  “Well, you won’t have to make a trip to Tallassee at all,” said Adele Starret, “because the will has already been read, probated and executed.”

  Mama caught her breath in shock.

  Adele Starret presented a long narrow envelope to Mama. Quick-fingered, Mama plucked out a single folded page. She went stiff and then thrust it at Adele Starret.

  “Please read it for me, Miz Starret,” she asked, with a tremor in her voice.

  Adele Starret did so.

  Everything that Deirdre Carroll, late of Ramparts, City of Tallassee, Elmore County, Alabama, owned, possessed, had control over or interest in, all her possessions, goods and chattels, were bequeathed to her grandson, Ford Carroll Dakin. Until his twenty-first birthday, that inheritance would remain under the control of his guardians, one Winston Weems, attorney, and one Lewis Evarts, physician, of Tallassee, Alabama. The custody of Ford Carroll Dakin had been assigned in separate documents to Dr. Evarts, until such time as Ford Carroll Dakin was twenty-one.

  To her daughter, Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, Deirdre Carroll bequeathed a particular pen, which was contained in the envelope.

  Mama still held the envelope, forgotten, on her lap. Slowly she turned it upside down and a cylindrical object rolled out onto her open palm, presumably the aforementioned pen. She dropped the envelope to the floor of the verandah.

  Mama sat there stunned.

  Adele Starret read on: “To Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin’s daughter, Calliope Carroll Dakin, Deirdre Carroll bequeathed twice what Calliope Carroll Dakin had inherited from her father, the late Joe Cane Dakin.”

  Mama seemed not to hear that clause as Adele Starret declaimed it. Her fingers had closed around the pen. In the silence that followed Adele Starret’s reading of the will, Mama clicked the pen. Its nib emerged and Mama winced and let the pen fall onto the floor. It rolled gently to the nearest gap between the floorboards and fell through onto the sand beneath.

  “I caint believe Lew Evarts would do this to me,” Mama muttered. Then she said, “Mama must have been as crazy as a mockingbird on a live wire when she wrote that thing. But that’s it, Miz Starret!”

  “What’s it?”

  “My mama didn’t write the will. Winston Weems wrote it—that snake dipped his forked tongue in ink and signed my dead mother’s name to a lie!”

  “I photostatted the will at the courthouse,” Adele Starret said, “and had a handwriting expert examine it, along with some samples of your mother’s handwriting. Your mother very definitely wrote out that will.”

  I wondered at how quickly Adele Starret must have worked, to have obtained the will (and have it examined by a handwriting expert), samples of Mamadee’s writing, the death certificate, and the whole long story of Mamadee’s death, since Mrs. Mank had phoned her.

  “Then he held a gun to her head while she dictated it!”

  “He wasn’t there. I interviewed the two witnesses, and your mother was alone but for them.”

  “Who were the witnesses?” Mama demanded.

  Miz Starret rattled her copy of the will. “Mr. Vincent Rider and someone named Martha Poe.”

  “Rider? I never heard of him. And Martha Poe? What was she doing at the house?”

  “Perhaps she was helping your mother with the will.”

  “Why the hell would she do that? Martha’s a nurse!”

  “Really?” Mrs. Mank said. She had been so quiet that I had nearly forgotten that she was there. She was smiling in amusement. “I was under the impression Martha Poe was another girl lawyer—like Adele.”

  Usually Mama remembered and kept track of her lies. That she had forgotten this one was a measure of her distress.

  Mama hesitated a moment, then said, vaguely, “I believe Martha studied both medicine and law—at Huntingdon College—but couldn’t make up her mind which one to devote herself to—curing people or getting them off the hook.” She changed the subject. “And that other one, Rider—some stranger, stranger to me, anyway.”

  “Mr. Rider is new to Tallassee,” Miz Starret said, “so perhaps you never met him. He deals in pianos. Evidently your mama asked him to assess a piano that she had in mind to sell. He is a respectable businessman.”

  “Mama would never have two strangers, one of them a complete stranger, some piano peddler, witness such an important document.”

  “Nevertheless, the witnesses both confirm that your mother wrote out the entire will, signed it, enclosed it with the pen in the envelope, and sealed the envelope.”

  Mama lit a cigarette with quivering fingers. None of it made sense. It was all bad.

  What Miz Starret told Mama next was very much worse. “Your son will inherit somewhat over ten million dollars from your mother.”

  Mama snarled, actually snarled. “Mama didn’t have ten million dollars! Mama didn’t have anything like that! She bought her Cadillacs on time!”

  “I tend to estimate low in such matters.”

  “I am listening to a lie!”

  “Then it’s not me that’s lying,” returned Adele Starret. “It’s U.S. Steel and AT&T and Coca-Cola that are lying when they tell me how much of their stock your mother owned.”

  I waited for Mama to speak, to protest, to question, to prompt some mitigating response from Adele Starret. But she was rendered silent for a long moment. Cups clattered, the women sipped their coffee, Mama smoked.

  Finally: “I want my baby boy. I’m his sole living parent. I only left him with Mama because he’s sickly and she could take care of him. I was always gone go back for him. He’ll surely be cheated out of his inheritance by that wicked old shyster Weems. Isn’t there something I can do?”

  “You did sign him over to your mother, and she made the choice to assign his protection to Mr. Weems and Dr. Evarts. But certainly you can sue to regain custody. You have a good chance. Most courts would be sympathetic to a blood relative, let alone a parent, seeking custody of a minor in your son’s situation. Of course if you won, you would still have to work out some arrangement with Mr. Weems and Dr. Evart about access to his inheritance.”

  “I was cheated once, and now I’ve been cheated twice,” said Mama. “First by the man I m
arried, and then by the woman who gave me birth. It’s not up to you and me anymore, Miz Starret, because they both are dead and beyond our reach.”

  Miz Starret ignored the theatrical declaration to proceed to the practical. “What day did you leave Tallassee?”

  “I didn’t leave. My own mama hounded me out of town. The day Mama died.”

  Miz Starret’s voice became impatient. “What day of the week did your mother hound you out of Tallassee?”

  Mama finally got what she meant. “Thursday. I know it was Thursday because there was a brand-new wheel of butter on the table Wednesday night, and the butter-lady comes on Wednesday morning, and there wasn’t any left the night before.”

  “So it was Thursday, the twenty-fourth of the month,” said Miz Starret.

  “Yes. Thursday the twenty-fourth.”

  “Thursday, the twenty-third,” said Miz Starret pointedly, “is how she dated the will. Either your mother got the day of the month wrong, or else she got the day of the week wrong.”

  “What damn difference does it make? Mama couldn’t even remember my birthday and on Thursday she was always thinking it was Friday.”

  “Here’s the damn difference it makes,” said Miz Starret, sounding like a real lawyer. “If she made out the will on the twenty-third and just got the day of the week wrong, then she was probably sane, and you are out of luck.”

  Mama sat up straighter. “But if she got the day of the month wrong, that means she wrote the will on Thursday, the day she lost her mind and went out buying up every umbrella in town. And if she was crazy when she made out the will, then—”