Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  “Then we can contest it,” Adele Starret said with great satisfaction.

  Thirty-nine

  ADELE Starret must have noted the discrepancy in the date when she obtained the will. She might have told Mama at once. But she didn’t.

  Mama was instantly invigorated. Mamadee might be dead but Mama could still fight her, with no possibility of Mamadee retaliating down the line. Once the money was hers again, Mama would not only be returned to her rightful station in life—rich—but would have Ford back.

  Mama was ready to whip Miz Starret off the verandah to her automobile, so urgently did she want the woman lawyer to get started.

  Miz Starret was not so easily moved. She had something else on her mind. “We haven’t talked about a fee for my services yet.”

  “I’d give you a million dollars, Miz Starret, just to see justice done, but as you see I have been robbed blind twice already in the past year, and I don’t have a penny to my name,” Mama said.

  “I understand that, and I’m willing to wait until we come to the resolution of the case. Lawyers do it all the time. We call it a contingency fee.” Miz Starret continued, “My fee will not be a million dollars. I’ll satisfy myself with fifteen percent of whatever may be the total of the estate that eventually comes to you.”

  After a pause, Mama spoke. “That seems a lot to me.”

  “I regret to say that I never bargain,” said Miz Starret.

  She stood. Miz Verlow and Mrs. Mank came to their feet a fraction of a second later.

  “Thank you, Merry Verlow,” Miz Starret said. “It was a pleasure to see you again.”

  “Give my love to Fennie,” returned Miz Verlow.

  “Thank you, my dear,” Mrs. Mank told Miz Starret in a grim tone that was just short of an apology.

  Mama was too agitated to react coherently.

  Adele Starret reached the verandah steps before Mama caught up with her.

  “Miz Starret!” Mama lowered her voice but her words tumbled out breathlessly. “I thought you said fifty percent. I thought you meant half! Of course you get your fifteen percent!”

  “Fifteen percent!” Mrs. Mank said, from just behind Mama.

  Mama jumped. She hadn’t noticed Mrs. Mank following her. Or Miz Verlow, for that matter.

  Clutching the dropped pen, I crept after them, beneath the verandah, until I reached the steps. The skirt there gapped a little, to allow the ascent of the steps, and I was still small enough to slip out, and into the shadows, without being noticed. Quietly I emerged from the shadows to sit on the bottom step, as if I had been there all along.

  “Normally,” Mrs. Mank said, “my friend Adele wouldn’t take a case like this at all. She was considering it only as a favor to me. Even when she takes on such cases, cases with much more likelihood of success, she’d take twenty-five percent at the very least, and her usual rate is a full one-third of the estate.”

  Miz Starret, Mrs. Mank and Miz Verlow started down the steps, with Mama falling in behind them. They skirted me as if I were a plant pot that had always squatted there at the turn of the railing. I jumped up and grabbed Mama’s skirt. She glanced down at me without surprise or any particular interest.

  Mrs. Mank and the woman lawyer stood a few yards away, engaged in a seemingly casual murmured exchange. They chuckled. They were recollecting the meal they had eaten at Merrymeeting. Mama couldn’t hear them, of course.

  “Don’t just stand there like a street sign,” Mama said, “start praying, because if Mrs. Mank caint get that woman lawyer to contest that will, then you and I are going to starve, and since you are littler, you are going to wither away weeks before I do.” Mama hugged herself. “I caint take this anymore,” she said finally. “I’m going inside and slit my throat. If they ever finish out there, come in and tell me what they decided.”

  Mama went past Miz Verlow, watching her friend Mrs. Mank and Mrs. Mank’s friend Adele Starret having their tête-à-tête, at the bottom of the steps. The screen door slapped smartly after Mama going into the house.

  “The dishes,” Miz Verlow said, without looking at me.

  I climbed the steps and went to the alcove, where I picked up the envelope, folded it and tucked it into one sock. The pen went into the other. I stacked the cups and saucers the four women had abandoned and carried them to the kitchen. Cleonie and Perdita ignored my entrance. On my step stool, I could see into the parking area, where Mrs. Mank now stood at the open driver’s window of a late-model yellow Cadillac, still talking to Miz Starret behind the wheel. Just as I had seen Miz Verlow saying good-bye to Mrs. Mank. At last the woman lawyer turned the key in the ignition and drove away, while Mrs. Mank watched her going.

  We retired to our room that night as soon as was decently possible.

  Ostensibly in the bathroom to brush my teeth and wash my face, I locked the door and examined the pen and the envelope. On the envelope was written

  The Last will and testament of Deirdre Carroll.

  The ball of the pen glistened with green ink.

  Mama was waiting in our room.

  “Give it to me.” Mama held out her hand.

  One after the other, I removed the pen from one sock and the folded envelope from the other sock and handed them over.

  She studied the envelope for a long moment before she looked up at me.

  “Do you know what this means?”

  I nodded.

  Mama threw the envelope down on her vanity and dropped the pen on top of it.

  “I caint believe it!” She sat down on the edge of the bed and thrust out one foot.

  I tugged off her shoes for her.

  “Go take care of your hands,” she said.

  When I came back from brushing my teeth, washing my face and my hands, she was in her pajamas.

  She reached for the ashtray and her cigarettes and settled onto her bed. She watched me open her jar of foot balm.

  “I’ve been a fool,” said Mama. “I believed that Mama loved me. Deep down. She loved me. But she never did. She must have hated me.”

  “Reckon she did,” I agreed, sitting at her feet.

  Mama waved her cigarette at me. “What do you know about it? You’re seven years old. Both your mama and your daddy have loved you every day of your life. You may be a Dakin but you’ve had every damn thing you ever wanted. Your daddy spoiled you rotten.”

  Preferring that she rant on, for whatever I could glean from her unguarded speech, I said nothing.

  “I don’t know why I am the least bit surprised,” Mama went on. “I should have seen it. I thought that when I ran away to Grandmama’s that I was just trying to get out from under her thumb. I should have thought about my sisters and what she did to them. The only one of us she ever gave a damn about was Bobby. And then Ford. She had to get Ford away from me.”

  Risking the possibility that she would button up at an interruption, I asked, in a whisper, “What did she do?”

  Mama was blowing smoke circles at the ceiling. “Grandmama came and took them away and Mama said good riddance.”

  I dug my knuckles into the sole of her foot the way she liked and coached her, “Tell me about Great-grandmama.”

  She closed her eyes. “Keep doing that. Nobody knows how I suffer with my feet. They are just an agony tonight.”

  A few minutes went by and I figured that she had done talking about anything that I wanted to know.

  “My grandmama,” she said, her free hand gone to her bosom, “loved me. She really did love me. She took Faith and Hope, but welcomed me, when I ran away to her. I didn’t need to be anything but myself.”

  “But why did she take them?”

  She gave me an irritated look and I wished that I hadn’t asked.

  “They were special,” she said, with a deliberately false lightness. “Very special.”

  “Why?” I prodded.

  Mama narrowed her eyes at me. “We were talking about me.”

  I applied myself at once to her feet.


  “I wasn’t as old as you are now when Grandmama took them away. I can hardly remember them.”

  “What did Grandmama do with them?”

  “Raised them,” Mama said. “I swear you cannot be my child, you can be so dim.”

  “Where are they now?”

  Mama ground out the butt of her cigarette in the ashtray. “Do I look like a Missing Persons Bureau? Mind what you are about and stop your endless ridiculous questions.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I agreed.

  She settled back and closed her eyes again.

  Moments passed and her breathing seemed to even. I capped the jar.

  “I was supposed to be Charity,” Mama whispered. “Do I look like a Charity to you?”

  I gave her no answer.

  As quickly and quietly as I could, I shed my clothes and put on my pajamas.

  Then she spoke again. “Mama’s idea of a joke. Mock Grandmama and make her angry. Ha-ha-ha.”

  The next sound she made was a ladylike snore.

  IN the years that followed, Miz Starret’s communications were always encouraging and hopeful. A settlement of Mamadee’s estate was always just around the corner. The suit to regain custody of Ford was well in hand, according to Miz Starret, except it never seemed any closer to coming to trial. Though Mama received letters, the occasional telegram, papers to be signed in the presence of witnesses, and sometimes a half-hour long-distance phone call from Miz Starret telling how the case was going, neither Mama nor I ever saw the woman lawyer again.

  I began this story by telling about Daddy’s death, and the research that I had done gathering the details that had been kept from me. In the course of that research, I came across a photograph of Mrs. Mank’s friend Adele Starret.

  The photograph showed Miz Starret sitting at a long table. On her left was Janice Hicks and on her right was Judy DeLucca—the two women who kidnapped and murdered Daddy.

  The photograph had been taken in the courtroom, at the defense table.

  Adele Starret had been their attorney.

  Forty

  MAMA signed over the Edsel to Miz Verlow almost immediately. The loss did not seem to constrain her. She was spared the expense of upkeep and fuel, thus paring her cost of living to little more than covering her back. In the years to come, she would sell her outdated couturier clothing at a consignment shop and use the money to buy new off-the-rack that was no longer beneath her. Letting her Alabama license lapse, she seemed willfully to forget how to drive. She depended upon Miz Verlow’s kindness and that of the occasional guest for transport if she did want to go anywhere.

  One morning the Edsel was gone. Miz Verlow offered no explanation. Mama would not lower herself to ask what Miz Verlow had done with it, and its absence actually relieved Mama of the reminder of her losses.

  Mama and Mamadee had schooled me from the cradle in dissatisfaction. Mama and I would continue to tug the ends of the rope between us, if only out of habit. But discontent did not come naturally to me. I was in that respect a healthy child; nearly everything under the sun was new to me and very little had yet to stale. I didn’t need any promises to be happy to stay right where I was.

  Every day after breakfast, a list of chores awaited me. Being useful made me feel needed, and being needed made me feel more secure. The knowledge that I was chalking up nickels in Miz Verlow’s account book was a small and secret pleasure—in my opinion, the very best kind.

  My hair remained a disgrace. Whenever Mama noticed it again, she would rant at me about Merry Verlow’s high-handedness in bleaching and frizzing my hair without her permission. What with the tangled scrub of déclassé tow on my skull and my outsized ears, I was a goofy-looking kid, which had this minor benefit—goofy-looking is at least disarming.

  Miz Verlow did her best to protect my skin from constant sunburn with one of her salves, with imperfect success. She decided that I must wear a hat when out of doors to shade my face. I did, at least when she was around. Perdita made hats for me, a kind of amalgam of a woven-palm Panama and a kerchief that provided corners to tie under my chin when it was windy, and detached for washing. Her hats not only shaded my face, they covered my hair and ears, and slightly muffled my hearing, which was frequently a boon to me.

  On account of my skin, I wore long-sleeved shirts under my overalls out of doors, but that was no trial to me. I rolled sleeves and pants-legs and burnt my arms and legs and feet anyway, at least when I was out of sight of Miz Verlow. When she took me with her on her seemingly aimless walks, of course, I did no such thing. I needed the sleeves and pants-legs and socks and tennies too, for some of those walks, as she tramped us through patches of marsh and bog that in summer were just naturally foggy with bugs and the beach that jumped with sand fleas. Miz Verlow had me take home twigs and flowers and seeds and berries and bark and so on, and identify them for myself from the books. As sparsely vegetated as the island seemed at first glance, it supported an unexpected variety of plants on the backsides of the dunes and in the hollows between. A shrub rosemary grew there, and calamintha, conradina, coral root and pinxter.

  The most immediate and important lesson was that not everything is in the books. The second was that the curious odiferous shrubs, Candle Bush, that crept round the lattice skirts of Merrymeeting, were from the wild; Miz Verlow had transplanted them from various sites on the island. They were a senna or cassia, unique to the island and naturally dwarfed by the harsh climatic conditions. Cassia alata, var. santarosa, was not in the books at my disposal, or any that I have since examined. Miz Verlow used every part of the plant, from root and branch to the flower spikes that erupted in May to the pods that developed from them, in her preparations.

  Before the school summer vacation came to an end, I had begun to know a little of Cleonie’s and Perdita’s immediate families. Perdita’s husband, Joe Mooney, had a snapper smack of his own and fished for a living; as I have mentioned, he was often a source of supply for Merrymeeting’s table. Joe had some children from a previous marriage, grown-up boys, who fished with him. He had raised them alone after losing their mama when they were little. He and Perdita had no children of their own.

  Cleonie always called her husband Mr. Huggins, leading me to expect that he would be as solemn as a minister. Turned out that he called her Miz Huggins, and the formality of address was a joke between them. His Christian name was Nathan and he worked for a lumber company that imported mahogany logs through Pensacola. He had worked there since a boy, except for his military service. He bossed a crew—a colored crew, of course—that herded logs off the docks. The Hugginses had three girls older than me, and also a boy, Roger, who was about my age. They all lived in one house with Mr. Huggins’s mama and Cleonie’s mama, daddy, and granddaddy.

  When I found out that the Hugginses had a dog and Perdita had two cats at home, I begged Miz Verlow for a pet. I tried to make the request modest: a kitten would do.

  “Oh, Calley, I’m sorry that I have to say no. Kittens grow into cats, and cats eat mice and birds.”

  I had not considered the dietary habits of cats.

  “A puppy?”

  Miz Verlow smiled sadly.

  “Puppies grow up to be dogs,” I said. “What do dogs do?”

  “Sleep on the furniture,” she said. “Leave hair everywhere. Chew things. Smell like dogs when they’re dry and wet dogs when they’re wet. Grow old and die and make you cry your heart out.”

  “What’s so bad about that?”

  She shook her head. “Take my word for it, Calley. You have to be careful what you love because love has to be paid for.”

  She talked me right away from the subject. I let it go, figuring like any other kid that I could change her mind at some point.

  As curious as I was about the Hugginses and the Mooneys, they were only minimally interested in me. They were more than decent to me but they had their own lives. Cleonie and Perdita assumed a degree of authority over me, chiding me as they would have their own, but it wasn’t because
they wanted to have anything to do with raising me. They had standards, and one of them was that any child, colored or white, respected elders.

  But I ended up spending a lot of time with Roger, who usually passed his school vacation with his mama at Merrymeeting until we entered our teens. He slept on a cot in Cleonie and Perdita’s room during the week and went home for Sundays, just as they did.

  I won’t say that we were friends but we got along. Because he was a boy, and older than me by seven whole months, he regarded himself as in charge. Naturally we had a few disagreements. The first time that I ever met him, I waggled my ears for him, which impressed him deeply. Roger countered by exhibiting how he could make all his fingers and his thumbs bend backward, and pop his arms in and out of their sockets. I was deeply impressed too, and not just out of politeness.

  Miz Verlow had arrangements with the guides who took out deep-sea fishermen who were occasionally guests; she didn’t want the trouble of maintaining a deep-sea boat or the larger bayside dock one would require. The Merrymeeting property did run Gulf to bayside, straight across the island, and on the bay was a little beach and dock. Miz Verlow kept some skiffs and a couple of sailboats there. One seven-year-old alone would be hard put to keep that little beach clean, the bitty dock tidy, the watercraft watertight and the sails in good order, but working together, two could. That first summer on Santa Rosa Island, tidying the little beach was among the earliest chores that Roger Huggins and I were assigned as a team by Miz Verlow.

  We each had our separate chores indoors, but some we did together simply because four hands made lighter work.

  The guest rooms very often could not accommodate all the guests’ luggage, particularly for those who stayed weeks at a time. Roger and I were consequently oft detailed to haul various forms of luggage to the attic for temporary storage. The larger pieces were usually emptied into the closets and dressers of the guests’, so the pieces were often more bulky and awkward than heavy.

  When first I reached the top of the stairs, my back was to it, and I was facing Roger, over a footlocker. It was a military style footlocker—how could it be otherwise?—but emptied, so we could manage it. We put it down promptly at the top of the stairs.