Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  We were nearly dumbstruck for a long moment.

  “She’s the spit of your mama,” Grady said, “when your mama was younger.”

  Roger nodded. “Like your mama dressed up with her hair done old-fashun.”

  Except, I thought, Mama never smiled like that in her life.

  I shifted my gaze to the other wing of the egg. Delicately engraved in swooping letters was the name CALLIOPE.

  When I showed the boys, they reacted with even more surprise and wonder.

  “ ’At’s your name!” Roger said. “All spelt out.”

  Grady nodded dumbly and then said, “Well, is that her name? Calliope?”

  “Dunno.” I knocked back the rest of my iced tea and pushed the egg on its silk rope into the pocket of my shorts.

  The timer was set for fifteen minutes for the next round. We were supposed to go in different directions each time.

  Grady came back with a blue Pepsi bottle. He told us that his uncle Coy had one and claimed it was made before the First World War.

  I had a plate. It was a decorative souvenir, with a yellow Florida printed on it. The image of the state was edged with things like pelicans and leaping sports fish and tropical flowers.

  In the pocket of somebody’s peacoat hanging on an old hat rack, Roger had found a handful of old tickets from the dog-track.

  A draw, we concluded.

  In the third round, I wandered several moments, with an increasing sense that time was running out. I spun around and plunged into the depths of the attic—and almost put one of my eyes out blundering into Roger’s hat rack, the one with the peacoat. I grabbed it by its bole to prevent it falling over and taking me with it. I wound up hugging it. After I caught my breath, I released it from my embrace and stepped back. The peacoat had fallen to the floorboards. Tied around one of the arms of the hat rack was a gauzy and glittery scarf. It seemed so familiar that I thought it must have been Mama’s.

  I just made the end of the round, with the scarf turbaned around my head.

  Roger had a blue-glass candleholder.

  Grady had turned up a horsewhip.

  The boys admired the scarf teasingly but we all agreed to award Grady the third round. His prize was three paper cups of iced tea to the one that Roger and I each tossed back. We smoked another cigarette before we began round four, for which we allotted seven minutes. Roger and I spun Grady around and pushed him off in one direction. Roger spun me around and pushed me off. He took another direction yet.

  I barked my shins on one thing or another and had to brush the loose ends of the gauze scarf out of my eyes. The gauze was as sweat soaked as the rest of me. Even the palms of my hands were damp. I wiped them on my shorts, to no avail, as they were so sweaty that they were sticking to me. I looked around for any sort of absorbent material and spotted a rug covering a trunk. Placing my candle stub carefully on a nearby stack of suitcases, I knelt down next to it to dry my hands on the mangy wool fibers of the scrap of faded Persian rug. With my hands a little drier, I started to rise. A sharp pain exploded in my head. I went back to my knees and then to all fours, bracing myself against the pain that grew duller and more comprehensive. Then I dropped to my stomach, as if by getting lower, I could duck under the head pain. My eyes were tearing steadily but my face was so wet with perspiration it hardly made any difference. Droplets tracked down my face and dripped from my jaw and chin.

  I closed my eyes. After a moment or two, the misery seemed to ease. I heard Roger and Grady, already back at the tarp, talking to each other.

  I pulled my knees up under me again and pushed upward. A twinge in my head. The scarf around my head felt as if it had tightened. My fingers worked at the knot that held it but the fabric was wet, too slippery to move. Giving up on the knot, I managed to get back on my feet. I could only think to bumble my way back and admit defeat. As I blinked the blur of moisture from my eyes, I saw someone. Not Grady. Not Roger. Someone else. And then I recognized the flicker of shape in my eyes as a reflection, of myself. I saw the frame around it. Propped a few feet away, on top of a cluttered table, was something framed under glass. I snatched it up. It was a large frame but more bulky than heavy. The whole thing seemed to be about the size of the window on the landing, the one with the stained glass in it. The frame was incredibly dusty, and I grimaced at the filth but then I realized the dust was absorbing the moisture from my fingers and palms.

  Embracing my find, I lurched breathlessly onto the tarp just as the timer buzzed.

  Roger whistled at how close I had come to missing the deadline.

  Holding the framed whatever-it-was against my front, I squatted down with them.

  Grady produced a box of playing cards folded to look like cranes. Each had a bit of string piercing it that made it obvious that they were meant to be hung up.

  Roger had an old black umbrella, like something that an undertaker would have to shelter mourners from rain.

  Awkwardly because of its size, I turned my discovery around so that they could see it. I tried to see it myself at the same time but could not, so I propped it against the attic wall and wriggled around in front of it.

  “Wow,” said Roger.

  “Amen,” Grady said.

  I rubbed at the dusty glass.

  It was a framed poster.

  Around the legend that took up the middle of the poster, various circus acts were depicted in gaudy colors.

  A parade of elephants, a spangle-clad woman in the howdah on the first of the great beasts.

  Drawn by white horses, a calliope on wheels, with a woman at the organ keys.

  A man in a top hat and tails stood beaming in a spotlight.

  A mustachioed man in jodhpurs with a whip, surrounded by complacent lions.

  A very painted woman with big gold hoop earrings offered a crystal ball to the viewer.

  An enormously fat woman sitting on a loading scale.

  Clowns, all crammed together in and falling out of a pumpkin-shaped coach drawn by sheep.

  Another man in tails, holding a top hat with a bunny peeking out of it.

  An orange-haired woman in tights, full-bodied, in a costume like a corset, balanced barefoot on a high wire. Bringing my candle close to the poster, I peered at the high-wire walker. She bore a shocking resemblance to Fennie Verlow. I wondered if I really remembered Fennie Verlow’s features that well. The woman could not be Fennie Verlow, for the poster was far too old, the costuming and hairstyles suggesting the nineteen-aughts.

  I rubbed more dust away and held my candle stub close and examined every human figure on the poster intently. The fortune-teller’s scarves were very like the one around my head. The name Tallulah popped into my mind, but no more useful information than its bald syllables. Did I know the fat woman on the loading scale? The very tall thin man stretching himself like rubber? Could it be Mr. Quigley? The ringmaster in the top hat and tails: Father Valentine? The woman running the calliope was the spit of the current Queen Elizabeth, I thought. No, it was Mrs. Mank she most resembled. I shook my head in amazement, realizing it was Mrs. Mank who looked like Queen Elizabeth—who always had.

  The woman in the howdah, sitting cross-legged like a snake charmer, her legs in net stockings. Her face was a rough approximation, I saw with a jolt of my heart, of the woman depicted in the photograph inside the egg. She held a lighted candle in one hand, and on the other perched a scarlet macaw. Lightly sketched upon the bird was the suggestion of a harness. At once I understood the odd nature of the loops of silk in my pocket, the ones on which the egg hung. It was the harness, not of a rat, but of a bird as large as a macaw.

  We three huddled close, peering at the poster.

  “This is old,” Grady said. “Like a hundred years.”

  “More ’an ’at,” said Roger.

  “Calley wins all,” said Grady.

  Roger nodded his head yes.

  We sat back on our heels and had another round of iced tea. The ice in it was long melted and the bourbon taste
somewhat diluted. Our thirst was greater and we drank eagerly, while we continued to study the poster.

  “I’m filthy,” I said. “Miz Verlow sees me like this, she’ll wan know why.”

  I had an idea that I was going to go downstairs and clean up. But when I started to get up, I had to sit back down again.

  Roger said, “Uh-oh.”

  “Tight?” asked Grady.

  “Am not,” I insisted.

  “Better stay sat down then,” Grady advised.

  “I’m gone melt,” I said. I leaned forward to blow out my candle.

  The boys weren’t expecting the sudden darkness around me. They jumped and then snickered to hide their momentary alarm.

  I drank the last of the tea. Queasy, dizzy—I closed my eyes.

  Grady and Roger got their hands under my elbows and guided me toward the stairs.

  They told me where to put my feet. “Down. Now the other.”

  “Here’s the bathroom,” said Grady. “Maybe you better stop here and pour some water over your head.”

  They walked me in and I sank to my knees. Grady pushed my head over the side of the bathtub. Roger turned on the shower tap. Water spurted over my head and down my back. The ends of the gauze scarf dripped down my face and into the bathtub.

  The water stopped, one of the boys wrapped a towel over my head, and they sat me down next to the toilet.

  “What are we gone do with her?” Grady asked Roger.

  “Caint leave her,” said Roger.

  Between the two of them they half carried me out of the house and out onto the beach and walked me into the Gulf up to my waist. They held me up like bookends. The light outside was a blinding glare. My eyes were running water and everything was blurry.

  “One, two, three,” the boys counted and they pushed me down under the water. I heard Grady say, “I baptize thee in the name of the Lord.” Roger laughed. They hauled me up like a dead fish. I leaned over their arms and vomited into the sea.

  “There,” said Grady, “reckon you feel better.”

  They let me down among the tall grasses. Roger squatted next to me, holding one hand, cooing at me.

  Grady came back in a few moments with a jug of water, some aspirin and towels.

  I was shivering. They wrapped me up and administered the aspirin and water. Grady made a chair of himself for me, holding me between his legs, letting my head rest on his shoulder.

  I closed my eyes.

  I listened to the Gulf. The nearly ever-present wind. A pulse, a breathing. The more intently I listened, the more I heard “You Are My Sunshine,” from the multiple brass throats of a calliope.

  Fifty-two

  MIZ Verlow was not deluded that I was sunstruck, nor poisoned by a bad oyster.

  “I’ve heard the lie about the bad oyster already,” she told Grady.

  “Yes’m,” he agreed.

  I could hear them outside my room, where Grady and Roger had finally deposited me, in all my ludicrous glory.

  Some inchoate impulse to help Grady out moved me just then to fall off the bed and crawl under it. Miz Verlow and Grady lunged back through the door that they had just exited.

  Just too dumb and too sweet to leave me, Grady had been sitting at my bedside when Miz Verlow and Mama returned from the Fiesta. Mama’s feet hurt so it fell to Miz Verlow to find out what Grady Driver was doing sitting in my room, and what I was doing, sprawled like a wino on my sweat-drenched sheets.

  Once I was back in bed, Miz Verlow sent Grady on his way. She sat on the edge of the bed and studied the knot in the gauze scarf. Patiently, she picked it out. My head immediately felt less constricted.

  From beneath my eyelids, I spied upon Miz Verlow’s brief examination of the scarf itself. She made a little face, one of distaste, before she dropped it in the ragged little basket that I used for a trash can. A question struggled to form itself in my head.

  “How much bourbon do you owe me for?” she asked.

  “A pint.”

  “You must have gotten most of it.” She spoke with real satisfaction. “I caint get you out of doing your mama’s feet. Try not to throw up on her.”

  “Yes’m.”

  “Take a bath now, and try not to drown. Drink a lot of water though. Grady said that he gave you aspirin.”

  “Yes’m.”

  Miz Verlow stood and moved to the door. She looked back at me.

  “Was Grady a gentleman?”

  I moaned. “What’s that mean?”

  “You know what that means.”

  “Are you inquirin’ about the purity of Southern womanhood?” I asked in Mama’s voice.

  “How very amusing,” said Miz Verlow, in a tone that made it perfectly clear that she did not find it the least bit so.

  “Grady’s too dumb to cop a feel, if that’s what you mean. Or anything else. Look at me, for crying out loud. I’m ugly.”

  “So’s Grady,” said Miz Verlow. “Ugly never stopped sex yet.”

  “Ha-ha. Roger was there. He chaperoned.”

  That made Miz Verlow really angry.

  “Funny, ha-ha,” she said.

  If cold were ice cubes, her words could have chilled a nice glass of water for me.

  She came back to my bedside and bent over me to say, “I never want to hear of you hanging around with Roger Huggins again, with or without Grady Driver. Do you want to get the boy strung up from the nearest tree? Think of his mama, if you can think of anything but yourself.”

  She slammed out, leaving me to think about it. I heard her going up the stairs to the attic, and then moving around above my head.

  In 1955, a gang of white-sheeted bastards had murdered a fifteen-year-old kid named Emmett Till for whistling at a white woman. It’s entirely probable that Emmett Till did not in fact whistle at that woman, or make an outrageous remark, or any thing of the kind.

  I might have been only thirteen but I could not claim ignorance of that horror story. Roger had showed me the copy of Life magazine with the pictures in it, that his daddy had tucked away trying to keep it from him. Nathan Huggins didn’t buy that copy at any newsstand. If that issue was sold in any newsstand in Pensacola, it was unlikely that it was sold to any colored man who asked for it. Mr. Huggins’s copy came to him by way of a cousin in Chicago. Roger had found it by accident. His daddy found him crying over it, and they had a long talk.

  I was chastened. I made myself get up and go to the bathroom to bathe. Lolling in the bathtub, I wanted to sink beneath the water and not come back up.

  I made my way to Mama’s room and did her feet while she told me all about her day at the Fiesta. Of course it had all been terribly hard on her poor feet. Even as Mama nattered, I found myself longing to crawl into the bed next to her and listen to her heartbeat and the breath going in and out of her lungs, and go to sleep.

  Mama stopped talking suddenly. She jammed the butt of her cigarette into her ashtray.

  “Calley, baby,” she said, “you look like hell. Got your period? You just crawl up here and into this bed.”

  She slipped between the sheets too, and tucked them up around me. It was too hot for blankets; sheets were only bearable because the punkah fan turned steadily overhead.

  Mama began to snore gently. Her pulse fell into a counterpoint with the fan. Seventy beats a minute, I thought. Her lungs were a little cloudy but had been a long time. It didn’t seem to be getting worse. She had gotten bonier, I thought. No, her flesh was slacker.

  I was overwhelmed with how much I loved her. How much I needed a Mama to love.

  Though we no longer slept in the same room, I had gone on, as I had as long as I could remember, massaging Mama’s feet.

  And frequently Mama would come to my room late at night, shake me awake as roughly as if the house were afire, and demand to know what opinion I had on the subject of Adele Starret and the probability of her contesting Mamadee’s last will and testament. She feared that if Adele Starret moved too aggressively against Mamadee’s estate, Law
yer Weems would make it seem to Ford that his mother was trying to defraud him of his rightful inheritance. What then if she lost the suit? She would also be forfeiting her son’s love and would end up with exactly nothing, exactly less than nothing. I told myself that I couldn’t know that she had already lost Ford’s love, if she had ever had it, but at my angriest, I was unable to be cruel enough to her to tell her so.

  Mama was privately relieved that we heard so infrequently from Adele Starret. Mama convinced herself that the minute my brother, Ford, reached his majority, all the world would be put right again. Once he was out from under the legal authority of that thief, that liar, that salt-scum lawyer Winston Weems, then Ford would take control of whatever was left of the family fortune, and he would raise Mama back to her rightful place in society.

  Ford was still alive, I had no doubt. I had not heard his voice among the voices the Gulf waters brought me.

  Nightmares wracked my sleep. They were not new ones, which made them all the scarier, for I knew where they were going and still could not escape. On waking in the morning, though, with the caw-caw of the old doorbell loud in my ears, the memory was clear in my mind of opening the door to the ghost who called herself Tallulah Jordan, who had worn the scarf that I had found in the attic.

  Fifty-three

  MERRY Verlow began to keep close track of the key to the attic. When I had something to take up or retrieve, she made sure to be there. She allowed me no loitering time there to find the framed poster again. There was always another and urgent chore to be done. Trying hard to get back into her good graces, I promised myself that I would find it later, and let later become a lot later.

  The high school I attended was something of an odd place—newly built, for one, and so lacking both history and cohesion. At least half the students were service brats, which meant the student population was in constant flux. Of the locals, none of us were as well-heeled, as well-traveled or as well-spoken as the children of the military. Our focus was hardly ever really on school, but on our families, on jobs that we had in the mornings before our first classes or that we had to leave for, early in the afternoon.