Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  The birds were about their business, and so were the critters that lived in the sand, damp or dry, and the ones in the vegetation beyond the first dune. The beach mice were snugging up to sleep away the day. No other human beings were visible on the great swathe of white sand.

  The bump of the book in my overall pocket intensified the faster I ran, until it was spanking me, as if I were a horse that needed urging in some furious race. The other horses in the race were invisible to me, though, and I could not see a finish line. I slowed to a trot and then a stroll, veering across the beach toward the dunes. The finish line, it appeared, was my nest in the high grass, and there it was.

  Still breathing deeply from my run, I took the book from my pocket and sank into panic grass and sea oats, to the patch my bottom had long since shaped for me. The coarse tall grasses made space for two when Grady was with me, but when I was alone it seemed to fill in cozily around me.

  The bird guide was familiar to my hands. Thick for a small book, the paper of its pages as thin as the print on each page was tiny. Most of the dust had shaken off the book while it was in my pocket but the cover was still slightly dust-dull. I rubbed the book, back and front, and then the spine, on the thighs of my overalls.

  With the spine up, my vision blurred as if I had gotten dust in my eye. I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes, and felt a few quick automatic tears leak. They sparkled in my lashes as I blinked, and were gone.

  On the spine of the book, where the legend

  should have been, were the words

  National Audubon Society Field Guide to Eastern Land Birds

  The Gnashunull Oddybone Sassyassidy Birdery

  Once more, I tried to clear my vision with rapid blinking, but the legend remained the same. The absurdity of it made me laugh. I had no memory of altering it, and did not see how it could have been done. It took an effort to turn the spine away into the palm of my left hand, to look at the blank front. Then I flipped the book and looked at the spine again, as if to catch it changing back to what it should have been. It remained

  The Gnashunull Oddybone Sassyassidy Birdery

  I paged a leaf at a time: first blank page, the thin second blank page, the flyleaf, and instead of Bobby Carroll, the inscription was

  Hope Carroll

  And the title leaf read

  The Gnashunull Oddybone Sassyassidy Birdery

  When new, the guides are so firmly bound that they never just fell open, but the binding of this one, in the dry dusty space above the closet, had become loose. It fell open to the colored illustrations. Looking up at me was a cartoon of a loony woodpecker—loony not just in its expression, but its coloration, as it was all black-and-white as the common male loon is, and it sported a red crest (not that loons have crests, but woodpeckers do). Like many birds, the eyes of loons are red. The loony woodpecker clung to a cartoon tree trunk. It was identified as

  Ivory Bill, the Woodpecker!

  woodpeckerus nearextinctus

  The loony woodpecker winked at me, double-drummed the trunk of the tree, and then cackled

  Haha—hahaha! Haha—hahaha!

  I dropped the book as if it were afire. The woodpecker’s cackle ended abruptly in an offended squawk. The sounds were very like those of Woody Woodpecker, but harsher and more mournful.

  Listen to the book.

  Cautiously, I picked it up again and let it flop open.

  A cartoon parakeet looked up from the page. The cartoonist had turned the yellow feathers of the parakeet’s crown into a handkerchief wrapped around its head, and patched one eye piratically. The fluffy green feathers on its legs billowed into voluminous pirate’s pants, tied about the waist with a string. It was identified as

  Papaw Parakeet

  conuropsis nocanfindus

  The parrot screamed

  Kee-ho! Keck-keck-kee!

  I slammed the book closed between my palms. As with the woodpecker, the bird’s call ended in an insulted squawk, in a much higher pitch.

  I was listening to the book, but it was so bizarre, I could hardly give thought to what I was hearing.

  I let it fall open a third time. It was a pigeon cartooned this time, in a threadbare morning coat with tails and a hobo’s bindle under its wing. Its name was given as

  Nestor Pigeon

  ectopistes gonebyebye

  The bird did not so much sing as fret

  Wherewherewherewhere?

  I stuck my tongue out at the cartoon pigeon. It pursed its beak—a cartoon bird can do that—and gave me a raspberry.

  I closed the book and then opened it quickly, as if to catch the contents on the change.

  The cartoon that looked up at me was of a Scarlet Macaw. It wore the traces of a harness.

  Calley the Scarlet Macaw

  ara macao calliope

  Cosima, it rasped. Cosima, Calley want a cracker. Calley want a cracker.

  The voice of this bird, I thought, was a real bird’s voice. I shut the book gently, as if lowering a shade over a birdcage.

  The book held tight in my sweaty, frustrated grasp. If it had something more to say, I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to listen to it. After a moment’s fidget, I let the book fall open once more.

  The cartoon on the page was of myself, with my ears exaggerated into wings. It was labeled:

  Calliope Carroll Dakin

  calliope clairaudientius

  Calliope—Kalliope—is a Greek word; clairaudient, half-French, half-Latin. It was easy enough for me to understand. I had taken Latin as much for its use in taxonomy as for the foundation that it provided for all the other Romance languages, and English, and intended to take Greek as soon as I had access to instruction. But I did not need a spurious Greco-Franco-Latin tag to name myself, or my nature.

  I waited. The bird’s beak parted slightly and out came, whispered in my daddy’s voice:

  You are my sunshine

  Tears ran down my face and I choked out a single sob.

  Closing the book again, grasping the spine tight between the thumb and fingers of my left hand, I fanned the pages. I expected the faint breath of the pages on my face. Instead, there was an organ chord.

  And from the closed book, in the voices of the cartooned birds that were pictured within, came a funereal hymn.

  In the sweet by and by,

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore;

  In the sweet by and by,

  We shall meet on that beautiful shore.

  We shall sing on that beautiful shore

  The glorious songs that are lost;

  And our spirits shall sorrow no more,

  Nor sigh for the species unwrought.

  By the dark of the moon

  We shall rise on that beautiful shore

  From the ashes and ruin

  On great fiery wings shall we soar.

  Squawwwk!

  So endeth the reading, or the listening.

  It was all so utterly nutty that I had to restrain myself from jumping up and pitching the book into the waters of the Gulf.

  The pieces of the puzzle were in my head, however, and I could not help pushing them about.

  Hope Carroll was the name of one of Mama’s sisters, my aunts, the ones Mamadee had given up to my great-grandmama. I knew nothing more of her than she had had a sister, Faith.

  What was I to extract from all this oddybone sass? The cartooned birds—caricatures of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Carolina parakeet, the passenger pigeon—were of species known or feared to be extinct. The altered wording of the hymn first discouraged hope and then implied resurrection or rebirth. The phoenix, rising from its own ashes. Which told me exactly what? Nothing that my poor birdbrain could sort out. That I was one of the last of the species? Scarlet Macaws weren’t near-extinct. And they weren’t North American birds either.

  Despairing of comprehension, I tucked the book back into my overall pocket, and stubbed my fingertips on the egg locket at the bottom.

  “I’m psycho,” I
told myself aloud. “Schizo. Somebody lock me up.”

  Calley the Scarlet Macaw

  ara macao calliope

  The Scarlet Macaw’s name was Calliope, Calley, for short. She had been my great-grandmama’s own bird. Mama had named me after her grandmama’s pet macaw.

  I might have laughed, had I not been knuckling tears from my face.

  At least Cosima had loved her Calliope, or she would not have attached the egg locket to Calliope’s harness.

  As I emerged from the grasses, a darkness against the distance coalesced into the figure of a human being. I slipped down the dune onto the beach. A few steps confirmed my immediate suspicion: Mrs. Mank was walking south on the sand. As broad as the beach was, we were the only two people on it and there was no way I could avoid her.

  After years of not being sure how I felt, I knew then that I did not like Mrs. Mank, but I did want the education that she was offering, and I did not know how to get it on my own.

  Mrs. Mank was dressed as informally as I ever saw her (until she was dying), in sandals, clamdiggers and a middy. In splendid oxymoronic defiance of their purpose, the clamdiggers had a parade-ground crease in them. Every stitch she wore was hand-tailored and looked it. I couldn’t say what unborn animal had been sacrificed to make the fragile leather for her sandals, but it was likely the last one of whatever it was. She wore dark glasses but no hat and the rising sun highlighted her hair that was no less and no more silvery than it ever had been.

  When she reached me, her hand fell directly over my right forearm, which was still more than a little numb from electrical shock. The low sun behind her made a corona around her, bright enough to make me squint.

  “Calley, walk with me.”

  My legs were longer than hers, and I was a few inches taller, forcing me to shorten my pace to match hers.

  “You’re going to be six feet tall,” she said, as if I were a prize ficus plant. She gave me an arch look. “If you stay here any longer, I fear you will become pot-bound.”

  “That would be a metaphor.”

  “So the local school has taught you something.”

  “I hope so, ma’am.”

  “What’s that great lump in your pocket? A book?”

  “A bird guide.”

  “Which one. Let me see it.”

  Reluctantly, I gave it up.

  The spine read:

  National Audubon Society

  Field Guide to

  Eastern Land Birds

  “This is ancient,” she declared. “Don’t you have a more recent edition?”

  “Yes, ma’am. If I get this one wet or sandy, it’s no loss.”

  The skepticism lingered in her face. Her elegantly manicured nails pried at the covers, but the covers seemed to resist. Her eyebrows veed in surprise.

  “It’s gotten wet so many times,” I said, trying not to show my utter terror that she would either succeed in opening it or else throw it into the Gulf, “the pages stick together.”

  “Glued together, I swear,” Mrs. Mank said. There was an edge of anger in her voice. “I can’t imagine that you could separate one page from another without destroying both.”

  I produced my oyster knife and she looked down her nose at it and made a dismissive noise. She thrust the book at me, and I made it disappear into my pocket again.

  “Merry Verlow has informed you where you will go to college and that you will live with me,” she said, picking up the thread of her previous remarks. “I know that you would like to finish high school here but that’s impossible. In order to succeed in the caliber of school to which you are going, you need to spend a year in a first-class prep school.”

  The thought of leaving Merrymeeting and Santa Rosa Island evoked a shiver of panic. I was not as ready as I thought.

  Mrs. Mank squeezed my forearm insistently.

  “It’s the right time, Calley. Your mama is engaged to marry Colonel Beddoes. She is going to start a new life. Surely you don’t want her to live the rest of her life alone.”

  “Surely, I don’t. It’s not Mama that gives me pause, Mrs. Mank. I was preparing myself to go, just not so soon.”

  She said nothing for a time while we walked on. My own thoughts were rushed, my emotions surging from panic to excitement. My whole body shivered with gooseflesh.

  “When?” I asked.

  “Not very long,” was her placid answer. “Not long at all.”

  We were within sight of Merrymeeting.

  “There is nothing like the sea air for spurring appetite,” Mrs. Mank remarked. “I am ravenous for Perdita’s breakfast sausage. Say nothing to Roberta Dakin when she returns, Calliope. Let her have the pleasure of her wedding planning.”

  We parted in the foyer, Mrs. Mank for the dining room, me for the kitchen.

  I won’t tell Mama, I thought. I won’t tell anyone, not even Grady. And not just about leaving.

  Fifty-nine

  THE day we set out, Grady and I made Tallassee by dinner-time, but of course we didn’t go Mama’s crazy route through Elba. I told no one that I was going. Grady was always good at keeping his trap shut, so we had fixed our own day, borrowed the Edsel from Roger, and snuck off as soon as it was light enough to see.

  Tallassee had gotten smaller, to my eye. That’s the way it felt, though of course I knew that it was Calley Dakin who had gotten bigger.

  The first thing we did was hit a diner that served breakfast all day and night. After we had filled our stomachs, we went looking for a service station to refill the Edsel’s tank. The sight of a rusty red Pegasus sign sent my pulse racing. I took it for luck and it was: The gas station had a telephone booth with a phone book chained inside.

  I checked Mr. Weems’s phone number against the list in my lunar notebook and copied out his home address. The names in the phone book jumped from Ethroe to Everlake with no stop for Evarts. A careful study of the page that listed physicians informed me that Tallassee had more doctors than when I was a child, but that Dr. Evarts did not appear to be among them.

  The listings for lawyers offered no Adele Starret, not even A. Starret.

  “I’ll write the Alabama bar,” I told Grady. “Adele Starret would have to be listed with them.”

  “If she was for real.”

  When he said that, for an instant I felt as if he had decided that I had made the whole thing up. A certain mulishness welled up in me.

  I checked that phone book for Verlows and Dakins too, in case of new listings or a mistake by the directory assistance. Not a one. I didn’t expect to find Fennie Verlow’s name but it seemed strange that a clan as big as the Dakins should have no listings. Surely some of them would share a party line with someone somewhere.

  Grady occupied himself gawking at Tallassee. He hadn’t ever been outside of a thirty-five-mile radius of Pensacola, and marveled at how strange it was to be so far north. He wasn’t sure that he liked it, being so far from the Gulf or any other body of saltwater, never mind he didn’t understand half of what anybody said to him.

  Without a map, and depending on a small child’s memory, I had more trouble than I expected finding Ramparts. We kept coming to the same block of recently built houses.

  Grady drove us downtown, where I went into the old pharmacy. To my relief, Mrs. Boyer was behind the cash register and Mr. Boyer was visible in the back of the store, doing his pharmacist duties. They were both older than I remembered but not as old as I expected they might be.

  “Mrs. Boyer,” I said.

  For a second there was a question in her eyes because she wasn’t sure who I was.

  “I’m Calley Dakin,” I told her.

  “Calley Dakin,” said Mrs. Boyer. “Well, I never.”

  Mr. Boyer raised his head and peered at me.

  I waggled fingers at him.

  “All grown up,” marveled Mrs. Boyer.

  “Yes’m,” I agreed, and laughed as if being grown up was just what I put down on my Christmas list. “It’s been so long since I was her
e, Miz Boyer, I caint seem to find Ramparts!”

  “Oh dear.” Mrs. Boyer’s smile faded straight away and she looked very unhappy.

  Mr. Boyer came to the front of the store.

  “Calley Dakin,” he said, shaking his head. “Honey, Ramparts burned down, oh—well, years ago—it went for new houses. All those old live oaks, chainsawed right down.”

  To know Ramparts was gone was an unexpected relief, though I felt some regret for the trees.

  “Oh.” I put my hat back on and tied the ends loosely. “Oh, well.”

  “She didn’t know,” Mrs. Boyer said to Mr. Boyer in a pitying voice.

  He shook his head. “Didn’t know.”

  “Thanks,” I said, and stumbled gracelessly out the door to the Edsel.

  The Boyers looked out at me as I flung myself into the passenger seat.

  “Ramparts is gone,” I told Grady. “Burned.”

  Grady glanced at the Boyers looking out at us behind the plate glass of the pharmacy. He turned the key in the ignition.

  “Shit,” he said with notable cheerfulness. “Ain’t it allus the way. I was looking ford to them umbrellas.”

  The Weems’s house was at least still there, though it took three go-rounds of the neighborhood before we found it.

  This time Grady went to the door with me.

  A colored woman answered the doorbell.

  I opened my mouth, intending to inquire politely if Mr. Weems was at home, but what fell out was, “Tansy?”