Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  I rested there a moment, savoring the hardly perceptible surcease of heat, and the access to the salt-tinged air. Reluctantly I moved on, promptly barking my shins on a crate, using a standing lamp to steady myself, and stumbling about until I was face-to-face with the totemic face of the old semanier. Something, at last, that I recognized. Recalling that I had not tried all the drawers, I began opening them from the bottom. Crap galore in them, from Masonic jewelry to a nice selection of little silk shorts—underpants, I realized as I handled them with my dirty fingers, from the twenties. Step-ins, Perdita called them. I dropped them back into their drawer and rummaged behind them. The rigid edge my fingertips stubbed up against proved to be a rusty little tin box, with a matchbook in it.

  Fire! My heart leapt as if I were a caveman coming on a lightning-struck mammoth, split open to give me access to rare meat and steaming offal.

  Soon I had my crude candle burning. I held it carefully, while peering around for something to put it in. It was frustrating to see nothing, not even an old ashtray that might be useful, when I had seen so many candleholders and candlesticks on previous visits. I considered the little tin box, but it was flimsy and rusty and might get hot to hold. Surely I could do better.

  And I did. Gyrating slowly, holding the candle high to cast its light over the greatest area, I caught a glimpse of purple-blue glass on an open shelf of a shabby curio cabinet that had had the glass of its door broken right out. I reached careful past the shards still in the frame of the door, and brought out the cobalt-blue glass candleholder that Mama had bought in New Orleans, in the ticking antique shop. Prop: Mr. Rideaux. The bell on the door jingling. The woman who looked at me. A wall of clocks lying about the time. Mama’s lost Hermès Kelly bag that wasn’t lost at all.

  Despite the nonstandard chubbiness of my candle, the glass candleholder married my candle as if the two objects were made for each other.

  Holding it high again, moving carefully so as not to bang myself up any more, or inadvertently light up something flammable, I made better progress in my exploration. I was running sweat as if instead of the burning candle, I was doing the melting. My overalls and the man’s undershirt that I wore underneath it stuck to me as wet pages stick to one another.

  The thought reminded me of the bird guide. I touched it to reassure myself. It occurred to me that I ought to look at it, to see what state it was in—steady-state National Audubon Society Field Guide, or nutty oddybone.

  I drew it out, picked out a nearby rug-covered chest with an end table next to it, and sat down. I put the candlestick on the table. Held in both my hands, the spine of the book read

  The Odderbone Field Guide to Calley Dakin

  I expected it to flop open but nothing happened. When I tried to open it, it seemed to be as firmly stuck closed as it had been for Mrs. Mank.

  An insubstantial and mildly impatient voice said, enunciating each word clearly:

  Listen to the book.

  I stopped trying to open the book. I knew that voice. It was Ida Mae Oakes’s. Tears welled over my lower lashes and I blubbered.

  “I’m all ears,” I said in a whisper. “Ida Mae, I’ve listened for you particularly. I wish you wasn’t dead.”

  Me too, Ida Mae said. If it wasn’t for the Peace That Surpasseth All Understanding, I’d rather be alive. You stop your blubbering now. I had a nice easy passage, which is more than a lot of folks get. Closed my eyes for a minute during the second Sunday service, and woke up hovering over my own daid old carcass, and nobody even noticing, they was so many of them nodded off. It was a hot day and Brother Truman would drone, no matter how much the amen corner tried to work up a momentum. And I was so young. I wasn’t but fifty-six. My mama is still alive, with sugar, cataracts, not a tooth in her head and don’t know her own name most days. She married her third husband when she was fifty-six, and raised up three of his children that had run wild since their mama passed of a sudden. She earned a crown doing that, I am sure, but she’s been in no hurry to claim it. She asks for me all the time, thinking I am still alive. I hear her, “Where my Ida Mae? Why don’ she come see her mama?”

  “I missed you,” I told her. “Missed you terrible.”

  I know, she said, in her old gentle way. I held my tongue all this time for a penance for being put out with passing so all-of-a-sudden, but I would have spoke if needed. I kep my eye on you, darlin’. You don’ know how many souls are keeping their eyes on you. Well, mayhap you do.

  “Daddy?”

  You know it, darlin’.

  “Tell me why he died—”

  Hush, now. It was his time—

  “No it wasn’t!” I cried.

  The candle wavered as if I had struck it.

  “Revenge is mine, saith—”

  “Yeah, you bet,” I retorted.

  Mind your manners, Ida Mae said sharply. I’ll hear no blasphemy from a child that still has breath in her lungs for to be grateful.

  “I want some answers,” I said. No, I didn’t say it. I shouted.

  Ida Mae made a very odd laugh. People in Hell want sweet tea, Calley Dakin.

  “I believe I am in Hell,” was my retort.

  Gotta be a lot worse than you have been yet to get there. Ida Mae hummed briefly as if she were about to sing. Listen to the book, she sang softly, to the tune of “I See the Moon.” Listen to the book.

  The book fell open in my lap, to the flyleaf. It was inscribed: Calley Dakin, in my own handwriting.

  Unlock the footlocker, the book said in my voice, with a little flutter of its fine thin pages.

  “I don’t know where it is.”

  Ida Mae’s voice came out of the nowhere again. You’re sitting on it.

  Sixty-two

  I jumped off and spun about, losing my grasp on the field guide and worse, nearly knocking over the candle. I dropped the book and used both hands to secure the candle. A fearful sweat was running from my hairline in rivulets, and from every pore, or so it seemed. I was breathless and my belly was knotted up like a fist.

  With the candle safe and steady on the end table, I drew the rug away from the chest, and sure enough, it was not really a chest, but a military footlocker. Green and black. Padlocked. No key in sight. I sniffed the air but detected no odor of the abattoir.

  The guidebook lay on the dusty wooden floor. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, and when I did, my fingertips encountered the key to the attic.

  I drew it out and studied at it. It was a door key, the old-fashioned long-barreled kind, not the stubby key that a padlock would have. I pulled out my oyster knife. One of them was going to open that padlock, or else. I didn’t know what the else might be, but I knew that I was serious about it.

  I made a try with the door key. And, of course, it worked. It slid into that padlock like water down a thirsty throat. And I was thinking about water; I was thirsty by then. I turned the key and the padlock let go.

  If I failed to actually open the footlocker, Ida Mae was going to speak up or use the guidebook for a megaphone—oh, how stupid I had been; of course that was exactly what the guidebook was, a ghost megaphone.

  I bent my knees, unhooked the padlock from the metal tongues of the footlocker, and put my back behind my lifting of the lid of the chest. There was no resistance, only the unhappy shriek of its disused hinges, as it rose and then fell away with my immediate push. I looked down into the trunk, which was filled with neatly banded bundles of money. Sitting on top of the paper money was a silver dollar. Not a bill in a bundle would be dated later than 1958, I was immediately sure: It was the ransom that had not saved Daddy’s life, and the silver dollar appeared to be my very own.

  I put my silver dollar in my pocket. Seeing an old wicker laundry basket not far out of reach, I fetched it to the footlocker and emptied the ransom money into it. The hamper was less bulky, less heavy, and I could push it toward the steps, where there was luggage close at hand. After I had done just that, I went back for the candle, my oyster knife, and
my guidebook.

  By the light of the candle, I filled a well-used good-sized canvas suitcase with the money. I did it without excitement or anxiety. A million dollars was a lot of money back in 1968. Finding the silver dollar on top of it all seemed like a signal that the paper money was mine to dispose of as I wished. It was freedom; I could buy my own education and shed Mrs. Mank, Miz Verlow, and Mama, all in one go.

  I closed the suitcase, click-click, and repressed a chortle. Whatever part of me was true-blue Carroll was deeply satisfied for the first time in my life. I felt for the door key. And did not have it, for it was on the floor by the footlocker, still in the open padlock.

  Taking my rapidly diminishing candle with me, I turned to go back to the footlocker.

  The heat was getting to me. Sweat set on my upper lip and my tongue could not keep up with licking it off. But I did lick at it reflexively, for it wet my mouth and throat. In a few steps, I doubted my direction. It occurred to me that I could die here in the attic, die of thirst or starvation or the heat. But, of course, I would cry out first and be heard. It was only being wrung out by the heat that even made it seem possible. The hell with the key, I told myself, I still had my oyster knife. I would find my way back to the steps and the suitcase.

  Long moments later, I had not found my way. I crouched by one of the portholes and sucked at the air coming in through the screen, and berated myself for failing to bring water with me. And breadcrumbs, or white stones, anything to have used for a trail.

  The candle’s tiny flame breathed a little larger. It would very soon gutter in its own melted wax.

  “I listened to the book,” I said in a mutter. “A fine kettle of fish it’s gotten me into.”

  Making myself breathe easy and concentrate, I listened closely, but Ida Mae did not speak. I listened hard enough to hear the babble beneath the water of the Gulf but no voice I knew emerged from it. I slid my fingertips into my overalls pocket to touch Calliope’s locket, half-expecting some magic from it. But there was none, except the skin smoothness of the gold at the tips of my fingers.

  Heat rises. Hot as it was on the floor, it was not as hot as it was at my full height. I crawled, awkwardly, what with having to hold the candle in one hand. The book bumped against my flank as if to remind me it was there.

  Stopping in a crouch, I put the candle on the floor and took out the book.

  As I held it in my hand, it said, speaking again in my own voice:

  Point your finger. Follow it.

  My forefinger, I thought, the one I burned in a candle flame the Christmas morning when I was seven.

  So I stood up, shoved the book back into my pocket, picked up the candleholder with my left hand, and pointed my forefinger. It failed to sting or redden. I turned slowly, until it did. And it did. It felt just as if I was shoving it into the flame of my homemade candle in the cobalt-blue candleholder. A doorbell caw-cawed far away. The sound came from my pocket, so I knew it was the book.

  I moved in the direction that my finger pointed. The way was far from clear. I had to go over low things, and between things, and around things, and then point my finger again until the pain of burning confirmed the direction.

  The beams as they sank toward the eaves forced me into a stoop and then a crouch. I could smell dead meat again. Finally I was on my knees, and the footlocker was in sight, against the low wall of the eave. It was not the same one, I told myself. The one that had contained the ransom had had plenty of headroom above it. A padlock was on the floor, open, no key in sight.

  The closer I crept to the footlocker, the more the stench gagged me. The tongue of the footlocker hung loose. With one quick movement, I lifted the lid and flung it back. I let myself fall back in reaction to my own forward force, so there was some space between the footlocker and me.

  The candle was just at hand. Its flame all but floated on the transparent melt of its wax. Lifting it slowly so as not to smother it by a sudden rush, I drew closer to the footlocker, close enough to hover the candle over the open footlocker. The bottom looked a long way down. The Calley effigy was sprawled there, with Betsy Cane McCall obscenely between her legs.

  Unbidden, the thought was suddenly in my mind: I should set the rag doll aflame, and use it for a torch, to spread fire at every corner of the attic. When the house was on fire, someone would unlock the attic door. The rag doll looked up at me with its stony eyes. The flame of the candle raised a light in each one, and a tiny reflection of me. Its eyes pled with me; it so wanted to burn.

  Bent over the open footlocker, I lowered the candleholder. A tiny unsteadiness in my hand spilled a clear hot drop of wax upon the rag doll’s face, where it became a cloudy tear splat.

  I moved the flame to her hair, which flared at once. The sudden flare of fire stung my hand like a whip. I dropped the candleholder into the footlocker. The hot melted wax spattered over the blackening rag doll, feeding the fire. Sooty black smoke bloomed from the flames. The rag doll writhed. It looked like a blackbird on fire. Poor Betsy Cane McCall blackened and fumed too; as it melted her polyvinyl mouth seemed to gape open, her eyes to widen, until she appeared to be screaming.

  I dropped back onto my heels, then jumped up and kicked the footlocker with my bare foot. It felt as if I had busted every toe. But the force of my kick drove the footlocker back against the wall, and the lid dropped down, pinching a billow of smoke into my face. It was nasty and black, that smoke, and I got a mouthful of it that made me cough and wretch.

  I crouched nearby, watching the footlocker, to see if it would catch. When it seemed as if at least an hour had gone by, though I knew it was only ten minutes or so, I ventured to open the footlocker again. Of course doing so released another cloud of the foul smoke right into my face. More coughing and gagging, this time until tears ran down my face. I knuckled the tears and smeared wet soot around my face.

  After a moment or two, I could see into the footlocker. Fire out, starved of oxygen. The cobalt candleholder sat in the black mess at the bottom of the footlocker, like an unpolished gem in a tar pit. Like my own heart, sooty and hard, but unmelted. I felt no fear any more of the rag doll or the footlocker. I dropped the lid again.

  When I stood up, I looked up, searching out the center beam of the attic. Once I was under it and could look in either direction, I followed it to the attic steps. I coughed a lot while I made my way.

  Impulsively, I gave the light pull chain a yank, and all the lightbulbs came on. I could have done that before, when I brought the ransom money to the luggage, but had not, what with realizing that I had left the door key in the padlock. I might have had clear vision, if only I had done the simple and obvious thing: Try the light chain again.

  There was only one way to turn the lights on, and that was the pull chain. I had not heard its distinctive catch and click, never mind anyone who might have pulled it. Knowing that it had not been the fuse still left me without answers that mattered.

  I backed down the steps, with the canvas suitcase bumping on each step after me. When I tried the door, it was still locked. I used the oyster knife. It worked and I swore I would never be without it.

  It was only midday, I realized, as I emerged into the hallway. I heard the sound of dinner from the dining room. The best place to temporarily stash the money, I decided, was in the linen closet. That highest shelf, where the Christmas decorations were stored, and no one ever ever looked, that was the place. In a few moments, the ransom was hidden, and I had gathered clean clothes and was locked in the bathroom.

  The sight of myself in the mirror made me laugh until I cried again. I looked like a charred owl. I jumped into the shower to cover the noise I could not stop making.

  When I went down the backstairs to the kitchen, Perdita was arranging dessert plates.

  “I’ll do those,” I said.

  She watched me do one to make sure that I did it right, and then she wrinkled her nose.

  “I smells burnin’. Bin smellin’ least a quarter hour. Nothin’ b
oil over, though, nor burn on neither.” The outrage in her voice made it clear that Perdita would not allow boil-overs or burn-ons.

  I sniffed the air and shook my head in puzzlement. “Maybe somebody’s campfire on the beach.”

  “If it is, Lawd save whomsoever be eatin’ that mess!” Perdita said.

  Miz Verlow did not seem to notice, perhaps because so many of the guests just then were smokers, and the smoke was always wafting in from the verandah. She did give me several puzzled glances, as if she could not quite remember who I was.

  I heard her in the attic that night. She went straight to wherever she was going and stood there for a long moment.

  And then, very clearly, she said, “It’s too late, Calliope Dakin.”

  Sixty-three

  MAMA came home with a new pair of tits. Her jawline was ten years tighter. Her eyes had acquired a slight and sexy tilt, like Barbara Eden’s, while the shadows under them had disappeared. The suggestion of Barbara Eden was entirely deliberate; Mama was rigged out in billowing gauzy harem pants and a form-fitting short jacket that was meant to serve up her décolletage like a tray of meringues, and did.

  She sashayed into Merrymeeting still wearing her sunglasses, so she could casually whip them off. She had to check the effect in the mirror in the foyer and on anyone who might be standing there looking. Everyone was, given she had timed her arrival for the cocktail hour, when the guests gathered to knock back a few drinks before supper.

  Several of them were regulars who knew Mama. They knew that she was different but only a few of the women could have said how. Fewer of the guests were new; Mama had the greatest effect on them. One of the younger men even made a low whistle—very low and very short and ending in an odd, smothered yelp, as his wife stomped down on the toe of his sandaled foot.

  Colonel Beddoes, bringing in Mama’s suitcases, missed the byplay. He passed the luggage off to me to take up to Mama’s room, freeing himself to put an arm around Mama’s waist and nuzzle her ear.