Candles Burning

by Tabitha King

  A car and hired driver awaited us. It was a black Cadillac, and the driver was a woman. She was a thin woman, the worn-out Southern kind, with huge eyes and sun-damaged complexion, bad teeth and cigarette-stained fingers. She did not have an ounce of flesh to spare, no chest, no fanny, and her hair had been burnt to rusty wire by harsh home perms and dye-jobs.

  The first thing that she did was to introduce herself as Doris, and then express her condolences for the late Mrs. Dakin. Hers was a lunger’s voice, breathy and harsh.

  I wondered how Doris knew Mama’s name. Surely Ford had not put it in any of the local newspapers. Perhaps Mrs. Mank had included the information with the address of the cemetery that was our destination.

  Doris’s eyes in the rearview mirror were curious but only for brief seconds; she drove skillfully, and never hesitated as to our route.

  Mrs. Mank glanced at the Rolex on her wrist and said, “We’re going to be a little late.”

  Doris stepped down on the accelerator. She did her best, but the country roads could not be driven as if they were highways, not safely.

  The Promised Land shocked me, so closely did it match my memory. Its resemblance to a used-car junkyard was deeply disheartening. Someone had left a dusty Corvette at the verge of the road into the cemetery.

  “Stay here, please,” I asked Mrs. Mank.

  She rolled down the windows and sat back. “Have it your way.” From her purse, she took a flask.

  Doris held the door for me.

  “I’ll just wait with Missus,” she told me, with a flicker of her gaze toward Mrs. Mank. It was as if she didn’t want to say Mrs. Mank’s name.

  There was no grass, just prickly weeds in patches. The weeds were rooted in coarse sand, amid pebbles with edges so sharp I could feel them biting the thin soles of my flats. Crumbling concrete marked out the sunken rectangles of the graves and all the tombstones tilted forward as if they wanted a better look at the man or woman or child or stillborn infant they commemorated. On nearly every grave a cracked clay pot or old milk bottle held dried-up old flowers. The few trees thereabout were all bent and scraggly and seemingly half dead. They looked like the paper trees we cut out in kindergarten for Halloween decorations, so the bats and ghosts would have some background beside the moon.

  I looked for a crow. Not only were there no crows, there were no birds at all, and in Alabama, I recalled, there were always birds in the sky.

  A casket waited on a mechanical frame in an open grave. There were no flowers. Nearby stood a big black funeral hack, its rear door open. Two men sat inside the hack, in the front seat, with the windows rolled down, and cigarette smoke whisping out. A white man in a black suit leaned against the body of the hack, smoking a cigarette. He wore a black fedora. He did not need to remove his sunglasses for me to recognize him.

  He pitched his cigarette butt past the coffin and into the open grave.

  “Let’s get this gone,” Ford said in a bored drawl.

  The two men, the undertaker and the driver, got out of the front seat of the hack and assumed respectful postures next to it.

  Ford hitched the hem of his suit jacket, which was silk and hand-tailored, and drew a small, thick book from a rear pocket. The jacket fell perfectly back into line.

  He pushed his hat back on his forehead. He let the book fall open.

  He did not look at it but intoned, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to lay to rest the sorry remains of the late not very beloved Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, relic of Joe Cane Dakin, the larger proportion of him moldering already just to my left. If you examine his stone—beg pardon, there is no stone, as Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin never got around to having one placed there. Let none of us doubt that she had a more pressing need, if she ever did recall that she had yet to perform this widow’s duty, perhaps for cigarettes, or silk stockings, or makeup, that week. Allow me to substitute mere words:

  Here lies Daddy,

  Soul still achin’

  Without a stone

  ’Cause he was a Dakin.

  A Dakin, A Dakin, A no-count Dakin.”

  Ford took a mocking bow.

  “To the task at hand.”

  He looked down at the casket. He spread his hands upon the polished wood of the top.

  “Mama,” he said. “Blame me. I had your bloated carcass drug here all the way from Pass Christian. I bought this here plot next to Daddy, just for you. Now your fine Carroll bones gone spend eternity right next to his Dakin bones. Most of ’em, I mean. Mama, I spent the last decade of my life thinking up the things I was gone say to you. But now we’re here, I ain’t wasting my breath.”

  He tipped his chin heavenward and closed his eyes behind the lenses of his sunglasses reverently.

  “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he said mournfully, and then laughed. “Let’s go get drunk.”

  “I’d like to sing a hymn,” I said.

  He tore off his hat and cast it roughly to the ground.

  “I knew it,” he said. “I knew you could not by-god-and-sonny-jesus keep that huge flapping mouth of yours shut.”

  Ignoring him, I sang, in my own tuneless voice.

  I see the moon,

  and the moon sees me

  and the moon sees the one I long to see.

  So Gobbless the moon

  And Gobbless me

  And Gobbless the one I long to see.

  “Okay,” said Ford. “Now shut up and let’s go get drunk.”

  Sixty-eight

  “I want a few minutes with Daddy.”

  Ford rolled his eyes. “He’s deader than she is, Dumbo.”

  But he waited. And he removed his hat.

  I stepped sideways to the sunken place that he had indicated was Daddy’s grave. I felt nothing, no emanation, certainly, and no sense of peace.

  “He’s not here,” I said.

  “What I said.” Ford smoothed his hair and stuck his hat back on his head, the same way, tipped jauntily back. “Better go tell Saint Peter.”

  Ignoring Ford, I started back toward the Cadillac. I was going to tell Mrs. Mank that I meant to go have a drink with Ford, possibly even get drunk, and she could go back to Massachusetts, but I didn’t bother to tell Ford. He was full enough of himself already.

  He strolled along behind me, though.

  Doris stood next to the sedan, her eyes bigger than ever at what she had heard and witnessed. She opened the passenger door at my approach.

  Ford stepped between me and the open door.

  “You,” he said to Mrs. Mank, in a mocking tone.

  She flinched.

  “That’s right,” he said. “Why don’t you just get yourself out of this here Cadillac and dig yourself a hole in an unconsecrated ditch somewhere and pull the dirt in on yourself and die, Auntie? I won’t help you either. I won’t even throw the dirt on your face, old woman.”

  She snarled, but seemed unable to speak a word.

  “She wants to make a confession, first,” I said.

  Mrs. Mank looked from me to Ford and back again. Her jaw twitched violently, nearly dislocating itself. At last she got it in gear.

  “I am owed Calley. I knew it the minute that I saw her in that shop in New Orleans face-to-face. Deirdre promised me. Her stupidity cost me those two girls, Faith and Hope. The two of them weren’t half of Calley, of course, not that Deirdre would admit it. She thought she was going to get Joe Cane Dakin’s money too. Fennie sorted her out for me. You should thank me for that, boy. You two have no complaint against me. Old Cosima was charcoal before you were born. What could she do for you but interfere?”

  Ford slammed the door hard enough to make the automobile shake.

  Inside, Mrs. Mank hit the door lock. Clunk. Cadillac door locks always clunked.

  “Let’s go get drunk,” he said. “I had all this I can take.”

  “What about her?”

  “What about her?” he said irritably.

  He strode toward the Corvette and with a glance back
at Mrs. Mank’s purpling face, I followed him. I guessed that I didn’t have to tell her anything. I didn’t have to account to her.

  Ford did not open the car door for me. He went over the one on the driver’s side, of course, rather than open it for himself. I did the same thing on the passenger side, no doubt showing my underpants to Doris, Mrs. Mank, the undertaker and his man. Those two fellows had yet to begin lowering the casket. They were standing there gawking, and who could blame them?

  Sinking into the bucket seat, I unpinned the beret and took it off. I tucked it under my fanny.

  Ford watched me quizzically.

  “It’s a Schiaparelli,” I said.

  He chortled. “Oh, Mama, you hear that?”

  He drove just the way I expected he would, like an idiot. It was highly enjoyable, and I whooped and hollered and laughed along with him.

  We came to a roistering stop outside a cement block road-house. It was properly low in every way, as a Southern bar should be, on account of drinking and everything associated with it is so sinful. The least a body could do was sin in as squalid a place as could be found.

  We didn’t actually stay. Ford bought a bottle of Wild Turkey from the old blind man behind the bar and we carried it away to his Corvette. A black limousine waited in the parking lot not far from it. Doris waved at me from behind the wheel. The windows were up, no doubt with the air-conditioning keeping Mrs. Mank cool, and so she was not visible to us.

  “Is this against the law?” I asked Ford.

  “Hope so,” he said, throwing the cap away.

  Handing me the bottle first was an unexpected, gentlemanly gesture that might have brought tears to my eyes, if Ford were anyone else but Ford.

  “Krast,” he said, letting his accent thicken ridiculously. “You growd tits. No much of ’em but that’s about as much as I expected. You gone drink that whole bottle yourself?”

  “You ain’t changed a bit,” I said, with airy contempt.

  He sucked a good mouthful out of the bottle, swished it around like mouthwash and swallowed it.

  “That’s a lie,” he said. “Now we’re orphans, you best be kinder to me.”

  “You gone be kinder to me?”

  “Maybe.” He fingered the breast pocket of his jacket, withdrew from it a card, and passed it to me.

  “Fred Hatfield. Damn,” I said, “I’m getting all warm and gooey.” I tucked the card into the pocket in my dress.

  “Daddy set up a dealership to sell Fords to colored people,” Ford said. “That was the last straw for Mamadee. Not that it matters. When somebody wants to kill somebody else, motivation is justification, that’s all. So when Auntie offered to help get rid of Daddy and steal his money, Mamadee jumped right on. She should have known Auntie would double-cross her. Evarts and Weems and Mamadee cooked the books on Daddy. They were gone steal him and Mama blind. And did. But those loonies that murdered Daddy, they were tools. Tools for Isobel Mank, who felt about Daddy much as Deirdre Carroll did but was most anxious to control you. What you gone do about her, that old witch Isobel?”

  I shrugged. Truly I did not know.

  “What happened to all the Dakins?” I asked him out of left field.

  He grinned and rubbed his thumb and forefinger together. “They accepted the kind assistance of Mamadee’s agent, Lawyer Weems, to remove to California. I’ll send you all the addresses of the ones that are still alive.”

  “How do you know her?” I asked.

  “Same way you do,” said Ford. “She bought me from Lew Evarts. He took the money and run. She told me right off that she was Mamadee’s sister and my closest blood, next to Mama, who run off like the slut she was. She already had custody of you, she said, and you were in someplace for the feebleminded. She put me into the Wire Grass Military ’Cademy. It’s outside of Banks, Alabama, about as far from anywhere as you can get and not be dead. It’s run by some friends of hers, the Slaters, and it’s a lot more like a prison than a school. First-class teachers, though. They’d all been run out other schools for some peccadillo or another, like picking their noses in church or being ex-Nazis or something socially iffy.”

  “There were other kids there?”

  “Seventy-five, give or take. Juvenile delinquents, basically.” Ford grinned. “I learned as much from my fellow inmates as I did from the faculty.”

  “Did you send Mama that letter, the one from Paris?”

  “Yeah. I went from Wire Grass to Phillips Exeter, and then I got control of my money and split for France.”

  “How did you do that? Get control of the money?”

  “Blackmailed Mank. I can connect her with Fennie Verlow, the morning that y’all skedaddled. I hear the Edsel plowing up the driveway and reckoned Mama was in a snit at Mamadee. So I came downstairs and there was ol’ Fennie havin’ a cozy chat with Tansy. Tansy tucked some cash money away real quick, so I wouldn’t see it, but I did. Then Mamadee started squealing for her coffee and toast. A couple hours later, Mamadee had this thing on her neck I couldn’t even see to start, and she was going batty. Tansy pretended to find fault with something and ran off, which made me a little suspicious. I poked around the kitchen and found the new butter thrown into the trash with just a little bit gone, enough for Mamadee’s toast. It didn’t smell like butter. It had a funny medicine smell. After she ran around town buying umbrellas, Mamadee went into her bedroom and didn’t come out. I peeked in and by then that thing on her neck was visible, my God it was disgusting. I jammed an umbrella ferrule into the keyhole. Lew Evarts turned up and got the door open. I saw him touch that thing and then it exploded. She flopped around like a fish on a hook and then she was dead. I didn’t see Lew Evarts do a thing to stop it. The blood. He just looked disgusted.”

  He paused for the cause and then resumed. “Anyway, that isn’t the only thing that I’ve got on Madame Mank. Among other things, she twiddles currency, you know, and a lot of it she forgets to do legally. I’m a hell of a researcher, worse luck for her, and a very good thief”—he rubbed the tips of the fingers of one hand together—“and while I can’t hear the way you can, Calley, I mastered the latest techniques in phone tapping at Phillips Exeter. Some of those rich kids come by dishonesty honestly. You ever smoke pot?”

  I shook my head regretfully.

  He looked at me. “You’re gone enjoy college. What’s your next move? You gone let Mank pay your way through school, and then work it off for her?”

  I was still thinking about it. “How free am I, right now?”

  “Free enough to say no. I’ll pay your way through college, Calley. I’m a thief but I’m your brother too. Most of the money I’ve got was Daddy’s, or Mamadee’s, and we should both be heirs. I’ll give you half. Take you to a lawyer today and sign it over.”

  The offer stunned me.

  “I’ve got the ransom,” I confessed.

  Ford winked at me. “You do have some Carroll in you.”

  He watched me take another drink from the bottle and pass it back to him, and fidget, while I turned everything over in my mind.

  “You think you can beat Mank at her own game?”

  “You did,” I said. “And maybe you’d help.”

  Now it was his turn to drink, fidget, glance at the limo, drink again and pass me the bottle.

  “I’ll be on the outside,” he said, with a surprised unhappiness in his voice. “I gotta think about it. We’re talking about your soul, you know.”

  Impulsively, I gave him a kiss on the cheek. While he was laughing and wiping it off his cheek, I climbed out of the Corvette.

  Doris saw me coming and was outside of the limo opening the door by the time I reached it. I glanced back at Ford, before I folded myself into the rear seat. I thought I saw him give the briefest of nods, and then he threw me a double eagle.

  Epilogue

  ONE of my ghosts evaporated unexpectedly and with embarrassing ease. In a course on meteorology, taken to fulfill some undergraduate requirement, I discovered that the gia
nt ghost in the fog was myself. Mrs. Mank’s headlights had cast my own shadow onto the fog. It’s called the Brocken Spectre. I suffered no chagrin. It happened when I was an ignorant little girl in strange circumstances. The discovery did, however, allow me to dismiss the occasional leakage of other memories of weirdness in my childhood as just as likely to be explainable in rational terms.

  The ease with which I pick up languages and sciences, everything that I learned working in radio while I went through the various colleges that I attended, I built into a double-barreled career as a translator and radio producer. There were other schools that I attended under Mrs. Mank’s sponsorship, schools that don’t give degrees to hang on the wall. Under cover of translation and radio production, I have traveled everywhere in this world, gathering and absorbing information useful to Mrs. Mank and her superiors. I was more than a good servant, I was a brilliant one, and as much as I earned, I was never overpaid. I am proudest of the mischief to Mrs. Mank’s interests that I was frequently able to trigger without her suspicions ever being raised. Ford and I between us put many a spoke in her wheels. Toward that end, she knew that someone was playing a long game against her, and that she was weakening and would eventually lose.

  She believed that I was passing messages to her from her mama, my great-grandmama, Cosima, forgiving her, giving her direction. Ouija-board stuff, really. Mama, will I go to Hell? Mama, should I buy low and sell high? Mama, should I bet on this politician or that one? Mama, blah, Mama, it wasn’t my fault, I’ve just had to do what I had to do, Mama. Deirdre brought it on herself, Mama, you know she did. Isobel Mank, who scammed the world, let herself be scammed by Joe Cane Dakin’s daughter, with a little assistance from Cosima. It was easy for me to speak in Cosima’s voice, of course, but oftentimes I really was telling her something that Cosima told me to tell her.