Candles Burning

Sixteen

ON one side of the church sat the governor and his wife, the mayors of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Mobile, a delegation from the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, most of the successful businessmen of Alabama, most of the grandees and pooh-bahs of Montgomery and Tallassee and points in between and thereabout, Dr. and Mrs. Evarts, the two FBI agents from Birmingham, and Mamadee, Ford, Mama and me.

The most interesting to me of the group of dignitaries was the director from the Ford Motor Company. His hair looked painted on. When the light struck his rimless glasses just right, he seemed to be as empty-eyed as Little Orphan Annie. He had no discernible lips either, and his teeth looked older than he did. He looked like he might be cold to the touch, like a croaker. I thought he must be Mr. Henry Ford, the younger one, but I found out next day from the newspaper that his name was Mr. Robert S. McNamara. The S stood for Strange, which in itself was impossible to forget.

On the other side were about four hundred Dakins, or so Mama said, but Ford told me later that small-business people and a passel of country folk actually filled most of those pews.

“About a hundred of them were Dakins,” Ford said. “Hundred and one, counting you, and a hundred and one and maybe half, counting you and what’s left of Daddy.”

He didn’t count himself. It was fine by me if Ford didn’t want to be counted a Dakin.

Mama had always emphasized the unregenerate wickedness of the Dakins—by which she meant that they did not have any money. So instead of paying attention to the minister or to the woman at the organ whose amazingly orange hair was marcelled like Mamadee’s, or thinking about Daddy lying dead and chopped up in the coffin, I stared across the aisle at my uncles and their families, and all the kin that I barely knew. My Uncles Dakin—Jimmy Cane, Lonny Cane, Dickie Cane, Billy Cane—uncomfortable in their cheap and rarely worn suits, sat solemn as a row of old men in rocking chairs on the verandahs downtown on a Saturday night. Like the surface of the moon, their complexions were deeply scarred and thickened. Their wives, the Aunts Dakin—Jude, Doris, Gerry, Adelina—were uniformly slack at the bosom, as though mother’s milk and comfort had been sucked right out of them. Though not all were bone-thin, the fat they carried looked dense and hard. The flowers in their hats were faded, their dresses to a woman, the plastic-belted, collared rayon shirt-waist in every size and any color, so long as it was dark, that hung on the racks at Sears. My cousins, the Sons Dakin, were numerous and fidgety. They did not take well to the hard oaken pews and the hand-me-down jackets that pinched in the shoulders or were too short in the sleeve. There were too many of them for me to remember all their names or to whom they belonged. They did a good deal of sniggering and staring at Ford and me. There were no Daughters Dakin.

At least on that side of the church. On our side of the church, there was me. I had new white gloves and a new hat, a white straw boater with a black ribbon band and streamers, which Mama had had to go out and buy when she realized that I didn’t have a thing to put on my head or hands for the funeral. As usual she bought the hat too big, so it would fit down over my twinned ponytails and ears. Wisps of straw tickled my ears unmercifully. When I tried to look around more, Mamadee dug her fingernails into the nape of my neck.

Mama had, of course, expected the worst of the Dakins but none of them wept audibly, though their bandanna hankies got used to mop up the occasional tear and they blew their noses loudly. At least there were no outbreaks of “Praise Jesus.” When they looked at Mama at all, it was sidelong.

Outside the church, before we got into the cars for the graveyard, my uncles held their hats in their hands and yanked at the hard, tight knots of their ties.

Aunt Jude hugged me and cried, “You poor baby! I know you are desolate.”

The other aunts murmured their agreement and patted my head.

Mama hastened to say, “This little girl is not a particle as desolate as I am. Not a particle.”

But the aunts did not touch Mama and they did not speak to her directly. Mama mistook this as a signal of respect for her person and her station. The Dakins did not bother with Ford either, or Mamadee, and Mamadee and Ford did not bother with the Dakins.

On the off chance that they were voters, the governor came over and shook the hands of the Uncles Dakin. He paid no attention to the Aunts Dakin. Likely as not, they voted the way their husbands did, or not at all.

We got into the Edsel that had been washed clean of road dust first thing in the morning by Leonard. Mama had driven us to St. John’s in Montgomery in it. Mama was not about to ride in Mamadee’s Cadillac. She and Mamadee were only speaking to say pass-the-salt-please and thank-you and whatever cuttingly courteous spitefulness they could invent.

The drive to the graveyard was so long that I dozed off. When the Edsel came to a stop and I woke up, we were out in the country. Mama crammed my hat back onto my head and I straightened my glasses on my face. I had been expecting one of the cool shady green cemeteries in Montgomery or Tallassee. Mamadee had said that Daddy’s burial would be a circus unless it was out in the backside-of-the-moon. Evidently she had won over Mama on that count.

But 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 soles of my Mary Janes. 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. On one raggedy pine perched a crow. Its beak prospected busily underneath one wing.

“Where are we?” I whispered dry-mouthed to Ford.

“Hell,” Ford said. Adding, “This is where they bury Dakins.”

He snatched off my glasses and smeared them with his thumbs, before flipping them back to me. While I was trying to get them back on my face, he pushed me toward Mama.

Blinking through the blur on my lenses, I caught up with Mama and grabbed at her gloved hand. “Where is this, Mama?”

“The Promised Land. Where your daddy bought himself a plot. That’s what they call it. The Promised Land.”

I wasn’t old enough to wonder why Daddy had bought this plot, or when, or why just one plot instead of a family one. It was more significant to me that when I looked around, Mamadee’s Cadillac was nowhere to be seen, nor was she, nor any of the other grandees or notables or pooh-bahs.

The two FBI agents had come though; I saw them getting out of their black Buick sedan, and taking off their fedoras. One of them had a bald spot. I had known they were FBI agents as soon as I had seen them drive up to Ramparts on Monday. They looked like the other ones, the ones in New Orleans. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover must have figured if they all looked the same, nobody would notice them. Maybe men wouldn’t notice them. Any half-wit woman would notice right off, two men looking like they dressed out of the same closet.

The pair of agents had spent most of Monday afternoon with Mama. They had been very interested in the papers that Mr. Weems had turned over to her. She had to develop a sick headache to get them to leave.

Ford and Mama and I were on one side and the tribe of Dakins were on the other, just like at the church, except that now it wasn’t the church aisle between us, it was Daddy’s coffin, being lowered into Daddy’s grave.

That graveyard is still my image of the life—of the death—that comes after dying. Blurred. Recognizable but barren of any comfort whatever.

The woman with the marcelled orange hair who had played the organ during the funeral service came around with limp sheets of mimeographed paper that smelled of pears. The green plastic frames of her cat’s-eye-shaped glasses were studded with glittering rhinestones. She was wearing Tangee lipstick, I could tell.

“Calley and I will share,” Mama said.

“No,” the woman said pleasantly, “the little girl gets one of her own.”

She held out the limp pages and I took one. Not from the top and not from the bottom, but from somewhere in the middle of the limp stack. Typical of the mimeograph process, the words were smeary, and the greasy state of my lenses did not help me in making out the words. The gloves on my hands made holding the sheet difficult as well.

These were hymn sheets. As they were passed out to all the Dakins, a preacher—not the one from St. John’s but a rotund lay preacher with mail-order dentures and a shiny-seated suit—recited the verses about To Everything There Is a Season. It is very popular at funerals, presumably comforting to the mourners, but in this instance, I realized when I was some years older, it was grotesquely inappropriate.

When the preacher was through, the woman with the marcelled orange hair raised up her hand as if everyone had been talking and she wanted silence, though no one was doing anything at that point but clearing throats, blowing noses, and shuffling from one foot to another.

She shut her lips tight and hummed a note.

Then all the Dakins began to sing.

I sang the way Daddy did. Mama sang very loudly, to drown me out. Ford stepped on the side of my foot, which only made me sing louder. None of the Dakins seemed the least surprised that I could sing like Daddy. We all sang the word there to rhyme with afar, which made Mama cast her eyes heavenward very briefly. No archangel of proper pronunciation saw fit to punish us with a lightning strike, however.

It was on the chorus after this second verse that I got into trouble. The words on my mimeographed sheet were different from everybody else’s.

Everybody else had the chorus just as it was before. But the words I sang were just for me:

Uuuuhk shrieked the crow in the raggedy pine.

As soon as we had finished the chorus and all the Dakins were starting on the fourth verse, Mama grabbed the mimeographed page out of my hand and hissed at me, “Calley, what in the hell are you doing?”

I tried to get the page back from her—the mimeographed page that I had chosen from out of the limp stack that the woman with the orange marcelled hair had offered to me. The page I had chosen the way a volunteer from the audience chooses a card from the magician’s proffered deck. The page that had a message on it meant just for me.

But Mama threw it into the hole under Daddy’s coffin in the ground. It fluttered down like Betsy McCall’s head when I sliced it off. Then the Uncles Dakin lowered Daddy’s coffin into the crumbling pebbly earth on top of it. It seemed to me less that they were interring Daddy than that they were making certain I could not retrieve the ripe-pear-smelling mimeograph.

I threw myself onto the coffin, only to be snatched out by the long arms of an uncle. I struggled wildly in the tightening enclosure of those strong arms.

“‘You are my sunshine,’” I sang out, “‘you make me happy when skies are grey.’”

Hushing and shushing me, Uncle Billy Cane Dakin carried me away.