Candles Burning

Eighteen

MAMA really had been overcome. I knew how poorly she slept at night and how little she ate. My own sleeplessness kept pace with hers, so I was perpetually wore out. When I ate, I ate ravenously, causing my meals and snacks to come right back up. After this happened several times, Mamadee declared me unfit to sit at the table and banished me to the kitchen. Tansy must have felt some pity for me, for she fed me plain boiled rice and canned peaches, which I usually could retain. To make sure everybody knew that advantage was being taken of her, she grumbled the whole time about having to cook separate meals.

Mama spent the days immediately following the funeral first writing notes back to all the people who sent flowers to the funeral, and their condolences, and, in a cloud of cigarette smoke, going over and over Daddy’s papers. The FBI agents visited again, sometimes for short conversations, sometimes for lengthy ones. Mama flirted with both of the agents, and from their responses, it was clear that they were charmed. Or taken in.

Not surprisingly, Mama’s migraines plagued her so much that she used up all the BC and Goody’s Headache Powder in the house.

One night while I was giving her a foot rub, Mama said, “I ran into your friend at the drugstore.”

“What friend?”

“You know. What’s-her-face. Orange hair. Fannie.”

“Fennie, I think. Miz Verlow. How could Miz Verlow be my friend, Mama? She’s a grown-up lady. What did she say?”

“Oh, she just ran on like she thought I was somebody who cared. Told me her sister had a house on the beach near Pensacola—as if I cared whether her sister was alive or staring at the wrong side of a coffin lid—and said we could go down there and stay for a while.”

“Where’s Pensacola?”

She ignored the question. “I would never—and when I say never I am talking about the eternity of the angels—I would never throw myself on the mercy of a Dakin.”

Mama expected me to remind her that Fennie was not really a Dakin. I stayed silent. My mind was jumping ahead to looking up Pensacola and finding out where it was, as soon as I could do it without Mama knowing.

“Or anyone else for that matter,” Mama concluded.

She could not help a quick glance at the cedar chest that held the footlocker.

Everybody knew everything, as they always do.

Everybody knew that Mama had arranged for Daddy to be buried like a dead dog in a ditch in the middle of nowhere.

Everybody knew that if Mama had had the nerve to hold a proper reception after the funeral, all the rich and powerful and respected people who had known Daddy would not have attended, for fear of association with a suspected murderess.

Everybody knew that Daddy had somehow embezzled his own assets and Mama had had him murdered, no doubt in hope, at the very least, of getting the insurance.

Everybody also knew that Mama had embezzled his assets and then arranged to have him murdered.

Everybody knew that Mama must have done something truly terrible to my daddy to get him to revoke a generous will and leave Mama the legal minimum.

Even Mama was frightened—though she never said so aloud—that he had done it to punish her for something that either she hadn’t remembered doing, or had failed to realize at the time was so horrible as to justify such a revenge. And Mama was frightened that the FBI kept rummaging through Daddy’s papers, and asking her questions. Mama had a lot of fears, many of them entirely justified.

Only once did anyone wonder aloud why Daddy had omitted me entirely from the will. Rosetta, the colored woman who sewed Mama’s clothes, to whom we had taken the funeral meats, was pinning Mama, to take in a waist, up in Mama’s room. Rosetta had been Mama’s seamstress since Mama was a girl, and even after Mama married Daddy and moved to Montgomery. Sometime long ago, Rosetta had been Mamadee’s seamstress, but they had had a falling-out. It was to spite Mamadee that Rosetta went on sewing for Mama, and Mama went on hiring her. Rosetta had not forgotten the specifics of her own quarrel with Mamadee, but she had long since settled into taking Mama’s side.

Rosetta asked Mama, “But why dint Mr. Dakin Are-Eye-Pee, leave something to—?” with a jerk of her head in my direction.

I was cross-legged on the floor, pinning scraps Rosetta had given me on Betsy Cane McCall.

The look Mama gave me, the question was brand-new to her.

“Probably he thought Calley was not his child,” Mama said. “Course I do not think she’s mine either.”

I pretended not to hear Mama’s answer. I stuck Betsy Cane McCall with one straight pin, right in her head.

Of course I was Daddy’s child. Had not Mama and Mamadee informed me all my life at every opportunity that I was pure-D, backside-of-the-moon Dakin?

The fact is, I was excluded from the will—though the estate be nothing at all—but Mama had not been. If Mama saw everything that had happened as a plot against her, it was natural for me to feel the same way, only more so. It meant little to me in terms of wealth. A seven-year-old with a sweaty dime in hand is wealthy. My silver dollar meant more to me than a million-dollar ransom. But now that it was pointed out to me, I could not help wonder if Daddy had forgotten me. Or worse. The only comfort was in clinging to the belief that the will was fake.

Being at Ramparts had begun to seem less like a visit and more like an exile. I missed going to school. I surely did not want to go home to our old house in Montgomery. I did not know where I wanted to be, other than not at Ramparts. I day-dreamed about Pensacola, in Florida, on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, where Fennie Verlow’s sister lived.

Ford grew more tiresome, indeed loathsome, with every passing day. When not trying to trip me up on the stairs or trap me in a corner to gooch me or pull my hair, he tormented Mama. He would come into whatever room she might be in, sit down and stare at her wordlessly. If she spoke to him, he would not answer. If she tried to give him a hug or a kiss, he would flinch away from her or even push her away.

At first Mama was puzzled. Then his coldness and rejection began to frighten and distress her. I might have doubts that she loved me but there was no doubt about her feelings for Ford.

Her already troubled sleep frayed to near-nothing, I knew—despite having a bed of my own up that short flight of stairs to Junior’s radio room, I managed to go sleep in her bed after rubbing her feet every night. Several times a night, she would get up and go into the bathroom to smoke. She lost weight that she did not have to lose. When she put on her makeup in the morning, she often paused for long moments, staring at herself. Sometimes she seemed to be looking at herself critically. Other times, she seemed to be looking through the mirror into some other time and place. The darkness around her eyes scared me.

One day Ford would not get out of bed. After he wet the bed, Mamadee called Dr. Evarts, who came and talked to Ford. Then he talked to Mama and Mamadee. He told them that Ford was deeply affected by Daddy’s death and the family situation. Ford was high-strung, Dr. Evarts explained, and the shock had been terrible for him. Without question Ford was scarred for life and must be handled with kid gloves.

What handled with kid gloves meant was soon evident. Mamadee went out and bought a color television set for Ford and had it installed in his bedroom. Just getting it up the stairs required both Leonard and the man from the appliance store. Ford settled in to spend most of his time on his bed, watching television. Tansy brought him meals on a tray.

Sometimes Ford pretended to sleepwalk. In that state, he might pee directly out the window. Or he might go into the kitchen and eat whatever he wanted, drinking milk right out of the bottle, or juice from the pitcher, or spoon sugar directly from the bowl to his mouth. He might let a glass or dish drop from his hand on the floor and stand there amid the shattered bits with a look of confusion on his face as if he did not know where he was or how the dish or glass had come to be broken.

I came out of the house early one morning, so as not to wake anyone else up, and found a note under a windshield wiper of the Edsel. It was on pink paper and written in green ink. It read

The pink paper was damp, not with dew but scent, Mama’s scent. Shocking. I ran back into the house and got Mama up to come out to see it. She was not happy to be waked from the few morning hours of sleep that she was getting.

“This better be important,” she threatened, pocketing her cigarettes and lighter in her dressing gown.

The note woke her up in the wrong way. She snatched the paper out from under the wiper and tore it to bits.

Then she slapped me. “If you didn’t do this, just count it as a warning not to copycat.”

But it was not the last note. They turned up in her handbag, on her pillow, in the frame of the vanity mirror in her bedroom, even in her pockets. They were all on pink paper, all written in green ink, and all said the same thing. After she tore them to bits and flushed them, she did not acknowledge them. She locked up her scent in the cedar chest. When she thought no one would notice, she looked all over the house for the pink paper and for a green ballpoint pen. She never found either item. She seemed not to understand that even if she did, she still would have no proof of the identity of her tormentor.

If Ramparts was no refuge, she could not show her face anywhere in Tallassee—in the drugstore, the church on Sunday—without being followed by whispers that were just barely whispers. If the words were too soft for her to make out, the tone was audible always, and always it was accusatory. Mama kept her spine straight and her head up but in the privacy of Ramparts, she was jumpy. Every passing day was like the Chinese water torture (a practice Ford read about in one of his boys’ yarns and threatened me with whenever he remembered it), wearing her down a little more and a little bit more.

We stayed at Ramparts through the warming days and nights, through dogwood and magnolia blossoms, the leafing out of the trees, the return of the hum of bees and the racket of the birds courting and nesting—a period of about two months. For most of that time, I was able to be out of doors. Mama was preoccupied and nobody else seemed to notice whether I was there or not either. I didn’t care whether they did or not; I just wanted to be out of sight and hearing of Mamadee and Ford—my enemies, my tormentors. Away from them, I could remember Daddy. Out of their hearing, I could speak and sing to myself in his voice, so as not to forget it.

My childhood memory of Tallassee was that it was an up-and-down sort of place, in the middle of which a great wall of water fell over a dam and raised a mist. The ups-and-downs were much greater, the houses and stores and trees much larger, the streets much longer, of course, to a child of seven. I wandered all over. In the margins of the old bird and tree books on Junior’s bookshelf, I marked the ones that I already knew and the ones that I encountered in my meanderings. Grackles and catbirds, hickory and catalpa. The names in my mouth were satisfying. It felt a little like being in school again.

Frequently I tramped to the Birmingham & Southeastern train depot. Bump & Slide Easy, Daddy used to call it. No regular passenger trains stopped there anymore—though the mail still did—and the depot was next door to abandoned. The windows of the old depot were tall, with low sills that allowed me to peer through the glass that was as dusty as an old blind woman’s eyes. In Sunday school and in church, I had heard many times that we see through a glass darkly. As I peered into those windows into the depot I realized all at once that a darkly was not an object like a pair of sunglasses or binoculars but an adverb, describing a manner of seeing. Because right then, I was seeing through a glass darkly.