Candles Burning

Twenty

ONE night in early May, Mama and Mamadee sat out on the verandah. They smoked cigarettes and rocked side by side in tall green-painted rockers. The crescent moon peeked through the leaves of the nearby live oak in front of the house.

I was up the tree, passing for a mockingbird.

“Mama,” Mama said, “I’m out of cash. With everything tied up in this horrible mess, I need something to survive on. Maybe you could lend me a little now and then until it’s all sorted out.”

Mamadee’s silence went on too long. “I will have to see what I have on hand, Roberta Ann.”

Mama laughed. “You know to the penny what you have in your purse, Mama. I have to find another lawyer, a real one. You know it’s going to cost me one-third of everything to break this will.”

Mamadee flicked a spatter of angry ash away into the night. “Why can you not get it through your head that there is nothing to break the will for? I would advise you, Roberta Ann, to keep your trap shut from now on about the will.”

Mama fumed for a moment before she spat out, “I was a widow first, Mama, but now someone has made me a victim.”

“Of course you would see it that way,” Mamadee said, “but I am not sure that it shines in exactly that light for everybody.”

“What are you talking about?”

The longer the introduction to something unpleasant, the more unpleasant it always turns out to be.

So Mama urged Mamadee on. “Just tell me what everybody in the whole damn town is saying, Mama. It can hardly be worse than the things I’ve said about them, except I am always telling the truth.”

“You went to New Orleans,” Mamadee said in a condescending tone, “with the intention of murdering your husband. You hired a fat woman and her friend to do it. He found out about the plot and rewrote his will, only you did not know about it, and had him killed anyway, and now it just serves you right to be left high and dry.”

“Is that what people are saying?”

“Except most people add a few details. And the only good that people have to say about you is that at least you hired white women to torture and murder him and cut him up afterward.”

The two women rocked in furious silence for a while, inhaling and exhaling like a pair of dragons threatening each other with smoke signals.

Mama ground the fag end of her Kool into the lid of a Ball jar that she was using for an ashtray. “People probably do say that. But other people say something else.”

“What something else do other people say?” Mamadee’s tone of voice plainly expressed her belief that Mama was about to fabricate.

“Other people say Joseph’s death had nothing to do with me, that Winston Weems and Deirdre Carroll just found a way to get their hands on Joe Cane Dakin’s money. They typed out a will, paid the witnesses to swear that Joseph really signed it, and they’re trying to make everyone believe it was me who is guilty. So I will get run out of town, and you can hire another fat woman and her friend to kill Winston Weems’s idiot wife and you and Mr. Weems will live high on the hog till you both rot.”

“People are saying nothing of the kind,” said Mamadee. “I suppose you have sold that fabrication to those silly FBI agents.”

“It makes more sense than the other.”

“What makes the most sense, darling, is the part about you getting out of town.”

Mama’s rocker ceased to rock. “I caint believe my ears. No, I lie. I can believe my ears. You gave my sisters away as if they were old clothes. You never wanted any of us, except Robert.”

“Careful, careful, Roberta Ann. Stir the mud, raise a stink.” Mamadee took her usual tack: Any resistance to her plans evidenced wanton lack of virtue. “If you are too selfish to consider me, have a thought for Ford. Those two women are going on trial in a few days. The scandal will be revived to sell newspapers. You might be wise to find someplace where you can lie low. And not just until the sensation of the trial is over. For ten or twelve years. You and Calley. Ford is in far too fragile a state to be left to your care. In fact, I am quite sure that any reasonable judge would find that it is your fault that the boy is in such a terrible way and that you are an unfit mother.”

Mama caught her breath audibly.

Mamadee knew every judge in Alabama. Many of them owed their black robes to her contributions to their campaigns and her influence. Mamadee could make her threats come true.

Mama shook out a new cigarette and fired it up.

“My own mother.” Mama’s first draw on her cigarette was shaky. “Have you ever loved me, Mama?”

Mamadee disdained any question. “I am ashamed to have to remind my own daughter that out of the goodness of my heart, I have paid a very expensive hotel bill in New Orleans, as well as the burial expenses of her bankrupt husband, and that she and her daughter have been eating at my table and sleeping under my roof for these past months, and charging to my accounts all over Tallassee. And more importantly, Roberta Ann, I have not forgotten that you have a million dollars in a footlocker that rightly belongs to the creditors of Joe Cane Dakin’s estate. And you dare ask me for loans.”

Mama jumped up. With her left hand on the other forearm and her cigarette in her shaking right hand, she stalked away stiffly into the darkness under the live oaks.

In the solitary quiet that remained, Mamadee rocked complacently. She coughed lightly, and then chuckled.

My sisters, Mama said. Like old clothes. To whom had Mamadee given Mama’s sisters? And why? Perhaps the answers could be found at Ramparts, in the back of a closet, the bottom of an old trunk, an attic, a cellar, a barn. Ramparts was suddenly interesting again.

I should have known that meant there was no chance in hell that I was going to get a chance to find out.