Candles Burning

Twenty-eight

WHEN the first morning birds woke me, I was tangled in a coverlet on the floor. Mama was asleep in the bed. Horrid dreams had fevered my night. I did not want to recall any detail. When I finally did, I wished heartily that I had not.

My first concern was thirst. At that very early hour, I had the use without challenge of the bathroom we shared with other guests. I gulped from the tap like the barely domesticated little animal that I was. And then I did the opposite and relieved myself.

I became aware of feeling a little less substantial, a little lighter on my feet. After splashing my face and head, I brushed the sick taste of my nightmares from my mouth. A few strands of my hair fell into the basin, into the foam of toothpaste spat.

My hair was loose, the ribbons and rubber bands left on Mama’s dresser, along with the gap-toothed comb that she had assigned me since I had lost mine. My scalp felt lighter than usual. I was a fright, of course: my eyes half-closed with swelling, my nose like a moldy potato. I made a face in the mirror and stuck out my tongue at myself.

When I crept back into the bedroom, intent on getting my clothes and scooting out again, Mama was just stirring. She opened one eye, saw me, moaned, and turned over, yanking a pillow over her head.

I dressed as swiftly and quietly as I could. The rubber bands, the yellow ribbons, the comb, all waited on the dresser. It felt as if they were watching me: the rubber bands gasping, the comb gnashing its uneven teeth, the ribbons flickering like snakes’ tongues that would burn when they bit. I slipped out without touching them and with an intense sense of having escaped.

Cleonie and Perdita were in the kitchen already, Miz Verlow in conversation with them, so I was able to creep out of doors unseen and unheard.

The light edging over the eastern horizon brightened the foam on the breakers in the west to a dazzling pure white. A fleet of pelicans flying parallel to the shore passed almost silently over my head, throwing their huge shadows over me and onto the white sand. They seemed very close and very large. My relative small size enlarged them to enormity.

Up and down the beach, at watch in the swash, stood solitary herons—harrings. Suddenly I understood Cleonie’s pronunciation. As I approached the nearest, it seemed entirely indifferent to me and yet was aware of me; I saw it in its eyes and heard its heartbeat surge. It too was a large bird, taller than I was, but its legs were stilts, its long neck as thin as my wrist, its head no bigger than my fist. A long, thin inky slash of droopy feathers atop its skull, and the long feathers on its chest, ruffled in the breeze.

A law firm of birds waded in the swash or near it: sander-ling, dunlin, dowitcher, sandpiper, willet, stilt and avocet. Pelicans, skimmers, terns and gulls hunted just offshore.

As I squatted barefoot on the beach, a breeze ruffled my hair, and took away a strand. And then another.

A fish crow screeched a loud awk and hurtled toward me. It passed over my head with its claws outreached, snagged lightly, and was gone. I did not need to see the strands in its claws to know that it had taken some of my hair. The interesting sensation was the absence of resistance from the hair. It was painless. The hair went quite willingly where it was tugged. It no longer felt rooted or connected to me in any way.

I made an uhhk at the fish crow. In a black vortex, a dozen or more fish crows hovered over me, diving toward me, skimming away a few strands of hair at a time, rising away again. My scalp felt more and more naked. The sea breeze passed as a cool ruffling through thinner and thinner locks. The birds played around my head acrobatically, teasingly, and their wings fanned me from every direction until I heard nothing else. Some of their cries sounded like questions—uhuh-uhuh? Others like answers—brruhk. My throat grew dry from conversing with them, and then they were gone.

I could hear other things again: the other birds, the tall, swaying grass on the dunes, the slosh and splosh and sigh of the water, the swift scuttle of ghost crabs emerging from their holes in the sand, the wet breathing of the clams under the sand. And then the raucous mirth of a laughing gull.

The beach and the birds enthralled me to the extent that if awakening hunger had not brought me back to the house, I might have stayed there all day. I had yet to understand how much sustenance was all around me.

Mama was again at the table in the dining room, with the guests and Miz Verlow.

Mama’s eyes widened at the sight of me. She gasped as if she were choking on a fishbone. Miz Verlow handed her a glass of water. Mama got her tubes cleared, patted her mouth with her napkin, and recovered her poise. The guests, after initial murmurs of alarm, maintained an uneasy attentiveness to their breakfasts.

I took my place at the table and thanked Cleonie when she put a plate down in front of me.

“What is the meaning of this, Calliope Carroll Dakin?” Mama’s voice was half-strangled and very low.

“The meaning of what?” My mouth was full of warm fresh-baked buttery biscuit.

Mama took a deep breath. She wore only lipstick at this hour of the morning, so the reddening of her face was undisguised. Everyone else concentrated on his or her meals. The table could have easily been a refectory in some monastery under vow of silence—not that I knew at the time that there were such things as refectories, or monasteries, or vows of silence.

“Leave the table,” Mama said.

I placed my fork neatly on my scrambled eggs, slid from my chair, took my plate and made for the kitchen. I helped wash up the dishes.

No one said a word about the fact that my scalp was hairless. As I was drying my hands, Perdita summoned me with the crook of a finger. She whipped a linen napkin around my head in complicated folds and secured it with a small tight knot high on one side. She left my ears exposed. Then she twitched the cloth on either side and the folds bloused out and covered my ears.

On the wall next to the door to the butler’s pantry was a small mirror that Miz Verlow, Perdita and Cleonie checked nearly every time they left the kitchen. From the way she invariably rolled back her lips to check her teeth, Miz Verlow had a horror of having spinach or lipstick on them. Cleonie and Perdita were just vain—vain as peacocks. They always smiled at what they saw. Their pleasure in their own looks made me think of them with awe as about the most beautiful people in the world. Perdita placed the step stool under the mirror so I could climb up and see myself. The napkin was snowy white, and with my blacked eyes and swollen face, I looked like an odd sort of white-capped owlet.

Mama was madder than a nest of paper wasps busted open with a hickory stick. I know because I did that once, when I was too young to know better, and got stung so many times, I wet my pants. But I was fearless. What could she do to me? Make me wet my pants? Black my eyes? Scalp me bald? Tear me limb from limb?

Miz Verlow was in the upstairs hall when Mama marched me toward our room.

“Miz Dakin, I beg your pardon,” said Miz Verlow. “I forgot to mention that I do not allow corporal punishment in this house.”

“I beg your pardon, Miz Verlow.” Mama’s every word cutting as Miz Verlow’s own shears. “Calley is mine and I shall raise her as I see fit.”

Miz Verlow shook her head. “I remind you, Miz Dakin, of our agreement.”

Mama paled. Her hand fluttered to her throat. “You cannot be serious. You must be mad.”

“Loretta Young again? Please don’t waste your acting talent on me, my dear. You will not use any form of corporal punish on Calley under my roof. Is that understood?”

Mama went all Mamadee-rigid. Her fingers twitched, yearning for something to throw, eyes to scratch out.

Miz Verlow seemed hardly to notice. Wishing Mama good morning, she turned away.

Mama stalked past me into our room and slammed the door.

Miz Verlow paused, her hand hovering suddenly over the folds of the scarf around my head as if to pet me, but she did not actually touch me.

I let myself into the room, still dark against the sun. Mama was sitting at the vanity, tucking up loose strands of hair. In the mirror, Mama narrowed her eyes spitefully at me.

“Want me to rub your feet, Mama?”

She kicked off her shoes and flung herself onto the bed. “Don’t think your Merry Verlow is putting anything over on me, Calley Dakin. Don’t think you are either. I know a game when I see one.”

I hesitated.

“Rub my feet, Calley,” Mama said impatiently. “The least you can do is make yourself useful.”

That, at least, was a well-established principle.

After a while Mama was calm enough to talk again normally and reverted to her favorite subject, herself. “I have been so distraught that I forgot that you were skipping school.” As if I were deliberately doing it. She went on, “When it starts up again, you are going to school. You may not learn anything but at least you won’t be under my feet all the time.”

I liked school—the learning part of it anyway, and the being out from under Mama’s feet. In the meantime, I was caught up in exploring the island.

As soon as I was out again, I ventured across the road and all the way to the other side of Santa Rosa Island. Miz Verlow’s house stood at a narrow waist of the narrow island, but that side of the road was nonetheless different in striking ways from the Gulf side. On the bay side, the sand mounded up chaotically, as if the dunes had been tied in knots. Sand pines and shrubs crowned the high places and other kinds of trees and shrubs grew in the low places. Some of the low places were wet, at least some of the time, and had their own kinds of plants and critters. The old deranged dunes nestled areas of salt marsh. What beach there was, was narrower and less cool, as the body of the island and the vegetation gave it some protection from the winds off the Gulf. Between the island and the mainland was the quieter water of Pensacola Bay, with more boat traffic. On the nether shore Pensacola was laid out before me like a toy town.

The sight of Pensacola reminded me of our journey from Tallassee and of Mamadee and Ford. I did not want to be reminded. Nor did I want to remember losing Daddy in New Orleans or our life before that loss. More than anything else, I wanted to hold on to Daddy alive. I spoke to myself in his voice, repeating things that he had said to me. He was still with me; I still heard his voice, even if I had to make it myself. I hardly needed the obvious reasons for protecting myself from the loss and the trauma and the grief. As any child does, I lived far more in the moment than most adults do.

My trek across the road had inspired me to inquire of Miz Verlow if she had a map of the island. Indeed she did. In her tiny office just inside the foyer—it looked as if it had once been a coat closet—she had her desk and chair and file cabinet. The file cabinet stored numerous folders to answer the questions of her guests: local maps, restaurants, events, churches, and so on.

The map she gave me was a simple one, but could not be otherwise: Santa Rosa Island is a strip of sand, miles long and, at that time, with one main road more or less down the middle. The west end of the road is called Fort Pickens Road, and the other, the Avenue de la Luna. At the west end were the abandoned Civil War fortifications of Fort Pickens, and facilities for camping; the eastern end of Santa Rosa Island was part of Eglin Air Force Base. Of course I had heard airplanes, jets and props both, but had given them no particular thought: Pensacola presumably had an airport. There were bridges at three points on the island, with clusters of small businesses, hotels and motels, and residences at the island end of them. The short westernmost bridge connected a small intervening island, where a village had named itself Gulf Breeze. From it, the long Causeway reached to Pensacola.

The physical divide of the island from the mainland was one kind of safety. I would have erased that Causeway from the map if I could, but at least the bay it crossed constituted something of a moat. Mamadee did not know we were here. The crazy maid and the crazy cook from the Hotel Pontchartrain would never be able to find us here. Miz Verlow was another kind of safety, less obvious and of untested reliability, but a fallback position to Mama without a question.

Still, when I asked Miz Verlow if she had seen my broken glasses or my Betsy Cane McCall, she surprised me.

“I am not responsible for your belongings, Miss Calliope Dakin,” she said, very severely. “They are entirely your own responsibility.”

Of course she was correct. It seemed to me that I saw well enough without my glasses, and Betsy Cane McCall, well—I hardly missed her. I forgot the paper dolls and Rosetta’s shears in their shoebox. Santa Rosa Island was a better toy than I had ever had. Or would.

A day or so later, when I wanted clean clothes, I noticed that the bloodied clothes and towels that I had thrown down the laundry chute had not been returned to me. When I inquired of Cleonie if she knew where they were, she frowned and said that she had never seen them at all. She would have remembered them because of the blood, she said, which she would have soaked in cold water before sending them out to be laundered. I looked frantically but was unable to avoid Mama’s wrath that I had managed to lose one of the few changes of clothing that I owned, to say nothing of Miz Verlow’s towels. Mama made me sleep on the floor for a month.