Candles Burning

Thirty-two

NO more than a couple of hours after the Edsel spat gravel at her, Mamadee drove her Cadillac the three and a half blocks to downtown Tallassee. She parked in front of Mrs. Weaver’s dress shop. There, she went inside and announced that she was going to buy every umbrella on the premises. When Mrs. Weaver reacted with understandable surprise, Mamadee only replied imperiously that she had her reasons for the purchase. Mrs. Weaver then apologized that she had only five umbrellas for sale, but added that she would be happy to relinquish her own umbrella at an appropriate discount.

“Why in the hell would I want your old umbrella?” Mamadee replied.

Mrs. Weaver sniffed discreetly, sure that Deirdre Carroll had been drinking and before the noon hour, but she was disappointed. Only momentarily however, for in a quarter of an hour, she had convinced herself that she had indeed smelled bourbon on Deirdre Carroll’s breath.

Mamadee deposited the five umbrellas in the trunk of her Cadillac and then went to Chapman’s Department Store, where she bought every umbrella for sale in the ladies’ department, every umbrella for sale in the men’s department, and the one undersized frilled parasol that was for sale in the children’s department. She gave her car keys to a salesman and told him to just put all her purchases—the umbrellas—in the trunk of her Cadillac, and that she would be back in a while to retrieve the keys. While the salesman was stowing the umbrellas in the trunk of the Cadillac, Mrs. Weaver came to the door of her shop and shared her belief with him that Deirdre Carroll had been drinking before noon. The salesman observed that he wouldn’t be the least surprised.

Half an hour later, Mamadee returned to the department store with a little colored boy in tow. The child was burdened with five brown paper parcels, each with one or more umbrella handles sticking out of it. Mamadee had gone to every store and every shop and demanded to purchase every umbrella in current inventory. At the Ben Franklin Five and Dime, she had procured seven, two at the Harvester’s Seed and Feed, three at Bartlett’s Hardware, two at Durlie’s Dollar Store, and one at the Piggly Wiggly—the tail end of a Morton Salt promotion. She had found none for sale at Dooling’s Barber Shop, the Tastee Freez, the Alabama Power Company, Ranston Insurance, Smart’s Jewelry, or at Quantrill’s Lighting, Plumbing and Gas Fixture Supply Company, but she certainly had inquired.

Retrieving her car keys, Mamadee led the little colored boy with the fifteen umbrellas to the Cadillac. When he had shut the trunk, Mamadee carefully counted out not the promised twenty-five cents, but thirty-three dollars and thirty-two cents. Handing it over, she told the boy to come round to the house later so that she could make up the penny shortfall.

When the little colored boy had wandered off in the stupor of his unanticipated wealth, Mamadee entered Boyer’s Drugstore, the only retail establishment in downtown Tallassee she had not yet visited. Here, however, she did not ask for umbrellas but rather marched directly to the pharmacy counter, and impatiently placed herself behind an elderly farmer whose deafness was severely slowing his purchase of a proprietary senna preparation for his even more elderly mother.

The pharmacist, Mr. Boyer, was surprised to see Mamadee at his counter. She always sent a maid if she needed a prescription filled or wanted an illegal refill of her blue paregoric bottle. She almost never came herself.

Having dealt with the deaf old farmer, Mr. Boyer steeled himself, smiled obsequiously and asked, “Miz Carroll, what can I do for you?”

Mamadee lifted her chin high into the air, to show its soft underside.

“Look at this place,” she demanded. Place was the word used to refer to a small bruise, blemish, or wound of indeterminate origin.

“I caint see anything from here,” puzzled Mr. Boyer. “Maybe I better come around.”

The pharmacist came round and closely peered beneath Mamadee’s chin. “I still don’t see anything, Miz Carroll.”

“Well, it’s there! I can feel it!”

By this time everybody at the fountain counter in front of the drugstore had turned to watch and listen.

Mr. Boyer started to press his index finger against the underside of Mamadee’s chin, but she jerked back in alarm.

“Don’t touch it! Just give me something to make it go away.”

Mr. Boyer was at a loss. His wife left her station behind the counter and came to the back of the store.

“Is it a blister, Miz Carroll?” Mrs. Boyer asked.

“It is not a blister,” Mamadee retorted. “It is a boil. I know it is a boil.”

“I caint see anything either,” Mrs. Boyer said gingerly, trying not to give offense.

“Do I care a hoot in hell if you can see it or not? It itches and I want to pick at it but you don’t pick at a boil. So all I need from you is something to put on it so I don’t pick at it and get it infected.”

“Give her something,” Mrs. Boyer muttered to Mr. Boyer.

Mr. Boyer hardly needed prompting. He mixed up a quantity of cold cream, cod liver oil, diaper-rash cream, and calamine, and filled a squat glass jar with it, typed out a label instructing Apply As Warranted, and handed it over to Mamadee. “I’m not supposed to give you this without a doctor’s prescription, so I could get in real trouble. It’s two seventy-five; I’ll just put it on your bill.”

By noon, all of Tallassee knew that Roberta Carroll Dakin had fled Ramparts. By four o’clock that afternoon, all of Tallassee knew of Deirdre Carroll’s peculiar behavior downtown and in Boyer’s Drugstore. Dr. Evarts therefore was not surprised when Mamadee called him up and told him to get over to her house right then.

“I have five people in my waiting room and all five of them have appointments,” he told her.

Dr. Evarts intended to judge by her response to this refusal just how dire she felt her case to be.

“If I have to come over there,” Mamadee replied, “those people in your waiting room won’t be alive long enough to get cured. Do you hear me?”

Dr. Evarts had heard about Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin’s departure with her odd little girl but without her son, and about Deirdre Carroll and the umbrellas. Dr. Evarts perceived gossip as an integral part of the life of the town, amusing and informing him, but on which he need not necessarily act. However, once he had arrived at Ramparts, Dr. Evarts realized that the tales he had heard had not been exaggerated. He found the front door open and when he called out for Tansy, there was no answer. The door was open, Dr. Evarts noted, and a sick woman lay within.

He found every door open, and opened umbrellas in every room.

Open umbrellas were propped in chairs, open umbrellas depended from the chandeliers, an open umbrella was planted in the deep pocket of a fox-fur coat in an open closet. An open umbrella filled the horn of the gramophone in Captain Senior’s library. A small, open, frilled child’s parasol—the kind of thing a six-year-old future beauty queen would brace on her shoulder at an Easter parade—was hooked over the ceiling molding on the staircase landing.

Upstairs, opened umbrellas like enormous black bats squatted on beds, snagged on curtain rods, or kept the rain out of commodes. Dr. Evarts paused to peek into Roberta Ann’s bedroom. It appeared Roberta Ann had rummaged her own room like a thief. He peered around; the photograph of Roberta Ann showing off her legs in her shorts was gone. That bothered him more than he would have expected. He had always enjoyed looking at that photograph. Joe Cane Dakin, while he lived, had enjoyed the favors of a very beautiful woman. On the other hand, Joe Cane Dakin’s fate was unenviable, to say the least.

Distracted already, he hardly glanced into the next open bedroom door and so passed it before what he saw registered. He took three steps backward and looked again.

The boy, Ford, sat on the edge of the bed. He wore a suit and tie. His hair was damp from a recent combing. A suitcase shared the counterpane with him. He looked bored. Dr. Evarts could not help reflecting what a handsome boy he was, blessed if blessing it was, with his mother’s beauty and grace, and with her and Deirdre’s willfulness, almost certainly no blessing.

“Took your time.” Ford came to his feet. “The old witch has gone batty.”

“Thank you for your diagnosis,” Dr. Evarts said.

“You’re welcome.” Ford came to the door. He nodded down the hall toward Deirdre’s room. “Well?”

Deirdre’s bedroom door was closed. The keyhole was jammed with the ferrule of an umbrella—a small red and yellow affair with a long stem, meant to be raised over the seat of a tractor.

“Deirdre!” Dr. Evarts called at the door.

He tried to pull the umbrella out of the lock, but the point broke off.

He knocked. “It’s Dr. Evarts! Are you in there, Deirdre?”

Ford leaned against the wall a yard away, his face impassive.

Though Dr. Evarts heard nothing, he had no doubt that Deirdre Carroll was on the other side of the door. He twisted the doorknob, pressed his shoulder against the panels, tried to twist the broken point out of the keyhole, all in vain. He looked round, stalked down the hall, and snagged the open umbrella that had been hooked over the stem of a gas sconce. It was large and unadorned, with an ebony handle, cold steel ribs, and black silk as thin as crepe. He positioned the steel ferrule against the floor, forcefully pressed his foot against the ribs of the umbrella, warping and then snapping them, straining and then ripping the dyed canvas, until nothing was left but the handle, the stem, a tiny halo of broken ribs, and the ferrule—all that he needed.

Squeezing the ferrule into the keyhole alongside the other, broken spike, Dr. Evarts twisted and pushed and pulled, lifted and jerked down and jerked out and shoved in, until he heard the sound of the entire mechanism of the lock breaking. The knob turned freely in his hand.

The ferrule that had been embedded in the keyhole fell out. It was red, as if it had been heated, and it smoked, singeing the hall carpet.

Ford applauded for a few slow sardonic claps.

Dr. Evarts glanced back at Ford. If Deirdre Carroll were indeed on the other side of the door, someone else must have jammed the umbrella in the keyhole, someone who meant to lock Deirdre in that bedroom.

“Where’s Tansy?”

Ford shrugged. “Run off.”

As Dr. Evarts had been quite sure, Deirdre Carroll was in the room. Even before he saw her, he heard her breath—soft, labored, stertorous. She lay motionless on her bed, her head turned slightly toward him in the doorway. When the doctor entered the room, Deirdre Carroll didn’t speak. Very possibly she couldn’t, owing to the boil beneath her chin.

It was nearly round, larger than a softball, and in color a dull black like the soot coating the walls of a fireplace where only the cheapest grade of coal ever burned. Whatever its origin, whatever purulence festered inside it, the black boil was larger and more obscenely bloated than the worst cancerous growth that Dr. Evarts had ever seen. Deirdre Carroll’s head tilted back. The glistening black boil was so engorged, it pressed on her lungs below and pressed her jaw shut. It was little wonder she breathed only with difficulty, it was no wonder at all she had not responded to his calls.

Deirdre’s eyes rolled in her head as she strained to see him. Avoiding eye contact, Dr. Evarts approached the bed. The surface of the boil was sooty black but it was definitely skin—the charred black skin of burn victims who had to sleep sitting up because it was less painful than lying down. Yet the boil glistened in places—shone with a lick of purple. Realizing his mouth had twisted in disgust, he tried a smile. The attempt failed.

“You should have called me sooner,” he said, reaching a finger to touch the black boil. She winced away. He was unable to avoid the panic in her eyes: Please don’t touch it! The same panic most people had of the needle, of the knife, of the cold steel forceps.

“It’s all right, Deirdre, you’re just going to feel a little pressure,” he said, lightly pressing his index finger against the boil’s black burned skin.

It exploded.