Candles Burning

Fifty-one

ROGER Huggins first began to help guests launch the little boats or tie them up, and then to go out with the tentative ones on calm days. There were dolphins to spot, and mullet leaping in the bay. Puddling about made a pleasant low-key outing for those who were nervous of deeper water. Roger grew adept at showing this guest or that one where to fish for mullet, or a secret beach on which to crab.

Miz Verlow made note of his increasing skills as a boat handler and guide, and by the time Roger was thirteen, she had acquired a larger sailboat and a larger, though still modest, motorboat, for him to operate. She didn’t pay him much but she did encourage the guests to tip him generously.

If sometimes rocket science is plumbing, plumbing is not rocket science. Grady had mastered the rudiments by the time he was twelve. In the brief periods in which his daddy, Heck, was sober, he managed to teach Grady a little more, and in a pinch, Grady took his questions to the shop teachers. Miz Verlow gave him her custom, provided he never brought his daddy with him. Grady soon knew the plumbing at Merrymeeting better than anyone else.

Being around Merrymeeting brought Grady into contact with Roger. Grady knew something about boats and longed to learn to sail. Soon enough, he was Roger’s mate oftener than I was. Often, if a guest was particularly inept in a boat, Grady or I could be a real help to Roger. For one thing, Grady and I spoke nearly comprehensible Southern white American, and while Roger might make an effort in that direction, he really preferred not to speak at all.

This is not to claim that the three of us were Huck and Tom and Jim, drifting on a raft with our poles in the water. What we had in common was working day in and day out and being close in age. We joked around some, argued about work and music, and bitched about our parents. I lie. Roger never bitched about his parents. He knew Mama, of course, but the both of us were shocked by the squalor and misery of Grady’s home life. Grady never complained of being poor; he just resented getting beaten up by Heck and his five uncles.

From the time Roger and I first carried a footlocker to the attic, we went there at least weekly. Occasionally, after hauling something to the attic, we had a few moments without another chore, and amused ourselves by rearranging luggage and furniture and bric-a-brac in order to make more room. Nearly weekly, we recovered luggage from the attic to deliver to a departing guest. Familiarity diminished the creepiness of the attic. It became just an enormous closet. Once in a rare while, something would catch my attention, or Roger’s, and we would muse upon whatever it was: a postcard found on the floorboards, a crow’s feather, the old aluminum Christmas tree, long since replaced with an annual real tree. None of it had any significance and none of it was scary. There never seemed to be any lack of curiosities; we were forever discovering things that we had not previously noticed.

Grady’s plumbing chores never took him to the attic but he heard about it from Roger and from me. It was the only part of Merrymeeting that Grady did not know as well as Roger and me. It began to seem unnatural that he had never been in it.

The summer before we were all to start high school, we settled on the day of the annual Five Flags Fiesta, when Cleonie and Perdita had the day off, and all the guests and Miz Verlow were at the Fiesta all day, for Grady’s first visit to the attic.

Once the house was quiet, we set off on our mission. So as not to get either of the boys in trouble if we were discovered, I carried the key that I had taken from Miz Verlow’s office. The attic, of course, was hideously hot. I wore only a halter and a pair of loose shorts. The boys were stripped down to their shorts. We had a jug of sweetened iced tea that I’d made and laced with pilfered bourbon. We had some cigarettes, lifted singly from one unattended pack or another, and saved up for the occasion. Grady had a lighter. I had a few candle stubs and paper cups for the tea. And Roger had a kitchen timer.

Instantly, muck sweat dampened our bodies and our clothing. We spread out an old canvas tarp and set up near a porthole to share a smoke and drink the syrupy spiked iced tea. Grady lighted three candle stubs. The old used candles seemed to us more sophisticated than the electric bulbs. We dripped melting wax onto the tarp until there was enough to fix the stubs upright.

Grady climbed up on a broken end table and peered all around, getting a sense of the space.

We had a plan. After the first cigarette and the first round of drinks, we were going to explore. We each took a candle stub and moved in a different direction. We set the timer for ten minutes, in which we had to find something to show off to the other two.

I lifted tarps and pulled out balky drawers and rummaged and heard Roger and Grady doing the same. Under one tarp I found what I thought at first was some kind of totem, an object as high as my waist, with seven pairs of frowning owlish eyes one over the other. My first reaction was to start away from its malevolent stares. Bringing the candle closer, I saw that it was a semanier, a narrow chest of shallow drawers. Inlaid dark wood made the brows of the owls, the handles the owlish eyes. I giggled at my childish credulity. Opening each drawer in turn, I was surprised to find each one contained several things. I took a single object. I didn’t think about it, just snatched it up, slammed the drawer shut and bounced away as if somebody might catch at it.

My find fit into my closed fist. I was back at our tarp well ahead of the ten minutes. A couple of minutes later, Roger sank onto his haunches next to me. He kept one hand behind his back, and made a motion with the other for a cigarette. I lighted one of our precious stock, took a puff, and passed it to him. Barely under the ten-minute mark, Grady emerged from the darkness, his hands also behind him.

Roger had a spoon. It was a silver spoon, and at the tip of the handle was the thick-lipped, kinky-haired caricatured face of a black boy. Engraved in the bowl was the legend: Souvenir of Pensacola.

Grady had a coconut monkey. I’d made it myself when I was seven or eight, from an immature coconut that washed up onto the beach.

“My old monkey,” I said. “Its name is Ford.”

The boys laughed.

“Ford?” Grady asked.

“My brother.”

“I didn’t know,” Grady said, and Roger rapped the spoon against the coconut.

“We know you don’t know,” said Roger.

“It’s okay,” I said. “I guess I never mentioned him.”

Grady was embarrassed at having hit what both he and Roger took for a tender nerve. The only surprise for me was that I felt more for the monkey as an artifact of my childhood than I did for my brother.

I opened my fist, with a triumphant excitement that made me giggle. In my palm a golden egg the size of a quarter glinted from its nest of coiled and braided silk loops.

The boys wowed.

Opening my fingers, I let the egg roll off the tips, spinning out the silk braid behind it. I expected it to depend smoothly from the braid but it hitched almost at once to a stop. At first I thought the braid tangled but then, with the egg in one hand and the braid in the other, I saw that there were two braids. The longer one, on which the egg hung, had a wee gold buckle and looked like a belt. The other was attached to it at three points, like a pair of suspenders. It was not, as I had first taken it, a child’s pendant.

“What?” Grady muttered.

I passed it to him.

He pushed it around in his palm. “Looks like a harness. Too big for a mouse, too small for a raccoon.”

He passed it to Roger.

“Maybe a rat,” Roger suggested. “The ‘string to swing it wit’—”

Roger and I sniggered. Grady scratched his head, reminding me of the days when he had nits. Grady never did get past moving his lips when he read.

Roger passed it back to me and they awarded me the first round, and I got to drink twice as much of the iced tea this round. While I drank it, I studied on the egg itself. It was not one piece. A ridged seam went down one side from top to bottom, and a smoother one on the other side. Like a locket, I realized, and pushed down experimentally on the bit at the top, the little gold ring where the braid went through. The egg opened like a book.

“Cowie,” exclaimed Grady.

Roger blew a breath out explosively.

They scuttled close to me and we looked at the opened egg together.

On one side, the interior of the egg framed a tiny picture. It was a head-and-shoulders portrait, one of those soft old-timey photographs, and indeed the young woman it depicted wore a hairstyle that I knew was called a Gibson. Her neckline was very low, though, making her neck swanlike under the heavy weight of luxuriant upswept hair.

We were nearly dumbstruck for a long moment.

“She’s the spit of your mama,” Grady said, “when your mama was younger.”

Roger nodded. “Like your mama dressed up with her hair done old-fashun.”

Except, I thought, Mama never smiled like that in her life.

I shifted my gaze to the other wing of the egg. Delicately engraved in swooping letters was the name CALLIOPE.

When I showed the boys, they reacted with even more surprise and wonder.

“ ’At’s your name!” Roger said. “All spelt out.”

Grady nodded dumbly and then said, “Well, is that her name? Calliope?”

“Dunno.” I knocked back the rest of my iced tea and pushed the egg on its silk rope into the pocket of my shorts.

The timer was set for fifteen minutes for the next round. We were supposed to go in different directions each time.

Grady came back with a blue Pepsi bottle. He told us that his uncle Coy had one and claimed it was made before the First World War.

I had a plate. It was a decorative souvenir, with a yellow Florida printed on it. The image of the state was edged with things like pelicans and leaping sports fish and tropical flowers.

In the pocket of somebody’s peacoat hanging on an old hat rack, Roger had found a handful of old tickets from the dog-track.

A draw, we concluded.

In the third round, I wandered several moments, with an increasing sense that time was running out. I spun around and plunged into the depths of the attic—and almost put one of my eyes out blundering into Roger’s hat rack, the one with the peacoat. I grabbed it by its bole to prevent it falling over and taking me with it. I wound up hugging it. After I caught my breath, I released it from my embrace and stepped back. The peacoat had fallen to the floorboards. Tied around one of the arms of the hat rack was a gauzy and glittery scarf. It seemed so familiar that I thought it must have been Mama’s.

I just made the end of the round, with the scarf turbaned around my head.

Roger had a blue-glass candleholder.

Grady had turned up a horsewhip.

The boys admired the scarf teasingly but we all agreed to award Grady the third round. His prize was three paper cups of iced tea to the one that Roger and I each tossed back. We smoked another cigarette before we began round four, for which we allotted seven minutes. Roger and I spun Grady around and pushed him off in one direction. Roger spun me around and pushed me off. He took another direction yet.

I barked my shins on one thing or another and had to brush the loose ends of the gauze scarf out of my eyes. The gauze was as sweat soaked as the rest of me. Even the palms of my hands were damp. I wiped them on my shorts, to no avail, as they were so sweaty that they were sticking to me. I looked around for any sort of absorbent material and spotted a rug covering a trunk. Placing my candle stub carefully on a nearby stack of suitcases, I knelt down next to it to dry my hands on the mangy wool fibers of the scrap of faded Persian rug. With my hands a little drier, I started to rise. A sharp pain exploded in my head. I went back to my knees and then to all fours, bracing myself against the pain that grew duller and more comprehensive. Then I dropped to my stomach, as if by getting lower, I could duck under the head pain. My eyes were tearing steadily but my face was so wet with perspiration it hardly made any difference. Droplets tracked down my face and dripped from my jaw and chin.

I closed my eyes. After a moment or two, the misery seemed to ease. I heard Roger and Grady, already back at the tarp, talking to each other.

I pulled my knees up under me again and pushed upward. A twinge in my head. The scarf around my head felt as if it had tightened. My fingers worked at the knot that held it but the fabric was wet, too slippery to move. Giving up on the knot, I managed to get back on my feet. I could only think to bumble my way back and admit defeat. As I blinked the blur of moisture from my eyes, I saw someone. Not Grady. Not Roger. Someone else. And then I recognized the flicker of shape in my eyes as a reflection, of myself. I saw the frame around it. Propped a few feet away, on top of a cluttered table, was something framed under glass. I snatched it up. It was a large frame but more bulky than heavy. The whole thing seemed to be about the size of the window on the landing, the one with the stained glass in it. The frame was incredibly dusty, and I grimaced at the filth but then I realized the dust was absorbing the moisture from my fingers and palms.

Embracing my find, I lurched breathlessly onto the tarp just as the timer buzzed.

Roger whistled at how close I had come to missing the deadline.

Holding the framed whatever-it-was against my front, I squatted down with them.

Grady produced a box of playing cards folded to look like cranes. Each had a bit of string piercing it that made it obvious that they were meant to be hung up.

Roger had an old black umbrella, like something that an undertaker would have to shelter mourners from rain.

Awkwardly because of its size, I turned my discovery around so that they could see it. I tried to see it myself at the same time but could not, so I propped it against the attic wall and wriggled around in front of it.

“Wow,” said Roger.

“Amen,” Grady said.

I rubbed at the dusty glass.

It was a framed poster.

Around the legend that took up the middle of the poster, various circus acts were depicted in gaudy colors.

A parade of elephants, a spangle-clad woman in the howdah on the first of the great beasts.

Drawn by white horses, a calliope on wheels, with a woman at the organ keys.

A man in a top hat and tails stood beaming in a spotlight.

A mustachioed man in jodhpurs with a whip, surrounded by complacent lions.

A very painted woman with big gold hoop earrings offered a crystal ball to the viewer.

An enormously fat woman sitting on a loading scale.

Clowns, all crammed together in and falling out of a pumpkin-shaped coach drawn by sheep.

Another man in tails, holding a top hat with a bunny peeking out of it.

An orange-haired woman in tights, full-bodied, in a costume like a corset, balanced barefoot on a high wire. Bringing my candle close to the poster, I peered at the high-wire walker. She bore a shocking resemblance to Fennie Verlow. I wondered if I really remembered Fennie Verlow’s features that well. The woman could not be Fennie Verlow, for the poster was far too old, the costuming and hairstyles suggesting the nineteen-aughts.

I rubbed more dust away and held my candle stub close and examined every human figure on the poster intently. The fortune-teller’s scarves were very like the one around my head. The name Tallulah popped into my mind, but no more useful information than its bald syllables. Did I know the fat woman on the loading scale? The very tall thin man stretching himself like rubber? Could it be Mr. Quigley? The ringmaster in the top hat and tails: Father Valentine? The woman running the calliope was the spit of the current Queen Elizabeth, I thought. No, it was Mrs. Mank she most resembled. I shook my head in amazement, realizing it was Mrs. Mank who looked like Queen Elizabeth—who always had.

The woman in the howdah, sitting cross-legged like a snake charmer, her legs in net stockings. Her face was a rough approximation, I saw with a jolt of my heart, of the woman depicted in the photograph inside the egg. She held a lighted candle in one hand, and on the other perched a scarlet macaw. Lightly sketched upon the bird was the suggestion of a harness. At once I understood the odd nature of the loops of silk in my pocket, the ones on which the egg hung. It was the harness, not of a rat, but of a bird as large as a macaw.

We three huddled close, peering at the poster.

“This is old,” Grady said. “Like a hundred years.”

“More ’an ’at,” said Roger.

“Calley wins all,” said Grady.

Roger nodded his head yes.

We sat back on our heels and had another round of iced tea. The ice in it was long melted and the bourbon taste somewhat diluted. Our thirst was greater and we drank eagerly, while we continued to study the poster.

“I’m filthy,” I said. “Miz Verlow sees me like this, she’ll wan know why.”

I had an idea that I was going to go downstairs and clean up. But when I started to get up, I had to sit back down again.

Roger said, “Uh-oh.”

“Tight?” asked Grady.

“Am not,” I insisted.

“Better stay sat down then,” Grady advised.

“I’m gone melt,” I said. I leaned forward to blow out my candle.

The boys weren’t expecting the sudden darkness around me. They jumped and then snickered to hide their momentary alarm.

I drank the last of the tea. Queasy, dizzy—I closed my eyes.

Grady and Roger got their hands under my elbows and guided me toward the stairs.

They told me where to put my feet. “Down. Now the other.”

“Here’s the bathroom,” said Grady. “Maybe you better stop here and pour some water over your head.”

They walked me in and I sank to my knees. Grady pushed my head over the side of the bathtub. Roger turned on the shower tap. Water spurted over my head and down my back. The ends of the gauze scarf dripped down my face and into the bathtub.

The water stopped, one of the boys wrapped a towel over my head, and they sat me down next to the toilet.

“What are we gone do with her?” Grady asked Roger.

“Caint leave her,” said Roger.

Between the two of them they half carried me out of the house and out onto the beach and walked me into the Gulf up to my waist. They held me up like bookends. The light outside was a blinding glare. My eyes were running water and everything was blurry.

“One, two, three,” the boys counted and they pushed me down under the water. I heard Grady say, “I baptize thee in the name of the Lord.” Roger laughed. They hauled me up like a dead fish. I leaned over their arms and vomited into the sea.

“There,” said Grady, “reckon you feel better.”

They let me down among the tall grasses. Roger squatted next to me, holding one hand, cooing at me.

Grady came back in a few moments with a jug of water, some aspirin and towels.

I was shivering. They wrapped me up and administered the aspirin and water. Grady made a chair of himself for me, holding me between his legs, letting my head rest on his shoulder.

I closed my eyes.

I listened to the Gulf. The nearly ever-present wind. A pulse, a breathing. The more intently I listened, the more I heard “You Are My Sunshine,” from the multiple brass throats of a calliope.