Candles Burning (14 page)

I rearranged my glasses on my face and Betsy Cane McCall on the pillow.

In the early afternoon I went to see Mama.

“Go away,” Mama said to my knock. Her eyes were full of dark worry. She looked melted with unhappiness.

I went to Mama and hugged her.

“Do you have giant plugs of wax in your
ears,
Calley Dakin? Did I say
go away
?”

She touched the keys hanging on my neck and checked the knot on the silk string. The string had come from one of her shoe bags.

“Calley, I have read those papers until I am half blind. Joe Cane Dakin is damned to hellfire for what he has done to me. That string around your neck with the keys on it is all we have got in this world for sure, so you better not lose it.”

I might have asked about the ransom money but just then I heard the Edsel. She would have lied about it anyway. I raced out to meet Uncle Billy Cane Dakin.

“PLEASE, please, please, Mama,” I begged.

I could tell that she was not listening. She was freshening her lipstick, and all her attention was on her lips in the mirror.

She and Ford were going to take the Edsel to our house in Montgomery to pack up those personal things that Mr. Weems had informed her that she could have. With Mama and Mr. Weems not on speaking terms, Mamadee was going also, in her Cadillac, to oversee Mama and make sure that she did not take anything not on Mr. Weems's list. We were allowed to have our own clothes and something called personal effects, which I construed to mean my paper dolls already cut out of their books. I reckoned that our clothes were the wrong sizes for anybody at the bank in Georgia that had foreclosed.

Mamadee insisted that Mama's jewelry was part of the estate. All the pieces that had been in the safe-deposit box in Montgomery had been seized when it was opened under Mama's power of attorney by Mr. Weems. But the jewelry Mama had taken to New Orleans was either on Mama or in Mama's pocketbook, and it was going to take Mamadee and Winston Weems and a whole army to get it away from her.

She barely glanced at me. “Calley, if you do not stop nagging at me, I'm gone slap you.”

“It is a
silver
dollar.”

She looked right at me as she capped her lipstick. “ ‘It's a
silver
dollar,' ” she mocked me. “Would you kindly strive to remember that I have a few other
concerns
on my mind?”

I was certain then that she would try to get to it before Ford did. The trick for me would be to steal it back. I did not want to go with her to get it myself. A shivery scared feeling choked me like a peach pit. If the house were empty of Daddy, it would prove that he was gone forever. And if Daddy
were
there, would he still be Daddy? He might be a haunt, or worse, if there was such a thing.

While they were gone, I climbed the oak to watch Leonard and Daddy Cook install the new French doors, replacing the ones that Mama had broken. They knew I was up here, so I did not have to try to be invisible. They did not mind if I sang a little, so I did, and sometimes they would sing with me, and then laugh, like it made them happy.

Tansy was in a good mood too; she brought out coffee and sandwiches and lemon cake for us all. Leonard brought her a lawn chair and she sat herself down and picnicked with us. Actually, I sat in the tree and she put my sandwich and a milk bottle of iced tea in a basket and I dropped a rope and hauled it up. It was more fun that way, and, for once, Tansy didn't seem to mind me having fun.

After we were all replete and patted our stomachs and observed that if we ate one more crumb, our bellies would burst, I climbed down and helped her take the dishes back to the kitchen.

Tansy tipped up her chin a little to signify upstairs, and told me that she was not being paid to mind children and to get out from under her feet before I broke something.

All that lunch made me sleepy. I went upstairs and flung myself on the iron cot. I did not wake until, from the depths of dreaming, I heard the Edsel and the Cadillac return. The afternoon had worn on, the light in the narrow room under the eaves begun to dim. I wiped the wet corners of my mouth on the pillowcase. Though the room was cool, I was sweaty. I had been having a daytime nightmare. Daddy's arms around me would not let go. Daddy's head tumbled from his shoulders. Judy DeLucca in her maid's uniform and a huge fat woman whom I did not know picked it up and tried to tape it back on with a huge strip of Scotch tape. I wanted to cry out for Ida Mae but my throat was cut and taped too, my voice stuck like lint on the sticky side.

Suddenly everyone except me was going in and out of the house, up and down stairs, in and out of bedrooms. Leonard and Tansy and Mamadee and Mama and Ford trucked in boxes and suitcases. It was boring to hear. I waited for Leonard to bring me up a suitcase or a box of my clothes, maybe even some toys. What could a bank want with my doll-house? But he did not, because they had not brought any of my clothes or things from the house in Montgomery. What I had was what I would have.

Not until I could look them in the eyes, or hear the lies, either in their voices or in their silences, would I know whether Mama or Ford had gotten to my silver dollar first. I was relieved. I would outgrow the clothes anyway and the toys too. If Mama and Ford had brought me nothing from our house that was no longer our home, they had left behind whatever might have clung to those things as well. The very dust of our old house might bear some dreadful unknown bad luck or curse or haunt. That house was a closet of memories that I needed to lock away until I was old enough to examine them safely.

ON one side of the church sat the governor and his wife, the mayors of Montgomery, Birmingham, and Mobile, a delegation from the Ford Motor Company in Detroit, most of the successful businessmen of Alabama, most of the grandees and pooh-bahs of Montgomery and Tallassee and points in between and thereabout, Dr. and Mrs. Evarts, the two FBI agents from Birmingham, and Mamadee, Ford, Mama and me.

The most interesting to me of the group of dignitaries was the director from the Ford Motor Company. His hair looked painted on. When the light struck his rimless glasses just right, he seemed to be as empty-eyed as Little Orphan Annie. He had no discernible lips either, and his teeth looked older than he did. He looked like he might be cold to the touch, like a croaker. I thought he must be Mr. Henry Ford, the younger one, but I found out next day from the newspaper that his name was Mr. Robert S. McNamara. The
S
stood for Strange, which in itself was impossible to forget.

On the other side were about four hundred Dakins, or so Mama said, but Ford told me later that small-business people and a passel of country folk actually filled most of those pews.

“About a hundred of them were Dakins,” Ford said. “Hundred and one, counting you, and a hundred and one and maybe half, counting you and what's left of Daddy.”

He didn't count himself. It was fine by me if Ford didn't want to be counted a Dakin.

Mama had always emphasized the unregenerate wickedness of the Dakins—by which she meant that they did not have any money. So instead of paying attention to the minister or to the woman at the organ whose amazingly orange hair was marcelled like Mamadee's, or thinking about Daddy lying dead and chopped up in the coffin, I stared across the aisle at my uncles and their families, and all the kin that I barely knew. My Uncles Dakin—Jimmy Cane, Lonny Cane, Dickie Cane, Billy Cane—uncomfortable in their cheap and rarely worn suits, sat solemn as a row of old men in rocking chairs on the verandahs downtown on a Saturday night. Like the surface of the moon, their complexions were deeply scarred and thickened. Their wives, the Aunts Dakin—Jude, Doris, Gerry, Adelina—were uniformly slack at the bosom, as though mother's milk and comfort had been sucked right out of them. Though not all were bone-thin, the fat they carried looked dense and hard. The flowers in their hats were faded, their dresses to a woman, the plastic-belted, collared rayon shirt-waist in every size and any color, so long as it was dark, that hung on the racks at Sears. My cousins, the Sons Dakin, were numerous and fidgety. They did not take well to the hard oaken pews and the hand-me-down jackets that pinched in the shoulders or were too short in the sleeve. There were too many of them for me to remember all their names or to whom they belonged. They did a good deal of sniggering and staring at Ford and me. There were no Daughters Dakin.

At least on that side of the church. On our side of the church, there was me. I had new white gloves and a new hat, a white straw boater with a black ribbon band and streamers, which Mama had had to go out and buy when she realized that I didn't have a thing to put on my head or hands for the funeral. As usual she bought the hat too big, so it would fit down over my twinned ponytails and ears. Wisps of straw tickled my ears unmercifully. When I tried to look around more, Mamadee dug her fingernails into the nape of my neck.

Mama had, of course, expected the worst of the Dakins but none of them wept audibly, though their bandanna hankies got used to mop up the occasional tear and they blew their noses loudly. At least there were no outbreaks of “Praise Jesus.” When they looked at Mama at all, it was sidelong.

Outside the church, before we got into the cars for the graveyard, my uncles held their hats in their hands and yanked at the hard, tight knots of their ties.

Aunt Jude hugged me and cried, “You poor baby! I know you are desolate.”

The other aunts murmured their agreement and patted my head.

Mama hastened to say, “This little girl is not a particle as desolate as I am. Not a particle.”

But the aunts did not touch Mama and they did not speak to her directly. Mama mistook this as a signal of respect for her person and her station. The Dakins did not bother with Ford either, or Mamadee, and Mamadee and Ford did not bother with the Dakins.

On the off chance that they were voters, the governor came over and shook the hands of the Uncles Dakin. He paid no attention to the Aunts Dakin. Likely as not, they voted the way their husbands did, or not at all.

We got into the Edsel that had been washed clean of road dust first thing in the morning by Leonard. Mama had driven us to St. John's in Montgomery in it. Mama was not about to ride in Mamadee's Cadillac. She and Mamadee were only speaking to say pass-the-salt-please and thank-you and whatever cuttingly courteous spitefulness they could invent.

The drive to the graveyard was so long that I dozed off. When the Edsel came to a stop and I woke up, we were out in the country. Mama crammed my hat back onto my head and I straightened my glasses on my face. I had been expecting one of the cool shady green cemeteries in Montgomery or Tallassee. Mamadee had said that Daddy's burial would be a circus unless it was out in the backside-of-the-moon. Evidently she had won over Mama on that count.

But there was no grass, just prickly weeds in patches. The weeds were rooted in coarse sand, amid pebbles with edges so sharp I could feel them biting the soles of my Mary Janes. Crumbling concrete marked out the sunken rectangles of the graves and all the tombstones tilted forward as if they wanted a better look at the man or woman or child or stillborn infant they commemorated. On nearly every grave a cracked clay pot or old milk bottle held dried-up old flowers. The few trees thereabout were all bent and scraggly and seemingly half dead. They looked like the paper trees we cut out in kindergarten for Halloween decorations, so the bats and ghosts would have some background beside the moon. On one raggedy pine perched a crow. Its beak prospected busily underneath one wing.

“Where are we?” I whispered dry-mouthed to Ford.

“Hell,” Ford said. Adding, “This is where they bury Dakins.”

He snatched off my glasses and smeared them with his thumbs, before flipping them back to me. While I was trying to get them back on my face, he pushed me toward Mama.

Blinking through the blur on my lenses, I caught up with Mama and grabbed at her gloved hand. “Where is this, Mama?”

“The Promised Land. Where your daddy bought himself a plot. That's what they call it. The Promised Land.”

I wasn't old enough to wonder why Daddy had bought this plot, or when, or why just one plot instead of a family one. It was more significant to me that when I looked around, Mamadee's Cadillac was nowhere to be seen, nor was she, nor any of the other grandees or notables or pooh-bahs.

The two FBI agents had come though; I saw them getting out of their black Buick sedan, and taking off their fedoras. One of them had a bald spot. I had known they were FBI agents as soon as I had seen them drive up to Ramparts on Monday. They looked like the other ones, the ones in New Orleans. Mr. J. Edgar Hoover must have figured if they all looked the same, nobody would notice them. Maybe
men
wouldn't notice them. Any half-wit woman would notice right off, two men looking like they dressed out of the same closet.

The pair of agents had spent most of Monday afternoon with Mama. They had been very interested in the papers that Mr. Weems had turned over to her. She had to develop a sick headache to get them to leave.

Ford and Mama and I were on one side and the tribe of Dakins were on the other, just like at the church, except that now it wasn't the church aisle between us, it was Daddy's coffin, being lowered into Daddy's grave.

That graveyard is still my image of the life—of the death—that comes after dying. Blurred. Recognizable but barren of any comfort whatever.

The woman with the marcelled orange hair who had played the organ during the funeral service came around with limp sheets of mimeographed paper that smelled of pears. The green plastic frames of her cat's-eye-shaped glasses were studded with glittering rhinestones. She was wearing Tangee lipstick, I could tell.