Candles Burning (17 page)

I wore my grey dress and my black Mary Janes, which were good enough for Daddy's funeral, and was told by Mamadee to be grateful to have a straw boater and gloves I had only worn once. I fidgeted through Sunday School before the service, and then, during Easter service, I fought the scent of lilies so thick that it was smothering. I actually fell asleep for a few seconds at a time, only to jerk awake again. A strange thought intruded: If I were Jesus, I wasn't having any success moving the rock aside.

On our return from church, having taken off my boater and gloves, I went directly to the table that was now set for dinner to admire my basket of eggs. Mamadee followed me but she did that all the time and I thought nothing of it. I assumed that she wanted to make sure that I didn't break any of her crystal.

“Exquisite,” I murmured to myself.

From behind me, Mamadee said, “Pride goeth before a fall.”

Then she jabbed me in one shoulder blade with the hatpin she had drawn from her hat.

In shock, I shrieked, “Jesus God!”

Mamadee slapped the back of my head.

“The Lord's name! On Easter!”

“You stuck me with that hatpin!” I shouted.

“I did not!”

I could have spat. I lifted my chin and declared, “I hate you.”

Mama heard it all. Saw it all. She was right there in the doorway of the dining room, with her hat in her hand.

“Go to your room, Calley,” Mama said.

As I passed her, she slapped the back of my head. Maybe she thought Mamadee hadn't done it hard enough.

“She's a monstrous little heathen,” Mamadee said. “How you can doubt for two seconds that Calley is writing those terrible notes to you, I don't know.”

“I am not,” I shouted from the stairway. “I never did! You lie!”

I took the rest of the stairs two at a time. I was confident of enough of a head start that Mamadee would not be able to catch up with me. I slammed the door of Junior's radio room behind me hard enough to crack the glass in the window. The whole house echoed with that slam. It echoed longer for the silence that followed it.

Opening the door again, I stomped back to the landing and shouted into the now churchy stillness: “I'm gone wet the bed now! Somebody call for my color television set!”

My provocation produced no response.

Back in Junior's radio room again, I poked out the glass from the windowpane and climbed out onto the roof. There I sat cross-legged and made plans. I would run away. Find one of my Dakin uncles. One of them would take me in—Billy Cane and Aunt Jude for sure. If Mama did not want me, she should have left me with them anyway. The thought of Ida Mae Oakes came to me, but, of course, even if I had known where to find her, I could not go to her. Should I take three steps into the colored part of town, some grown-up would take me by the hand and walk me right back out, and find some white grown-up who would return me to Mama. Ramparts might as well be on the backside-of-the-moon from there.

A crow was eyeing me from the nearest live oak but one. I made eye contact with it. It shouted a great ugly
cawwwww!
I shouted it back. The crow took off as if the devil were after it. A few minutes later, it settled on the same branch. It went side-to-side, claw-to-claw, deciding where on the branch to clutch. It kept its cold eyes fixed on me the whole time. By way of experiment, I moved suddenly. The bird jumped. But when I froze again, it stayed.

Crows have a great deal to say to one another, and some of it is fairly obvious, just as it is with people. Certain sure that one crow will let all the others in the neighborhood know when a dog or cat makes an appearance.

After a few moments to reassure the crow that I meant it no harm, I did some cawing.

The bird listened carefully. Then it flew away and I saw it drop a white bomb smack on the windshield of Mamadee's Cadillac.

When I crawled back inside, I stripped the case off the pillow, to stow a clean pair of underpants, socks, Daddy's undershirt, and Betsy Cane McCall and my paper dolls. I shucked my dress and threw it on the floor. Kicked my Mary Janes into a corner. I considered cutting the silk string from around my neck and flushing it down a toilet or throwing it out the window, keys after it. My shoulder blade hurt. I checked the inside of my dress and found a blood spot inside it from the pinprick.

I carried the dress out to the front stair landing and threw it down into the foyer.

“Liar!” I shrieked.

Again, nobody responded. It was as if I were alone in the house.

I went back to my room and flung myself face down on the bed. The close air thickened with the scent of lilies.

A beam of sunshine fell upon my face like a gentle warm hand. I floated, weightless and elegant, upon a current. One toe held me to the earth, my only mooring a slender ribbon of green. I was all ear, white and fleshy ear, and the current that rocked me whispered a ceaseless song in a familiar voice.

The sounds of the silver and china in use downstairs in the dining room woke me, along with pangs of hunger. The odor of the clove-studded ham wafted up the stairwells. Mamadee and Mama were the only diners. The only conversation at the table consisted of polite murmurs of please-pass-the-something and thank-you and you're-welcome.

Nobody came up to bring me anything to eat or to tell me I could come downstairs.

I played all the swing and bebop records from the crate in the closet as loudly as I could crank the volume on the record player. All at once the turntable began to slow and the needle screeched in the groove. The turntable stopped. I unplugged the record player and plugged a lamp into the socket to see if the socket was live. It was not. I checked the other sockets in the room and all were just as dead. Someone had shut off the power to the room.

They must have forgotten that I did not need a record player. I sang all the songs that I could remember at the top of my lungs.

I peed in the pot and threw it out the window, twice.

The records were strewed all over the floor. When I collected them up to re-sleeve them in their cardboard jackets and line up in their crate, I saw something glint under the bed. Flat on my stomach, I squiggled under far enough to retrieve it.

I flung myself onto the bed and studied on the thing from under the bed. It was made of braided silk threads, like a fancy tie-back on a drapery, but very fine and light. It was not a tie-back, though. One loop of the braid sported a tiny gold buckle. Another separate Y-shaped loop went around the first in three places. It looked a little like a pair of suspenders on a belt, only for someone very small.

The Y loop fit over Betsy Cane McCall's head with ease, to hang upon her very small shoulders, but the belt part of it was far too big for her. I was able to wind the little belt part around her a couple of times. Then I pulled one of her little sweaters over it and it was safely hidden away. Somewhere, I concluded, was a doll it fitted. Something to look for in the vastness of Ramparts.

By twilight of the long spring day, I was very hungry indeed. Sprawled on the bed in the gathering dark, I heard the sounds of Mama and Mamadee and Ford having their suppers from trays in their rooms. At first it made me furious again, until I realized that it might be a good time to sneak downstairs to the kitchen.

So I did. Never having bothered to dress again, I was barefoot in my underpants. I padded into the empty kitchen. The aluminum-foil-shrouded Easter ham was the first thing that I saw when I opened the refrigerator door. Beneath the foil, it was carved into perfect slices. The smell of it spurred my already intense hunger. I snatched a slice and bit into it, even as I was suddenly overwhelmed with the sensation that it was meat, dead meat, between my teeth. Cold dead meat, cold as clay. The thick desiccating salt, the cloying sugar-syrup taste, with a bit of tough tooth-resistant skin on it, billowed in my mouth. My stomach revolted. I like to swoon and puke and choke all at the same time. I spat out the bite into my free hand and thrust both pieces of meat back under the foil. My mouth felt gritty, as if I had been eating dirt.

The remnants of the lemon meringue pie rested on a lower shelf of the icebox. Scooping up a handful of meringue and lemon filling, I filled my mouth. The sharpness of the lemon, the cleaner bland sweetness of the meringue, overcame the ham tastes, and its cool sliminess slid past the constriction in my throat easily. The remains of the pie disappeared, as I ate with my fingers until I was full. I followed the pie with sweet tea from the pitcher. It was not a neat meal. Gobbets and orts of piecrust, lemon filling and meringue ringed the floor where I stood in front of the open icebox. I burped loudly. Some of the pie was crusted around my mouth. I ran my tongue out as far as it would go and around my mouth by way of cleaning my face.

Then I wandered into the dining room to look at my eggs in their basket. It was all the Easter basket I was getting. The year before, the Easter Bunny had left a huge basketful of candy with a stuffed bunny in it. Ford had called me stupid and told me the secret; that's how I found out that Daddy was the Easter Bunny. Remembering it made me feel aggrieved all over again—at Ford for telling, at Mama for failing to provide a basket this year, for Daddy, and not just because he was no longer able to be my Easter Bunny.

Tansy had cleared the table, so my homemade basket was all there was on it again. When I was close enough, I saw that every egg in the basket was smashed flat. For a fraction of a second, I could hardly breathe. Then I saw that under the mound of fragments, there was another egg, a whole one, the only whole one left. Brushing away the bits and pieces of shell, I picked out that one whole egg and held it in one palm. It was blown out and dyed, but not by me. I knew my own. It was pink as an azalea blossom, and patterned in a contrasting web of green.

Mama left her room upstairs. I turned toward the dining room door and waited.

She paused in the doorway to ask, “Calley, what are you doing?”

I held out the egg in my palm. “Somebody smashed my eggs. I found this one. It's not mine.”

Mama came closer to take it from me. She barely glanced at it. “Looks like the other ones to me.”

“Well it isn't.”

Mama made a face at the basket of smashed eggshells. “After all the time Tansy spent helping you with those eggs, you smashed them all to bits.”

“I did not!”

Her fingers closed around the one whole egg and crushed it. For an instant, she blinked rapidly and then opened her palm and looked down. In the tangle of fragments was a small roll of paper. She dumped the mess on the table and picked out the note. Unrolling it, she gave it a hasty look, as if looking at it too long might blind her. Green ink, pink paper. Then she handed it to me.

“You're so hungry,” she said. “Eat it.”

I shoved it into my mouth, chewed frantically and then spat the cud of paper at her. And turned and ran again. She didn't bother to come after me.

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.”