Candles Burning (18 page)

“People are saying nothing of the kind,” said Mamadee. “I suppose you have sold that fabrication to those silly FBI agents.”

“It makes more sense than the other.”

“What makes the most sense, darling, is the part about you getting out of town.”

Mama's rocker ceased to rock. “I caint believe my ears. No, I lie. I can believe my ears. You gave my sisters away as if they were old clothes. You never wanted any of us, except Robert.”

“Careful, careful, Roberta Ann. Stir the mud, raise a stink.” Mamadee took her usual tack: Any resistance to her plans evidenced wanton lack of virtue. “If you are too selfish to consider me, have a thought for Ford. Those two women are going on trial in a few days. The scandal will be revived to sell newspapers. You might be wise to find someplace where you can lie low. And not just until the sensation of the trial is over. For ten or twelve years. You and Calley. Ford is in far too fragile a state to be left to your care. In fact, I am quite sure that any reasonable judge would find that it is your fault that the boy is in such a terrible way and that you are an unfit mother.”

Mama caught her breath audibly.

Mamadee knew every judge in Alabama. Many of them owed their black robes to her contributions to their campaigns and her influence. Mamadee could make her threats come true.

Mama shook out a new cigarette and fired it up.

“My own mother.” Mama's first draw on her cigarette was shaky. “Have you ever loved me, Mama?”

Mamadee disdained any question. “I am ashamed to have to remind my own daughter that out of the goodness of my heart, I have paid a very expensive hotel bill in New Orleans, as well as the burial expenses of her bankrupt husband, and that she and her daughter have been eating at my table and sleeping under my roof for these past months, and charging to my accounts all over Tallassee. And more importantly, Roberta Ann, I have not forgotten that you have
a million dollars
in a footlocker that rightly belongs to the creditors of Joe Cane Dakin's estate. And you dare ask me for loans.”

Mama jumped up. With her left hand on the other forearm and her cigarette in her shaking right hand, she stalked away stiffly into the darkness under the live oaks.

In the solitary quiet that remained, Mamadee rocked complacently. She coughed lightly, and then chuckled.

My sisters, Mama said. Like old clothes. To whom had Mamadee given Mama's sisters? And why? Perhaps the answers could be found at Ramparts, in the back of a closet, the bottom of an old trunk, an attic, a cellar, a barn. Ramparts was suddenly interesting again.

I should have known that meant there was no chance in hell that I was going to get a chance to find out.

MAMA shook me before sunup with her finger to her lips to shush me. I was already awake, just keeping my eyes closed. She had been up awhile, putting on her face, fixing her hair, and dressing. She wore a tailored suit and a smart hat. Without a word, she pulled her suitcases out from under the bed.

I dressed hastily and helped her pack. Once I glanced in her vanity mirror and saw her slipping in a jewelry case behind my back. It wasn't one of hers.

A sheet of paper on the dresser caught my eye. It read:
Deirdre Carroll is hereby authorized to act in loco parentis for me, Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, in relation to my minor son, Ford Carroll Dakin, until his majority
. It was typed, except for Mama's signature at the bottom, so I knew it was something Old Weems had conjured up.

Then we opened the cedar chest, lifted out the footlocker, and crept down the stairs with it. The thing was horribly heavy. I had no idea that money could weigh that much. Moving Mamadee's petticoat table could hardly be more difficult.

Mama tore up her nails and stockings. Somehow she managed not to say any bad words.

By the time we stowed it in the trunk of the Edsel, I was staggering. Mama saw I needed a break. I sat down on the curb for a few minutes and examined the scrapes and bruises and nicks and cuts on my legs and feet. My overalls had given me some degree of protection but because I had been barefoot, my feet had suffered most. They were bleeding from multiple cuts and not only bruised all over, but several of the nails were bruised black.

Mama brought another one of her big suitcases down. Then I went upstairs again with her. We made several more trips down with the rest. The Edsel settled on its springs with the weight of it all. We did it all with hardly a word between us.

In a low voice, she told me to go get my suitcase and be quick about it.

I was up the stairs and down again in all of four minutes. The books in the suitcase shifted heavily with every step, so that I staggered against the uneven and unreliable burdens of it and my record player. Mama was just coming out of the downstairs powder room. She was barelegged.

She stopped me with a look.

Setting down my suitcase and then my record player nearly tipped me over. I dashed into the powder room. Mama's torn stockings were in the wastebasket.

Mama darted in and out of the house with light steps. When I came out, my suitcase and record player were sitting where I had left them. Anxious that Mama might leave without me, I stumbled out with them. The suitcase banged against my legs, seconding the black-and-blue I was already sporting on them.

She was standing by the open trunk, a pair of Mamadee's silver candlesticks wrapped in linen napkins in her hands. She tucked them neatly between the suitcases. Other napkin-wrapped objects were visible that had not been there previously.

My tennies were in the pockets of my overalls, along with Betsy Cane McCall. I wore Daddy's shirt under my overalls. The toothbrush and comb I had taken to New Orleans with me were still in Mama's bathroom. My coat still hung in Junior's closet. I would have liked to have all those things and the crate of records too. That Mama would leave me if I tried to go back for any of them, I was sick-to-my-stomach certain.

There was no room for my things in the trunk. Mama even had luggage filling the backseat. I tried to fit my record player in.

Mama hissed. She reached past me, yanked out the record player and dropped it on the driveway. The impact popped open the lid, spilling the records inside onto the gravel. Mama snatched up my suitcase, gasped at its unexpected and unbalanced weight and dumped it onto the floor of the shotgun seat. She picked me up bodily, slung me into the Edsel and slammed the door.

Frantic to recover my record player, I scrabbled at the handle. Mama dove into the driver's seat to reach over me and lock me in. Then she slapped me hard, making full contact with my left ear. My head rang with the pain.

As Mama turned the key in the ignition, Mamadee appeared on the verandah. Mamadee was still in her nightgown, silk kimono, and kidskin mules, with her silvery hair up in pink rollers. Greasy white cream covered her face. The flush from the powder room or the slam of the car door must have wakened her, or else some instinct that Mama was stealing her blind. Clutching her kimono over her bosom with one hand, Mamadee hurried to the driver's side of the Edsel to rap sharply at the window.

Mama yanked out the cigarette lighter, jammed her cigarette onto its red ring, and put the gears in reverse. Then she rolled her window slowly down. Her cigarette smoke rushed out into Mamadee's face.

Mamadee coughed as she tried to speak. “I caint believe you are leaving without saying a word! Not a word about where! Those FBI men are gone want an address and the papers for Ford's custody have to be—”

Mamadee never got another word in.

Mama glanced quickly over her shoulder and punched the accelerator. Mamadee almost fell down. I was thrown forward into the dash, bumped my face, and bounced back into the edge of the seat. My record player crunched like the glorified cardboard box that it was under the Edsel's wheels. Mama wheeled the car into a turn that took it off the gravel, over the grass, and then back onto the driveway. My scramble to gain some purchase left me hugging the back of the seat. The tires of the Edsel spewed gravel against the parlor windows as Mama floored it in drive.

Behind us, Mamadee ducked, holding up her hands against the pebbles and dust that peppered her. In the filtered light of the sun on the horizon, she was whitened from head to toe like a ghost. I never saw her again, in life, but we heard from her, Mama and me, and by then she was a ghost for real.

ROBBED of breath to speak, let alone to cry out in protest, I wanted to snatch the wheel and send the Edsel smack into the nearest tree. An equally violent fear possessed me that she would dump me out on the side of the road and drive away. Or, as now seemed entirely possible, she might back over me deliberately as she had my record player.

My ear still stung and ached. Huddled in the seat, I wanted my daddy back with a greater desperation than ever before.

On a red dirt country road out of Tallassee, Mama put on her sunglasses against the sun rising into a clean blue sky. If the maps in Captain Senior's library were still correct, east would take us to Georgia. Pensacola was nearly due south. Mama must not know where we were going. Why else would we be driving east?

The road passed through already dusty fields and stands of scrub oak and by abandoned houses overrun with kudzu. Mama lowered the windows, so the smell of the unwashed, uncombed countryside swept through the Edsel. Dogs chained to trees slept in farmyards, where raggedy chickens pecked the dirt apathetically. Mosquitoes were already swarming blindly out of the sharp gullies on either side of the road. My daddy once told me that water moccasins nursed their young in those gullies.

The familiarity of sitting in the shotgun seat as I had when I had traveled with Daddy comforted me. That was what he called it: the shotgun seat. Every passing mile took us farther from Mamadee. My record player was as busted as Humpty Dumpty. I would not give Mama the satisfaction of grieving openly for it. My fists uncurled, my jaw relaxed, as the Edsel rolled onward. Mamadee was behind us. A blessing worth the loss of my record player.

We arrived at a crossroads where there was no sign or marker, and no view of house, store, man or cur. Not so much as a red cloud of dirt to show a vehicle had passed there recently. Not a blackbird in the sky, not a grackle, not a starling, nor rusty blackbird, nor crow of any kind, fish or common—and in Alabama, there are always blackbirds in the sky.

Mama stopped the Edsel in the middle of the intersection. She turned off the ignition.

“What am I going to do? My place in the world, my darling son, my husband, have all been taken from me.”

Her voice shook. She actually did feel victimized. Her conviction of it was enough to make me believe that somehow she had been.

“You still have me,” I reminded her.

The cynical look she gave me was about what I expected for my sycophancy.

“I promised your daddy,” she said impatiently, and looked one way and then the other. “We could turn right, or we could turn left. Or we could go straight ahead and see where this red dirt road takes us.”

I wanted to know what she promised my daddy. I looked every which way, as she had, and then upward. Still no blackbird in the sky, nor anything else.

“Let's go ri—” I began, then instantly amended. “No, I mean, let's go left, Mama. I want to go left.”

Suddenly a flock of blackbirds came wheeling overhead.

“Count the crows,” Mama said.

“One for sorrow,” I chanted, “two for go, three go left, four turn right, five stop now and stay the night—”

“Oh shut up,” exclaimed Mama. “I didn't mean literally. Calliope Carroll Dakin, I swear you are retarded. You've got it all wrong anyway. You're always getting things wrong. I thought I was going to die of embarrassment when you sang the wrong words at that god-awful cemetery.”

Mama looked to the left. She sighed as if she saw the Emerald Towers of Oz there. Then she looked at me, smiled crookedly, and shook her head, as if to advise me that the Emerald Towers of Oz were a mirage and a betrayal. She gave a quick glance to the right and rejected that way too.

“I want to try straight ahead.”

I pretended to think about it for a bit. “We caint go left?”

“Not today.” Mama turned on the ignition.

The Edsel leapt forward, raising red dust on both sides of the car.

I opened the glove compartment and took out the road maps. Mama immediately held out her right hand. In my road trips with Daddy, I had studied his maps all I wanted. Mama snapped her fingers impatiently. I gave up the maps. She transferred them to her left hand and tossed them out the window one by one. I turned around in my seat to watch them flying away behind us, map-birds in the wake of the Edsel, flapping paper wings all barred with roads.

The glove compartment still held a manual and a pencil stub. I took them out and wrote on the back of the manual the road signs as we passed them:

 
It would be years before I would see them again, except in an atlas of the states.

Outside of Banks, Mama pulled over to the side of the road. We made water in a little pinewood. On such empty roads, our modesty was at little risk. We had tissues for blotting but I thought it wiser not to remark upon the absence of a place to wash our hands.

Then Mama sat behind the wheel and stared down the road toward Banks. She touched up her lipstick in the mirror. She yanked out the ashtray and emptied it out the window onto the side of the road. She lit a new cigarette. When she started the Edsel again, she made a U-turn away from Banks. We passed through Troy and into Elba.