Candles Burning (27 page)

I am looking at a chair, Roberta Ann, that chair right behind you
—
my mama did the bargello on that chair. So where on earth did you get it? Because I know that chair burned up. It burned up in 1942. Are you in Mama's house again, Roberta Ann?

“No!” Mama cried, “It's 1958 and this is Pensacola Beach!”

It's Banks,
said Mamadee's voice,
and this is a house that burned down, due to your carelessness with candles, before Calley was born. So if you are here, then you are dead
—
both of you
—
and I'm glad. . . .

“She doesn't mean that,” Mama whispered hotly in my ear. “She doesn't wish we were dead.”

“Why are you glad we're dead?” I asked Mamadee.

Because then, Calley, you wicked wicked little witch
—Mamadee laughed, the same laugh she used to laugh when she read in the morning paper that someone she did not like had died before she had—
because then, Calley, I will not have to warn you about what's going to happen to you. So now maybe they will let me go back. So maybe
—

I guess “they” did let Mamadee go “back,” because she left right then in the middle of her thought, and we never heard her voice again.

MAMA'S mind fastened not on what had happened but on what it might mean to her. If it had truly been Mamadee's ghost who had spoken, then Mamadee was dead. The idea of Mamadee dead and gone threw Mama into unbearable panic; it meant that the rope she had been hauling on all her life was all at once loose at the other end. The reality of Mamadee's death could hardly be countenanced; it stuck in her craw like a mouse in a snake's belly. Before she could digest it, she had to figure out why she had been informed of the fact—if it were a fact—by such extraordinary means.

If that were not enough, Mamadee's cryptic remark,
I won't have to warn you about what's going to happen to you,
was guaranteed to unsettle us. Mama had to find an interpretation of that sibylline pronouncement that was not a portent of evil.

I was willing to say it had been Mamadee's voice, simply because, if it were, Mamadee might very well be dead. I certainly hoped so, with all my heathen heart, and was only disappointed that she had not complained of the singe and stink of hellfire. I could think of no reason that Mamadee should tell the truth just because she happened to be deceased. To this day I have found no reason to believe that the human soul, duplicitous to its core, suddenly becomes truthful just because it comes to be divorced from a corporeal form. I knew that I had held a conversation with Mamadee. I held my tongue, awaiting further developments. Waiting for Mama to realize the obvious.

Miz Verlow quietly collected our scattered cards and dropped them into a wastebasket. She picked up the candlestick.

“Lordy, I
am
cold,” she said. “I believe I will indulge myself in some hot tea. If you should like to join me, I am sure the kitchen will be more comfortable than this ever-so-depressing dark room.”

With this very reasonable excuse to escape the parlor, we repaired to the kitchen. It might have been the one time in her life that Mama went into a kitchen eagerly. The sudden conviction seized me that Mamadee had spoken not to inform us of her death and not to give Mama or me a warning but because
I
was in the room with Mama and Miz Verlow. From beyond the grave, she was pointing one of her knotty, meticulously manicured fingers at me. She wanted Mama and perhaps Miz Verlow to believe that I was either the source of a deception—or else her killer. Or both.

Miz Verlow settled the candlestick on the table. “Do sit down, Miz Dakin. I am going to fetch a shawl against the chill while the kettle boils. Would you like me to bring you a shawl or a sweater? One for Calley?”

Mama nodded.

Miz Verlow filled the kettle and lit the gas under it, then left us alone for a few minutes.

I busied myself fetching cups and saucers, teaspoons, a teapot, sugar and a cream jug from the butler's pantry, as I had been so recently trained.

The kettle shrieked as if to herald Miz Verlow's return. She smiled at me when she saw how busy I had been. Around her shoulders she had drawn a very fine soft wool shawl of a slate color.

For Mama she had brought Mama's own black cashmere sweater, and for me, a sweater of coarser wool. It was not my sweater. I did not own one anymore. The sweater Miz Verlow fetched for me was pilled and clearly hard-worn, with red blobs on a yellow background that were both busy and ugly. The sweater smelled too, of long storage in mothballs, and of something else, a rank mucky smell that reminded me distinctly of an outhouse. Mama shrugged quickly into her sweater without remarking upon the fact that Miz Verlow must have entered Mama's room and opened Mama's closet to obtain it.

I stuffed my hands through the sleeves of the yellow sweater with its peculiar red motif, and with considerable effort, forced the sharp-edged buttons through the too-tight buttonholes. The sweater did not make me warmer. If anything, I felt colder. The wool prickled my skin. It was badly knitted too, lumpy in some places, loose to the point of gaping in others, and so tight around my armpits that it cut into my skin. Once it was on me, I was instantly convinced that it had belonged to a child now dead. I could hear that child choking in the waves, and the water drawing it relentlessly down. When I tried to unbutton it to get out of it, my fingers were too cold to manipulate the buttons through the buttonholes again.

Miz Verlow hummed while she made the tea and poured it. I recognized the tune.

“You are my sunshine,”
I sang in my own voice,
“my only sunshine.”

“Stop it, Calley!” Mama cried. “My head's killing me.”

Miz Verlow leaned over Mama. She took one of Mama's unresisting hands and then the other and wrapped them around a teacup.

“Hold the warmth, Roberta Ann. Drink it up. It will help your poor head.”

Mama wanted to believe Miz Verlow; I saw it in her face.

Miz Verlow sat on one side of Mama while I wriggled into the chair on the other side.

The candle flame reflected darkly in my tea; it looked as if it were burning inside the liquid. The tea burned my mouth, and all the way down my throat. It was Lapsang souchong, its normal flavor adulterated by the taste of wax and charred wick. The surface of the tea in the cup settled and I stared again at the candle flame in it; my head felt heavy, my eyes strained. My scalp felt as if it were bleeding from thousands of pinpricks; I could feel the stubble poking through the follicles.

Mama put down her empty cup and Miz Verlow refilled it.

Mama looked at me.

“Calley,” she said, in a flat, ugly voice, “you were making that voice, I know you were. Mocking me! Mocking my poor darling mama!”

With a slow shake of my head, I denied it silently.

A mild, amused speculation danced in Miz Verlow's eyes as she looked from one to the other of us.

“Do it,” Mama said, “Say ‘It won't make any difference,' in Mamadee's voice.”

I looked at Miz Verlow and shrugged.

Miz Verlow seemed unsurprised and very interested.

“Don't you call me a liar,” Mama said. “Don't you make me look crazy, Calley!”

Miz Verlow reached out and touched my wrist but she spoke to Mama. “Miz Dakin, we have had a shock. I take it from what you say that the voice we heard was that of your mama. Why ever do you think that Calley was somehow speaking in that voice? We were both looking right at her. I did not see her lips move except when she asked The Voice a question.”

Mama ignored her. Mama said my name angrily. “Calley!”

“Uh-uh, Mama, I caint make Mamadee's voice without moving my lips.”

Miz Verlow's fingers around my wrist tightened. “But you can mimic your grandmama's voice.”

“ ‘Roberta,' ”
I said in Mamadee's voice,
“ ‘where on earth are you?' ”

Mama shuddered.

“Is that your mama's voice?” Miz Verlow asked her.

“Yes,” Mama whispered. “To the life.”

“I have to move my lips though,” I pointed out. “And I ain't makin' mock.”

“Say something in my voice,” Miz Verlow told me.

So I did.
“ ‘Say something in my voice.' ”

In the silence that followed, I took a big gulp of the tea in my cup. Speaking in someone else's voice made me dry. The tea scorched my throat without relieving my thirst.

“I should have taken Ford and left her,” said Mama. “I believe she is possessed.”

I ignored the gibe about my being possessed. I had heard it before; it meant nothing much to me.

“Ford did not want to go,” I reminded her. “He wanted to stay with his color TV. And Mamadee.”

“Ford.” Mama's voice rose with excitement as she finally realized what the first consequence of Mamadee's passing was. “I'm going to get back my baby boy!”

Just then the lights flickered on and off, and then steadied in the fullness of the electrical power restored. The flame of the candle seemed to shrink.

Miz Verlow reached across the table to pinch it out.

Black smoke like fleeing souls writhed from the wick. The odor of the burnt wax hung in the air; the taste of it in my mouth, charred and greasy. The odor and the taste and the tea leaves in my cup seemed to be all that remained of the visitation. It struck me that the leaves at the bottom of my cup made a pattern like the ugly red blobs on the sweater Miz Verlow had fetched me. Never before had I seen such a strange design. Polka dots most often keep their distance from one another but these not only stood alone but made short lines and angles and yet there was no symmetry to them. Some of them looked like spots of dried blood.

Mama reached into a skirt pocket for her pack of Kools. Crumpled and wrapped around its meager bouquet of three butts, it was no wider than the packet of matches tucked between its cellophane and foil. She was rationing her cigarettes against the chance of bumming some from one or more of the newly arriving guests, and tomorrow morning's walk to the gas station at Pensacola Beach for more. She began poking around the kitchen, hunting an ashtray.

Miz Verlow took the teapot back to the stove to add hot water.

The candle had subsided into a new shape and the melted wax was slightly translucent. I touched the candle to confirm its warmth. It took the imprint of my fingers as if it were ink. Under the crash of waves and a rising wind, I heard a distant motor, one I recognized.

“You might as well have that candle, if you want it, Calley, it's just a stub.” Miz Verlow turned to face us again, with the teapot in both hands. “And we can spare a stub.”

She had not seen me touch the candle, nor had Mama.

Mama snorted smoke.

“Don't let her have any matches,” Mama advised, dropping her lit match hastily into the ashtray in her other hand as its flame nipped her fingertips. “Not if you don't want her burning down this house!”

Miz Verlow poured herself another cup of tea. She didn't sit down again but stayed on her feet, looking down at me.

“Do you do that often, Calley?” she asked. “Burn down houses?”

I shook my head no. I wondered if I should tell Miz Verlow the lady with the fedora was returning.

“Too bad,” Miz Verlow said. “Some days, I would insure this one to the roof beams and buy the matches for you.”

Mama near choked.

When she recovered from her coughing, she said, “Name the devil! Are you trying to give Calley ideas?”

Miz Verlow never answered the question. She put a hand to one ear, listening.

“I do believe I hear a guest arriving.”

OUTSIDE the world was still submerged in fog. I raced from the front door to the drive, leaving Mama and Miz Verlow to follow in a more dignified fashion. There was nothing to see, not yet, though the motor
thrum
continued its approach. As I stood hugging myself against the cold, the wind twitched the fragile veils of mist. My teeth chattered; my skin goose bumped.

“Calley,” shouted Mama.

I turned toward her voice.

A ghostly giant stood right in front of me. My breath stopped in my throat. As the fog shivered and rippled, the giant shivered and rippled over me, as if to engulf me.

The oncoming vehicle was behind me, the noise of its approach increasing, the sweep of its lights intensifying even as the giant ghost loomed closer over me. An automobile horn blatted violently.

A sudden gust dissolved the giant ghost. The fog-colored coupe, smoothly losing momentum, sailed by along the milky way of its own headlights.

I scampered back to the verandah steps to find Miz Verlow smiling at the coupe while Mama, at her side, peered at it anxiously. When I slipped behind Mama, grabbing at her skirt, she yanked the cloth from my fingers briskly.

“Stop being such a baby,” Mama said, but her attention was riveted on the arriving guest.

Like the servants in a BBC period-costume film, Mama and I stood to one side as Miz Verlow opened the door of the silver coupe with the Maryland plate. A woman emerged from behind the wheel.

Everything about the lady was grey, yet she seemed neither old nor faded at all. She appeared older than Mama and Miz Verlow, younger than Mamadee, and there was nothing stupid or weak about her. She was no ghost out of the fog but a woman of dense human substance. Her presence calmed me. The giant ghost figure that I had seen seemed at once to have been nothing more than a flighty delusion.

When she drew off her driving gloves, her hands were exquisitely manicured, and the skin younger than that of her neck. Obviously she protected and cared for her hands, even though they were not in themselves beautiful or elegant. They were entirely unremarkable hands, square and short-fingered. Soft of course. This woman never did a lick of work for herself, or even stooped to playing tennis or gardening. She wore no rings or bracelets.