Candles Burning (47 page)

“Yes'm, Miz Verlow.”

I stared up at Miz Verlow fixedly, in the hope that all she would see in my eyes was the state of my pupils.

“I'll sit with her, Cleonie,” Miz Verlow said.

Cleonie went out.

Miz Verlow's face was oddly stiff on one side and she was hollow-eyed. She had had that root canal. Her whole lower face was braced against pain.

“Did you fall asleep on the beach or get a cramp swimming?”

“I don't remember.”

“That's convenient. Someone's been in the attic. The door was open. Is that the key on that chain around your neck?”

Her words seemed to summon the chain and key into existence; I had not felt them before but now I did, half choking me.

She hooked one finger under the chain and against the skin of my neck and yanked. The chain bit at me, and then it was gone, hanging in her hand.

It appeared to be the chain from the attic light, run through the hole at the top of the key.

“I was looking for a carpetbag to borrow. I'm gone to Tallassee,” I lied. “I want to find Ford. Or one of my uncles. It's a good time to go, while Mama's away.”

Miz Verlow nodded. “And how did you come to wind up semiconscious on the beach?”

“I don't remember. Maybe I fainted.”

Miz Verlow glanced around, saw the water tumbler and handed it to me.

I took a mouthful and then another, amazed at how cool the water still was and how dry my throat felt.

Miz Verlow made a carefully neutral observation. “The heat up in the attic can be fierce, never mind how easy it is to get sunstruck on the beach.”

I thought of all the times Mama and Miz Verlow and the guests remarked upon the heat, the lack of it, the wind, the rain, the drought, ad infinitum, and suppressed a giggle.

A speculative gleam appeared in Miz Verlow's eye. “Calley, you have been taking your vitamin, haven't you?”

My vitamin. Of course I was taking my vitamin. I couldn't imagine how taking it would prevent a swoon from the heat in the attic.

As if in answer, she said, “You could be anemic.”

I didn't think that I needed to respond.

“Calley, you'd tell me, wouldn't you, if you thought you were pregnant?”

I could hardly believe what I heard—it's a cliche, but that's really the way I felt.

“You're too young to have a baby. And Grady Driver is experience and nothing more.”

“Grady's my friend and that ain't ‘nothin' more'.”

“Of course,” agreed Miz Verlow. “And a handy useful young man he is and entirely appropriate to screw.”

My face burned all the way to the helices of my ears. She meant to shock me, of course, to show me that
she
was unshockable. And that I could keep no secrets from her.

“The footlocker is up there in the attic, the one they tried to stuff Daddy into and it's still bloody,” I blurted. “Mama and I left it in Elba but it's in the attic, over our heads. It has been all this time. And I found something in it.”

Miz Verlow's hand went swiftly again to my brow. I had risen bolt upright in my agitation.

“Lie down again, Calley.”

Words continued tumbling out of my mouth without me knowing what I was going to say: “There was a
thing
in it.“

Miz Verlow hushed me. “Shhh.” She tucked a blanket up around me. “You're all shiver. Quiet yourself now, Calley. I'm going to get you something to help you sleep.”

Cleonie must have been stationed just outside. She came in as Miz Verlow went out, to sit down and hold my hand again. In a very few moments, Miz Verlow was back, with the plastic lid of a small jar in her hand. In it were two homemade pills. For the first time and without knowing why, I was afraid of them. A depth of confusion that I had never experienced before in my life overcame me.

Yet my lips parted, my mouth opened, Miz Verlow put the pills on my tongue, and Cleonie held the water tumbler that I might drink. The pills went down like hard little dried peas. Immediately, I shook uncontrollably for several moments and then suddenly, a calmness came over me. I don't remember closing my eyes or falling asleep. When I woke in the morning, I remembered dreaming of sleeping with my eyes open. Lying there in my room, while Cleonie sang to me and the moon fell into the sea.

A few days later, just before sunup, I dislodged the collar of the light fixture in my crookedy closet and felt around above it for my tin box.

My fingers informed me of grit and lint and dust and then—a flash, as my arm went rigid with shock and sharp little points exploded into my eyes. The electricity hit me hard enough to knock me deep into the corner of the closet, and in doing so, broke the contact between my hand and the live wire.

For a moment I was dazed. My head felt as if it were going to explode. My first coherent reaction was fear that the little bits that had sprayed at me were glass. But I could see. I managed to bring my left hand up to brush at my face. Grit and lint and dirt. Above me, I could hear a tiny smolder of fire like little mouse teeth chewing something up.

My right arm ached deep into the socket; it lay slack across my torso. I could not lift it. Every other muscle was weak as dust. I'd wet myself. The closet was not only dark because the light was blown out; there was smoke in it. I coughed.

As quickly as I could, I sorted myself out and struggled out of the closet. My strongest emotion was one of disgust at my own stupidity; if this didn't prove that no one on this earth could be stupider than Calley Dakin, I didn't know what would. A small dirty cloud of smoke hung just below the ceiling of my room. The window was open; I turned on my little fan to help circulate the smoke on out and draw in the good air.

Taking the flashlight from my bottom drawer, I staggered back into the closet. It was a huge relief to see no flame. I no longer heard the fire; apparently it had gone out.

I sniffed. Lovely. A bouquet of fragrant pee, ash and ozone smell. The flashlight beam showed me the electrical line and the top of the light fixture. Where the line joined the fixture, the insulation was gone. I knew at once that I had managed to touch a live wire, but the beam showed me where it was. The little tin box was wide open—and heaped with ash and fragments of burnt bills.

So much for storing up treasure in this world. I dropped onto my bed, pulled a pillow over my face and laughed into it until my stomach hurt.

I had a mess to clean up, and myself. I kept a supply of small waxed-paper sandwich bags for disposal of used tampons. With a couple of these in hand, as quietly as I could and with due care of the exposed wire, I collected the little tin box and its ashy contents. Then I played the flashlight again to make sure that I had gotten everything even remotely flammable. The light picked up a dark corner of something. I used the flashlight itself like a hook to move the object closer. It was a book.

Even before I turned the flashlight full on it, I recognized the most common size and shape of a bird guide. An odd thought intruded:
I don't see it. It's not there.
But it was, most assuredly. There. As gingerly as if it were electrified, I touched it with my forefinger.

A puddle of something soft draped over the book, and a lump of gold hung against the edges of its pages. The bird harness, the egg locket.

I drew the book toward me and gathered the loops of silk rope and the egg locket with the other.

The book fit my hand perfectly—that sort of book is
designed
exactly for fitting hands. Still, I felt an excitement kindling inside me that I could neither explain nor resist. A jolt. A blast. It was the way I felt when I heard Haydn for the first time, or Little Richard.

I remembered: I put the book there, when I moved into my crooked little room.
I didn't need it. I had other, more recent guides. Mama, someone, might notice that it was stolen, that my uncle Robert Junior's name was written on the flyleaf.

But I had not hidden the other books that I had taken from Ramparts, and, in fact, Mama had never looked into any of them. Every book that I owned had somebody else's name written on the flyleaf.

 
Listen to the book.

 
My heart felt as if it were on one of those pull chains with the white knob at the end. Something yanked that chain, and my whole being seemed to light up inside me. One of my fingertips stung as if burned. The one with the scar on it.

And dreams that were memories opened like a book in my mind.

The cold gold egg locket in my palm had my name inside it, opposite a picture of a woman I thought must be my great-grandmama. She was dead before I was born. Why had she written my name inside the egg locket?

The household was only just beginning to stir. Mrs. Mank's Benz sportster was parked next to Miz Verlow's Lincoln on the kitchen side of the house. She had been expected; I'd helped Roger and Cleonie arrange her suite, and then heard her arrive shortly after I had gone to bed. I left the house barefoot, with the legs of my coveralls rolled up to my knees and pinned there. My hat in a pocket of my coveralls. I needed some light, some sun, and even the thin light of dawn was freshening. As I had done habitually since a little girl, I ran barefoot through the swash, northward, away from Merrymeeting.

The birds were about their business, and so were the critters that lived in the sand, damp or dry, and the ones in the vegetation beyond the first dune. The beach mice were snugging up to sleep away the day. No other human beings were visible on the great swathe of white sand.

The bump of the book in my overall pocket intensified the faster I ran, until it was spanking me, as if I were a horse that needed urging in some furious race. The other horses in the race were invisible to me, though, and I could not see a finish line. I slowed to a trot and then a stroll, veering across the beach toward the dunes. The finish line, it appeared, was my nest in the high grass, and there it was.

Still breathing deeply from my run, I took the book from my pocket and sank into panic grass and sea oats, to the patch my bottom had long since shaped for me. The coarse tall grasses made space for two when Grady was with me, but when I was alone it seemed to fill in cozily around me.

The bird guide was familiar to my hands. Thick for a small book, the paper of its pages as thin as the print on each page was tiny. Most of the dust had shaken off the book while it was in my pocket but the cover was still slightly dust-dull. I rubbed the book, back and front, and then the spine, on the thighs of my overalls.

With the spine up, my vision blurred as if I had gotten dust in my eye. I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes, and felt a few quick automatic tears leak. They sparkled in my lashes as I blinked, and were gone.

On the spine of the book, where the legend 
should have been, were the words

 
The Gnashunull Oddybone Sassyassidy Birdery

Once more, I tried to clear my vision with rapid blinking, but the legend remained the same. The absurdity of it made me laugh. I had no memory of altering it, and did not see how it could have been done. It took an effort to turn the spine away into the palm of my left hand, to look at the blank front. Then I flipped the book and looked at the spine again, as if to catch it changing back to what it should have been. It remained

 
The Gnashunull Oddybone Sassyassidy Birdery

I paged a leaf at a time: first blank page, the thin second blank page, the flyleaf, and instead of Bobby Carroll, the inscription was

 
Hope Carroll

 
And the title leaf read

 
The Gnashunull Oddybone Sassyassidy Birdery

When new, the guides are so firmly bound that they never just fell open, but the binding of this one, in the dry dusty space above the closet, had become loose. It fell open to the colored illustrations. Looking up at me was a cartoon of a loony woodpecker—loony not just in its expression, but its coloration, as it was all black-and-white as the common male loon is, and it sported a red crest (not that loons have crests, but woodpeckers do). Like many birds, the eyes of loons are red. The loony woodpecker clung to a cartoon tree trunk. It was identified as

 
Ivory Bill, the Woodpecker!
woodpeckerus nearextinctus

 
The loony woodpecker winked at me, double-drummed the trunk of the tree, and then cackled

 
Haha—hahaha! Haha—hahaha!

 
I dropped the book as if it were afire. The woodpecker's cackle ended abruptly in an offended squawk. The sounds were very like those of Woody Woodpecker, but harsher and more mournful.

 
Listen to the book.

 
Cautiously, I picked it up again and let it flop open.

A cartoon parakeet looked up from the page. The cartoonist had turned the yellow feathers of the parakeet's crown into a handkerchief wrapped around its head, and patched one eye piratically. The fluffy green feathers on its legs billowed into voluminous pirate's pants, tied about the waist with a string. It was identified as

 
Papaw Parakeet
conuropsis nocanfindus

 
The parrot screamed

 
Kee-ho! Keck-keck-kee!