Candles Burning

Nine

JUDY DeLucca and Janice Hicks both got off work at two o’clock in the afternoon, when they went home and tortured Daddy.

Janice lived with her baby brother, Jerome, who also weighed more than three hundred pounds, in a house owned by an aunt and uncle no one had seen in years. Judy rented a room in the house next door to the Hicks. Judy’s landlady was eighty-two years and deaf, so she never heard Daddy’s screams.

Nobody knows why the two women were in the hotel at night, when Daddy was last seen, or how they got him out of the hotel without being noticed. Judy’s testimony was at best sketchy.

Judy said, “I hit him over the head and I pushed him into a taxi and I told the driver that he was my uncle who had a plate in his head since the war and sometimes he got dizzy and to take us to my house.”

Janice only said, “It was Judy got him to her house. I hardly had a thing to do with that part. I was out buying stuff.”

The stuff Janice Hicks bought was a sturdy metal footlocker, two bottles of rubbing alcohol, five rolls of bandages, a pair of cuticle scissors, and a new broom. She gave a colored man fifteen cents to carry the bulky footlocker to Judy’s.

The two women cut off all Daddy’s clothes. He must have been unconscious, because Judy patiently used the cuticle scissors—though there were other, much larger pairs of scissors in the house—and that must have taken a long time. With strips of the cloth of his trousers, jacket, and shirt—and employing intact his belt and his tie—they tied him to Judy’s bed.

“I poured the rubbing alcohol in his eyes,” Janice said, “but it didn’t make him blind.”

That was the first day.

The second day, when Judy and Janice came home from work, Judy’s landlady complained about a smell.

The smell was from Daddy, who had been tied to the bed all night and morning long with no provision for his bodily functions.

“I cleaned it up that time,” Judy said in court, “but Janice said to me, ‘Judy, we caint have no more of this,’ and I went downstairs and got the new broom and we pushed it up his”—Judy blushed with embarrassment—“his bottom,” she finally said. “And then we tied a string around his”—Judy paused again. “Prepuce,” the district attorney prompted, and Judy went on: “Peep ruse? My daddy called it his”—she told the district attorney in a stage whisper—“his Pope’s hat. Anyway, I wasn’t having that man pee-pee in the bed again.”

On the third day, the force of Daddy’s bowels expelled the broom handle. His prepuce had ruptured with the pressure of urine. Because he called Judy and Janice very bad names—they never revealed what those names were—Judy stuck two fingers into Daddy’s mouth, grasped his tongue and pulled it out beyond his lips. Janice thrust a knife blade through his tongue perpendicularly, and left it there—Daddy’s pierced tongue protruding, and the blade and handle of the knife pressed against his face.

The fourth day was Mardi Gras, Fat Tuesday. On their return from work, Janice and Judy discovered that Daddy had managed to free his tongue of the knife—by the simple expedient of pulling his tongue into his mouth, allowing the knife to sever it. He had spat blood over his chest and abdomen for hours. Judy sprayed Daddy’s face with D-Con bug killer until he was blinded. Then she cut five notches in his right ear with her cuticle scissors.

On the fifth day, Janice and Judy discovered that Daddy had once again soiled the bed linen. This may well have been surprising to them, considering that Daddy had had nothing to eat in those five days and that the only thing he’d drunk was the blood that flowed from his severed tongue and the urine Judy squeezed into his mouth from the wet sheets.

“This is the last straw,” Janice told Judy.

“I caint hardly blame you for being mad at him,” Judy commiserated.

They untied Daddy from the bed and put him on the floor. Judy put a pillow over Daddy’s face. Janice climbed on top of him and pressed the pillow into his face to stop his breathing. Her three hundred and ninety-seven pounds on his torso crushed all his internal organs before he could even struggle for breath.

And that is how my daddy, Joe Cane Dakin, died, on Ash Wednesday of 1958, in New Orleans, Louisiana.

My seventh birthday.