Candles Burning

Fifteen

“PLEASE, please, please, Mama,” I begged.

I could tell that she was not listening. She was freshening her lipstick, and all her attention was on her lips in the mirror.

She and Ford were going to take the Edsel to our house in Montgomery to pack up those personal things that Mr. Weems had informed her that she could have. With Mama and Mr. Weems not on speaking terms, Mamadee was going also, in her Cadillac, to oversee Mama and make sure that she did not take anything not on Mr. Weems’s list. We were allowed to have our own clothes and something called personal effects, which I construed to mean my paper dolls already cut out of their books. I reckoned that our clothes were the wrong sizes for anybody at the bank in Georgia that had foreclosed.

Mamadee insisted that Mama’s jewelry was part of the estate. All the pieces that had been in the safe-deposit box in Montgomery had been seized when it was opened under Mama’s power of attorney by Mr. Weems. But the jewelry Mama had taken to New Orleans was either on Mama or in Mama’s pocketbook, and it was going to take Mamadee and Winston Weems and a whole army to get it away from her.

She barely glanced at me. “Calley, if you do not stop nagging at me, I’m gone slap you.”

“It is a silver dollar.”

She looked right at me as she capped her lipstick. “‘It’s a silver dollar,’” she mocked me. “Would you kindly strive to remember that I have a few other concerns on my mind?”

I was certain then that she would try to get to it before Ford did. The trick for me would be to steal it back. I did not want to go with her to get it myself. A shivery scared feeling choked me like a peach pit. If the house were empty of Daddy, it would prove that he was gone forever. And if Daddy were there, would he still be Daddy? He might be a haunt, or worse, if there was such a thing.

While they were gone, I climbed the oak to watch Leonard and Daddy Cook install the new French doors, replacing the ones that Mama had broken. They knew I was up here, so I did not have to try to be invisible. They did not mind if I sang a little, so I did, and sometimes they would sing with me, and then laugh, like it made them happy.

Tansy was in a good mood too; she brought out coffee and sandwiches and lemon cake for us all. Leonard brought her a lawn chair and she sat herself down and picnicked with us. Actually, I sat in the tree and she put my sandwich and a milk bottle of iced tea in a basket and I dropped a rope and hauled it up. It was more fun that way, and, for once, Tansy didn’t seem to mind me having fun.

After we were all replete and patted our stomachs and observed that if we ate one more crumb, our bellies would burst, I climbed down and helped her take the dishes back to the kitchen.

Tansy tipped up her chin a little to signify upstairs, and told me that she was not being paid to mind children and to get out from under her feet before I broke something.

All that lunch made me sleepy. I went upstairs and flung myself on the iron cot. I did not wake until, from the depths of dreaming, I heard the Edsel and the Cadillac return. The afternoon had worn on, the light in the narrow room under the eaves begun to dim. I wiped the wet corners of my mouth on the pillowcase. Though the room was cool, I was sweaty. I had been having a daytime nightmare. Daddy’s arms around me would not let go. Daddy’s head tumbled from his shoulders. Judy DeLucca in her maid’s uniform and a huge fat woman whom I did not know picked it up and tried to tape it back on with a huge strip of Scotch tape. I wanted to cry out for Ida Mae but my throat was cut and taped too, my voice stuck like lint on the sticky side.

Suddenly everyone except me was going in and out of the house, up and down stairs, in and out of bedrooms. Leonard and Tansy and Mamadee and Mama and Ford trucked in boxes and suitcases. It was boring to hear. I waited for Leonard to bring me up a suitcase or a box of my clothes, maybe even some toys. What could a bank want with my doll-house? But he did not, because they had not brought any of my clothes or things from the house in Montgomery. What I had was what I would have.

Not until I could look them in the eyes, or hear the lies, either in their voices or in their silences, would I know whether Mama or Ford had gotten to my silver dollar first. I was relieved. I would outgrow the clothes anyway and the toys too. If Mama and Ford had brought me nothing from our house that was no longer our home, they had left behind whatever might have clung to those things as well. The very dust of our old house might bear some dreadful unknown bad luck or curse or haunt. That house was a closet of memories that I needed to lock away until I was old enough to examine them safely.