Candles Burning

Twenty-seven

WHILE I bathed, I contemplated Miz Verlow’s terms and Mama’s reactions, which had been almost more interesting than the terms.

You reside here at my pleasure.

You will obey my rules.

Your room and board I will take in barter from those goods that came with you. Or you can choose to work, but only here on this island and with my consent or approval.

You will attempt no communications with anyone without my foreknowledge and consent.

You will make no contracts nor incur any debt without my foreknowledge and consent.

You will not leave the island without intent to return, nor travel more than fifty miles away without my foreknowledge and consent.

You will not abandon the child here. Understand that she is all that stands between you and a fate worse than the one that befell your late husband.

The child will go to school.

The reach of your enemies is long and their enmity persistent. If you cannot agree to this, you will imperil your life and freedom.

There is no negotiation of these terms.

The choice is entirely your own.

Mama had begun disdainful, she had sniffed and snorted, but at the end, she had been trembling with anger and fear.

Nothing that I could imagine was more appealing to me than staying where we were. Since I had feared all along that Mama would abandon me, it was no shock to find out that Miz Verlow suspected it of Mama as well. The talk of peril and enemies and enmity was uniquely satisfying. Not only did it confirm my own sense of precariousness, it did so in the guise of a fairy-tale stricture: Break a rule as simple as speaking to a stranger, and be punished with a hundred years of naptime. The relief to me of having Mama firmly tethered to me, and to this place, was immense. The nature of the perils, of the enemies and their grudges, did not need to be elaborated. My daddy was in bloody pieces. Somebody, something, had done us a terrible turn. It was only wise to reckon they might not be done with us. A seven-year-old does not normally or naturally think very far beyond the moment, but raw fear forced it on me.

Having bathed and washed my hair, I swished the two pieces of my glasses through the soapy water. I dried them and put them, with Betsy Cane McCall, in the pocket of my clean overalls.

Miz Verlow caught me on the backstairs landing again, putting my bloodied towels and clothing in the laundry chute.

“Child, I’ve seen bramble bushes with birds caught in them that were still neater than your hair,” she said. “Get your mama to comb it and tie it up for you.”

Mama’s door was closed and locked. I had tried it already. My face hurt. My head hurt. I realized that the throbbing in my head was what Mama meant by a headache. I could not think what to do next.

Miz Verlow’s voice softened. “You need an aspirin, Calley.”

She drew me along with her, through a door and into an ell of the house and down a hallway and into a bedroom. I was surprised to see her open a door into another bathroom. This bedroom—hers, it came to me—had its own private bath. She came out of the bath with a damp washrag, a glass of water and a small orange pill.

The little orange pill may have been the first aspirin I ever had. Certainly I have no memory of such a thing even existing in the house in Montgomery. This aspirin was not only orange in color; it had a tang of orange and grittiness on my tongue that raised goose bumps on my arms.

She picked up a small bottle from the dresser and poured a few pearly drops into one palm. After rubbing her palms together, she very gently worked the stuff from the bottle through my hair. She massaged my scalp the way I did Mama’s feet at night. The pain in my head began to fade. Then she combed my hair and tied up my ponytails. It didn’t hurt a bit.

“How about some ribbons?”

One second, one long piece of yellow ribbon draped her fingers and the next, there were two, flickering away from the blades of the shears with a cool faint whisper. The shears were very sharp, sharp enough to take off a finger or a foot, and well oiled too, for the pivot of the blades moved with only the slightest of sounds. The whole ribbon fell hypnotically into two perfectly equal parts between the flash of the two blades.

“Who was the lady who left this morning?”

“I thought you would never ask. Why do you think that she was wearing her hat to obscure her face?”

“So I would ask who she was.”

Miz Verlow laughed softly. “You are sharp as the blades of my shears, Calley Dakin.”

My tongue was suddenly thick in my heavy head, my eyelids impossible to lift.

THE sound of the dinner bell woke me. I had no memory of falling asleep. My neck was stiff and damp and I was hungry. It seemed to me that the dinner bell was my hunger, ringing right inside my head and in my stomach.

Now warmed by my body heat, the damp washrag sat like a deflated old toad on my forehead: I flung it off. The pillow was damp from my wet hair. So heavy had my sleep been that I had drooled a little. My earlobes and behind my ears and my neck were crusty with the tracks of it.

I slipped off the bed and went into the bathroom to pee and wash my face. A small high window was propped open to the salt air and the intricate conversation of birds and sea and wind. The room itself was imbued with a complex aroma, something like a spice cupboard all mixed up with a medicine cabinet.

The yellow ribbons around my ponytails shone back at me in the mirror over the basin. My swollen face was muddy with bruises. The yellow of the ribbon was exactly the wrong color; it made my hair more colorless, my skin hectic, the discoloration of the bruises violent. My head hurt again just looking at myself. When I felt in my pocket for my broken glasses and Betsy Cane McCall, I found nothing.

But I was so hungry, I was hollow clean through.

I found my way back to the foyer and the dining room and would have gone onto the kitchen but Miz Verlow was there at the table, with Mama and the guests who wanted dinner, and she stopped me with a commanding look.

“Miss Calley Dakin,” she said, “you are late. Beg pardon, please, and take your seat.”

She indicated a chair with the slightest of gestures of her head.

“Beg pardon,” I tried to say but it came out all thick and clogged as if I had a cold.

Mama snickered.

No one else did.

I fell on my dinner as the wolves on the Assyrians—at least that’s the way I remember it, wolves on Assyrians—ate everything on the plate Cleonie put down in front of me: ham steak and red-eyed gravy and cornbread, and creamed corn and scallop potatoes and green beans cooked with side meat, and bread-and-rice pudding with whipped cream. I drank three whole glasses of sweetened lemonade. To the consternation of the guests, to Mama’s horror and humiliation, to Cleonie’s wrinkled nose, and to Miz Verlow’s apparent indifference, I finally slid woozily off that chair and vomited on the turkey rug.

“Concussion,” said Miz Verlow shortly. “Put the child to bed.”