Candles Burning

Twenty-nine

THOUGH the very young heal quickly by nature, the salve Miz Verlow gave me for it hastened the process. What it was, I do not know. Like all her nostrums, it came unmarked in a little glass jar or bottle. They all smelled of some flower or herb.

Rarely was there any more in the jar or bottle than was needed, the most immediate exception being Mama’s pale green foot balm, which Miz Verlow provided in cylindrical milk glass containers like short fat candles. The contents would last a week. The fragrance was a new one to me, but not to Mama.

Mama declared that she had been looking for just that balm for years. It was the one that her beloved grandmama had used. It must be an old recipe, she advised me, for her grandmama’s foot balm had been made up at the local pharmacy. Either Miz Verlow had had the recipe herself or a source in some pharmacy that still had the recipe; the important thing was that Miz Verlow deserved as little credit for the superior foot balm as Mama could give her. On occasion though, when it suited Mama, she would praise Miz Verlow’s foot balm extravagantly, and speculate that it would make a fortune if it were made commercially available.

Merrymeeting had two parlors. The small parlor—relatively smaller—was, as I have said, home to the television set and the radio-phonograph console. Miz Verlow’s collection of LPs included commonplace classical music, musicals and film soundtracks. She allowed me to use the turntable in the late afternoon, before supper. The Zenith television in the opposite corner remained of only minor interest to me. Pensacola only had one television station, WEAR, and the offerings were limited. I knew how to operate the Zenith and how to adjust the rabbit ears, and did so for the guests who on occasion wanted to watch some particular program in the early evening.

The large parlor boasted the biggest bookcase in the house. On leaving, guests often abandoned books. The left-behind volumes found a new home in the big bookcase in the large parlor, or in other smaller bookcases around the house. Miz Verlow had been shelving or reshelving the books when I arrived, but before I went back to school, I took over the job. In those first few days, I thumbed through the slew of books on birds and shells and native plants.

Miz Verlow happened on me studying on one of them, on the floor behind a big wing-backed chair, so as not to be underfoot or bother anyone. She told me that I could keep the ones that I was studying in Mama’s room, unless a guest asked for it. I added them to the books that I had stolen from my dead uncle. In the room that Mama and I shared, I had a bottom drawer in a dresser for my clothes. My books fitted under my clothes well enough, at least for a while.

Later, Miz Verlow took me with her on long walks to gather herbs and bark used in her medicinals. One of these plants was the shrub that grew up against the skirts of the house. As soon as I smelled it, I recognized it as one of the ingredients in Mama’s foot balm. Miz Verlow said its common name was Candle Bush, after its yellow flower spikes. Perdita and Cleonie called it Burnin’ Candles.

For a week, Miz Verlow sent a nightcap up to Mama every evening. Mama slept late in the mornings and arose in a cheerful mood. I was able to slip out each day without disturbing her.

When I was rubbing her feet at bedtime, Mama would bemoan her woes and then swear that she would get Ford back and the money and see her mama in hell. Those goals required a lawyer, of course; she complained bitterly to me that she had no money for a lawyer. She could not hire a Florida lawyer anyway, because Florida lawyers couldn’t practice law in Alabama. She knew that for a fact because she had called a firm of lawyers in Pensacola, right out of the phone book. She consoled herself with the conviction that the lawyers in Pensacola were likely all drunks anyway, or profoundly incompetent in the protection of widows and orphans.

Mama was so gracious and sweet to Miz Verlow that no guest would ever suspect that Mama hated her. Mama had spent her life at war with Mamadee. What could be easier or more convenient than to replace Mamadee with Miz Verlow. Mama could never admit to herself that she did not, in fact, signify all that much to Miz Verlow.

Mama played Southern lady of the house to the guests when they were around. She did not speak of what had happened to Daddy nor did she hasten to reveal that I was her child. Miz Verlow introduced me merely as “Little Calley.” Some of the guests concluded that I was some foundling benefiting from Miz Verlow’s conscientious charity. Others hardly noticed that I existed, which was fine with me.

I never minded the chores that structured the day. They made me feel as if I belonged. After I washed up after each meal, Miz Verlow showed me the page of a notebook on which she kept the record of each nickel that I earned. Until my bruises healed—only a few days—I ate in the kitchen.

Miz Verlow’s guests most commonly departed on Saturday, new ones arriving on Sunday evening. Taxis summoned from town took away the guests who had not come in their own vehicles, and the parking lot emptied of everything but Miz Verlow’s Country Squire and the Edsel.

By one-thirty in the afternoon, Cleonie and I had the customary Saturday dinner buffet cleared away and the table reset for the supper that Perdita was preparing. Miz Verlow would serve it, allowing Perdita and Cleonie to take their leave. By three, the beds were stripped and remade, the bathrooms cleaned and restocked with the necessities. Thereupon, the colored taxi came to drive Cleonie and Perdita to the lives they lived in Pensacola. They would return Sunday evening by nine P.M. The other six nights of the week, they slept in a room behind the kitchen. It had its own little closet with a basin and a toilet.

On the shabby old dresser that the two women shared were family photographs that I had not yet had sufficient opportunity to study. Perdita and Cleonie were respectable AME church ladies and worshipped as conscientiously as they worked for Miz Verlow.

Their AME church was not included, of course, in the listing of local churches and their schedules that Miz Verlow provided for her guests. The most exotic church on that list was St. Michael’s Roman Catholic in Pensacola. Jews, Baha’is, Mormons and Muslims never did get any listings, nor did any snake-handlers or Holy Rollers. Pensacola certainly had some of each and no doubt they all had their places of worship. Pensacola had then and has now as many churches as any other town, so about anyone not a total heathen could and can find their own brand. Heathens, of course, have nothing to complain about.

In her defense, Miz Verlow expressed absolutely no interest in the religious affiliations or practices of her guests. If she knew that some of them were Catholics or Jews or Buddhists who practiced their religions anonymously, it did not stop her letting them her rooms. I am confident that she would have found a means of turning away a suspected snake-handler, not because she had any particular feelings about snake-handling but to spare her other guests being proselytized. She had a great feeling for the privacy of her guests that she observed by her own idiosyncratic set of rules. And she was quite willing to drive them back and forth to the place of worship of their choosing.

That very first Sunday we did not attend church at all.

Mama said, “I cannot take you out in public looking such a fright. I don’t suppose the inconvenience to me entered your calculations, did it?”

“I ain’t got a dress anyway,” I said, “or a hat or coat or gloves.”

Reminded that I had arrived at Merrymeeting with little more than a couple of changes of clothes in my suitcase and had lost one change, Mama glared at me.

“I was nearly growed out of the grey dress anyway,” I pointed out.

She pursed her lips. “I suppose you think good clothes grow on trees? Stop saying ‘ain’t’ and ‘growed.’ You’ve been raised to know better. I swear the Dakin in you has destroyed all the Carroll.”

Mama slept in until noon that Sunday and then spent the afternoon on the beach. It was scarcely warm enough yet for sunbathing but Mama had decided that she was sickly pale, due to pining away in widowhood and having lost a child and all the other terrible shocks of recent months, and so she shivered on a chaise in her sunsuit. I was in charge of fetching her coffee or another magazine from the house. Sadly for her, I was also her only audience.

Mama explained to Miz Verlow the necessity to go into Pensacola to buy me a dress. On Tuesday, with her guests all settled, Miz Verlow drove us to town in her Country Squire. Miz Verlow knew where the best store was, she assured us, which happened to be having a sale on children’s clothing. Between flattery and pointing out all the bargains to be had, Miz Verlow baited Mama into buying me not only these new dresses, but a new coat, new Mary Janes, new socks and a hat, another straw boater that fit over the napkin on my head, new underpants, new pajamas, and new overalls and shirts. Each piece of clothing fit me, but it was all in colors that made me look half dead. I was indifferent. I never had had any pretty clothing and didn’t expect any. The whole collection really came surprisingly cheap, which pleased Mama intensely. Of course, after all that shopping, I had to massage her feet for an extra-long time that night.

Mama was forced to give me a few inches of closet space to hang my three dresses, but she made me unload the books from my clothes drawer to accommodate the rest of my new clothing. She threatened to throw the books out. My wails brought Miz Verlow, who saved my books by granting me the lowest, least used shelf in the linen closet.

The following Sunday, the first in May, Miz Verlow very kindly chauffeured Mama and me to Christ Episcopal. A blind fog obscured our passage on and off the island as thoroughly as the dark of night had on our arrival, yet Miz Verlow always seemed to know where she was.

My appearance with the napkin around my head under my new boater caused a little flutter in the church. Mama wore black, including her veil. When we left the church, the pastor took Mama’s hand in his at the door. I thrust myself between them and stepped on the toes of the pastor’s well-shined shoes, producing a satisfactory wince and the release of Mama’s hand.

On our return, the mist so blurred Miz Verlow’s house, it appeared to be abandoned. The lights were all out; the power, off. Inside, the house felt empty as an old barn. The diffuse, feeble light of the dark day did not penetrate the darker corners of the house, while the cold damp pierced us all to our marrow.

Miz Verlow sent me to the kitchen to fetch the cold plates Perdita had left for us. We ate in the dining room, by the light of a single yellow candle in a silver candlestick that had come from Mamadee’s house. I was not so foolish as to mention that I recognized it. What interested me more was that the candle was obviously homemade—not crudely either, but with skill. As it burned, it gave off a tarry but not offensive odor that made me think of Mama’s foot balm.

Little as I wanted to think about Miz Verlow’s terms, I was not enough Mama’s child to be able to exclude from my thoughts that which was—unpleasant. On the contrary, the more I wish not to think of something, the more I do. I have learned to think what I have to think when I have to think it. Naturally, unwelcome thoughts return but they do so less annoyingly.

Once dinner was out of the way, Miz Verlow suggested cards.

Though Mama’s first reaction to the suggestion of Sunday card playing was a scandalized hitch of one eyebrow, she realized immediately that her outrage was wasted without an audience. She sat down to the card table with a coy lack of enthusiasm. Mama always loved cards. She played the worst and had the worst luck of anyone I ever knew. In Mama’s world though, she was a sharp, a player without equal. Presented with an opportunity to exercise her skills, she seized upon it. Quite aside from anything else, cards might very well provide her with leverage over Merry Verlow.

Mama and Miz Verlow and I sat down in the large parlor to play Hearts. My card playing skills at that time were very basic but I already knew enough to let Mama win. Rather than open new, we played with an old deck of cards, a red one with the initials CCD on the back. My initials—though the cards were at least twenty years old, and truly unfit for anything but cheating at Solitaire. The parlor was as quiet as it could be with the three of us in it, speaking as little as possible, concentrating on the cards. Our only light was the candle that Miz Verlow brought with her from the dining room. Its light was magnified by the parlor’s enormous mirror, hanging opposite me and the fireplace behind me. The small flame burned intently, the burnt wick collapsing sadly into the pooled melted beeswax. In the mirror, it appeared as a tongue of fire, kindled out of the depthless shadows in the reflected fireplace. The scent of the burning candle reminded me of the church service we had attended, and of my daddy’s funeral.

It won’t make any difference.

“What won’t?” Mama responded tersely, glaring at her exposed cards in hope of defying Miz Verlow’s unexpected gibe.

“Pardon me?” said Miz Verlow.

Miz Verlow and Mama then looked at me, though the voice that had spoken possessed neither the scale nor timbre of a seven-year-old girl child.

Miz Verlow passed the question on to me. “What won’t make any difference, Calley?”

It won’t make any difference to me simply because I am dead.

We were at that moment all looking at one another. None of us had spoken.

So who had?

We were alone, the three of us, in that isolated house.

Mama was stricken pale. Even Miz Verlow looked distressed. It fell to my lot to deal with the matter. And to me, Calliope Carroll Dakin, whose initials were on the deck of playing cards on the little triangular table before us, it was perfectly obvious whose voice had sounded in the stifling front parlor. I looked in the mirror. Her face looked out, not at us, but as if through a window. Her eyes were wide and teary with terror.

“Mamadee, is that you?” I asked.

It is, and it isn’t.

“Shut up!” Mama snapped at me.

I kept my eyes fixed on the mirror but before I could tell Mama to look into it, Mamadee’s voice spoke again:

You don’t have to be rude, Roberta Ann.

Mama jumped up and strode toward the door, preparing to fling it open—even though she knew as well as I that the voice was not coming from the hallway or from any other part of the house.

I am not out there, Roberta Ann.

Mama stopped with her hands reaching for the door. Then she took a step backward as if the door itself had spoken.

Miz Verlow rose. “Are you in here?”

She was like a miner, digging deep to rescue a child tumbled down a disused shaft. Breaking open a crumbling wall, she softly questions the dead, soft darkness, Are you in there?

I understood then that neither Miz Verlow nor Mama saw Mamadee in the mirror.

I don’t know. I don’t know where I am. But I know I see who killed me—

“She’s lying. Mama’s not dead.” Mama looked at me hard. “If my mama were dead, we would know about it.”

“Are you dead?” I asked aloud.

Mama grabbed my shoulders and shook me hard. “Stop pretending to be Mama!”

Then she looked around her, as if something were hiding behind her back. Eyes wide as ever I had seen them, she was visibly shaking.

“Mama!” she wailed. “You caint be dead!”

Suddenly the room was colder, as if someone had opened a window. The candle flickered and went out. Thin threads of white smoke rose from its wick.

The voice exclaimed in outrage: Roberta Ann Carroll, that is my candlestick on that table!

Mama was not to be diverted by mere issues of ownership.

“You want to make me feel bad!” she cried. “Well you caint make me feel bad because number one I did not kill you, and number two I never even knew you were dead, and number three, I don’t believe you are my mama because we don’t have ghosts in our family! There are no Carroll ghosts!”

The ghost—or whatever it was—had no response to Mama’s barrage of illogic. Mama dug her fingers out of my shoulders. Miz Verlow started to move toward the door. She was going to try to get us out of there before anything else—and anything worse—happened.

Then, abruptly, Mamadee spoke again, asking a confused, tentative question: Roberta Ann, where on earth are you?

“What does she mean?” Mama whispered to me.

I replied in the voice that seven-year-old girls use when reciting an Easter verse at the front of the church: “We are in Pensacola, Florida, Mamadee. In Miz Verlow’s house. She is distant kin to the Dakins but not related to them by blood.”

Again the voice came, soft and fumbling, addressing Mama and ignoring my reply and me.

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.