Candles Burning

Thirty-seven

THE business of the umbrellas made it nearly impossible to find a place to bury Deirdre Carroll. Her behavior downtown on that Thursday morning, buying up every umbrella that could be bought, taking them home, and opening them all over the house was a much more disturbing phenomenon to Tallassee than the fear of contagion from the strange, rapid, and fatal ailment that had laid her low. Deirdre Carroll, it judged, had gone insane. Practically, it was a mercy that her end came so quickly as it did. That sudden, intense insanity shut the gates of every graveyard within the town limits.

Adele Starret did not tell Mama but I knew what happened next. Never mind that I had dreamed it; any half-wit seven-year-old could have predicted it.

Leonard and Tansy refused ever to set foot in Ramparts again. No other sensible colored person would consider it, never mind the foolish ones. Of the whites, both sensible and idiot, only five could be found willing to enter the house. Dr. Evarts had and would, and no one thought the less of him for it, for his fundamental Yankeeness protected him in some indefinable way from the evil in Ramparts, and he was, after all, a Man of Science. My brother, Ford, would, but of course he thought there might be something in it for him, and, after all, it was his family estate. And Winston Weems would, for the same reason of self-interest, and also to protect his reputation as a hardheaded Man of Bidness. Men like Dr. Evarts and Mr. Weems could not believe in haunts or curses or hoodoos, for such things must necessarily be beyond their purchase or control. Mr. Weems hired two white men who would do anything for a jug, but who were not yet too debilitated by their vices to do the heavy lifting.

Ramparts was emptied in one weekend of almost everything perishable, usable or saleable (out of town, where its provenance was unknown), under the direction of Mr. Weems, Dr. Evarts, and my brother, Ford.

A single piece of furniture was abandoned: Mamadee’s bed, its bloody sheets already rotting, still stood in her bedroom.

And the umbrellas. Eccentric currents of air native to the house itself rolled the open umbrellas this way and that in the empty rooms. The tips of the ribs of the umbrellas tapped the floors and walls tick-tick-tick, as regularly and syncopated as clocks all set to different times. The rustling, the snicking and clicking, the faint thuds, all echoed through the house, along with its own creaks and groans.

That Ramparts was haunted, there was no doubt. Outside it, the live oaks shuddered, the rags of their Spanish moss twisting and flapping like grave clothes on a revenant mummy. Children dared one another to creep up on to the verandah and stare through the dusty windows. The glass under their palms was so cold that they snatched their hands away. One or more of the opened umbrellas, upside down and right side up, and sideways in every room would move, and the children would run away shrieking. Few returned for a second peek.