Candles Burning

Forty-one

CAME the first day of school, I walked to the road and climbed up onto the bus, which, except for the driver, proved to be empty. I would be first on and last off, for I lived at the greatest distance from the elementary school.

As soon as I was out of sight of Merrymeeting, I removed my homemade hat. It was one of the few things that I could do to avoid becoming a goat. I could do nothing about my looks, let alone the inevitability that it was known that my father had been murdered and dismembered. The younger they are, the fewer social inhibitions children have. I was immediately asked directly if it was true that my daddy had been suffocated to death and cut to pieces. My first instinct was to act as if I did not understand the question.

A furrowed brow, “Huh?” and the witless announcement that I had seen a mouse on the beach, convinced my questioners that I was twice as stupid as a doorstop. My schoolmates did not persist, thankfully, as the commencement of the school term provided many more excitements than the frisson supplied by gore associated with a newcomer. When I was a little bit older, I realized my instinct had been correct: If ever I had started describing Daddy’s murder, I would never have been shut of it.

The learning part was largely effortless and enjoyable; the social part of school, like constant sunburn to me. Science and languages came easily to me, so much so that by the time I was ten, I was being bussed to junior high school classes in those subjects. Social ineptness was expected of those who turned out to be “whizzes” at some subject or other. My schoolmates were in any case as put off by evidence of intellect as they were by overly large ears—waggable ears, after all, constituted true talent, along with being able to touch one’s nose with the tip of the tongue, or make armpit farts. My teachers, most of them, were my schoolmates grown up; they suspected any child who gave evidence of being smarter than they were, and nonconformist behavior was swatted as quick as a housefly. Naturally, there were others like me in some way: their physical defects all too evident, or they were intellectually too slow or fast, relative to the norm. Every social group has its castes; I accepted mine with something like relief, as it excused me from the anxiety of being someone and something that I was not. My ability to overhear my class-mates whispering and the confidences of the teachers to each other also gave me a useful edge in self-defense.

My formal schooling on the island settled into a dreamy, remorseless repetition of morning and early afternoon hours, five days a week, thirty-eight weeks a year. I rarely thought about it except when I was actually there.

My best school was Santa Rosa Island. Older and younger than its human residents, it was constantly remaking itself over time infinitesimal and infinite, immeasurable by my limited human senses. The great storms that I experienced on that exposed coast—Irene, in October of 1959; in 1964, Hilda, the first real hurricane of my life; the nameless tropical storm that came in June of 1965; and Hurricane Betsy, in the fall of that same year; in June of 1966, Alma would frighten, humble and exhilarate me all at the same time. But no less than the sight of a heron standing in the swash of the storm-wracked shore, one foot on a downed sand pine bole. No less than the peeps playing footsie with the quieted wavelets, the ghost crab peeking out of its tunnel, the hermit crab from a conch shell, the narcissus-pale trumpet of the railroad vine, or the houndstooth pattern of bird’s feet on the sand.

How could any ordinary school compare?

For Mama, playacting at Merrymeeting was hardly enough. She discovered that first fall a little theatre troupe in Pensacola and cast herself instantly as a star. The discovery that the troupe had put on Teahouse of the August Moon the previous season devastated her. Only the conviction that the show must go on enabled Mama to fight off a massive migraine. She comforted herself with the anticipation of trying out for the new production the troupe was planning: Anastasia. For hours, she fussed with her hair, and put on her most regal diamond earrings. Her accent developed a tinge of the foreign, though just what foreign it was impossible to say. Constipated British English was the only element that I could name; the rest had likely never been heard on any known continent or planet.

She returned from her audition with the ever-threatening migraine at full bore, and sore feet, leaving her in misery from the crown of her head to the tips of her toes.

On seeing how white and strained Mama’s face was, Miz Verlow sent bourbon and ice for her up to our room.

“So thoughtful of her,” Mama said, with her old Alabama accent, and knocked back half a glass at once.

Tears ran down her face as I massaged her feet by candlelight that evening.

“I should have known,” she said. “All these little theatre groups are cliques, talentless cliques. Pass me the ashtray, darling. Those people—classless. They wouldn’t know talent if somebody came in and knocked them over the head with an Oscar.”

Under my fingers, she stretched her toes and flexed her feet and moaned softly.

“Do I look like an understudy to you? I’m supposed to wait in the wings for that mumbling po-faced drip to fall off the stage?” She breathed cigarette smoke at the ceiling. “At least they’re going to do A Streetcar Named Desire next. I am Blanche DuBois. Just look at me.”

Depend upon the kindness of strangers though Mama always had, she was not Blanche DuBois, nor did she manage to wish her rival off the stage of Anastasia. Each time she went to Pensacola for rehearsals, she came back with a migraine and pain in her feet. The night arrived that she could barely walk.

Miz Verlow summoned Dr. McCaskey, who ordered bed rest for Mama. That was the end of Mama’s little theatre career. The migraines let up, and the pain in her feet. When she was on them again, she was summoned by the doctor to have her feet x-rayed. Dr. McCaskey found nothing wrong with Mama’s feet that wearing a larger size shoe would not cure. The diagnosis made Mama furious. She made me swear that if she were on her deathbed, I would never ever call that charlatan.

On the twenty-first of November, smoke billowed over Pensacola. Mama and Miz Verlow and I sat on an overturned skiff on the splat of beach and watched the city docks burn. We could taste the soot in the air. The fire stormed on the docks and vomited lurid smoke and ash, the fire trucks and fireboats keened, the hoses and cannons hurled water onto the flames, and the figures of men, shrunk by distance and the enormity of the fire, looked like imps in the midst of hellfire. The cacophony of sound was hellish too; it seemed to me that if one could hear the caterwauling of the damned, it would sound just so. The water of the bay reflected pillars of flames, reveling and dancing, like a sea of drowned candles.