Candles Burning

Fifty-eight

A few days later, just before sunup, I dislodged the collar of the light fixture in my crookedy closet and felt around above it for my tin box.

My fingers informed me of grit and lint and dust and then—a flash, as my arm went rigid with shock and sharp little points exploded into my eyes. The electricity hit me hard enough to knock me deep into the corner of the closet, and in doing so, broke the contact between my hand and the live wire.

For a moment I was dazed. My head felt as if it were going to explode. My first coherent reaction was fear that the little bits that had sprayed at me were glass. But I could see. I managed to bring my left hand up to brush at my face. Grit and lint and dirt. Above me, I could hear a tiny smolder of fire like little mouse teeth chewing something up.

My right arm ached deep into the socket; it lay slack across my torso. I could not lift it. Every other muscle was weak as dust. I’d wet myself. The closet was not only dark because the light was blown out; there was smoke in it. I coughed.

As quickly as I could, I sorted myself out and struggled out of the closet. My strongest emotion was one of disgust at my own stupidity; if this didn’t prove that no one on this earth could be stupider than Calley Dakin, I didn’t know what would. A small dirty cloud of smoke hung just below the ceiling of my room. The window was open; I turned on my little fan to help circulate the smoke on out and draw in the good air.

Taking the flashlight from my bottom drawer, I staggered back into the closet. It was a huge relief to see no flame. I no longer heard the fire; apparently it had gone out.

I sniffed. Lovely. A bouquet of fragrant pee, ash and ozone smell. The flashlight beam showed me the electrical line and the top of the light fixture. Where the line joined the fixture, the insulation was gone. I knew at once that I had managed to touch a live wire, but the beam showed me where it was. The little tin box was wide open—and heaped with ash and fragments of burnt bills.

So much for storing up treasure in this world. I dropped onto my bed, pulled a pillow over my face and laughed into it until my stomach hurt.

I had a mess to clean up, and myself. I kept a supply of small waxed-paper sandwich bags for disposal of used tampons. With a couple of these in hand, as quietly as I could and with due care of the exposed wire, I collected the little tin box and its ashy contents. Then I played the flashlight again to make sure that I had gotten everything even remotely flammable. The light picked up a dark corner of something. I used the flashlight itself like a hook to move the object closer. It was a book.

Even before I turned the flashlight full on it, I recognized the most common size and shape of a bird guide. An odd thought intruded: I don’t see it. It’s not there. But it was, most assuredly. There. As gingerly as if it were electrified, I touched it with my forefinger.

Just a bird guide. Forget it.

A puddle of something soft draped over the book, and a lump of gold hung against the edges of its pages. The bird harness, the egg locket.

I drew the book toward me and gathered the loops of silk rope and the egg locket with the other.

The book fit my hand perfectly—that sort of book is designed exactly for fitting hands. Still, I felt an excitement kindling inside me that I could neither explain nor resist. A jolt. A blast. It was the way I felt when I heard Haydn for the first time, or Little Richard.

I remembered: I put the book there, when I moved into my crooked little room. I didn’t need it. I had other, more recent guides. Mama, someone, might notice that it was stolen, that my uncle Robert Junior’s name was written on the flyleaf.

But I had not hidden the other books that I had taken from Ramparts, and, in fact, Mama had never looked into any of them. Every book that I owned had somebody else’s name written on the flyleaf.

My heart felt as if it were on one of those pull chains with the white knob at the end. Something yanked that chain, and my whole being seemed to light up inside me. One of my fingertips stung as if burned. The one with the scar on it.

And dreams that were memories opened like a book in my mind.

A long time ago, the ghost of my great-grandmama Cosima spoke to me, preparing me to meet a ghost named Tallulah Jordan, who vanished before anyone else saw her. And Tallulah Jordan had instructed me to listen to the book. The burning of my fingertip had identified the book as this one, my very first own bird guide, that was stolen goods from a dead uncle.

The cold gold egg locket in my palm had my name inside it, opposite a picture of a woman I thought must be my great-grandmama. She was dead before I was born. Why had she written my name inside the egg locket?

The household was only just beginning to stir. Mrs. Mank’s Benz sportster was parked next to Miz Verlow’s Lincoln on the kitchen side of the house. She had been expected; I’d helped Roger and Cleonie arrange her suite, and then heard her arrive shortly after I had gone to bed. I left the house barefoot, with the legs of my coveralls rolled up to my knees and pinned there. My hat in a pocket of my coveralls. I needed some light, some sun, and even the thin light of dawn was freshening. As I had done habitually since a little girl, I ran barefoot through the swash, northward, away from Merrymeeting.

The birds were about their business, and so were the critters that lived in the sand, damp or dry, and the ones in the vegetation beyond the first dune. The beach mice were snugging up to sleep away the day. No other human beings were visible on the great swathe of white sand.

The bump of the book in my overall pocket intensified the faster I ran, until it was spanking me, as if I were a horse that needed urging in some furious race. The other horses in the race were invisible to me, though, and I could not see a finish line. I slowed to a trot and then a stroll, veering across the beach toward the dunes. The finish line, it appeared, was my nest in the high grass, and there it was.

Still breathing deeply from my run, I took the book from my pocket and sank into panic grass and sea oats, to the patch my bottom had long since shaped for me. The coarse tall grasses made space for two when Grady was with me, but when I was alone it seemed to fill in cozily around me.

The bird guide was familiar to my hands. Thick for a small book, the paper of its pages as thin as the print on each page was tiny. Most of the dust had shaken off the book while it was in my pocket but the cover was still slightly dust-dull. I rubbed the book, back and front, and then the spine, on the thighs of my overalls.

With the spine up, my vision blurred as if I had gotten dust in my eye. I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes, and felt a few quick automatic tears leak. They sparkled in my lashes as I blinked, and were gone.

On the spine of the book, where the legend should have been, were the words

Once more, I tried to clear my vision with rapid blinking, but the legend remained the same. The absurdity of it made me laugh. I had no memory of altering it, and did not see how it could have been done. It took an effort to turn the spine away into the palm of my left hand, to look at the blank front. Then I flipped the book and looked at the spine again, as if to catch it changing back to what it should have been. It remained

I paged a leaf at a time: first blank page, the thin second blank page, the flyleaf, and instead of Bobby Carroll, the inscription was

And the title leaf read

When new, the guides are so firmly bound that they never just fell open, but the binding of this one, in the dry dusty space above the closet, had become loose. It fell open to the colored illustrations. Looking up at me was a cartoon of a loony woodpecker—loony not just in its expression, but its coloration, as it was all black-and-white as the common male loon is, and it sported a red crest (not that loons have crests, but woodpeckers do). Like many birds, the eyes of loons are red. The loony woodpecker clung to a cartoon tree trunk. It was identified as

The loony woodpecker winked at me, double-drummed the trunk of the tree, and then cackled

I dropped the book as if it were afire. The woodpecker’s cackle ended abruptly in an offended squawk. The sounds were very like those of Woody Woodpecker, but harsher and more mournful.

Cautiously, I picked it up again and let it flop open.

A cartoon parakeet looked up from the page. The cartoonist had turned the yellow feathers of the parakeet’s crown into a handkerchief wrapped around its head, and patched one eye piratically. The fluffy green feathers on its legs billowed into voluminous pirate’s pants, tied about the waist with a string. It was identified as

The parrot screamed

I slammed the book closed between my palms. As with the woodpecker, the bird’s call ended in an insulted squawk, in a much higher pitch.

I was listening to the book, but it was so bizarre, I could hardly give thought to what I was hearing.

I let it fall open a third time. It was a pigeon cartooned this time, in a threadbare morning coat with tails and a hobo’s bindle under its wing. Its name was given as

The bird did not so much sing as fret

I stuck my tongue out at the cartoon pigeon. It pursed its beak—a cartoon bird can do that—and gave me a raspberry.

I closed the book and then opened it quickly, as if to catch the contents on the change.

The cartoon that looked up at me was of a Scarlet Macaw. It wore the traces of a harness.

Cosima, it rasped. Cosima, Calley want a cracker. Calley want a cracker.

The voice of this bird, I thought, was a real bird’s voice. I shut the book gently, as if lowering a shade over a birdcage.

The book held tight in my sweaty, frustrated grasp. If it had something more to say, I wasn’t at all sure that I wanted to listen to it. After a moment’s fidget, I let the book fall open once more.

The cartoon on the page was of myself, with my ears exaggerated into wings. It was labeled:

Calliope—Kalliope—is a Greek word; clairaudient, half-French, half-Latin. It was easy enough for me to understand. I had taken Latin as much for its use in taxonomy as for the foundation that it provided for all the other Romance languages, and English, and intended to take Greek as soon as I had access to instruction. But I did not need a spurious Greco-Franco-Latin tag to name myself, or my nature.

I waited. The bird’s beak parted slightly and out came, whispered in my daddy’s voice:

Tears ran down my face and I choked out a single sob.

Closing the book again, grasping the spine tight between the thumb and fingers of my left hand, I fanned the pages. I expected the faint breath of the pages on my face. Instead, there was an organ chord.

And from the closed book, in the voices of the cartooned birds that were pictured within, came a funereal hymn.

So endeth the reading, or the listening.

It was all so utterly nutty that I had to restrain myself from jumping up and pitching the book into the waters of the Gulf.

The pieces of the puzzle were in my head, however, and I could not help pushing them about.

Hope Carroll was the name of one of Mama’s sisters, my aunts, the ones Mamadee had given up to my great-grandmama. I knew nothing more of her than she had had a sister, Faith.

What was I to extract from all this oddybone sass? The cartooned birds—caricatures of the ivory-billed woodpecker, the Carolina parakeet, the passenger pigeon—were of species known or feared to be extinct. The altered wording of the hymn first discouraged hope and then implied resurrection or rebirth. The phoenix, rising from its own ashes. Which told me exactly what? Nothing that my poor birdbrain could sort out. That I was one of the last of the species? Scarlet Macaws weren’t near-extinct. And they weren’t North American birds either.

Despairing of comprehension, I tucked the book back into my overall pocket, and stubbed my fingertips on the egg locket at the bottom.

“I’m psycho,” I told myself aloud. “Schizo. Somebody lock me up.”

The Scarlet Macaw’s name was Calliope, Calley, for short. She had been my great-grandmama’s own bird. Mama had named me after her grandmama’s pet macaw.

I might have laughed, had I not been knuckling tears from my face.

At least Cosima had loved her Calliope, or she would not have attached the egg locket to Calliope’s harness.

As I emerged from the grasses, a darkness against the distance coalesced into the figure of a human being. I slipped down the dune onto the beach. A few steps confirmed my immediate suspicion: Mrs. Mank was walking south on the sand. As broad as the beach was, we were the only two people on it and there was no way I could avoid her.

After years of not being sure how I felt, I knew then that I did not like Mrs. Mank, but I did want the education that she was offering, and I did not know how to get it on my own.

Mrs. Mank was dressed as informally as I ever saw her (until she was dying), in sandals, clamdiggers and a middy. In splendid oxymoronic defiance of their purpose, the clamdiggers had a parade-ground crease in them. Every stitch she wore was hand-tailored and looked it. I couldn’t say what unborn animal had been sacrificed to make the fragile leather for her sandals, but it was likely the last one of whatever it was. She wore dark glasses but no hat and the rising sun highlighted her hair that was no less and no more silvery than it ever had been.

When she reached me, her hand fell directly over my right forearm, which was still more than a little numb from electrical shock. The low sun behind her made a corona around her, bright enough to make me squint.

“Calley, walk with me.”

My legs were longer than hers, and I was a few inches taller, forcing me to shorten my pace to match hers.

“You’re going to be six feet tall,” she said, as if I were a prize ficus plant. She gave me an arch look. “If you stay here any longer, I fear you will become pot-bound.”

“That would be a metaphor.”

“So the local school has taught you something.”

“I hope so, ma’am.”

“What’s that great lump in your pocket? A book?”

“A bird guide.”

“Which one. Let me see it.”

Reluctantly, I gave it up.

The spine read:

“This is ancient,” she declared. “Don’t you have a more recent edition?”

“Yes, ma’am. If I get this one wet or sandy, it’s no loss.”

The skepticism lingered in her face. Her elegantly manicured nails pried at the covers, but the covers seemed to resist. Her eyebrows veed in surprise.

“It’s gotten wet so many times,” I said, trying not to show my utter terror that she would either succeed in opening it or else throw it into the Gulf, “the pages stick together.”

“Glued together, I swear,” Mrs. Mank said. There was an edge of anger in her voice. “I can’t imagine that you could separate one page from another without destroying both.”

I produced my oyster knife and she looked down her nose at it and made a dismissive noise. She thrust the book at me, and I made it disappear into my pocket again.

“Merry Verlow has informed you where you will go to college and that you will live with me,” she said, picking up the thread of her previous remarks. “I know that you would like to finish high school here but that’s impossible. In order to succeed in the caliber of school to which you are going, you need to spend a year in a first-class prep school.”

The thought of leaving Merrymeeting and Santa Rosa Island evoked a shiver of panic. I was not as ready as I thought.

Mrs. Mank squeezed my forearm insistently.

“It’s the right time, Calley. Your mama is engaged to marry Colonel Beddoes. She is going to start a new life. Surely you don’t want her to live the rest of her life alone.”

“Surely, I don’t. It’s not Mama that gives me pause, Mrs. Mank. I was preparing myself to go, just not so soon.”

She said nothing for a time while we walked on. My own thoughts were rushed, my emotions surging from panic to excitement. My whole body shivered with gooseflesh.

“When?” I asked.

“Not very long,” was her placid answer. “Not long at all.”

We were within sight of Merrymeeting.

“There is nothing like the sea air for spurring appetite,” Mrs. Mank remarked. “I am ravenous for Perdita’s breakfast sausage. Say nothing to Roberta Dakin when she returns, Calliope. Let her have the pleasure of her wedding planning.”

We parted in the foyer, Mrs. Mank for the dining room, me for the kitchen.

I won’t tell Mama, I thought. I won’t tell anyone, not even Grady. And not just about leaving.