Candles Burning

Fifty-nine

THE day we set out, Grady and I made Tallassee by dinner-time, but of course we didn’t go Mama’s crazy route through Elba. I told no one that I was going. Grady was always good at keeping his trap shut, so we had fixed our own day, borrowed the Edsel from Roger, and snuck off as soon as it was light enough to see.

Tallassee had gotten smaller, to my eye. That’s the way it felt, though of course I knew that it was Calley Dakin who had gotten bigger.

The first thing we did was hit a diner that served breakfast all day and night. After we had filled our stomachs, we went looking for a service station to refill the Edsel’s tank. The sight of a rusty red Pegasus sign sent my pulse racing. I took it for luck and it was: The gas station had a telephone booth with a phone book chained inside.

I checked Mr. Weems’s phone number against the list in my lunar notebook and copied out his home address. The names in the phone book jumped from Ethroe to Everlake with no stop for Evarts. A careful study of the page that listed physicians informed me that Tallassee had more doctors than when I was a child, but that Dr. Evarts did not appear to be among them.

The listings for lawyers offered no Adele Starret, not even A. Starret.

“I’ll write the Alabama bar,” I told Grady. “Adele Starret would have to be listed with them.”

“If she was for real.”

When he said that, for an instant I felt as if he had decided that I had made the whole thing up. A certain mulishness welled up in me.

I checked that phone book for Verlows and Dakins too, in case of new listings or a mistake by the directory assistance. Not a one. I didn’t expect to find Fennie Verlow’s name but it seemed strange that a clan as big as the Dakins should have no listings. Surely some of them would share a party line with someone somewhere.

Grady occupied himself gawking at Tallassee. He hadn’t ever been outside of a thirty-five-mile radius of Pensacola, and marveled at how strange it was to be so far north. He wasn’t sure that he liked it, being so far from the Gulf or any other body of saltwater, never mind he didn’t understand half of what anybody said to him.

Without a map, and depending on a small child’s memory, I had more trouble than I expected finding Ramparts. We kept coming to the same block of recently built houses.

Grady drove us downtown, where I went into the old pharmacy. To my relief, Mrs. Boyer was behind the cash register and Mr. Boyer was visible in the back of the store, doing his pharmacist duties. They were both older than I remembered but not as old as I expected they might be.

“Mrs. Boyer,” I said.

For a second there was a question in her eyes because she wasn’t sure who I was.

“I’m Calley Dakin,” I told her.

“Calley Dakin,” said Mrs. Boyer. “Well, I never.”

Mr. Boyer raised his head and peered at me.

I waggled fingers at him.

“All grown up,” marveled Mrs. Boyer.

“Yes’m,” I agreed, and laughed as if being grown up was just what I put down on my Christmas list. “It’s been so long since I was here, Miz Boyer, I caint seem to find Ramparts!”

“Oh dear.” Mrs. Boyer’s smile faded straight away and she looked very unhappy.

Mr. Boyer came to the front of the store.

“Calley Dakin,” he said, shaking his head. “Honey, Ramparts burned down, oh—well, years ago—it went for new houses. All those old live oaks, chainsawed right down.”

To know Ramparts was gone was an unexpected relief, though I felt some regret for the trees.

“Oh.” I put my hat back on and tied the ends loosely. “Oh, well.”

“She didn’t know,” Mrs. Boyer said to Mr. Boyer in a pitying voice.

He shook his head. “Didn’t know.”

“Thanks,” I said, and stumbled gracelessly out the door to the Edsel.

The Boyers looked out at me as I flung myself into the passenger seat.

“Ramparts is gone,” I told Grady. “Burned.”

Grady glanced at the Boyers looking out at us behind the plate glass of the pharmacy. He turned the key in the ignition.

“Shit,” he said with notable cheerfulness. “Ain’t it allus the way. I was looking ford to them umbrellas.”

The Weems’s house was at least still there, though it took three go-rounds of the neighborhood before we found it.

This time Grady went to the door with me.

A colored woman answered the doorbell.

I opened my mouth, intending to inquire politely if Mr. Weems was at home, but what fell out was, “Tansy?”

She stared at me through thick-lensed glasses and crossed her arms over her stomach. Her hair had gone all white.

I took my hat off.

She blinked rapidly.

“Hit Calley Dakin,” she said, in an amazed mocking tone.

“Yes.” I drew Grady forward to stand next to me. “This is my friend Grady Driver.”

She gave him a cursory once-over that made it clear she didn’t think much of my choice of friends.

I managed to ask then if Mr. Weems were at home.

“Mistah Weems allus at home,” Tansy said. “Had hisself a stroke three years ago come Chrismus.” With considerable satisfaction, she added, “He caint talk, caint walk, caint get out the bed. He’s jes pitiful.”

“Well, maybe I could see Mrs. Weems.”

Tansy smiled grimly. “Miz Weems pass over. She loss her mine and Doc Evarts give her some pills to make her better and she took ever one of ’em all to onced.”

“What about Dr. Evarts?”

“He don’t live here no mo,” she told me, again with seeming pleasure. “He divoice Miz Evarts and lef. She done got married up again to a fella in Montg’mry.”

“Well, where’s my brother, Ford?”

“Doc Evarts took him with ’m.”

Though Tansy was telling me what I wanted to know, it was like begging for cookies and getting one at a time.

“Tansy, where?”

Tansy reached out and touched the tip of my nose. “What you done to your hair, gurl?” Then she started to close the door in my face. As the door closed between us, she said, “N’awlins. Hear tell they done gone to they Quarter.”

Then the door was closed.

“Ain’t got no address, do you?” Grady called after her.

Her voice came from behind the door, as if she still stood there. “Cracker wanna know? Ah know where they gone be someday,” she said, “where’s all the rest of them Carrolls, down to Hellfire Street, care o’ Satan hisself.”

I pounded on the door. “Tansy, I ain’t done talkin’ to you, open this door.”

Amazingly, she cracked the door open wide enough to peer out at me.

“What’s Rosetta’s last name? Where’s she at?”

“She at the colored boneyard. Her girls done bought her a big stone crosst, says Rosetta Branch Shaw right on it ’n’ her dates. Mama. Real sweet.”

We didn’t say anything to each other until we were back in the Edsel.

“Dry hole,” Grady said.

“Tansy’s grave’s gone be marked with a Dead End sign,” I told him.

He laughed and then said seriously, “I caint take another day, even if she ain’t lying and we could find ’em in a place as big as N’awlins.”

“I want to see Daddy’s grave and Mamadee’s. We’d still have time to go to Montgomery and maybe find Miz Verlow’s sister, Fennie.”

He shrugged.

“After that, we make a U-turn for Pensacola, OK? By then I reckon I’ll have seen about as much of Alabama as I ever expected to,” he said.

“Let’s see that phone book again.”

“For what?”

“Check the funeral parlors. Undertakers must know all the graveyards around here.”

“That’s right smart.”

“Not that smart. If I’d thunk of it before, I could have called ahead.”

Grady grinned. “Rattle them bones, Miz Calley.”

It seemed important to keep the red Pegasus in sight from the phone booth when I called the funeral parlor with the biggest ad.

A breathless, elderly voice answered. I had to repeat my question twice, and have it repeated back to me.

Then I waited, while the phone transmitted the sounds of the elderly person moving around what was apparently quite a small office space, trying to get a file drawer open and eventually succeeding, and a rummage among paper, all while the elderly person hummed and talked to—himself, I decided.

On picking up the receiver again, he cleared his throat, a process that easily took three minutes, and had Grady in stitches when I held the phone to his ear.

“This is necessarily partial,” the elderly man warned me sternly when he finally could speak. “Country folk bury folks anywhere, you know, and call it a cemetery.” Then he read the list, haltingly and with much repetition as I asked for spellings and directions, and while he lost and found his place in the listing.

I had hoped that I would remember the name of the graveyard where Daddy was buried if I heard it but when he finished, nothing had twigged my memory. All I had, and I wasn’t sure what the use for it might be, was how to get to the Last Times Upon Us Church Cemetery where Mamadee was supposed to be interred. I wasn’t even sure that I wanted to go there.

“You reckon that old fart choke up a lung?” asked Grady. “Let’s call him up again and see if we can get him to gargle up the other one.”

At least he was entertained. He looked at the directions that I had noted down. “You recall any of this?”

I shook my head no. “Never been there, to the best of my knowledge.”

It took stopping a deputy but we did find it.

Mamadee had come down in the world, for sure. The Last Times Upon Us Church Cemetery reminded me of the one where Daddy had been buried; if anything, it was grimmer. Some kind of mineral crystal winked in the sour dirt and among the dandelions and plantain that seemed to be the only green things able to grow there. Most graveyards, somebody lays out in plots. Nobody had done that in the Last Times boneyard. It was a crazy quilt, the rectangles of the graves helter-skelter, puzzle-pieced and shoe-horned in among each other. It was a weird contrast to the grove of spindly pines behind the graveyard, for the pines, making room for themselves by acidifying the ground beneath with their dead needles, were spaced as neat as tacks on a card at the hardware store.

Grady and I wandered around the chaotic boneyard for a good forty minutes before we found the grave. The stone wasn’t even marble. It was a coarse, already cracking, cement bar set unevenly in the ground.

Grady made a face and shivered. “Cold. Brrr. She don’t even get a Bible verse or an R-I-P?”

“There’s two Rs in Carroll,” I said. “I don’t know why she hasn’t climbed back out to fix it.”

“Don’t go putting any ideas in her old daid haid, now.” Grady was not entirely joking. “I don’t see how it’s gone help find Brother Ford.”

“Me either. Less blow this pop stand. I want to go to Banks.”

“Banks? We stickin’ some up after all?”

“Banks, Alabama. It’s on the way back to Pensacola.”

“What’s in Banks? You tole me Great-gran’s house burned down years ago.”

“Might be a graveyard there.”

Grady went back to the sedan, dropped in behind the wheel and shook out the tattered old road map that he had gotten from somebody he knew at some gas station on Santa Rosa Island.

I crouched quickly, wet the end of my finger and touched the dirt of Mamadee’s grave. I tasted my fingertips. Salt.

“Banks,” he said. And after a few seconds, “Bingo. There she is. That’s not what I call dreckly back.”

“It’s only a couple hours from Pensacola.”

He could see that, of course.

“Ain’t nothin’ there, Calley. Some railroad tracks and a couple streets. Probably nothing but graveyards there, on account of ever’body ever lived there is dead. Probably anybody even stays there overnight drops dead on account of there’s so much nothin’ in Banks, Alabama, there ain’t even air.”

He had a point. Finding a house that had burned down a decade or more ago was likely to be something of a chore, never mind the grave of my maternal great-grandmama, in the hope that I would learn something from it.

“You got the right of it,” I told him. “Less gone home.”

He chucked me under the chin. “I’m sorry, Calley. I wisht we’d found your brother.”