Candles Burning (11 page)

The room I was accustomed to using was up a short flight of stairs from the others, under the eaves. Once a servant's room, the narrow meager space had been taken over at some time by Junior, who may never have actually slept in it. The greater height in the house of that room must have offered better reception for his radios. The room accommodated a single bed of brown-enameled iron, a dresser with a Bakelite radio on it, and a wooden chair and desk that had seen some hard days. On the desk was a shortwave radio, a spill of pamphlets and old books about ham radio, and a suitcase record player. From the rod in the small closet hung a net bag of mothballs. On the bottom of the closet floor was a wooden orange crate of records, the cardboard sleeves all marked with the name Bob Carroll Jr.

The crate of records was better than pirate gold to me. The records were all far more recently pressed than Captain Senior's; many of the songs could still be heard on the radio. The box contained recordings by Charlie Parker, Count Basie, Duke Ellington and Dizzy Gillespie, and more,
hits
(as they were called on the radio shows) like “Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree,” “Swinging on a Star,” “Rum and Coca-Cola,” “Sentimental Journey.”

Among the records, I kept a rusty chisel, stolen from a toolbox in the barn, in case Mamadee boarded up the room while I was in it. I was big enough now to get out the window, so I probably wouldn't ever need it, but I left it as a courtesy to any other kid Mamadee might board up in the room in future.

Under the iron bed was an old stained china pot with a cracked lid. Over the bed, a few dusty books, with
Robert Carroll Jr.
inscribed in them, held each other up on a homemade wooden shelf. One was Peterson's
A Field Guide to the Birds of Eastern and Central North America
. It was a first edition, published in 1934, not that first edition meant doodly to me then. Another was
Birds of North America
, also dated 1934, with 106 full-color plates of Louis Agassiz Fuertes's paintings. It was a Bible-heavy old book, which for me added to its authority. Hall's
North American Trees: Guide
was easier to take off the shelf without braining myself. The third bird book was the most recent, a 1946
Audubon Bird Guide: Eastern Land Birds
, by Richard Pough. It had green binding and a comfortable fit to the hand. There were three or four others, all pertaining to the natural world, and in their margins, someone had written notes in a script faded to illegibility. I had been looking at those books since I was old enough to reach the shelf and before I could read. Fortunately, Mamadee never came near this room, so I did not have to worry about her catching me with the books and taking them away, which she surely would have for fear that I might enjoy them.

Once I had overheard Mamadee remarking to one of the women with whom she played Bridge, that when her Bobby died, it killed Captain Carroll too, sure as God Made Little Green Apples. I reckoned that meant Captain Senior grieved himself to death, a common fate of the bereaved in Alabama. I had to wonder now that Daddy was dead—if he really was—if
I
could grieve myself to death.

Almost outside the window, one of the old oaks whispered and creaked, and in it, the birds and the squirrels and chipmunks carried on their daily lives.

Mamadee's yardman, Leonard, had placed my suitcase on the bed, my record player on the floor and my Betsy Cane McCall doll and box of paper dolls on the bed. He had opened the window a few inches to air out the room; now it was chilly. I flung my coat on the bed, opened my suitcase and one of the dresser drawers, threw the contents of the first into the second, and slammed them both shut. I slid the suitcase under the bed next to the pot. That left the doll and my paper dolls. I lifted the box top and looked down into it. Betsy McCall Was Still In Pieces. At Ramparts.

My stomach grumbled. I ran downstairs and banged through the doors into the kitchen. Tansy paused with her chopping knife over the carrots she was dicing.

“Gone tear tha hinges right out the wall,” Tansy said. “You git, gal. I don't need no chile unfoot in my kitchen. Somebody could be done a harm.”

“I'm hungry!” I cried. “Desperate hungry!”

“So's a million Chinamen. Git.”

Tansy did the cooking and the light housekeeping and found professional fault with the succession of hard-up women who came in to do the heavy work. Mamadee had fired every servant she had ever had, or had them quit. Tansy had been fired or quit everywhere else and the only job she could get was at Ramparts. They were stuck with each other. Tansy gave Mamadee somebody to rag everyday, and Mamadee gave Tansy somebody to resent everyday.

I banged back through the doors out of the kitchen and headed down the hall for the library.

Ford lunged out of nowhere and grabbed my wrist. He spun me off course and pushed my face against a wall, holding my arm behind me. I opened my mouth to scream and he kneed me in the small of the back, so I couldn't get any air down my lungs.

“Ssshhh,” he whispered in my ear, strong-arming me into the powder room. His breath smelled of bourbon, which meant that he had penetrated the defenses of Mamadee's liquor cabinet once again. He shoved me inside and shut and locked the door behind us. I finally got a look at him. His hair was raked up and down and he had been crying. His nose was leaking. He wiped it with the back of his hand.

“I am gone crazy,” he said in a croak. “I caint take this no more. Mama got Daddy murdered and chopped up by those women. I do not know how but she did. You know it. You don't miss the sound of a mouse fart.” He threatened me with a curled fist. “You tell me how she did it and you tell me why she did it right now, or I swear I will kill you, Dumbo, I will cut your stupid ears off your stupid head and shove them down your throat!”

“She did not!” Then I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Mama did not do what you just said. You are a liar, Ford Carroll Dakin, a liar and a bully.”

We stared each other down for a long moment.

Then Ford said, “She's gone kill me next. You would like that. You would help her.”

I shook my head no. “Course I would help her, but Mama ain't gone kill you. Why would she? Why would she kill Daddy?”

“Money,” he whispered. “Get rid of me, she gets all the money.”

I knew money was important. Mamadee and Mama talked about it enough. I just could not see how any amount of money explained what had happened to Daddy, especially since I was not entirely sure exactly
what had happened
to Daddy beyond two crazy women having killed him and cut him up and stuffed most of him into a footlocker. Mama had not killed Daddy; those women had. And those crazy women had never collected the ransom.

And while Mama had threatened to kill me so many times that I could hardly take it seriously, I knew that she had never threatened to kill Ford, not in my hearing. She doted on him; he could do no wrong in her eyes.

“Money? You can have mine. You can have that silver dollar I got hid in my bedroom at home.” I reconsidered. Daddy gave me that silver dollar for my fifth birthday. “If you really want it.” Now it seemed like we were dickering. “You could let me have that Fred Hatfield card you got.”

“I can take that old silver dollar anytime I want. You are never getting that Fred Hatfield, you might as well forget it.”

I was relieved; if he took it from me, then I was absolved of the guilt that a trade would have carried.

I heard Mamadee's step in the hall.

“Mamadee!” I whispered.

Ford held his finger to his lips. We both froze. Mamadee paused at the powder room door.

“Calley? Ford? Ford, baby, you in there? I heard you. You sick, baby boy?” The doorknob rattled violently. “You unlock this door right now.”

The solitary window was too high and small for escape. There was no way out. Ford never did have sense enough to make sure he had a way out. He shot me a look of warning and flicked the lock.

Mamadee stood in the open doorway with her hands on her hips. “Just what is going on?”

“Nothing, ma'am,” Ford said. “We just had to do some crying, so we come in here so as not to bother anyone.”

My stomach gurgled loudly.

“Calley,” Mamadee said. “How many times have you been told not to swallow air?”

She engulfed Ford in an embrace that he could not gracefully escape. I lingered only long enough to enjoy his discomfort.

“My poor, poor orphan boy,” Mamadee murmured. “Don't you worry now, I'll keep you safe.”

Slipping past them and out the door, I heard Ford hiss, sadly, like a tire with a nail in it.

I stopped with my hand on the doorknob of the library. Mama was inside, talking on the telephone.

“—never informed that the police were gone to search my home. I never saw a search warrant—” There was a pause for an answer, and then Mama continued, “I beg your pardon? You had no business ‘sparing me,' Mr. Weems. You had no business authorizing an invasion of my home. You do not have my power of attorney”—her voice went high and shaky—“that was only to get the ransom money! You had better explain this right now. I will expect you within the hour.”

The telephone receiver crashed down onto its cradle.

Mama blew her nose. “Jesus God,” she muttered.

I opened the door and peeked in. She was sitting at Senior's desk.

“You heard everything, I suppose,” Mama said. “You never mind those words I just used. I am having a crisis. I do not know what is gone on but I do not care for it one bit.”

“Mama, would you like me to rub your feet?”

She chortled incredulously. “Yes, I would, Calley. Yes, I would.”

Mama yanked up her skirt and unhooked her garters. I pulled up a hassock and sat on it to roll down her silk stockings and rub her feet.

“The only useful thing that silly old man had to tell me was that your late beloved daddy owned a plot in some backside-of-the-moon boneyard. Isn't that just the cherry on the whipped cream!”

I guessed that boneyard meant cemetery but the significance of owning a plot, a single plot, in one, escaped me. All I knew was that Mama did not like it.

All the good of the foot rubbing I did went to waste, like the meal that Tansy had prepared for us. An hour later, two hours later, Mr. Weems had not answered Mama's summons to Ramparts, nor was anyone answering her phone calls to the Weems house. The Edsel was still on its way back from New Orleans, by arrangement with Uncle Billy Cane Dakin, and Mamadee wouldn't let Mama have the keys to the Cadillac. Mama threatened to walk to Mr. Weems's house. Tallassee was and is a very small town, so that no place, not even Ramparts, was very far from anywhere else. Mamadee's response was to lock Mama in the salon. While Mama was hurling ashtrays and candlesticks, breaking lamps and punching out windows with a chair, Mamadee called Dr. Evarts.

DR. Evarts had been born and raised in Chicago, gone to college in New York City and studied medicine in Boston. He had settled in Tallassee, Alabama, for the simple reason that there he would have no competition at all. Before he came, the nearest doctor was in Notasulga, twenty-two miles distant. With a near-monopoly in Tallassee, Dr. Evarts made upwards of fifty thousand dollars a year in 1958 dollars. The town provided an office for him. He secured the staffing of his office by marrying a competent, efficient and reasonably attractive registered nurse. It was a sensible, practical marriage—even a love match, if love of money on his part and of social status on hers was love enough. He also owned the small hospital where a few of the old and terribly sick hung on past the time that their nearest and dearest could care for them and where a few of the babies having trouble getting born either made it or didn't. Dr. Evarts got kickbacks from drugstores and the drug salesmen and the morticians and from the bigger hospitals in Montgomery when he sent patients to them, usually for complicated operations. He was received in the finest homes as a near equal. No more than a near equal; after all, no one was ever going to confuse him with a Southerner.

Except for his twice-annual vacations, he was on call twenty-four hours a day every day of the year. He paid a retired doctor from Montgomery to come out and tend his practice during his vacations, not because he cared that much about his patients but he did not want to encourage any poaching of his practice by hungrier physicians in reach of Tallassee.

Of course, he had to deal with Mamadee and the other grandees—
grandees
was one of Daddy's words for them, confusing me (when I was just a knee-baby) into a belief that all the superior folk of Tallassee were somehow related to me through Mamadee. Daddy also called them pooh-bahs. The grandees and pooh-bahs expected immediate attention, immediate relief, and then argued about the bill.

Dr. Evarts also treated the multitudinous diseases of the abjectly poor whites of the Alabama countryside when they could find a dollar or two. Pale and malformed and destitute, these unfortunates led lives hidden to all but the social worker, the sheriff, and the physician. They were deviled with diseases that Dr. Evarts's professors had declared eradicated. The dollar that he demanded from them for an office visit barely covered his costs, and for that reason alone, he slept the sleep of the just and righteous. His conscience was not so advanced for Dr. Evarts to treat coloreds. The nearest medical care for them was in Tuskegee, and how they got there or found the money to pay for their care, was of no interest to him. I learned later that when a colored male made the mistake of entering his office, Mrs. Evarts would determine if the man's complaint was likely to be syphilis, and if so, Dr. Evarts would direct the man to Tuskegee, to participate in the eventually notorious study in which syphilis was
not
treated. He was not the first or the only white physician to follow this practice; all the white physicians in the county had agreed to do it, as part of the study. I have read that colored physicians did also.