Candles Burning (9 page)

It is strange to me that no one then pointed out the coincidence that the footlocker that held the ransom money was identical to the footlocker into which Janice and Judy had worked so hard, so bloodily, so ineffectively, to cram Daddy's remains. Same size, same color, same manufacturer. The war was only over a few years, and given the number of troops under arms, I suppose there must have been hundreds of thousands of the things floating around the country.

When asked why they had singled out Daddy for abduction, Janice said, “Because he was staying on the twelfth floor.”

When asked the significance of the twelfth floor, Judy could provide no answer at all.

When asked why they had not made any attempt to collect the ransom, Judy said, “We were waiting for the right time.”

When asked what the right time would have been, Janice could only shrug.

Why had they tortured Daddy?

Why, when he was dead, had they mutilated and dismembered his corpse?

Why, having gone to the trouble of hiding his torso in a footlocker too small to hold him, all of him, did they leave the footlocker at the foot of the bloodied bed? For lack of a colored man who needed fifteen cents to carry it down the stairs?

In other states, in later years, Judy and Janice might have been judged insane. In Louisiana, in 1958, Judy and Janice were found guilty of kidnapping and first-degree murder. Janice and Judy admitted all the details of Daddy's torture. If they had left anything out, nobody could imagine what it might be. But the two women died without anyone ever discovering
why
they had done what they'd done.

What was the prompting? That was the great mystery, why the case is written about even now.

But here is the truth of it: Janice and Judy had no idea why they had done what they had done. There had been a motive all right, but the motive was not
theirs
. It was someone else's.

In 1958, when I was only a seven-year-old, I was quite certain I knew why Daddy had died.

He died because Mama and I went shopping.

He died because we had gone into the shop that ticked.

He died because Mama's brown Hermès Kelly pocketbook had disappeared, to turn up later inside a locked filing cabinet.

The very day we found the first note, I tried to explain all this to Mama, but she grabbed me by the shoulders and shook me hard, and cried, “What shop, Calley? What are you talking about pocketbooks for? Who in God's Green Glory is Mr. Rideaux, and caint you see that your Mama has other things to think about?”

TWO days after the recovery of The Remains, we returned to Montgomery on the Dixie Hummingbird. It was my first train ride. There were still a lot of firsts in my life at age seven.

The three of us sat by ourselves in the back of a coach, away from the few other passengers. They gawked at us and whispered to one another but left us alone once the train began to move:

 
The footlocker of ransom money was in our coach. Mama made me sit with my feet up on it all the way back from New Orleans. Perhaps she thought no one would suspect that a stupid-looking little girl with overly large ears and clutching a Betsy McCall doll in one fist could possibly have a footlocker full of money under her Mary Janes, or the key to it on a red silk string around her neck. And I was indeed stupid, thanks to the hotel doctor's tranquilizers still lingering in my small child's body. Mama's well-developed facility for believing what she wanted to believe allowed her to pretend that despite the weeklong coverage in newsprint and on the airwaves, the passengers sharing the car were totally unaware of the kidnapping and murder of Joe Cane Dakin. Murder was even then no rarity in New Orleans but the murder of a rich white man is always news anywhere.

Mama had no appropriate widow's weeds with her but while waiting for the coroner's release of The Remains and the departure of the next available train, she had obtained an off-the-rack black suit, black pumps and a veiled hat. She had to lift the veil from time to time to have a cigarette. Her makeup only seemed to make her complexion more pale, and her eyes more bruised and swollen with tears. When she spoke, her voice was thick and shaky and distant.

Ford kept his face turned to the window. He wore a new black tie with his navy gabardine Sunday church suit. He had not cried when we were given the bad news but his fingernails were chewed to the quick. Every chance he had he punched, tripped or gooched me. At one point, he backed me into a corner away from the adults and told me that Daddy had been slaughtered like a hog and butchered. That the two women who did it had intended to cook and eat Daddy. That they had collected his blood to make blood sausage. The excessive detail only convinced me that he was lying, as usual. I wriggled free and escaped to the safety of Aunt Jude's skirts. I almost knocked her over, hugging her.

All the black in my entire wardrobe was on me, in the form of my black Mary Janes and black patent leather belt. Some mothers dress up their little girls like dolls. If Mama ever had done it, she had given up on it by the time I was able to dress myself.

All my dresses, skirts and blouses had the cookie-cutter, ageless, sturdy look of a school uniform. For this return trip, I wore the grey dress with the white Peter Pan collar under my navy wool coat. The red silk string was long enough to hang unseen beneath the dress. The dress and coat were the clothes I had worn on our shopping trip in the rain. Mamadee had sent them out to be pressed on the Monday after Daddy disappeared. I have wondered since if Judy DeLucca had pressed my coat and dress. Certainly they had been returned to the closet with Hotel Pontchartrain paper capes over their shoulders.

As we rode into Alabama, I stared out the window too, but no snow remained to be seen. Try as I might, I could not grasp the magnitude of the calamity that had befallen us. I hardly comprehended what death was. Whatever it was, it happened mostly to old people. I had seen them. Mama and Mamadee shared the conviction that a child was never too young to drag to a funeral parlor or a funeral. I could not recall the specific occasions, only the old people asleep on their satin pillows in their ponderous beds. I do remember that I had felt no fear, no revulsion, and certainly no grief.

But my daddy had not grown grey and wrinkled and shrunken. He had simply gone out and not come back. Everyone insisted that he was not going to come back. I knew that it was childish, so I hid it, but I still clung to the fantasy that he would. I was exhausted with the ceaseless tension of listening constantly for his step.

A porter came with a hand truck to take the footlocker off the train for us. He was a balding middle-aged man with black-framed glasses, arms powerful with the burden of his work, and a uniform worn with pride. He winked at me and gave me a hand up to sit on the footlocker as he trundled it 
after Mama and Ford. Mama didn't notice. To be fair, she did have a lot on her mind at the time, but it was also simple fact that she usually looked right through colored people. Ford was pretending that he was alone in the universe or else waiting for everyone to fall down on their knees and beg his pardon for existing.

“Did you know my daddy?” I asked the porter.

He blinked and tilted his head at me questioningly. I guess he saw in my face some answer to his unspoken question because then he smiled and nodded.

“Not personal, Miss. I am sorry for your loss, though. I hear tell Mr. Dakin was an honest man in his dealings.” He spoke so softly that Mama could not hear.

“Thank you,” I said and repeated the formula that I had heard at wakes and funerals: “I am gone miss him.”

I might have asked him if he knew Ida Mae Oakes but Mamadee was in sight, waiting for us near the exit from the lobby. As soon as we were informed that Daddy was deceased, she hastened back to Alabama before us. It was almost as if she were squeamish in the face of the worst. It had fallen to Uncle Billy Cane Dakin to accompany Mama to identify The Remains. Mr. Weems had lingered another day to help make arrangements and then hightailed it after Mamadee.

“Calley Dakin, get down off that thing right this minute,” Mamadee cried. “What are you, a little heathen? Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, you might have had the decency to buy the man a coffin!”

Mamadee thought anything that I was doing was bad so I wasn't surprised to be found in the wrong yet again. I didn't understand the rest of it because I was still ignorant of Judy and Janice's footlocker.

Mama's black veil hid her face but did not muffle or disguise the fury in her voice. “Mama, I am ashamed of you. You might have had the decency to spare me your ridiculous remarks. You know perfectly well that Joseph is in a mahogany coffin in the baggage car.”

Mamadee did. She just wanted to be sure that no one in the station was unaware of the notorious Widow Dakin and her children.

“You might try to act like a grieving widow, Roberta Ann,” Mamadee scolded.

“What would you know about that, Mama?”

Mamadee seemed to grow taller, like clouds rushing to build up to a tornado. I thought for an instant that she might change into something else, like the archangel driving Adam and Eve from Eden that I had seen once in a picture in a Bible. But she allowed herself to be distracted, pretending that it was necessary for her to oversee the stowing of our luggage in her Cadillac at the curb outside the train station.

A man in a black suit and white gloves, the mortician, was at the curb too, with a hearse backed up and open. He was someone I had seen before, amid the flowers and polish and the whispering of his funeral parlor.

The mortician hurried to Mama's side, to press her hand between his and murmur consolations. We waited on the sidewalk while solemn porters wheeled out Daddy's coffin on a metal flatbed rack. The metal device was all hinges and could be raised and lowered, so the coffin could be slid smoothly into the back of the hearse. Observing it,  
as it was moved, helped me avoid thinking about what was left of Daddy being jostled and disturbed inside the coffin. I didn't really believe there was anything in it at all. The porters removed their hats to Mama and the mortician.

The mortician again pressed Mama's hand and bowed his head to Mamadee before he replaced his hat and hurried to take his place in the front seat of the hearse. A uniformed chauffeur, an elderly colored man who had been hauling white people to their white morgue and then to their white graveyard since Moses was bawling in the rushes, drove the hearse. He was a fixture, like so many of the colored people in our lives, indiscernible from his function.

Mamadee would drive only a white Cadillac, replacing it every three years. Mama had never said anything to her nor had Daddy ever remarked upon Mamadee's automotive disloyalty but we were all aware of it. Her Cadillac always had standard shift because it was gospel that a standard saved gas. Driving a standard was just one of the ways Mamadee informed the rest of the world that she knew what was what. The only problem was that she had never really mastered it.

Once we were all in the Cadillac, Mama in the passenger seat and Ford and I in the backseat with the footlocker between us, Mamadee
 
turned the key and
 
jerked at the shift and stamped her feet on both the gas and brake pedals. The gears shrieked and the car jumped where it stood. Continued assault on the gearshift finally produced forward motion,
 
up over the curb and
down again
 
and onto the street.

“I have found this whole dreadful business humiliating in the extreme,” Mamadee said. “Nothing like this has ever happened to the Carrolls. How could you let it happen?”

We were already well versed in the indelible stain upon the Carroll reputation as Mamadee had expressed the same feelings repeatedly while she was in New Orleans with us. This time, Mama did not take it lying down. She had been waiting and scheming the whole time to get her own back someplace where nobody who mattered might be listening. Mama and Mamadee were in most ways just alike. Like magnets with the same polarities pointed at each other, they forced each other away.

“I did
not
let anything happen,” said Mama, each word slow and distinct. “Nobody asked me if they could kidnap Joseph, torture him, murder him, and then try to fit him in a footlocker that wasn't big enough to hold him.”

This was the first mention of the other footlocker in my presence. Immediately I glanced at Ford. He was rigid, his face white—all the proof I needed that whatever she meant by torture and fitting Daddy into the footlocker was true. Ford had claimed earlier that Daddy had been butchered. Just the thought of the two women cutting off Daddy's head and his limbs stunned me.

Before that moment, for me, torture meant talking when someone had a headache. Whenever Mama had a headache and I said two words within range of her hearing, she would cry out, “Calliope Carroll Dakin, you are torturing your mama!”

Because I had not known Daddy's torso had been fitted somehow into a footlocker, I had no idea until then that it was identical to the one that contained the ransom. My imagination, however, was entirely adequate to the image of Daddy's torso being crammed into the ransom footlocker. I could see myself crammed into a commensurately small space, immobilized, without light or air. An instant's terror struck me breathless: Mama had made me sit with my feet up on that footlocker, with the key on the silk string around my neck, all the way back from New Orleans. But there was the unclaimed ransom, the coffin and the hearse, and Mama's explicit statement to Mamadee that Daddy was in the coffin. And, of course, I was used to the outrageous assertions that were Mamadee's stock in trade.