Candles Burning (19 page)

We had driven over one hundred and twenty miles. I longed to have the maps back. I was almost certain that the route we had taken to Elba was easily twice as long as it needed to be, in part because of the detour in the direction of Banks. I had no idea why Banks was of any interest to Mama.

Mama seemed uncertain where to go next. She seized upon the fact that it was past time for dinner—the midday meal in Alabama—and declared that if she did not eat soon, she would faint. In fact, she was more than hungry; she was exhausted.

Elba is a small place in Coffee County. The best thing about it, Mama said, was that we knew nobody there and nobody knew us. She was wrong about that. The best thing about Elba to me was that it was south of Montgomery, the worst was that it was nowhere near far enough south.

No doubt things have changed since those days, and Elba sports a Holiday Inn or a Motel 6, or even something as grand as a Marriott Courtyard, but then, the choice was between the Hotel Osceola, Slattery's—which was locally called Sluttery's for its fleas, Mama told me—or a boardinghouse. Mama would sleep in the Edsel before she would stay at a boardinghouse. She explained that everything and everyone in a boardinghouse was so ashamed of themselves that the blinds were always drawn, that the mattresses had all been died on, by somebody or other, and that everyone used the same bathroom, which with the awful food, created a universal constipation, which was all anyone in a boardinghouse ever talked about: being bound up. Impactions, Mama said.

The Hotel Osceola lacked the grandeur of the Hotel Pontchartrain by a country mile. To my surprise, when we entered it, Mama went straight to the desk and asked for the best room. The best room was on the third floor and it was the only room in the whole hotel that had a bathroom to itself. Mama went back to the Edsel with the fat man behind the desk and had him bring in some of our luggage—a suitcase of hers, my little red one, and the footlocker. Mama left me in the lobby while she accompanied the man with the luggage up to the room she had taken, as if she expected to spend the night there. I was disappointed and worried. What if Mama changed her mind and turned around and took us back to Ramparts?

She came down again and we had dinner—in the dining room downstairs, where we could look out at Elba's Main Street, and speculate on which of the old men sitting, chins on their chests, in the rocking chairs on the verandah of a general store across the street, might actually be dead. At two o'clock, we were the last to be served and all by ourselves. Mama guzzled glass after glass of unsweetened iced coffee and kept complaining to me of the heat, though it was not hot, not at all.

I remember thinking even then, it is a good thing Mama doesn't worry about me. Because if she thought she was responsible for me too, she would be even worse off in her mind.

“It's a good thing we have that footlocker upstairs, isn't it, Calley? Maybe it failed to save your daddy's life, but it sure as hell is gone save ours.”

That's how upset Mama was—she said “hell” in a public place. She said “ours” too, reassuring me a little.

Upstairs in the best room, she got way more upset. For the first time since she had tied it on me, she undid from around my neck the silk string with its pair of keys. The one key, of course, was to her cedar chest back in Ramparts; she tossed it onto the counterpane of the bed. Then she knelt by the footlocker to unlock it.

It was empty.

Except for the dark stains of Daddy's blood.

All color drained from her face. She rocked on her heels and staggered to her feet.

“Oh Jesus God! Jesus God!” she cried, and bolted to the bathroom.

Of course I followed and saw her kneeling at the commode, vomiting the iced coffee-black contents of her stomach.

When she pushed herself back onto her haunches, I dampened a washrag at the basin and gave it to her to wipe her mouth. Then I dampened another and bathed her face as she raised it to me. Her shivering and shuddering and shaking alarmed me. I wanted to run to the telephone and call the desk for a doctor.

She grabbed my wrist and pleaded with me. “It was there this morning, Calley! You saw it! It was there when we got up this morning and it weighed so much, we could hardly move it. The only key was on the string you had around your neck and you never took it off, did you?”

“No, ma'am.”

I had not. But I believed at once that the money had not been stolen from the trunk, not at all.

After we had gotten it out of Ramparts and into the Edsel, and Mama and I had gone back into the house, someone had simply taken the trunk with the money in it and in its place had left the identical trunk, which had once contained Daddy's dismembered torso. At seven, I had yet to watch enough television or see enough movies to understand that the bloody footlocker should have been in an evidence room in New Orleans. In the end, I picked up that information from police procedural paperback novels, sometime in my early teens. If I had known, I probably would have figured that if Mamadee could fix judges in Alabama, she could fix cops in New Orleans, Louisiana. I still believe it.

Mama began to recover herself, allowing me to help her to her feet and to the bed. She flinched away from the footlocker and closed her eyes so that she would not see it. Once she was off her feet, I went back to the bathroom to wet one of the washrags again with cool water. I folded it over her closed eyes and sat down next to her to take one hand in mine.

“Get that
thing
out of my sight!” Mama's words came from between her gritted teeth, behind the mask of the washrag on her eyes.

I was able to shove and drag the footlocker into a closet and close the door. It smelled. It reeked of old blood, like the butcher's shop. The odor was so foul, I could not understand why we had not smelled it instantly upon entering the room, or how Mama and the man who brought it up could not have noticed.

“What are we gone do?” Mama asked me in a despairing voice.

“What about Fennie?” It was the question Mama expected to hear from me, I think.

“What could Fennie do? We don't even know her name.”

But Mama got Fennie's name right this time. By saying
we don't know her name,
Mama implied it would be all right if I could provide Fennie's surname, and furthermore some way of getting a signal of distress to her.

“It's Verrill,” I said. Mama didn't care for me to read her too closely. “Verrill. No, that's not right. Verlow. It's Verlow.”

“Does that do us any good?”

I shook my head.

“For some reason,” Mama said, “I have the feeling that Fennie Verlow doesn't live in Tallassee.”

“Me neither.”

“Me either, Calley,” Mama corrected me. “Wherever that woman does make her humble abode, she might have a phone, but we don't have the number, do we?”

“No ma'am.”

“Well then, I suppose if you want to be any good to me at all, you had better go downstairs and find your mama aspirin for her throbbing head.”

“I need some money.”

“Go downstairs and beg for it, darling.”

I just stood there, hornswoggled.

“Might as well get in practice, because from now on, we'll be begging something from somebody every day of our lives. Today is just begging two dimes for a tin of aspirin from the first kind-looking gentleman you run across in the lobby. Don't ask a lady, darling, because she'll give you twenty cents, but afterward she will dig till she finds out exactly whose little girl you are.”

Mama lied. O my did Mama lie. We were not yet paupers. She had not mentioned her jewelry or any of the valuable items she had taken from Ramparts, nor her secret store of cash, very possibly including my silver dollar. And we had the Edsel. She could sell it. I knew what it sold for—an amount that was a fortune indistinguishable from the missing million-dollar ransom to a seven-year-old.

As I closed the door, the telephone rang in our room. That
brrrring
of the telephone in a hotel room in Elba, Alabama, where no one knew we were, let me breathe again.

It was Fennie, of course: no need to linger to be sure of it.

Mama said, “Hello,” in her sweetest voice—always reserved for strangers.

I ran down the corridor so that I would not hear any more.

Downstairs, I did not beg for twenty cents for Mama's BC. I went up to the lady at the tiny counter just inside the front door of the hotel. She sold Chiclets, Tiparillos, and the
Dothan Eagle
.

Wrinkling my brow, making sure my glasses were a little crooked, I said, “My mama has a throbbing headache and she sent me down for some BC but she did not give me any money. She said I could charge it to our room like we did in New Orleans one time—”

The counter lady was a young woman, hardly more than a girl. She might have cooed over an infant but ambulatory children were of little interest to her. Presented with a lump of a girl child of questionable intelligence, she wanted to get rid of me more than she wanted to confirm that I was, in fact, the child of a registered guest. She slipped the BC across her counter as she smiled artificially at someplace over my head.

Mama never asked me where I got the money for the BC. She had other things on her mind. She had to figure out how to leave the Hotel Osceola with the grandeur befitting her station at the same time she skipped on the bill.

“We are going to meet your friend Fennie's sister in Pensacola Beach,” Mama said. “When I mentioned that you had never seen the Gulf of Mexico or played in white sand, your friend Fennie would not hear the end of it. So, because of you, I suppose we have to leave
this
place and go to
that
place.”

Mama was appropriating what Fennie Verlow must have asked, I knew.

“Oh, we can stay here, Mama.”

“No we can't. If we stay here we will run up a bill. We go to your friend Fennie's sister's in Pensacola Beach or else you go back downstairs and start begging a good deal more than twenty cents for a pack of BC tablets.”

“How did Fennie know we were here?”

“She has relatives here in Elba”—so much for no one in Elba knowing us—“or that's what she said. Maybe one of them works in the hotel kitchen. Or is a chambermaid. Or runs the telephone exchange.”

“Maybe,” I said. “So maybe we could just get in the car and drive off like we were gone to visit somebody and leave everything here and that way nobody knows we have left and Fennie's relatives can take care of everything when the people downstairs are not looking.”

Mama looked at me with thoughtful amusement.

“I know what happened. I must have been walking alongside the gutter one day and a little baby reached up and grabbed the hem of my skirt and that little baby was you. Because no real daughter of mine would counsel theft and deception.”

“I am sorry, Mama.”

“And you are deeply ashamed too, I hope, as befits a proper young girl.”

“Yes ma'am.”

That's exactly what we did.

No one stopped us when we drove away from the hotel without baggage or receipt. And the luggage was waiting for us when we arrived at Fennie's sister's house.

THE drive south from Elba to Pensacola is a little less than two hundred miles, though it does not look nearly that far on a map. I had time to wonder why Mama's first thought had been of Fennie. I watched Mama closely. I listened to everything she said. It was the gas gauge that convinced me that Mama had no idea what was going on, after all.

We left the hotel by the front entrance—to go in any other fashion would have been tantamount (to Mama, at least) to be branded with a
P
for pauper. On our grand parade through the dinky lobby of the hotel and out to the Edsel, parked in one of the spaces in front of the dining room, Mama indulged in a running verbal debate with herself about whether we really wanted to visit our (imaginary) aunt Tallulah out on the Opp Road. I wished that I had an aunt Tallulah, just to have an aunt of that name. For a wild instant, I wondered if my real aunts, Faith and Hope, lived on the Opp Road, under the name of Tallulah. Faith and Hope Tallulah, secondhand clothes.

No one paid any attention to Mama's performance.

I knew no one would stop us and that we would get to Pensacola Beach. I expected Fennie's sister to be like Fennie. I even expected that Fennie herself would be there to greet us.

Mama was still sighing with the effort of the earth-shaking decision when she settled behind the wheel and fiddled the key into the ignition. She looked in the rearview mirror as she backed out and kept checking it. From long experience, she managed to pop in the cigarette lighter and light a cigarette, using both hands, as the ungrand Hotel Osceola shrank in the mirror and fell away behind us. She held the cigarette between two fingers as she blew smoke.

“Look out the back for the sheriff and bend your ear for the cock of a rifle, baby. Because you have to tell your mama when to duck,” she said.

Hanging over the backseat, I pretended to watch for the sheriff. Oddly enough, a sheriff's car appeared just as we were leaving Elba. I did not draw Mama's attention to it. The sheriff was not after us. I had seen enough television to know that sheriffs do not shoot just anybody for minor things like speeding or skipping a hotel bill. And if we did get stopped, no mere deputy, let alone a sheriff, would have a chance against Mama. What she had done to those FBI agents, she could do to any mere man. And to the best of my observation at that time, any man was mere.

“We have crossed the border into Florida,” Mama said about an hour later. “You can sit down and rest your eyes, Calley.”