Candles Burning (35 page)

As quickly and quietly as I could, I shed my clothes and put on my pajamas.

Then she spoke again. “Mama's idea of a joke. Mock Grandmama and make her angry. Ha-ha-ha.”

The next sound she made was a ladylike snore.

IN the years that followed, Miz Starret's communications were always encouraging and hopeful. A settlement of Mamadee's estate was always just around the corner. The suit to regain custody of Ford was well in hand, according to Miz Starret, except it never seemed any closer to coming to trial. Though Mama received letters, the occasional telegram, papers to be signed in the presence of witnesses, and sometimes a half-hour long-distance phone call from Miz Starret telling how the case was going, neither Mama nor I ever saw the woman lawyer again.

I began this story by telling about Daddy's death, and the research that I had done gathering the details that had been kept from me. In the course of that research, I came across a photograph of Mrs. Mank's friend Adele Starret.

The photograph showed Miz Starret sitting at a long table. On her left was Janice Hicks and on her right was Judy DeLucca—the two women who kidnapped and murdered Daddy.

The photograph had been taken in the courtroom, at the defense table.

Adele Starret had been their attorney.

MAMA signed over the Edsel to Miz Verlow almost immediately. The loss did not seem to constrain her. She was spared the expense of upkeep and fuel, thus paring her cost of living to little more than covering her back. In the years to come, she would sell her outdated couturier clothing at a consignment shop and use the money to buy new off-the-rack that was no longer beneath her. Letting her Alabama license lapse, she seemed willfully to forget how to drive. She depended upon Miz Verlow's kindness and that of the occasional guest for transport if she did want to go anywhere.

One morning the Edsel was gone. Miz Verlow offered no explanation. Mama would not lower herself to ask what Miz Verlow had done with it, and its absence actually relieved Mama of the reminder of her losses.

Mama and Mamadee had schooled me from the cradle in dissatisfaction. Mama and I would continue to tug the ends of the rope between us, if only out of habit. But discontent did not come naturally to me. I was in that respect a healthy child; nearly everything under the sun was new to me and very little had yet to stale. I didn't need any promises to be happy to stay right where I was.

Every day after breakfast, a list of chores awaited me. Being useful made me feel needed, and being needed made me feel more secure. The knowledge that I was chalking up nickels in Miz Verlow's account book was a small and secret pleasure—in my opinion, the very best kind.

My hair remained a disgrace. Whenever Mama noticed it again, she would rant at me about Merry Verlow's high-handedness in bleaching and frizzing my hair without her permission. What with the tangled scrub of déclassé tow on my skull and my outsized ears, I was a goofy-looking kid, which had this minor benefit—goofy-looking is at least disarming.

Miz Verlow did her best to protect my skin from constant sunburn with one of her salves, with imperfect success. She decided that I must wear a hat when out of doors to shade my face. I did, at least when she was around. Perdita made hats for me, a kind of amalgam of a woven-palm Panama and a kerchief that provided corners to tie under my chin when it was windy, and detached for washing. Her hats not only shaded my face, they covered my hair and ears, and slightly muffled my hearing, which was frequently a boon to me.

On account of my skin, I wore long-sleeved shirts under my overalls out of doors, but that was no trial to me. I rolled sleeves and pants-legs and burnt my arms and legs and feet anyway, at least when I was out of sight of Miz Verlow. When she took me with her on her seemingly aimless walks, of course, I did no such thing. I needed the sleeves and pants-legs and socks and tennies too, for some of those walks, as she tramped us through patches of marsh and bog that in summer were just naturally foggy with bugs and the beach that jumped with sand fleas. Miz Verlow had me take home twigs and flowers and seeds and berries and bark and so on, and identify them for myself from the books. As sparsely vegetated as the island seemed at first glance, it supported an unexpected variety of plants on the backsides of the dunes and in the hollows between. A shrub rosemary grew there, and calamintha, conradina, coral root and pinxter.

The most immediate and important lesson was that not everything is in the books. The second was that the curious odiferous shrubs, Candle Bush, that crept round the lattice skirts of Merrymeeting, were from the wild; Miz Verlow had transplanted them from various sites on the island. They were a senna or cassia, unique to the island and naturally dwarfed by the harsh climatic conditions. Cassia alata, var. santarosa, was not in the books at my disposal, or any that I have since examined. Miz Verlow used every part of the plant, from root and branch to the flower spikes that erupted in May to the pods that developed from them, in her preparations.

Before the school summer vacation came to an end, I had begun to know a little of Cleonie's and Perdita's immediate families. Perdita's husband, Joe Mooney, had a snapper smack of his own and fished for a living; as I have mentioned, he was often a source of supply for Merrymeeting's table. Joe had some children from a previous marriage, grown-up boys, who fished with him. He had raised them alone after losing their mama when they were little. He and Perdita had no children of their own.

Cleonie always called her husband Mr. Huggins, leading me to expect that he would be as solemn as a minister. Turned out that he called her Miz Huggins, and the formality of address was a joke between them. His Christian name was Nathan and he worked for a lumber company that imported mahogany logs through Pensacola. He had worked there since a boy, except for his military service. He bossed a crew—a colored crew, of course—that herded logs off the docks. The Hugginses had three girls older than me, and also a boy, Roger, who was about my age. They all lived in one house with Mr. Huggins's mama and Cleonie's mama, daddy, and granddaddy.

When I found out that the Hugginses had a dog and Perdita had two cats at home, I begged Miz Verlow for a pet. I tried to make the request modest: a kitten would do.

“Oh, Calley, I'm sorry that I have to say no. Kittens grow into cats, and cats eat mice and birds.”

I had not considered the dietary habits of cats.

“A puppy?”

Miz Verlow smiled sadly.

“Puppies grow up to be dogs,” I said. “What do dogs do?”

“Sleep on the furniture,” she said. “Leave hair everywhere. Chew things. Smell like dogs when they're dry and wet dogs when they're wet. Grow old and die and make you cry your heart out.”

“What's so bad about that?”

She shook her head. “Take my word for it, Calley. You have to be careful what you love because love has to be paid for.”

She talked me right away from the subject. I let it go, figuring like any other kid that I could change her mind at some point.

As curious as I was about the Hugginses and the Mooneys, they were only minimally interested in me. They were more than decent to me but they had their own lives. Cleonie and Perdita assumed a degree of authority over me, chiding me as they would have their own, but it wasn't because they
wanted
to have anything to do with raising me. They had standards, and one of them was that any child, colored or white, respected elders.

But I ended up spending a lot of time with Roger, who usually passed his school vacation with his mama at Merrymeeting until we entered our teens. He slept on a cot in Cleonie and Perdita's room during the week and went home for Sundays, just as they did.

I won't say that we were friends but we got along. Because he was a boy, and older than me by seven whole months, he regarded himself as in charge. Naturally we had a few disagreements. The first time that I ever met him, I waggled my ears for him, which impressed him deeply. Roger countered by exhibiting how he could make all his fingers and his thumbs bend backward, and pop his arms in and out of their sockets. I was deeply impressed too, and not just out of politeness.

Miz Verlow had arrangements with the guides who took out deep-sea fishermen who were occasionally guests; she didn't want the trouble of maintaining a deep-sea boat or the larger bayside dock one would require. The Merrymeeting property did run Gulf to bayside, straight across the island, and on the bay was a little beach and dock. Miz Verlow kept some skiffs and a couple of sailboats there. One seven-year-old alone would be hard put to keep that little beach clean, the bitty dock tidy, the watercraft watertight and the sails in good order, but working together, two could. That first summer on Santa Rosa Island, tidying the little beach was among the earliest chores that Roger Huggins and I were assigned as a team by Miz Verlow.

We each had our separate chores indoors, but some we did together simply because four hands made lighter work.

The guest rooms very often could not accommodate all the guests' luggage, particularly for those who stayed weeks at a time. Roger and I were consequently oft detailed to haul various forms of luggage to the attic for temporary storage. The larger pieces were usually emptied into the closets and dressers of the guests', so the pieces were often more bulky and awkward than heavy.

When first I reached the top of the stairs, my back was to it, and I was facing Roger, over a footlocker. It was a military style footlocker—how could it be otherwise?—but emptied, so we could manage it. We put it down promptly at the top of the stairs.

A long chain, of the kind composed of little metal beads that used to be commonplace for lights and ceiling fans, depended from the darkness overhead. Given a yank, it lit a series of bulbs suspended from the rafters. Though unshaded, the bulbs were of low wattage and dimmed with dirt and dust. By their light that never penetrated to all the nooks and crannies, the attic seemed vast to us then. In memory, it still is to me.

Despite the portholes under the eaves that were meant to relieve the accumulated heat, the attic was stifling in all seasons. As we paused there at the top of the stairs, I heard the coo of pigeons, the ruffling of feathers, a skitter of tiny claws. Crowded as the attic was with inanimate objects, the place was alive with critters: moths, spiders, flies, beetles, wasps, bugs, bats, birds and mice.

We shoved the footlocker into the nearest available space and paused again to look around. Roger and I exchanged a rueful glance; much as we would have liked to explore, we dared not dawdle. Miz Verlow awaited our services.

We would have other opportunities to visit the attic, and eventually, as we grew older, free access to the key that Miz Verlow kept in a certain drawer in her office desk. The attic never got less crowded. We were always finding things in it that we didn't remember having seen previously. Guests not only left pieces of luggage in storage during their visits but for temporary storage while they traveled elsewhere. The temporary storage sometimes became permanent, for reasons beyond our ken. A guest perhaps never returned, or forgot the left luggage, or deliberately abandoned it. The attic housed more than luggage, of course. It held everything that an attic should and then some.

Some of Miz Verlow's guests came and went, and never came back; some visited irregularly, and others were very regular indeed. Some stayed a week while others dallied a month or six weeks. Mrs. Mank proved entirely unpredictable. Her longest absence was five months; the shortest, a weekend. We saw her at least three times a year. Miz Verlow always knew well ahead that Mrs. Mank was coming but she never told me until it was time to arrange Mrs. Mank's suite.

I expected that we would one day see Fennie Verlow. Miz Verlow telephoned Fennie every few days and letters and small packages arrived for Merry Verlow, addressed in Fennie's hand. Mention was made of visiting, but Miz Verlow never did go visit her sister, Fennie. I cannot recall that Miz Verlow ever went so far afield that she could not return to sleep at Merrymeeting.

Miz Verlow never disputed or challenged Mama in her playacting as lady of the manse in front of the guests. In time, even perennial guests who knew otherwise came to behave as if it had always been so. Mama directed the conversation at every meal, permitting no discussion of religion, politics, money or sex. Her rules naturally made for some stultifying conversations—the usual clichés about the weather, and Mama's reminiscences of her days as a Southern belle, just after the war, when sometimes it seemed as if she were talking about the War Between the States instead of World War II—but on many occasions, the guests were more or less compelled to talk about themselves.

Miz Verlow's guests tended to be reasonably well educated—sometimes very well educated—and were nearly always well spoken. Artists and photographers, both amateur and professional, often sat at her table, along with divines, academics, schoolteachers, musicians and many other professionals. A substantial proportion of Merry Verlow's guests were also birders, a group with whom I had an immediate affinity. As the names in the guestbook changed, new subjects were introduced, and old ones continued. While Mama suffered through talk of birds and art and music and many other things irrelevant to the wants and the needs of Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, I sponged it all up. The result for me was a level of stimulation that I would never have received in my own home, had not Daddy been murdered and Mama and I cast out.

CAME the first day of school, I walked to the road and climbed up onto the bus, which, except for the driver, proved to be empty. I would be first on and last off, for I lived at the greatest distance from the elementary school.