Candles Burning (49 page)

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.

 
DEIRDRE DEXTER CAROLL
1899-1958

 
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.”

EXPECTING to help serve and clean up supper, I entered the house by the kitchen door.

Perdita glanced up at me from arranging portions on plates. “Miz Verlow waitin' you on the v'randah.”

As I crossed the kitchen, Cleonie came in from the dining room with an empty tray.

She held the swinging door open for me and hummed low at me as I passed. It was a hum of warning.

The guests in the dining room were forking in enthusiastically.

I paused at the front doors to listen for Miz Verlow and heard not only her but also Mrs. Mank. They were in the little alcove where Adele Starret had read Mamadee's will to Mama.

The two women were smoking cigarettes. The beverage of choice, I saw, was bourbon, in thick crystal glasses. The decanter sat close at hand on the little table. A candle flickered next to it, providing the only light in the alcove. The amber liquid in the decanter glowed with the reflected candlelight, as if it had a small pillar of fire at its core.

The faces of the two women were shadowed. I had to draw a chair up to face them and sit before I could see them clearly.

“What did you learn?” Mrs. Mank said, in a flat voice.

I gave up the finding that I thought least useful. “Mamadee's maiden name was Dexter.”

Of course it was. As in Dexter Bros., on the circus poster. Her daddy the Dexter who married Cosima, the bird lady who rode the howdah.

Miz Verlow raised her glass to her lips.

Mrs. Mank said nothing for a long moment. She took a long suck on her cigarette.

“And?” she said at last.

Tests. How many tests? Was I going to let these two women run my life and why did they even want to?

“Mamadee must have been ashamed of it, and if she was, then Mama is, and that's why Mama never told me.”

Miz Verlow relaxed.

“Deirdre's father was nobody,” Mrs. Mank said, with great satisfaction. “Deirdre tried to make herself into somebody by marrying a Carroll, but there it is, graven in cement.”

Miz Verlow made a little chuckling noise.

“I knew Deirdre,” Mrs. Mank said. “She ruined your mama and she would have ruined you. I was very glad to learn that your mama had taken refuge with someone whom I trusted entirely.”

Mrs. Mank reached out to pat Miz Verlow on the hand. Miz Verlow smiled warmly at her.

“Perhaps,” said Mrs. Mank, “one of us should have told you these things earlier. But you were a child. You've grown up on us and we were not prepared.” She smiled at me quite warmly. “We must do something about your hair and you really must learn how to dress properly, Calley. You're going to go out into the great big rest of the world very soon!”

I could not help the bloom of excitement in my guts.

“Well.” Mrs. Mank stood. “At least you were in time for supper. I'm quite hungry, Merry, and supper smells heavenly.”

I wasn't hungry but I ate too, and then helped clean up.

I took up Mrs. Mank's cocoa for her.

I bathed and went to bed. Though I was tired, sleep eluded me.

Mrs. Mank had known Mamadee. She held Mamadee and Mama to be no-account. She had not just chosen me out of the ether or on the say-so of Fennie or Merry Verlow. She had come close to an admission that she had made some attempt to interfere before Mama would ruin me, whatever “ruin” meant to Mrs. Mank.

When? When had she made her observations and drawn her conclusions? Before Daddy was murdered? Before Fennie Verlow sent us to Merrymeeting and her sister, Merry?

Did it matter?

And where? I did not remember Mrs. Mank from the first part of my childhood in Montgomery and Tallassee. Given how young I was, the lack of memory more than likely meant nothing. Mrs. Mank might have known Mamadee for years and years, and just not been around when I was a little girl in my daddy's house.

Mrs. Mank had spoken of Mamadee with a distinct, personal disdain. Perhaps they had known each other in childhood, and that was how Mrs. Mank came to know that Mamadee's father was “nobody.” What did the term “nobody” signify to Mrs. Mank? The snobbery innate to the term angered me. Grady Driver was nobody, and so was I.

If Mamadee's daddy was nobody, did that mean that her mama, my great-grandmama, Cosima, was
not
?

How was I going to get to New Orleans and, once there, find my brother? And before Mama returned. Before I could plan such a trip, I had to know more about where Ford might be in New Orleans or even if he were still there. It made sense to locate Dr. Evarts. If Ford were in college somewhere, Dr. Evarts would know. Surely he would tell me if I asked. I was Ford's sister, who had been a little girl when Dr. Evarts became Ford's guardian. Dr. Evarts could not believe that I was Mama's agent or that I had designs on Ford's money. Surely not. Oh, hell—yes, Dr. Evarts might very well think just those things about me.

All I could do was find the man. There must be some chance that if I did, even if Dr. Evarts would not tell me where Ford was, some clue might come my way. Why, Ford might be on break from college, and visiting with Dr. Evarts, and open the door when I knocked at it. That was hope, not wishful thinking, and hope was good, hope was necessary. Faith in myself, and hope for a good outcome. Faith and Hope, my aunties. I needed to think about Ford.

I was putting too much into the consequences of finding him. Likely it would turn out a wild goose chase. If Ford proved to be hateful, I told myself with what I felt was adult rationality, I would be free to walk away from childhood and the wreckage of my family. That's how young I really was.

MRS. Mank's plans for me made me more determined not to be diverted from either seeking Ford or any information about my family that I could unearth. The trip to Tallassee had been a severe disappointment. It was here on Santa Rosa Island that I had remembered, and not forgotten again, the memories of the events of my first months at Merrymeeting.