Candles Burning

Fifty-two

MIZ Verlow was not deluded that I was sunstruck, nor poisoned by a bad oyster.

“I’ve heard the lie about the bad oyster already,” she told Grady.

“Yes’m,” he agreed.

I could hear them outside my room, where Grady and Roger had finally deposited me, in all my ludicrous glory.

Some inchoate impulse to help Grady out moved me just then to fall off the bed and crawl under it. Miz Verlow and Grady lunged back through the door that they had just exited.

Just too dumb and too sweet to leave me, Grady had been sitting at my bedside when Miz Verlow and Mama returned from the Fiesta. Mama’s feet hurt so it fell to Miz Verlow to find out what Grady Driver was doing sitting in my room, and what I was doing, sprawled like a wino on my sweat-drenched sheets.

Once I was back in bed, Miz Verlow sent Grady on his way. She sat on the edge of the bed and studied the knot in the gauze scarf. Patiently, she picked it out. My head immediately felt less constricted.

From beneath my eyelids, I spied upon Miz Verlow’s brief examination of the scarf itself. She made a little face, one of distaste, before she dropped it in the ragged little basket that I used for a trash can. A question struggled to form itself in my head.

“How much bourbon do you owe me for?” she asked.

“A pint.”

“You must have gotten most of it.” She spoke with real satisfaction. “I caint get you out of doing your mama’s feet. Try not to throw up on her.”

“Yes’m.”

“Take a bath now, and try not to drown. Drink a lot of water though. Grady said that he gave you aspirin.”

“Yes’m.”

Miz Verlow stood and moved to the door. She looked back at me.

“Was Grady a gentleman?”

I moaned. “What’s that mean?”

“You know what that means.”

“Are you inquirin’ about the purity of Southern womanhood?” I asked in Mama’s voice.

“How very amusing,” said Miz Verlow, in a tone that made it perfectly clear that she did not find it the least bit so.

“Grady’s too dumb to cop a feel, if that’s what you mean. Or anything else. Look at me, for crying out loud. I’m ugly.”

“So’s Grady,” said Miz Verlow. “Ugly never stopped sex yet.”

“Ha-ha. Roger was there. He chaperoned.”

That made Miz Verlow really angry.

“Funny, ha-ha,” she said.

If cold were ice cubes, her words could have chilled a nice glass of water for me.

She came back to my bedside and bent over me to say, “I never want to hear of you hanging around with Roger Huggins again, with or without Grady Driver. Do you want to get the boy strung up from the nearest tree? Think of his mama, if you can think of anything but yourself.”

She slammed out, leaving me to think about it. I heard her going up the stairs to the attic, and then moving around above my head.

In 1955, a gang of white-sheeted bastards had murdered a fifteen-year-old kid named Emmett Till for whistling at a white woman. It’s entirely probable that Emmett Till did not in fact whistle at that woman, or make an outrageous remark, or any thing of the kind.

I might have been only thirteen but I could not claim ignorance of that horror story. Roger had showed me the copy of Life magazine with the pictures in it, that his daddy had tucked away trying to keep it from him. Nathan Huggins didn’t buy that copy at any newsstand. If that issue was sold in any newsstand in Pensacola, it was unlikely that it was sold to any colored man who asked for it. Mr. Huggins’s copy came to him by way of a cousin in Chicago. Roger had found it by accident. His daddy found him crying over it, and they had a long talk.

I was chastened. I made myself get up and go to the bathroom to bathe. Lolling in the bathtub, I wanted to sink beneath the water and not come back up.

I made my way to Mama’s room and did her feet while she told me all about her day at the Fiesta. Of course it had all been terribly hard on her poor feet. Even as Mama nattered, I found myself longing to crawl into the bed next to her and listen to her heartbeat and the breath going in and out of her lungs, and go to sleep.

Mama stopped talking suddenly. She jammed the butt of her cigarette into her ashtray.

“Calley, baby,” she said, “you look like hell. Got your period? You just crawl up here and into this bed.”

She slipped between the sheets too, and tucked them up around me. It was too hot for blankets; sheets were only bearable because the punkah fan turned steadily overhead.

Mama began to snore gently. Her pulse fell into a counterpoint with the fan. Seventy beats a minute, I thought. Her lungs were a little cloudy but had been a long time. It didn’t seem to be getting worse. She had gotten bonier, I thought. No, her flesh was slacker.

I was overwhelmed with how much I loved her. How much I needed a Mama to love.

Though we no longer slept in the same room, I had gone on, as I had as long as I could remember, massaging Mama’s feet.

And frequently Mama would come to my room late at night, shake me awake as roughly as if the house were afire, and demand to know what opinion I had on the subject of Adele Starret and the probability of her contesting Mamadee’s last will and testament. She feared that if Adele Starret moved too aggressively against Mamadee’s estate, Lawyer Weems would make it seem to Ford that his mother was trying to defraud him of his rightful inheritance. What then if she lost the suit? She would also be forfeiting her son’s love and would end up with exactly nothing, exactly less than nothing. I told myself that I couldn’t know that she had already lost Ford’s love, if she had ever had it, but at my angriest, I was unable to be cruel enough to her to tell her so.

Mama was privately relieved that we heard so infrequently from Adele Starret. Mama convinced herself that the minute my brother, Ford, reached his majority, all the world would be put right again. Once he was out from under the legal authority of that thief, that liar, that salt-scum lawyer Winston Weems, then Ford would take control of whatever was left of the family fortune, and he would raise Mama back to her rightful place in society.

Ford was still alive, I had no doubt. I had not heard his voice among the voices the Gulf waters brought me.

Nightmares wracked my sleep. They were not new ones, which made them all the scarier, for I knew where they were going and still could not escape. On waking in the morning, though, with the caw-caw of the old doorbell loud in my ears, the memory was clear in my mind of opening the door to the ghost who called herself Tallulah Jordan, who had worn the scarf that I had found in the attic.