Candles Burning (45 page)

I asked him, “You see Betelgeuse?”

He was hopeless. He never could see what I saw in the sky.

“Nope. Ain't your mama got an address or a phone number nor nothin'?”

I shook my head.

“So you don't even know where he is?”

“No, sir.”

“You sirring me?” Grady mock-cuffed me.

He wanted to go canoodle on the beach. We had our place. It seemed like a reasonable thing to do so I took his hand and we went down the beach and found it again. Grady wasn't so skinny as he used to be; he was starting to fill out to be a man. It felt good to be close to him and have his arms around me.

“You got any ideas?” he asked me. “Ma'am.”

I mock-cuffed him back. “Watch it, you!” I leaned back into his arms. “No I ain't got any ideas.”

The silence between us lengthened pleasantly and after a while I realized that Grady had dozed off. I poked him in the ribs.

He smacked his lips together. “Damn.”

“I need some money,” I said.

“Me too. Wanna hold up a bank?”

“You can try it, you want. I'm gone have to bust the Nickel Account, enough for a bus ticket to and from Tallassee. I can find out where Ford is if I go there, I know I can. I'll go right to Dr. Evarts and demand to see my brother.”

Grady scratched his head. “I like to go but I got to work.”

“Not right now,” I said. “But soon, when I get the time off.”

I hadn't ever asked for time off and hadn't even considered if I should tell Miz Verlow what I wanted to do with the time or not.

“You won't need a bus ticket,” Grady said. “We caint use my wheels, it taint reliable enough, but maybe we could borrow the station wagon, or even Roger's daddy's Edsel that used to be your mama's.”

“You're a genius,” I told Grady. “Sir.”

“Yes, ma'am,” he said. “Put your pants on, less go get some more beer.”

While Grady collected the rest of the beer in his Dodge, I went into the house and found Miz Verlow in the kitchen making a cup of tea, and begged the use of the station wagon for an errand.

“Beer run?”

“Yes'm.”

She tipped her chin at the hook where the keys to the wagon hung. “That boy's vehicle is a deathtrap. You drive. You hold your beer better than he does.”

I had an urge to kiss her but when I started to rise up on my bare toes, she gave me an appalled look.

“Put some shoes on, Calley,” she said. “You oughtn't drive with bare feet.”

I never have figured out what's so bad about driving with bare feet.

“Miz Verlow,” I said, as I began to bag some leftovers for snacks, “do you remember Mama's mama talking to us from the dead when I was a little girl?”

She gave me a long steady look. “So you remember.”

“Yes'm.”

“Do you remember me asking you just afterward if you could hear the dead?”

I nodded.

“You told me that you did. You didn't understand them.”

“No'm. I did not. Most of 'em. I mean, I understood what Mamadee said.” Another memory surfaced. “Cosima,” I said, “Mama's grandmama, she spoke to me twice. On a Christmas Eve. And then.” I felt myself jumping off a cliff. “Then Tallulah Jordan came to the door.”

Miz Verlow blinked at the name Tallulah Jordan.

“Who the hell is Tallulah Jordan?” she asked, with an edge of mockery in her voice.

“A ghost, like Mamadee was, and like my great-grandmama Cosima.”

Miz Verlow blinked again.

“I want to talk to you, in my room,” she said. “Tell Grady to go wherever he calls home.”

“No, ma'am,” I said. “I'm gone with Grady right now.”

Miz Verlow's lips tightened with anger. Her eyes livened with an almighty piss-off at me. I noted it with a smug adolescent satisfaction. It didn't occur to me that it was another moment like the one in which Mrs. Mank offered to tell me a secret and I declined. Then I declined out of fear. This time I was exercising my independence.

Miz Verlow took her teacup and stalked out of the kitchen without another word.

I picked up some sandals where I'd left them on the verandah. Grady was already lounging in the wagon's passenger seat. He shoved in the cigarette lighter and lit a Camel that he couldn't afford. Then again, he couldn't afford a cracker or the Cheez Whiz to spurt onto it.

I dropped the paper sack of leftovers in his lap.

“Comestibles,” I said.

He poked around in the sack.

“Com-estibles,” he said. “I like that word.”

We got some more beer in the village and parked down on Pensacola Beach. Grady greased up his fingers on leftover rib roast and then stickied them eating pecan pie out his hand.

He chased the chow with half a longneck and then belched.

I giggled.

He held out his left hand and I licked his fingers clean. Then he twisted around so I could clean the other one.

“Damn,” he said. “That's horny.”

I took a mouthful of the contents of the longneck I was holding between my legs and sprayed it at him. He just laughed.

Grady and me, we had some good times. I wouldn't ever be surprised to find out that he was related somehow to the Dakins.

MAMA cooed good night to Colonel Beddoes.

Peeking out the back window of the station wagon, I watched the two of them kiss just before Mama went into the house. I had my hand clapped over Grady's mouth so he wouldn't laugh or make me laugh. The two of us were fair tangled up, where we'd dozed off together, in the back of the station wagon. I lifted my hand from Grady's mouth and sank back down next to him.

Grady gave me a gooch in the ribs. “Mama needs her feet rubbed,” he teased.

I gooched him back in his belly and he went for the ticklish place under my chin. The wagon moved with us and I heard the roll of the gravel under Colonel Beddoes's footstep.

It was too late to get away, so I sat up and Tom Beddoes bent his knees a little to look in at us.

He popped open the back end of the wagon.

“I won't ask what you kids are doin',” he said. “I expect Miz Verlow wouldn't appreciate you using the back end of her station wagon for your pettin' party.”

I slid out and Grady unfolded himself after me.

“See ya, ma'am,” he said, saluted Colonel Beddoes smartly and strolled away toward his old Nash.

I watched him go and tried not to giggle at him adjusting the crotch of his old khakis.

Colonel Beddoes shook his head. “Your mama would be disappointed in you, Calley. That boy's just trash.”

“Mama's been disappointed in me since I was born. Any change might be too much of a shock.”

Colonel Beddoes frowned. “That's no way to speak of your mama, young woman.”

“She's
my
mama. You ain't even my stepdaddy.”

He wagged his finger at me and forced a fake smile on his face. “But I may be, I may be.”

“Don't get ahead of yourself, Tom Beddoes.”

I ran off toward the back door to the kitchen.

Mama was in her bedroom, just kicking off her shoes.

“Let's see the hands,” she said, reaching for her earrings.

I showed my hands. She recoiled.

I left to wash them, tidied my nails, lathered up with hand cream, and returned back to Mama's room.

She was in her nightgown, doing her face.

I hung up her dress, put her shoes aside for polishing, and collected her lacies for handwashing.

“You've got beer on your breath,” she said.

I didn't respond, just showed her my hands.

She flopped onto her bed. I sat down at the foot of it and spun the top off the jar of foot cream.

“I'm trying to be the best mama I can but you are making it very, very hard.”

I crossed my eyes at her.

“You spend way too much time with that boy. I see him out fishing with Roger Huggins. I never see him with other white boys. Any white boy hangs out with coloreds is headed for trouble.”

“You're right about that,” I agreed. “You ever read
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
?”

Mama ignored the question, which was fair enough, since I knew the answer.

“Any girl hangs out with a boy that hangs out with coloreds is headed for trouble,” she said. “I've seen many a girl ruin her life for some redneck piece of white trash.”

Like my daddy.

“Calley, you are going to have to make do with what life hands you. You need all the edge you can get.”

Her right foot was in my hand. Her toenails silvered to match her fingernails. This evening, when she went out to dinner with Colonel Beddoes, she had worn pale pink lipstick. Her hair was in a bouffant that would be a crow's nest in the morning. When a woman wears a hairstyle and lipstick too young for her, it never fails to make her look older than she really is, or so she used to tell me, before she started doing it.

Mama lit a cigarette. “Prepare yourself for a shock, baby. Tom and I are engaged.”

“Praise be to Jesus.” I gave her foot an extra squeeze before I put it down and picked up the other.

“I don't find blasphemy amusing, Calley. We're going to buy a ring tomorrow.”

I made no response.

She smoked awhile.

“Then I'm going to take a little vacation. I'll be gone six weeks.”

“Honeymoon?”

She laughed. “No, no. We're not getting married until the fall.”

“So?”

“So I need some time to myself. I'll be leaving the first of next week.”

School would let out by then.

“Miz Verlow know?”

“She will. You do what she says while I'm gone.”

Mama ground out her cigarette.

“Tom wants to be your friend, Calley. He's made me understand that you're nearly grown.” She sighed. “You'll always be a baby to me. Anyway, I want you to know that you can ask me anything.
Anything
.”

I patted her foot and put it down and screwed the cap on the jar of foot cream.

“Anything.”
Mama said one more time.

“Mama, you got any pictures of my great-grandmama?”

She sat up in surprise. “My grandmama?”

“Cosima,” I said. “That was her name, wasn't it?”

Mama sighed. “No, baby, not a one.”

“Tell me what she looked like.”

Mama's face softened with pleasure at being asked.

“She was an old lady by the time I knew her, of course,” said Mama, “but I saw the pictures of her when she was young. She looked like me, Calley. Mamadee used to say that I was the spit of her mama.”

“GOOD night, Mama.” I closed the door to her bedroom gently.

I wondered who was going to pay for Mama's “vacation,” and where she was going. I knew where she hid her cash and her remaining jewelry. She had managed to hold on to most of the jewelry that she had with her when we left Alabama but some of it was gone, sold off, along with all the jewelry she had stolen from Mamadee. Maybe she still had some of Gus O'Hare's money. She must have enough to finance a fairly expensive “vacation.” Or a college education for me.

Maybe she was going to see Ford. Maybe we would all run into each other in Tallassee. The thought made me grin. Surprise for everybody.

I glanced out my window at the quarter moon that had crossed the sky most of the way now.

 
I hardly ever saw the moon without thinking the first two lines, but the second two, I used only when I sang the whole song.

Did I long to see Ford? I didn't think it was exactly longing. Maybe it was only curiosity.

Mama had been the spit of Cosima. The image in my mind was as distinct as the portrait in the egg locket, the egg locket on the bird's harness that I had found in the attic. The harness and egg locket hidden in my hidey-hole.

SCHOOL could not let out nor Mama leave soon enough for me.

She no longer wore the wedding ring that Daddy had put on her finger but flaunted a showy diamond ring at table and in one parlor or the other or on the verandah, as if every one of our guests were an unsuccessful beau or an ex-husband to be taunted with it. If that weren't nauseating enough, whenever Tom Beddoes was around, she clutched his arm as if in fear that he might escape. The two of them cooed and cuddled ostentatiously.

In the meantime, the Atlas volume of the encyclopedia was under my bed, for immediate consultation of the map of Alabama, and my lunar notebook was filling up with questions and plans.

 
1.
Alabama Directory Assistance

I seized any fleeting opportunities when I was alone with a telephone. Eventually Miz Verlow would see the long-distance calls on the bill but I planned to own up unflinchingly and offer to pay her back.