Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

My stomach grumbled. I ran downstairs and banged through the doors into the kitchen. Tansy paused with her chopping knife over the carrots she was dicing.

“Gone tear tha hinges right out the wall,” Tansy said. “You git, gal. I don’t need no chile unfoot in my kitchen. Somebody could be done a harm.”

“I’m hungry!” I cried. “Desperate hungry!”

“So’s a million Chinamen. Git.”

Tansy did the cooking and the light housekeeping and found professional fault with the succession of hard-up women who came in to do the heavy work. Mamadee had fired every servant she had ever had, or had them quit. Tansy had been fired or quit everywhere else and the only job she could get was at Ramparts. They were stuck with each other. Tansy gave Mamadee somebody to rag everyday, and Mamadee gave Tansy somebody to resent everyday.

I banged back through the doors out of the kitchen and headed down the hall for the library.

Ford lunged out of nowhere and grabbed my wrist. He spun me off course and pushed my face against a wall, holding my arm behind me. I opened my mouth to scream and he kneed me in the small of the back, so I couldn’t get any air down my lungs.

“Ssshhh,” he whispered in my ear, strong-arming me into the powder room. His breath smelled of bourbon, which meant that he had penetrated the defenses of Mamadee’s liquor cabinet once again. He shoved me inside and shut and locked the door behind us. I finally got a look at him. His hair was raked up and down and he had been crying. His nose was leaking. He wiped it with the back of his hand.

“I am gone crazy,” he said in a croak. “I caint take this no more. Mama got Daddy murdered and chopped up by those women. I do not know how but she did. You know it. You don’t miss the sound of a mouse fart.” He threatened me with a curled fist. “You tell me how she did it and you tell me why she did it right now, or I swear I will kill you, Dumbo, I will cut your stupid ears off your stupid head and shove them down your throat!”

“She did not!” Then I lowered my voice to a whisper. “Mama did not do what you just said. You are a liar, Ford Carroll Dakin, a liar and a bully.”

We stared each other down for a long moment.

Then Ford said, “She’s gone kill me next. You would like that. You would help her.”

I shook my head no. “Course I would help her, but Mama ain’t gone kill you. Why would she? Why would she kill Daddy?”

“Money,” he whispered. “Get rid of me, she gets all the money.”

I knew money was important. Mamadee and Mama talked about it enough. I just could not see how any amount of money explained what had happened to Daddy, especially since I was not entirely sure exactly what had happened to Daddy beyond two crazy women having killed him and cut him up and stuffed most of him into a footlocker. Mama had not killed Daddy; those women had. And those crazy women had never collected the ransom.

And while Mama had threatened to kill me so many times that I could hardly take it seriously, I knew that she had never threatened to kill Ford, not in my hearing. She doted on him; he could do no wrong in her eyes.

“Money? You can have mine. You can have that silver dollar I got hid in my bedroom at home.” I reconsidered. Daddy gave me that silver dollar for my fifth birthday. “If you really want it.” Now it seemed like we were dickering. “You could let me have that Fred Hatfield card you got.”

“I can take that old silver dollar anytime I want. You are never getting that Fred Hatfield, you might as well forget it.”

I was relieved; if he took it from me, then I was absolved of the guilt that a trade would have carried.

I heard Mamadee’s step in the hall.

“Mamadee!” I whispered.

Ford held his finger to his lips. We both froze. Mamadee paused at the powder room door.

“Calley? Ford? Ford, baby, you in there? I heard you. You sick, baby boy?” The doorknob rattled violently. “You unlock this door right now.”

The solitary window was too high and small for escape. There was no way out. Ford never did have sense enough to make sure he had a way out. He shot me a look of warning and flicked the lock.

Mamadee stood in the open doorway with her hands on her hips. “Just what is going on?”

“Nothing, ma’am,” Ford said. “We just had to do some crying, so we come in here so as not to bother anyone.”

My stomach gurgled loudly.

“Calley,” Mamadee said. “How many times have you been told not to swallow air?”

She engulfed Ford in an embrace that he could not gracefully escape. I lingered only long enough to enjoy his discomfort.

“My poor, poor orphan boy,” Mamadee murmured. “Don’t you worry now, I’ll keep you safe.”

Slipping past them and out the door, I heard Ford hiss, sadly, like a tire with a nail in it.

I stopped with my hand on the doorknob of the library. Mama was inside, talking on the telephone.

“—never informed that the police were gone to search my home. I never saw a search warrant—” There was a pause for an answer, and then Mama continued, “I beg your pardon? You had no business ‘sparing me,’ Mr. Weems. You had no business authorizing an invasion of my home. You do not have my power of attorney”—her voice went high and shaky—“that was only to get the ransom money! You had better explain this right now. I will expect you within the hour.”

The telephone receiver crashed down onto its cradle.

Mama blew her nose. “Jesus God,” she muttered.

I opened the door and peeked in. She was sitting at Senior’s desk.

“You heard everything, I suppose,” Mama said. “You never mind those words I just used. I am having a crisis. I do not know what is gone on but I do not care for it one bit.”

“Mama, would you like me to rub your feet?”

She chortled incredulously. “Yes, I would, Calley. Yes, I would.”

Mama yanked up her skirt and unhooked her garters. I pulled up a hassock and sat on it to roll down her silk stockings and rub her feet.

“The only useful thing that silly old man had to tell me was that your late beloved daddy owned a plot in some backside-of-the-moon boneyard. Isn’t that just the cherry on the whipped cream!”

I guessed that boneyard meant cemetery but the significance of owning a plot, a single plot, in one, escaped me. All I knew was that Mama did not like it.

All the good of the foot rubbing I did went to waste, like the meal that Tansy had prepared for us. An hour later, two hours later, Mr. Weems had not answered Mama’s summons to Ramparts, nor was anyone answering her phone calls to the Weems house. The Edsel was still on its way back from New Orleans, by arrangement with Uncle Billy Cane Dakin, and Mamadee wouldn’t let Mama have the keys to the Cadillac. Mama threatened to walk to Mr. Weems’s house. Tallassee was and is a very small town, so that no place, not even Ramparts, was very far from anywhere else. Mamadee’s response was to lock Mama in the salon. While Mama was hurling ashtrays and candlesticks, breaking lamps and punching out windows with a chair, Mamadee called Dr. Evarts.

DR. Evarts had been born and raised in Chicago, gone to college in New York City and studied medicine in Boston. He had settled in Tallassee, Alabama, for the simple reason that there he would have no competition at all. Before he came, the nearest doctor was in Notasulga, twenty-two miles distant. With a near-monopoly in Tallassee, Dr. Evarts made upwards of fifty thousand dollars a year in 1958 dollars. The town provided an office for him. He secured the staffing of his office by marrying a competent, efficient and reasonably attractive registered nurse. It was a sensible, practical marriage—even a love match, if love of money on his part and of social status on hers was love enough. He also owned the small hospital where a few of the old and terribly sick hung on past the time that their nearest and dearest could care for them and where a few of the babies having trouble getting born either made it or didn’t. Dr. Evarts got kickbacks from drugstores and the drug salesmen and the morticians and from the bigger hospitals in Montgomery when he sent patients to them, usually for complicated operations. He was received in the finest homes as a near equal. No more than a near equal; after all, no one was ever going to confuse him with a Southerner.