Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

Mama tucked her legs underneath her on the sofa and lit a cigarette. Mamadee took out three glasses and a decanter. As she poured, Dr. Evarts admired the spill of bourbon into the glasses.

I touched the key on the string around my neck. I was hungry enough to eat the key and have the string for dessert. It was cold outside and I was shivering. Abandoning the tree to Ford, I went down it and retrieved my shoes.

I found Tansy at the table in the kitchen, eating a piece of the hot fruit casserole that was supposed to be dessert. Without invitation, I scrambled onto the other chair at the table. Tansy lumbered out of her chair to fetch a chipped dish and a cloudy glass from the cupboard where she kept dishes for her use and Leonard’s. She poured milk for me and then spooned fruit casserole into the dish. She topped it with a scoop of vanilla ice cream and put it down in front of me, with a spoon.

Sitting down again with a grunt, she watched me while I wolfed the fruit casserole and drained the glass.

“You got any space for chicken pie?” Her tone was sarcastic.

I nodded violently.

Getting up again, she brought me a piece of the pie that been sitting on the top of her stove and was still warm. She refilled my glass. “Onliest one that wants my food is you. The Lord be’s humblin’ me. I’m thinking ‘whatsomever you does for the least a mine, you does for me.’ ”

“Thank you, Tansy. Did you see the snow?”

“Snow? Snow in Alabama! Lying be’s a sin, Miss Calley Dakin!”

I changed the subject. “You got any Scotch tape?”

“What if I does?”

“I need some.”

She studied me awhile, trying to decide if I was responsible enough to be entrusted with tape. When I had cleaned my plate and drained my glass again and said thank you yet again, she produced a roll of tape. It was yellowed with age.

“Don’t you be gittin’ up to no good with none of my Scotched tape,” she said.

I held up my right hand and made the two-fingers-up, thumb-across-palm Girl Scout pledge gesture that I had learned from the older girls in the schoolyard.

“What’s that hoodoo?”

“I promise,” I said.

“Git. Yo face make me tired.”

I left her muttering in the kitchen about spoiled white children, and what her mama would have done to her, had she wasted food, never mind the luxury of Scotch tape.

I bounded up the two flights of stairs to my room. The sticky on the tape was mostly dried up and I came to the end of the roll very quickly. The tape made an ugly as well as useless bandage. It would not hold paper doll Betsy McCall’s neck and head stuck to her shoulders.

The room was as cold as it was outside. My stomach was too full. I just had time to yank the old pot from under the bed before Tansy’s chicken pie, her hot fruit casserole and ice cream and a pint of milk, slightly used, made their reappearance in it.

Shortly after Dr. Evarts’s car left, I heard Mama’s bare feet on the stairs and then the door of Mama’s bedroom slammed below me.

“Roberta Ann!” Mamadee called up the stairs but Mama made no answer.

I crept downstairs, pot in hand, and tapped on Mama’s door. In a moment, Mama unlocked and opened it. She looked down at me, registered the pot in my hands, and made a face.

I slipped past her and took it into her bathroom to dispose of it.

Mama stood in the open bathroom door. “I suppose Tansy let you make a pig of yourself?”

I rinsed out the pot in the basin and then helped myself to Mama’s Listerine. “You want me to rub your feet, Mama?”

“I am gone have a bath, Calley. You can wait in my bed. Go get your pajamas on while I draw my bath.”

That was more than I could hope.

My pajamas were four days past their last wash at the Hotel Pontchartrain. I dropped them on the floor with my grey dress and underpants and socks. I did have clean underpants. I put them on and padded back to Mama’s room.

“My pajamas are dirty,” I told her when she let me in.

She sighed a long-suffering sigh and poked around in a drawer and found an old undershirt of Daddy’s. It was cotton, softened by many wearings and washings. On me, it made an oversized nightdress, but at least I was decent. I was more than decent. I felt all at once as if Daddy’s arms were around me.

“Don’t wear those underpants to bed,” Mama said, as if I didn’t know that wearing underpants at night is nasty.

I dropped my underpants, picked them up and folded them the way I found them in my drawer at home: crotch up, sides over, like an envelope.

Between Mama’s sheets, I hugged a pillow. As Daddy’s undershirt warmed me, I realized I had been shivering and no longer was. My stomach was calmer. Perhaps because I felt better, I thought of Ida Mae Oakes. I let myself hope that she might come to see me, to offer her condolences. She might come straight to Ramparts, knock at the kitchen door, and be offered refreshment by Tansy, but insist on first seeing me. Or she might come to the funeral and the reception.

Mama had to wake me up when she came to bed. And we began a new ritual.

Mama had had Leonard place the footlocker with the ransom locked inside it in an even bigger old cedar chest at the foot of her bed. She strung the key to the cedar chest onto the red silk string around my neck. That first night at Mamadee’s, when she had waked me again, she unlocked the cedar chest and checked the locker. Mama did not allow me to take the silk string off my neck and so I had to kneel down in front of the chests so she could fit the keys into the locks. It was so much like kneeling by the bed, I felt as if I ought to say the bedtime prayer.

That night I dreamt for the first time of finding such a footlocker and lifting the lid. Sometimes in my dreams—to this day—I find the ransom. Sometimes I find Daddy, alive, neatly folded like a jack-in-the-box, ready to pop up and surprise me. And sometimes I find what you would expect me to dream of finding: the nightmare, the bloody broken, profoundly unpleasant, nightmare.

WHEN I collected all my dirty clothes to give to Tansy, I kept Daddy’s undershirt, hiding it away under the pillow on the cot upstairs.

It was Sunday. Mama told me to put on my overalls. That meant that we were not going to church. We had not been to church since leaving for New Orleans. Perhaps we were never going to go again. We were just going to kneel every night and every morning next to a footlocker full of money instead. Mama did not explain.

Mama teased Ford awake and made him come down to breakfast. He slumped in his chair, staring blearily at the bowl of cornflakes that Tansy put down in front of him. Mama put a spoon in his hand. Ford stirred it through the cereal listlessly.

“You are pining,” Mama said. “That’s all I need, two sick children.”

Ford gave me a quick surprised glance. I made to puke over his bowl to show him how I was sick too.

Tansy turned away from us hurriedly, making an odd noise. She pretended it was a sneeze, snatching a handkerchief from her voluminous pinafore and blowing her nose but I believe that she was trying not to laugh.

“Of course,” said Mama, “Calley did it to herself. Tansy, how could you let Calley eat herself sick? Don’t give her a lick of dessert at dinner! You hear?”

“Yes, ma’am,” Tansy agreed, as she filled Mama’s coffee cup.

Ford let go of his spoon. It slid into the bowl of cornflakes.

Tansy picked it out with a small pair of sterling silver ice tongs. When she presented him with a clean spoon, Ford let it thunk dully onto the tablecloth.

“Ford, darling,” Mama begged, “if you don’t eat, you’ll fade away to a shadow.”