Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

My right arm ached deep into the socket; it lay slack across my torso. I could not lift it. Every other muscle was weak as dust. I’d wet myself. The closet was not only dark because the light was blown out; there was smoke in it. I coughed.

As quickly as I could, I sorted myself out and struggled out of the closet. My strongest emotion was one of disgust at my own stupidity; if this didn’t prove that no one on this earth could be stupider than Calley Dakin, I didn’t know what would. A small dirty cloud of smoke hung just below the ceiling of my room. The window was open; I turned on my little fan to help circulate the smoke on out and draw in the good air.

Taking the flashlight from my bottom drawer, I staggered back into the closet. It was a huge relief to see no flame. I no longer heard the fire; apparently it had gone out.

I sniffed. Lovely. A bouquet of fragrant pee, ash and ozone smell. The flashlight beam showed me the electrical line and the top of the light fixture. Where the line joined the fixture, the insulation was gone. I knew at once that I had managed to touch a live wire, but the beam showed me where it was. The little tin box was wide open—and heaped with ash and fragments of burnt bills.

So much for storing up treasure in this world. I dropped onto my bed, pulled a pillow over my face and laughed into it until my stomach hurt.

I had a mess to clean up, and myself. I kept a supply of small waxed-paper sandwich bags for disposal of used tampons. With a couple of these in hand, as quietly as I could and with due care of the exposed wire, I collected the little tin box and its ashy contents. Then I played the flashlight again to make sure that I had gotten everything even remotely flammable. The light picked up a dark corner of something. I used the flashlight itself like a hook to move the object closer. It was a book.

Even before I turned the flashlight full on it, I recognized the most common size and shape of a bird guide. An odd thought intruded: I don’t see it. It’s not there. But it was, most assuredly. There. As gingerly as if it were electrified, I touched it with my forefinger.

Just a bird guide. Forget it.

A puddle of something soft draped over the book, and a lump of gold hung against the edges of its pages. The bird harness, the egg locket.

I drew the book toward me and gathered the loops of silk rope and the egg locket with the other.

The book fit my hand perfectly—that sort of book is designed exactly for fitting hands. Still, I felt an excitement kindling inside me that I could neither explain nor resist. A jolt. A blast. It was the way I felt when I heard Haydn for the first time, or Little Richard.

I remembered: I put the book there, when I moved into my crooked little room. I didn’t need it. I had other, more recent guides. Mama, someone, might notice that it was stolen, that my uncle Robert Junior’s name was written on the flyleaf.

But I had not hidden the other books that I had taken from Ramparts, and, in fact, Mama had never looked into any of them. Every book that I owned had somebody else’s name written on the flyleaf.

Listen to the book.

My heart felt as if it were on one of those pull chains with the white knob at the end. Something yanked that chain, and my whole being seemed to light up inside me. One of my fingertips stung as if burned. The one with the scar on it.

And dreams that were memories opened like a book in my mind.

A long time ago, the ghost of my great-grandmama Cosima spoke to me, preparing me to meet a ghost named Tallulah Jordan, who vanished before anyone else saw her. And Tallulah Jordan had instructed me to listen to the book. The burning of my fingertip had identified the book as this one, my very first own bird guide, that was stolen goods from a dead uncle.

The cold gold egg locket in my palm had my name inside it, opposite a picture of a woman I thought must be my great-grandmama. She was dead before I was born. Why had she written my name inside the egg locket?

The household was only just beginning to stir. Mrs. Mank’s Benz sportster was parked next to Miz Verlow’s Lincoln on the kitchen side of the house. She had been expected; I’d helped Roger and Cleonie arrange her suite, and then heard her arrive shortly after I had gone to bed. I left the house barefoot, with the legs of my coveralls rolled up to my knees and pinned there. My hat in a pocket of my coveralls. I needed some light, some sun, and even the thin light of dawn was freshening. As I had done habitually since a little girl, I ran barefoot through the swash, northward, away from Merrymeeting.

The birds were about their business, and so were the critters that lived in the sand, damp or dry, and the ones in the vegetation beyond the first dune. The beach mice were snugging up to sleep away the day. No other human beings were visible on the great swathe of white sand.

The bump of the book in my overall pocket intensified the faster I ran, until it was spanking me, as if I were a horse that needed urging in some furious race. The other horses in the race were invisible to me, though, and I could not see a finish line. I slowed to a trot and then a stroll, veering across the beach toward the dunes. The finish line, it appeared, was my nest in the high grass, and there it was.

Still breathing deeply from my run, I took the book from my pocket and sank into panic grass and sea oats, to the patch my bottom had long since shaped for me. The coarse tall grasses made space for two when Grady was with me, but when I was alone it seemed to fill in cozily around me.

The bird guide was familiar to my hands. Thick for a small book, the paper of its pages as thin as the print on each page was tiny. Most of the dust had shaken off the book while it was in my pocket but the cover was still slightly dust-dull. I rubbed the book, back and front, and then the spine, on the thighs of my overalls.

With the spine up, my vision blurred as if I had gotten dust in my eye. I blinked rapidly to clear my eyes, and felt a few quick automatic tears leak. They sparkled in my lashes as I blinked, and were gone.

On the spine of the book, where the legend should have been, were the words

Once more, I tried to clear my vision with rapid blinking, but the legend remained the same. The absurdity of it made me laugh. I had no memory of altering it, and did not see how it could have been done. It took an effort to turn the spine away into the palm of my left hand, to look at the blank front. Then I flipped the book and looked at the spine again, as if to catch it changing back to what it should have been. It remained

I paged a leaf at a time: first blank page, the thin second blank page, the flyleaf, and instead of Bobby Carroll, the inscription was

And the title leaf read

When new, the guides are so firmly bound that they never just fell open, but the binding of this one, in the dry dusty space above the closet, had become loose. It fell open to the colored illustrations. Looking up at me was a cartoon of a loony woodpecker—loony not just in its expression, but its coloration, as it was all black-and-white as the common male loon is, and it sported a red crest (not that loons have crests, but woodpeckers do). Like many birds, the eyes of loons are red. The loony woodpecker clung to a cartoon tree trunk. It was identified as

Ivory Bill, the Woodpecker!

woodpeckerus nearextinctus