Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

After a moment or two, I could see into the footlocker. Fire out, starved of oxygen. The cobalt candleholder sat in the black mess at the bottom of the footlocker, like an unpolished gem in a tar pit. Like my own heart, sooty and hard, but unmelted. I felt no fear any more of the rag doll or the footlocker. I dropped the lid again.

When I stood up, I looked up, searching out the center beam of the attic. Once I was under it and could look in either direction, I followed it to the attic steps. I coughed a lot while I made my way.

Impulsively, I gave the light pull chain a yank, and all the lightbulbs came on. I could have done that before, when I brought the ransom money to the luggage, but had not, what with realizing that I had left the door key in the padlock. I might have had clear vision, if only I had done the simple and obvious thing: Try the light chain again.

There was only one way to turn the lights on, and that was the pull chain. I had not heard its distinctive catch and click, never mind anyone who might have pulled it. Knowing that it had not been the fuse still left me without answers that mattered.

I backed down the steps, with the canvas suitcase bumping on each step after me. When I tried the door, it was still locked. I used the oyster knife. It worked and I swore I would never be without it.

It was only midday, I realized, as I emerged into the hallway. I heard the sound of dinner from the dining room. The best place to temporarily stash the money, I decided, was in the linen closet. That highest shelf, where the Christmas decorations were stored, and no one ever ever looked, that was the place. In a few moments, the ransom was hidden, and I had gathered clean clothes and was locked in the bathroom.

The sight of myself in the mirror made me laugh until I cried again. I looked like a charred owl. I jumped into the shower to cover the noise I could not stop making.

When I went down the backstairs to the kitchen, Perdita was arranging dessert plates.

“I’ll do those,” I said.

She watched me do one to make sure that I did it right, and then she wrinkled her nose.

“I smells burnin’. Bin smellin’ least a quarter hour. Nothin’ boil over, though, nor burn on neither.” The outrage in her voice made it clear that Perdita would not allow boil-overs or burn-ons.

I sniffed the air and shook my head in puzzlement. “Maybe somebody’s campfire on the beach.”

“If it is, Lawd save whomsoever be eatin’ that mess!” Perdita said.

Miz Verlow did not seem to notice, perhaps because so many of the guests just then were smokers, and the smoke was always wafting in from the verandah. She did give me several puzzled glances, as if she could not quite remember who I was.

I heard her in the attic that night. She went straight to wherever she was going and stood there for a long moment.

And then, very clearly, she said, “It’s too late, Calliope Dakin.”

MAMA came home with a new pair of tits. Her jawline was ten years tighter. Her eyes had acquired a slight and sexy tilt, like Barbara Eden’s, while the shadows under them had disappeared. The suggestion of Barbara Eden was entirely deliberate; Mama was rigged out in billowing gauzy harem pants and a form-fitting short jacket that was meant to serve up her décolletage like a tray of meringues, and did.

She sashayed into Merrymeeting still wearing her sunglasses, so she could casually whip them off. She had to check the effect in the mirror in the foyer and on anyone who might be standing there looking. Everyone was, given she had timed her arrival for the cocktail hour, when the guests gathered to knock back a few drinks before supper.

Several of them were regulars who knew Mama. They knew that she was different but only a few of the women could have said how. Fewer of the guests were new; Mama had the greatest effect on them. One of the younger men even made a low whistle—very low and very short and ending in an odd, smothered yelp, as his wife stomped down on the toe of his sandaled foot.

Colonel Beddoes, bringing in Mama’s suitcases, missed the byplay. He passed the luggage off to me to take up to Mama’s room, freeing himself to put an arm around Mama’s waist and nuzzle her ear.

Miz Verlow went through a little routine of being so attentive to one guest that she didn’t notice Mama until she turned around at the kerfuffle of commotion and saw Mama getting her ear sucked by Colonel Beddoes. Mama had to swat him down mockingly, to keep her dignity in front of Miz Verlow.

Mama went out again with Colonel Beddoes after supper and it was late when she returned but I was still awake. When I heard her, I went to her room and knocked.

She had left the door ajar, which meant that I should come right in. She looked at me in her mirror, where she was sponging off her makeup.

“My feet are killin’ me,” she said. “Show me your hands.”

I held them up so they were visible in the mirror. Then I picked up a bottle of her hand lotion and helped myself. My nails were fine but my skin was dry.

“That’s expensive,” she said, “don’t waste it.”

She had a cigarette burning up in an ashtray on the vanity and a glass of bourbon breathing pleasant airs. I picked up the cigarette and took a drag.

“Buy your own,” she snapped.

I took a sip out of her glass of bourbon too.

“Calley!”

I dropped onto her bed, kicked off my sandals and flopped back.

Mama stopped to suck on the cigarette and knock back some bourbon. “I don’t know what I did to deserve you.”

I didn’t say anything. She finished with her face, tied the sash of her negligee, took her cigarette and bourbon and went off to the bathroom for a quarter hour. I used the time to open her pocketbook and help myself to a twenty and then I turned down her bed for her.

Mama came back, glass empty, cigarette stub no doubt flushed down the toilet.

She handed me the glass and arranged herself on the bed. As I opened the jar of foot cream, she gave a great melodramatic sigh.

“It was hell,” she said. “You cannot imagine.”

I held her feet in my lap. Her new tits poked up the bodice of her negligee proudly. Her eyelids bore very thin but still visible red scars, and other scars were exposed behind her ears, where she had tied back her hair to do her face.

I worked the foot cream into her feet methodically.

“But,” Mama said, reaching for the pack of cigarettes and a lighter on the night table, “it was worth every damn cent and every damn miserable moment.”

She went into some detail about the miserable moments, which were more miserable for her than anyone else who ever experienced them. When I was finished with her feet, she was still talking. I closed the jar.

She paused to take a hit on her cigarette.

“Good night, Mama,” I said, leaving her with her mouth open, words ready to spill out and no one to hear them.

I closed the bedroom door gently.

IT was Miz Verlow’s custom to sort the mail when it arrived, usually right after breakfast. Then she would give it to me to distribute. As a rule, her guests received very little mail; they were short-term residents, after all.

In the years that we had been living at Merrymeeting, Mama had received only communications from Adele Starret, an occasional postcard or note from some guest with whom she had struck up an acquaintanceship or, even more rarely, a billet-doux from a boyfriend. It was more common for me to receive mail, for I shared the interests of so many of our longtime guests. Not only notes and postcards arrived with my name on them, but books and records and tapes, and even the occasional feather, dried flower, or packet of seeds.

The day after Mama returned, Miz Verlow handed me a letter for her. She handed me that envelope with a curtness with which I was now familiar. Miz Verlow ignored me most of the time, since my last visit to the attic, but sometimes it was obvious that she was extremely displeased with me. I made an early decision to ignore any reaction from her, and stuck to it.