Michael McDowell - Candles Burning

I laughed. “It’s been fascinating.”

She laughed as if she had been clever. “I bet. Look, I’ve been a fairy godmother to you. I expect some return on my outlay. Do we understand each other?”

I nodded as if in the affirmative. I needed her in order to get to Tallassee for Mama’s interment.

I drank her brandy, and let her think that she was ringmaster.

THE flight was direct, from a private terminal at Logan to the little airport at Tallassee. Firsts for me, to fly, to fly on a jet, to fly on a chartered jet—I remembered the train from New Orleans to Montgomery, and it came to me that I would not run out of firsts until my death, and that would be a first too. Mrs. Mank slept the whole way, because she did not want to talk to me, but also because she was hungover. She took a pill of some kind and offered me one, but I declined. Her lips pursed at the realization that my head was stronger than hers.

The wardrobe she had provided me was short on black, so I wore a boxy Courreges stewardessy cobalt-blue dress that went only halfway to my knees. I was barelegged, but my shoes were black, black flats because Mrs. Mank said tall girls had to wear flats and she had picked them out and paid for them. One day, I promised myself, I would buy my own shoes, and own a pair of stiletto heels in black. My copper-penny wig covered the stubble of my new hair. Both my black beret and the pin that held it to the wig were borrowed, volunteered by Mrs. Mank from her own wardrobe. The beret bore the label of Elsa Schiaparelli, and for that reason alone, I accepted the loan of it. Wig and hat felt like two hats, but I didn’t intend to make a habit of wearing the combination.

A car and hired driver awaited us. It was a black Cadillac, and the driver was a woman. She was a thin woman, the worn-out Southern kind, with huge eyes and sun-damaged complexion, bad teeth and cigarette-stained fingers. She did not have an ounce of flesh to spare, no chest, no fanny, and her hair had been burnt to rusty wire by harsh home perms and dye-jobs.

The first thing that she did was to introduce herself as Doris, and then express her condolences for the late Mrs. Dakin. Hers was a lunger’s voice, breathy and harsh.

I wondered how Doris knew Mama’s name. Surely Ford had not put it in any of the local newspapers. Perhaps Mrs. Mank had included the information with the address of the cemetery that was our destination.

Doris’s eyes in the rearview mirror were curious but only for brief seconds; she drove skillfully, and never hesitated as to our route.

Mrs. Mank glanced at the Rolex on her wrist and said, “We’re going to be a little late.”

Doris stepped down on the accelerator. She did her best, but the country roads could not be driven as if they were highways, not safely.

The Promised Land shocked me, so closely did it match my memory. Its resemblance to a used-car junkyard was deeply disheartening. Someone had left a dusty Corvette at the verge of the road into the cemetery.

“Stay here, please,” I asked Mrs. Mank.

She rolled down the windows and sat back. “Have it your way.” From her purse, she took a flask.

Doris held the door for me.

“I’ll just wait with Missus,” she told me, with a flicker of her gaze toward Mrs. Mank. It was as if she didn’t want to say Mrs. Mank’s name.

There was no grass, just prickly weeds in patches. The weeds were rooted in coarse sand, amid pebbles with edges so sharp I could feel them biting the thin soles of my flats. Crumbling concrete marked out the sunken rectangles of the graves and all the tombstones tilted forward as if they wanted a better look at the man or woman or child or stillborn infant they commemorated. On nearly every grave a cracked clay pot or old milk bottle held dried-up old flowers. The few trees thereabout were all bent and scraggly and seemingly half dead. They looked like the paper trees we cut out in kindergarten for Halloween decorations, so the bats and ghosts would have some background beside the moon.

I looked for a crow. Not only were there no crows, there were no birds at all, and in Alabama, I recalled, there were always birds in the sky.

A casket waited on a mechanical frame in an open grave. There were no flowers. Nearby stood a big black funeral hack, its rear door open. Two men sat inside the hack, in the front seat, with the windows rolled down, and cigarette smoke whisping out. A white man in a black suit leaned against the body of the hack, smoking a cigarette. He wore a black fedora. He did not need to remove his sunglasses for me to recognize him.

He pitched his cigarette butt past the coffin and into the open grave.

“Let’s get this gone,” Ford said in a bored drawl.

The two men, the undertaker and the driver, got out of the front seat of the hack and assumed respectful postures next to it.

Ford hitched the hem of his suit jacket, which was silk and hand-tailored, and drew a small, thick book from a rear pocket. The jacket fell perfectly back into line.

He pushed his hat back on his forehead. He let the book fall open.

He did not look at it but intoned, “Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to lay to rest the sorry remains of the late not very beloved Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin, relic of Joe Cane Dakin, the larger proportion of him moldering already just to my left. If you examine his stone—beg pardon, there is no stone, as Roberta Ann Carroll Dakin never got around to having one placed there. Let none of us doubt that she had a more pressing need, if she ever did recall that she had yet to perform this widow’s duty, perhaps for cigarettes, or silk stockings, or makeup, that week. Allow me to substitute mere words:

Ford took a mocking bow.

“To the task at hand.”

He looked down at the casket. He spread his hands upon the polished wood of the top.

“Mama,” he said. “Blame me. I had your bloated carcass drug here all the way from Pass Christian. I bought this here plot next to Daddy, just for you. Now your fine Carroll bones gone spend eternity right next to his Dakin bones. Most of ’em, I mean. Mama, I spent the last decade of my life thinking up the things I was gone say to you. But now we’re here, I ain’t wasting my breath.”

He tipped his chin heavenward and closed his eyes behind the lenses of his sunglasses reverently.

“Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,” he said mournfully, and then laughed. “Let’s go get drunk.”

“I’d like to sing a hymn,” I said.

He tore off his hat and cast it roughly to the ground.

“I knew it,” he said. “I knew you could not by-god-and-sonny-jesus keep that huge flapping mouth of yours shut.”

Ignoring him, I sang, in my own tuneless voice.

“Okay,” said Ford. “Now shut up and let’s go get drunk.”

“I want a few minutes with Daddy.”

Ford rolled his eyes. “He’s deader than she is, Dumbo.”

But he waited. And he removed his hat.

I stepped sideways to the sunken place that he had indicated was Daddy’s grave. I felt nothing, no emanation, certainly, and no sense of peace.

“He’s not here,” I said.

“What I said.” Ford smoothed his hair and stuck his hat back on his head, the same way, tipped jauntily back. “Better go tell Saint Peter.”

Ignoring Ford, I started back toward the Cadillac. I was going to tell Mrs. Mank that I meant to go have a drink with Ford, possibly even get drunk, and she could go back to Massachusetts, but I didn’t bother to tell Ford. He was full enough of himself already.