I rested there a moment, savoring the hardly perceptible surcease of heat, and the access to the salt-tinged air. Reluctantly I moved on, promptly barking my shins on a crate, using a standing lamp to steady myself, and stumbling about until I was face-to-face with the totemic face of the old semanier. Something, at last, that I recognized. Recalling that I had not tried all the drawers, I began opening them from the bottom. Crap galore in them, from Masonic jewelry to a nice selection of little silk shorts—underpants, I realized as I handled them with my dirty fingers, from the twenties. Step-ins, Perdita called them. I dropped them back into their drawer and rummaged behind them. The rigid edge my fingertips stubbed up against proved to be a rusty little tin box, with a matchbook in it.
Fire! My heart leapt as if I were a caveman coming on a lightning-struck mammoth, split open to give me access to rare meat and steaming offal.
Soon I had my crude candle burning. I held it carefully, while peering around for something to put it in. It was frustrating to see nothing, not even an old ashtray that might be useful, when I had seen so many candleholders and candlesticks on previous visits. I considered the little tin box, but it was flimsy and rusty and might get hot to hold. Surely I could do better.
And I did. Gyrating slowly, holding the candle high to cast its light over the greatest area, I caught a glimpse of purple-blue glass on an open shelf of a shabby curio cabinet that had had the glass of its door broken right out. I reached careful past the shards still in the frame of the door, and brought out the cobalt-blue glass candleholder that Mama had bought in New Orleans, in the ticking antique shop. Prop: Mr. Rideaux. The bell on the door jingling. The woman who looked at me. A wall of clocks lying about the time. Mama’s lost Hermès Kelly bag that wasn’t lost at all.
Despite the nonstandard chubbiness of my candle, the glass candleholder married my candle as if the two objects were made for each other.
Holding it high again, moving carefully so as not to bang myself up any more, or inadvertently light up something flammable, I made better progress in my exploration. I was running sweat as if instead of the burning candle, I was doing the melting. My overalls and the man’s undershirt that I wore underneath it stuck to me as wet pages stick to one another.
The thought reminded me of the bird guide. I touched it to reassure myself. It occurred to me that I ought to look at it, to see what state it was in—steady-state National Audubon Society Field Guide, or nutty oddybone.
I drew it out, picked out a nearby rug-covered chest with an end table next to it, and sat down. I put the candlestick on the table. Held in both my hands, the spine of the book read
I expected it to flop open but nothing happened. When I tried to open it, it seemed to be as firmly stuck closed as it had been for Mrs. Mank.
An insubstantial and mildly impatient voice said, enunciating each word clearly:
Listen to the book.
I stopped trying to open the book. I knew that voice. It was Ida Mae Oakes’s. Tears welled over my lower lashes and I blubbered.
“I’m all ears,” I said in a whisper. “Ida Mae, I’ve listened for you particularly. I wish you wasn’t dead.”
Me too, Ida Mae said. If it wasn’t for the Peace That Surpasseth All Understanding, I’d rather be alive. You stop your blubbering now. I had a nice easy passage, which is more than a lot of folks get. Closed my eyes for a minute during the second Sunday service, and woke up hovering over my own daid old carcass, and nobody even noticing, they was so many of them nodded off. It was a hot day and Brother Truman would drone, no matter how much the amen corner tried to work up a momentum. And I was so young. I wasn’t but fifty-six. My mama is still alive, with sugar, cataracts, not a tooth in her head and don’t know her own name most days. She married her third husband when she was fifty-six, and raised up three of his children that had run wild since their mama passed of a sudden. She earned a crown doing that, I am sure, but she’s been in no hurry to claim it. She asks for me all the time, thinking I am still alive. I hear her, “Where my Ida Mae? Why don’ she come see her mama?”
“I missed you,” I told her. “Missed you terrible.”
I know, she said, in her old gentle way. I held my tongue all this time for a penance for being put out with passing so all-of-a-sudden, but I would have spoke if needed. I kep my eye on you, darlin’. You don’ know how many souls are keeping their eyes on you. Well, mayhap you do.
“Daddy?”
You know it, darlin’.
“Tell me why he died—”
Hush, now. It was his time—
“No it wasn’t!” I cried.
The candle wavered as if I had struck it.
“Revenge is mine, saith—”
“Yeah, you bet,” I retorted.
Mind your manners, Ida Mae said sharply. I’ll hear no blasphemy from a child that still has breath in her lungs for to be grateful.
“I want some answers,” I said. No, I didn’t say it. I shouted.
Ida Mae made a very odd laugh. People in Hell want sweet tea, Calley Dakin.
“I believe I am in Hell,” was my retort.
Gotta be a lot worse than you have been yet to get there. Ida Mae hummed briefly as if she were about to sing. Listen to the book, she sang softly, to the tune of “I See the Moon.” Listen to the book.
The book fell open in my lap, to the flyleaf. It was inscribed: Calley Dakin, in my own handwriting.
Unlock the footlocker, the book said in my voice, with a little flutter of its fine thin pages.
“I don’t know where it is.”
Ida Mae’s voice came out of the nowhere again. You’re sitting on it.
Sixty-two
I jumped off and spun about, losing my grasp on the field guide and worse, nearly knocking over the candle. I dropped the book and used both hands to secure the candle. A fearful sweat was running from my hairline in rivulets, and from every pore, or so it seemed. I was breathless and my belly was knotted up like a fist.
With the candle safe and steady on the end table, I drew the rug away from the chest, and sure enough, it was not really a chest, but a military footlocker. Green and black. Padlocked. No key in sight. I sniffed the air but detected no odor of the abattoir.
The guidebook lay on the dusty wooden floor. I picked it up and put it in my pocket, and when I did, my fingertips encountered the key to the attic.
I drew it out and studied at it. It was a door key, the old-fashioned long-barreled kind, not the stubby key that a padlock would have. I pulled out my oyster knife. One of them was going to open that padlock, or else. I didn’t know what the else might be, but I knew that I was serious about it.
I made a try with the door key. And, of course, it worked. It slid into that padlock like water down a thirsty throat. And I was thinking about water; I was thirsty by then. I turned the key and the padlock let go.
If I failed to actually open the footlocker, Ida Mae was going to speak up or use the guidebook for a megaphone—oh, how stupid I had been; of course that was exactly what the guidebook was, a ghost megaphone.
I bent my knees, unhooked the padlock from the metal tongues of the footlocker, and put my back behind my lifting of the lid of the chest. There was no resistance, only the unhappy shriek of its disused hinges, as it rose and then fell away with my immediate push. I looked down into the trunk, which was filled with neatly banded bundles of money. Sitting on top of the paper money was a silver dollar. Not a bill in a bundle would be dated later than 1958, I was immediately sure: It was the ransom that had not saved Daddy’s life, and the silver dollar appeared to be my very own.