Candles Burning Read Free

favorite song was “You Are My Sunshine.” He said, “gone” for “going,” and left off the “to,” as we were all apt to do, though, of course, we were taught better.
    Just as he never got around to telling me how his nose got broke, Daddy never had a chance to tell me why he married Mama.
    I could speculate that he thought that he loved her. She was a young and beautiful woman and she wanted him to marry her. Between illness and the war and not being able to join up and fight in it, maybe he was looking to recover some of his fading youth and vigor. He may have begun to feel there should be more to life than money and the making of it. If he had not been a Dakin—if he had been born into a family like the Carrolls—he would have had a mama or a sister to look out for a suitable mate. But he was a sisterless Dakin and by the time he met Roberta Ann Carroll, Burmah Moses Dakin was long dead of poverty and overwork. If he had not married Mama, I wouldn’t ever have been born, nor would Ford. And Joe Cane Dakin would not have been murdered in New Orleans in 1958.

Three
    NATURALLY, Daddy drove anything he had a mind to drive, right off the lot. He put Mama in the model he wanted to promote in any given year. The sight of Mama behind the wheel might make a husband imagine that if he bought a car like that, his wife would maybe look a little like Mama. The wife might imagine herself looking a little more like Mama than she did.
    At that time in her life, Mama was not only the best-looking woman in Alabama, she was Miz Joe Cane Dakin, and that meant she was rich. Her looks had earned her position; she deserved it. Being Miz Joe Cane Dakin and driving a Ford was as far as she was willing to go in the direction of working for a living.
    In 1958 Daddy was promoting the Edsel, so Mama drove a four-door hardtop Edsel Citation, which had the big engine and wheelbase, a tri-tone gold-metallic, jonquil-yellow-jet-black paint job, gold upholstery with little flecks of metallic gold in it, and marshmallow-creme leather trim. Daddy knew the Edsel was an ungainly looking thing and Mama knew it too, but Daddy had his loyalty to the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Motor Company, he declared, paid the bills.
    Mama didn’t bother to hold an opinion on that. It was enough for her that Joe Cane Dakin paid the bills. The least Mama could do was to pretend to like the Edsel. She always derived a certain satisfaction from playing a role. Mama believed that being movie-star beautiful was the equivalent of having movie-star talent, though she would never, of course, be so common as to stoop to the hard work of becoming a real actress.
    When Daddy wanted to attend a convention of Ford dealers in New Orleans, he drove us the three-hundred-some miles from Montgomery in Mama’s Edsel: Mama in the front seat, Ford and I in the back. The convention was due to start on Friday the fourteenth and run into the next week, permitting the dealers to treat themselves to Mardi Gras on the eighteenth. And the very next day, Ash Wednesday, would be my seventh birthday. I was promised not only a birthday cake but also the specialité du maison of the Hotel Pontchartrain, a concoction called Mile-High Pie.
    Ford was able to make the trip because the convention fell during the February school vacation. I could have gone anyway, as my presence in Miz Dunlap’s first grade was not as strictly demanded as Ford’s was in Miz Perlmutter’s sixth grade. Whenever Daddy wanted me to keep him company on some drive to Birmingham or Mobile or wherever, I was allowed to play hooky. Miz Dunlap never said boo. Since Mama liked to pretend that Daddy never did anything that she did not tell him to do, when he took me with him, she always made it her idea; she would declare that if she didn’t get some relief from me, Joe Cane Dakin was gone have a wife in the mental hospital.
    While Mama and Daddy were gone be in New