Short
Candles
Short
Candles
Rita Donovan
Text © 2007 by Rita Donovan
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, digital, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior consent of the publisher.
Cover art/design: Vasiliki Lenis
Author photo: Ryszard Mrugalski
RendezVous Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for our publishing program.
Darkstar Fiction
An imprint of Napoleon and Company
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
11 10 09 08 07 5 4 3 2 1
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Donovan, Rita, date-
Short candles / Rita Donovan.
ISBN 978-1-894917-53-7
I. Title.
| PS8557.058S56 2007 | C813′.54 | C2007-903848-4 |
For Carol, For Tony
Well, it’s all right,
Love is what you want.
Flying saucer, take me away,
Give me your daughter.
-Marc Bolan, T.Rex
Fire Engine Sue
If she is wearing the shoes with the straps, do not look for the perfect punch hole her father has added with his awl. It is there, but hidden beneath the twisted posy of yellow trefoil and purple cow vetch with which she decorates her shoes.
Little Sue Cardinal, who will carry “little” until she is older, like Little Stevie Wonder, the blind singer she does not know, takes the route by the river nearly every day. It is the 1960s, and her parents are not worried about abduction, or drowning, or evil people who would take a child from a pathway and destroy it. Her parents are worried about other things: her father Robert, his health, which has magically declined, as if someone has a curse on him; and her mother Adele, her job working in an office on the other side of town.
Besides, everyone knows that Fire Engine Sue can take care of herself. Look at how confidently she skips along the trail, as if she has memorized every rock, every grassy clump of earth. She has been referred to as Fire Engine Sue since she was four years old and awoke to warn her family of a fire that was just beginning to lick up the yellow curtains in the kitchen. There was significant damage to their well-appointed house, but the family was safe, and everyone agreed that it could have been much, much worse. The baby, Carla, was in her crib, and everyone knew how smoke affected babies. It was Suzanne, Little Sue, Fire Engine Sue, who had saved them.
This is the beginning of it then. For it is one thing to wake up to the smell of smoke, to be a light sleeper, perhaps, or slightly weak of bladder. It is another to be able to tell the future. At four, the future is just about everything, her father argues at night with his wife. Why do people come to her with their problems? For Suzanne is what every community wants, an amulet against chaos.
Nothing is supposed to break through the line of box elders and maples at the edge of town. Why do you think those rows of peonies and the tall cosmos are along the driveways? And now they have Fire Engine Sue to keep them one step ahead of calamity, the law, the cancer creeping up the spine.
The town prides itself on those lines of trees along the perimeter. It had been a group endeavour some twenty years earlier, when people came back from the war. Suzanne’s father had come back then too, almost as young as when he’d left, but not as fresh. No. He was nineteen when he returned, having joined up with parental permission. Too young to drink or vote when he had enlisted, he had nonetheless managed to maneuver his tank across parts of Holland, to the relief of the thin and ragged Dutch. Or so he said.
He doesn’t talk much about the war any more. It is tucked into the headband of his fedora like a feather. And who is wearing hats these days?
Suzanne stops skipping, for there is a bullfrog speaking to her from the edge of the river. The bank is low here, so she goes over and waits politely for him to complete his original composition before continuing on. She should do something today. She wants to build a shelter in the woods for lost penguins, but she is unsure of the dimensions of such a structure. She will go to the library. They have everything there, books about people’s throats, a story about a wagon train that stretches far back into the picture on the cover. They will know about penguins as well.
“Hello, Little Sue!”
Mrs. Reidel. She is hanging out the same tablecloth again. The berry stain has not come out, despite the expensive powder she bought at Laturelle’s store. It has faded, though, into a light and pleasing pink that reminds Suzanne of the cheeks of her doll, Annabelle.
“Hello!” she waves back. “The bullfrog talked again.”
“Good,” Mrs. Reidel says, shaking a pale green dishtowel out of the basket. “Could you hand me some pins?”
Suzanne is over the fence in a flash and pointing wooden clothespins at Mrs. Reidel.
“They look like crocodiles.”
“Hmmm?”
The pins are in Mrs. Reidel’s mouth, four crocodiles ready to snap.
“Do you know about penguin houses?”
What people cannot understand, then, what has them really puzzled, is the cruelty of the gift. Little Sue, Fire Engine Sue, successfully predicted Mr. Gaumper’s broken leg, on ice in front of Laturelle’s store. She was able to warn Bobby Allerton away from three possible allergic reactions, one deadly. She told people to cover their plants, and Mrs. Reidel was one of the few who listened, and therefore did not lose her crop of tomatoes and beets to the freak hailstorm only four weeks earlier.
So what people have trouble understanding is how such a gift could not have prevented tiny Carla from falling to her death. Really, this sentiment almost overtook the general dismay at the funeral two years ago. Here was a baby who had survived a house fire, a toddler who followed her sister Suzanne around like a trusty St. Bernard. Suzanne knew this child better, surely, than she knew Mr. Gaumper’s leg or Bobby Allerton’s allergies, and yet the toddler was found beneath the second floor balcony, her small precise bones shaken and jittered back into place.
Robert Cardinal blamed himself. Hadn’t he been told to watch the tot that afternoon? Adele Cardinal blamed him as well. Suzanne? She said Carla was flying to Jesus and had left her body, with the scabbed knee, behind.
“Jesus might not like scabs.”
People kept away from Little Sue for a while after that. Perhaps the town didn’t have its own Fire Engine after all. Maybe it was a fluke. After all, it was inevitable that somebody would break a leg outside Laturelle’s store; the guy never salted or sanded.
Over time, a few people came back. Suzanne never refused to speak with anyone. And if they brought along a sucker or a bag of caramels, well, so much the better. Most people, though, just thought of her as the strange little kid who had lost her sister, an unfortunate blip in the timeline of the town.
“Hello Mrs. Craig,” Suzanne says as she bounces past the desk.
“Ssshhh.”