The Heaven of Mercury

by Brad Watson

  She could stand on the porch balcony in the evenings and watch cars and wagons go down the hill to the center of town, see the smoky outline of the buildings there, and the sun’s glow sink and fade behind the bluff to the southwest, inflaming the distant sandy ridge full of beeches, white and blackjack oak, mockernut hickory, hemlock, and pine. She tried to get a few minutes to herself every day, before suppertime in the winter, and after supper in the summer, after Earl’s family had settled into the living room to listen to the radio and talk. She didn’t separate herself rudely but when she could get a moment alone she did.

  When she could get away to town with Ruthie in a stroller, she pushed her down the hill to the drugstore or maybe to see a picture show at the Strand, stop in at Loeb’s department store to look at clothes. Sometimes when Earl’d had a good month she bought a little outfit for Ruthie or herself, but not too often, as Mrs. Urquhart would frown on her vanity, say she ought to be sewing her own. Merry tagged along some days, usually when they were going to see a show, and when Birdie would stop afterwards to look at a dress Merry would make a face, standing there with a hip stuck out, not unlike a pretty version of her mother’s bitter Holiness wrath.

  -You just don’t have the figure for that dress anymore, Birdie, she’d say. -It’d look a lot better on me.

  She was just fifteen, just two years younger than Birdie, but already a tart. She almost had no choice about being bad, it seemed to Birdie, with her mother so obsessed with sin and wickedness.

  Mrs. Urquhart was Holiness. Anything worldly was a sin, especially anything to do with the flesh. She was obsessed with the idea of a whore. The way Merry would stare at women in bright clothes and makeup, sauntering along the sidewalk below the porch, Birdie knew that’s what fired her imagination. She, Birdie, had never even heard that word until she married Earl. But after they moved in with the Urquharts she heard it all the time, came to know it was about to twist from Mrs. Urquhart’s mouth just from her expression, came to know just what a whore looked like, by Mrs. Urquhart’s lights.

  So little Ruthie grew up hearing the word and of course delighted in it. One day long after Earl had moved them out, she and Ruthie went over to visit, and Mrs. Urquhart’s neighbor Mrs. Estes came up to see them. Mrs. Estes was a good woman, but she had a male friend who would visit her, and word was she’d once been pregnant out of wedlock, lost the child—a punishment, to Mrs. Urquhart’s mind. -She ain’t our kind, she’d say when Birdie protested Mrs. Estes was good. But she came up that day wearing rouge and eyeliner and lipstick and a bright dress imprinted with all kinds of fruit like bananas, peaches, and clusters of grapes, going downtown. Little Ruthie jumped up and blurted, -Oh, Mrs. Estes, you look so pretty, you look just like a whore! Tickled Mrs. Estes but Birdie like to died.

  Earl’s little brother Levi was puny with a big round head and hound-dog eyes, dark circles underneath them, laying about the house and complaining of polio. Polio! Lazy-o is what you got, she’d say. I’ll tell Mama you whipped me, he’d say. He’d go to the toilet and cry, constipated, she’d have to go in, sit with him and then clean him up—he was far too old for that–and help him back to his bed. She’d see him smiling out the corner of her eye, and dump him there so he could wail she was mistreating him. Made him drink prune juice for the constipation and he threw it all up in the middle of the hallway out of pure spite.

  Mr. Urquhart, old Junius, wasn’t home much, out wandering the town and county all day, selling insurance or pretending to. Everybody said he was such a whoremonger, he’d pull a woman in off the street. He came in evenings smelling of whiskey and cigars, sat down to supper and ate it without saying a word, just looking at everybody in turn with those pale gleaming squinty eyes, wicked eyes she came to believe, always some kind of mischief going on, laughing to himself every now and then. Just his sitting there had Mrs. Urquhart interrupting every meal two or three times to say an extra grace over it, his wickedness was such a presence, it seemed. Kind of comical, really, when it wasn’t scary, when he was in a good mood and seemed almost kindly. But one evening after supper, when everyone else was out on the porch resting and Birdie was alone in the kitchen with the dishes, he came in there. She heard something then felt him come up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and give them a squeeze. And kept them there a good minute, her scrubbing away harder than ever.

  Finally she said, -What are you doing, Papa, for he made her call him Papa (as if he could hold a candle to her sweet, gentle Papa) like his real children did.

  -You got a fine shape, he said, I’d say my boy’s a lucky man, to have a good-looking young gal like you.

  -Well, she said, shifting her shoulders trying to suggest he let her go. She could smell and even feel his whiskey and cigar breath on her neck he was so close.

  -Let go, now, I’m trying to do these dishes.

  He held on, but after a minute gave a little har har under his breath and let her go, not before patting her behind on his way out.

  Merry said to her one day, -You don’t like my papa, do you?

  -What makes you say a thing like that? She was sitting by herself in the swing on the porch and Merry had come out, the little harlot in the making with her sleepy eyes.

  -I can tell by the way you act around him. And he likes you, she added.

  -Merry, you say the awfulest things. I ought to wash your mouth out with soap.

  -I’d like to see you try.

  -Well I could. Or get your mama to do it.

  -I wish I had a cigarette, Merry said.

  Birdie got up and went inside, left her out on the porch. Ruthie was asleep in their room. She picked up the moldy old book she’d found on the shelf in the foyer downstairs, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and opened it to her mark in the chapter called “The Slow Poisoners,” all about how way back in England and Italy and whatnot people had discovered how to kill a body slowly with different poisons. They’d started to use it on their enemies, until it became so common in Italy for a while the story said a woman wouldn’t think any more of doing it to a lover or husband than someone would to file a lawsuit today. It was interesting to her because Pappy had grown hemlock in his garden and told her about how people used to use it for poison in this wickedness or that, he’d been fascinated with it.

  In the book she found, it was mostly women who did it. One old woman in Italy was like the queen of the poisoners, saw it as helping out poor women who had no other recourse. It was horrible, but funny too, and she had fantasized about doing something like that to old Junius, and watching him get more and more poorly until his skin boiled over and his eyes popped out. She laughed out loud, almost woke up Ruthie sleeping beside her on the bed. But the longer she was forced to stay there alone, Earl on the road, the more miserable she was, and scared of Junius, too. She wanted to tell on him, but if she did Earl would kill him. Mrs. Urquhart wouldn’t be able to believe him capable of such a thing, anyway, in spite of his reputation and her tending to see evil and wickedness all around her. Birdie knew that for Mrs. Urquhart, evil was everywhere but remote, surrounding her and hers like a siege held off only by the force of her constant prayers, muttered under her breath every second of the day she wasn’t gabbing aloud about one thing or another. It would be Birdie who seemed evil to her, coming out with such a wild story. She decided she had to get out of there before things got worse.

  When Earl came home the next weekend she didn’t give him an explanation or a choice. Just said, -Either you move us out of here of I’m going home to my family. So they moved to a little apartment on Southside on a day when the dogwoods were ending their bloom, and their white withering petals were strewn across the yards surrounding downtown. A flock of cedar waxwings like a rustling visible yellow-brown gust of a breeze rushed over their heads and into a chinaberry tree beside the Urquharts’ porch, then out the other side red-flecked before the last one entered, a breeze delayed or caught in the branches and swirling on its way. And they were gone, she and Earl and R
uthie, from that house. She kept the bad blood to herself, though Earl knew something vaguely of it, and they didn’t speak of it for some time.

  After that it was easier, when he was away, because she’d fetch Pud and Lucy and bring them to town to stay with her, and run them back and forth to school in Earl’s car, and would bring Mama in sometimes, too. And Sundays they’d go out there and make a big Sunday dinner so Mama and Papa could see little Ruthie and she, Birdie, could walk with Pappy in the garden and hear his wonderful awful stories.

  Earl would be gone for months at a time. It was like she wasn’t married, or maybe a widow already, such long nights ticking by in the lamplight, Ruthie sleeping, Pud and Lucy gone home. Here she was married, and pretty much alone. When he came back, she did her best to make it seem a good home, and to show him she appreciated him, though it seemed he had a hard time readjusting to being there, himself. She had the idea he was more comfortable with himself out on the road or working alone in the city.

  Finally, though, Earl got the chance to open his own store in Mercury, and he bought them a little house just outside of town on the old Macon highway. It stood right across the road from where he’d build the big house with the deep front property during the war. One night in early June, the end of a hot day, they’d taken cool baths and lay in the bed with an oscillating fan blowing back and forth over them, and didn’t talk for a while, just lay there. There was a big honeysuckle bush between their house and the one next door, and the sweet smell of it drifted in the window, and for the first time ever she let Earl know, instead of him letting her know, that she wanted him. He turned on his side in the faint light and soon she could see his handsome eyes just looking at her. His coming home for good, and making them a real home, had tendered her toward him. They’d grown ever more remote during his years on the road. She touched him. Something about the way it happened—he was so gentle, and took his time, and maybe for the first time it felt as natural as could be, their being together like that. She forgot the night outside, Ruthie snoring childlike in her room, and the scent of the honeysuckles became something else not-honeysuckle, just became something all through the moment, and she cried out softly. It made Earl cry after, just silent tears she could see in that faint light, a glistening. -I love you, Birdie, with all my heart, he said, and wept, and she held him in her arms until they both fell asleep.

  She’d thought he’d been so happy and relieved that it made him cry. But later she’d think it must’ve been guilt and shame. That he must’ve gotten started with other women when he was on the road, and had a whole history of passion that’d had nothing to do with her. That, in this way, he had already left her far behind.

  She blamed herself, as much as him. He’d never had any real love around his house, no tenderness, not like her when she was growing up. One day not long after that evening, she went into town, caught a ride with Hazel Broughton in her new little coupe, and went into the store and all the girls looked up like she was a robber come in with a gun. She said, -Where’s Earl? No one said anything. -He’s up checking stock, one of them—a girl named Arlenie—finally said, and fairly rushed up the stairs. In a few minutes here comes Earl down, and when she kissed him she smelled a kind of perfume on him, a scent she’d smelled in the store before. She said nothing, just looked at him, and he looked away, said, -Well it’s real busy today, I’d better get to it, I need to work on some orders, and went into the office and left her standing there, all the girls avoiding her eyes.

  -Where’s Cinda? Birdie said then, of the girl she knew he’d hired not a month before.

  Another long silence. Then Arlenie, again, mustering a smile, says, -Oh, she took a late lunch, I think.

  And Birdie didn’t say a word after that, just left and walked in a kind of blindness all the way to the library and stood there in front of the main doors until someone spoke to her. It was Finus Bates, standing there smiling a kind of fond, ironic smile at her, his expression changing when he saw the way she looked at him.

  -Birdie, he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, leaning toward her just a bit. -Are you all right?

  She felt a little chill go through her, and stepped back. She was carrying Edsel, almost two months along. She hadn’t quite found the right time, just yet, to tell Earl.

  She nodded at Finus, standing there perplexed, and started back toward Woolworth’s.

  -Birdie? she heard Finus call out after her.

  She was supposed to meet Hazel there for coffee. And then Hazel would drive her back out to the house, so she could start cooking, and have a decent meal ready before Earl came home at seven, regular as clockwork, for supper.

  -Birdie? she heard Finus call after her again. -Is something wrong?

  She lifted her hand, without looking back, in a feeble gesture could have stood for any number of things, I’m fine, No time, Got to run now, bye.

  The Dead Girl

  PARNELL GRIMES, SON of Mercury’s most prominent local funeral director, possessed a general grief for such as those unclaimed and unmoored in the world. By the time he was fourteen he’d developed a working fascination with his father’s profession, and had begun to sneak down into the preparation room to see the corpses who would be embalmed and presented the next day. And on some few occasions during that time, and always when the people had been mauled in accidents or contorted in some terrible death, he’d gone down in the wee hours to find them simply gone, disappeared, and had fled back to his room terrified that these walking dead would grasp him at every corner. The next day, their funerals would go on as planned, closed-casket. He’d been too terrified to say anything or ask, except once, and then never again. He’d pushed it deeply into a place where he would not have to think about them all the time. He was able to do that. Until the time he thought himself to blame.

  The summer he was sixteen years old, he had been awake in his room one night and listening out the window to the occasional automobile rumbling past on the street. He’d seen the oscillating red of the silent ambulance light before he’d heard the car’s engine, and knew then he’d heard the telephone ringing earlier, as he’d thought, though it had awakened him from a deep sleep and he hadn’t been sure just then that it hadn’t been a dream. But he heard it now pull up out back, the whining sound of its transmission as it backed up to the preparation room doors, heard the two doors of the ambulance open and shut, heard the longer creaking of the heavy rear door, and then the rolling of a cart being removed and the voices of his father greeting the men quietly, and the men greeting him in return. And then the closing of the doors, and the ambulance driving off, with no red light now flicking, and then quiet. He rose and slipped into his clothes and shoes and crept down the stairs, in case his mother hadn’t awakened.

  This was in the year before the strange and mysterious illness of first his father, who died a horrible suffocating death about which no one had an explanation, followed just a week later by his mother. He’d been horrified by the strange noises they made in the room outside of which he crouched fearfully, old Dr. Heath going in and out, weary, and washing his hands, it seemed the old man washed his hands so furiously in the pail in the hallway outside the room. And the doctor would not let him assist with their preparation, not that he’d wanted to but he’d thought it proper, almost an obligation. Dr. Heath laid a hand on his shoulder and said, -Son, it may be catching. And when first his father, and then his mother, lay in their caskets and he stood over them one after the other in the parlor, as he had over so many they’d prepared themselves, he felt a separation of himself from something he couldn’t pin down, death reversed upon itself, become something less clinical and more strange, as if all the making way they’d done for other people to that point had been slowly absorbed by them until it became them, too. And so he felt it then, himself, that he’d already gathered some of his own dying, and it would be a lifelong process of accumulation.

  There was no explanation of what had happened for some two years until Dr. Heath
saw the article that led him to suspect the psittacosis, and then investigated to find out that the gypsy woman his father had embalmed just before he got sick had been a breeder of imported parrots. And had died in much the same way. And when word leaked out, a veritable posse of men from town, friends of his father’s, went out to the camp with torches and drove the gypsies away on foot, warning gunshots popping the air, burned the gypsies’ wagons, tents, and all their belongings in a conflagration of hatred, grief, and fear. Parnell had seen it from some distance away, having run to follow the men at a safe distance. What he remembered was the terrible sounds of the birds in their cages, trapped there and burning, their shrieking like women and babies, which settled into an awful silence replaced by the quiet crackling of the burning wagons—and the stench, faint but coming to him in little waves, of burning flesh and feathers. He could not stand a bird in a cage to this day.

  But on the night he’d awakened to hear the ambulance bring its cargo he’d crept downstairs and quietly opened the door to the preparation room to see something that made him catch his breath. The figure on the table was a girl near his age that he knew from school. He’d never spoken to her as she was a year older and a quiet girl, though he’d admired her. Her face seemed a sleeping face, not one with the contortions of pain or even the blankness of death, but with her mouth parted and her chin lifted just so, she seemed to be in an expectant sleep, as if she might wake any moment from the dream she kept alive by somnambulent will. His father turned and saw him, and pulled the sheet back over her face.

  -I know her, Parnell said.

  -You go on back to bed. You can’t help with this one.

  -What happened to her?

  Her father looked down at the form beneath the sheet.

  -Nothing, he said. -This one’s a mystery. Her parents are beyond grief. She went to sleep and never woke up.