by Brad Watson
-How long has she been asleep?
-She’s dead, son.
-I mean, how long was she asleep.
-A week or more, his father said. Then after a moment he said, -She’s too close to your own age, Parnell. I don’t want you helping me with the young ones. There’s time later in your life for that sad business.
-Yes, sir. There won’t be an autopsy, then?
-The parents said they can’t abide the idea. There’s no evidence of foul play.
-Will you do the embalming tonight then?
-No, his father said after a moment. -I’ve had my toddy tonight. I think I’d better wait till morning.
-Yes, sir.
-You go on back to bed. Here, I’ll wash my hands and come up, too.
So he waited while his father washed in the sink, though Parnell’s eyes never left the vague figure of the girl under the sheet. He looked at the shape of her feet beneath it and could tell she wore no shoes. He imagined she was in the nightgown she’d put on the night she lay down to sleep from which she would never awaken.
-Father, he said. -Was she even sick?
-Ran a little fever, is all, nothing much. His father turned, drying his hands and looked at the girl. -I cannot imagine anything more awful. I hate to know it can happen. But I knew it before. I’ll try to forget again, if I can. Though you should, more than me. He smiled at Parnell. -It’s you with your child-rearing days ahead of you.
Not something Parnell could imagine, though. He walked with his father back up the stairs to the parlor level, then up the curved staircase in the foyer to their living quarters, and his father kissed him on the forehead before leaving him in his room and going back to bed with Parnell’s mother. Parnell undressed, took off even his underwear and socks, and got into his bed. Some minutes later he heard his father’s steady sonorous breathing, and some minutes after that, stepping into his slippers and pulling on his cotton bathrobe, he stole back down the two sets of stairs and into the preparation room. He felt his way in the dark around the wall to the sink, switched on the little lamp there above it, and turned around.
She was like a ghost there under the sheet. He could imagine, felt almost he had been there with her when she had drawn her last breath. The sweet expiration. This loss to him, to Parnell, of that which had never been his nor could be in life, and now here alone with him in death, she was. His heart ached with it.
He drew the sheet away from her face, his hands trembling, and the shock of her features, more alone with him than he’d ever imagined a girl could be, moved through him like a mild electric current.
He hadn’t noticed her much, but a few times, passing her in the hallway at school he had observed her shyness, how she walked with her chin tucked down in her neck, her dark brown eyes glancing up to make sure she didn’t run into anyone or get run over in the between-class rush, hardly daring to make eye contact with anyone. Glance up with a smile that seemed almost apologetic, then look down again and make her tentative way along. She was beautiful, he could see now, but no one would have noticed this, she’d been so demure and invisible. Now so visible it seemed a crime that she had never been admired by anyone but her parents, or maybe some boy just as shy as she was, someone who’d never have had the nerve to talk to her or ask her to a game, or ask her to dance at one of the dances they sometimes held at evening in the gymnasium. Someone like Parnell. She was a little dark, and her dark eyebrows were narrow but thick and defined, with a little arch like a V pointing upward in the middle of each one. And her eyes, closed, were wide-set. But it was her mouth that transfixed Parnell. It was broad and full, her lips a little dry and cracked, and now parted in death he could only imagine how expressive it must have been when she was at home, with family, and uninhibited by her shyness, how much joy she must have given to her mother and father, how much they must have hoped for her.
It was the hint of exotic in her features that began to sink into him now. What exotic locale they suggested he could not imagine, but someplace different. It was not the look of a gypsy. Until the woman with parrot fever, which ended it all, his father had often embalmed and buried gypsies; he had a friendship with the old gypsy queen’s son. He’d buried the queen, in that grand ceremony they’d conducted down 8th Street to the old cemetery west of town, Rose Hill. But she was not a gypsy. Her name, now he remembered, was Littleton, that was fitting. Constance Littleton, they called her Connie. Little Connie Littleton, here alone with Parnell. He leaned down and kissed her lips. Dry as desiccated clay. No give there. No, there was the faintest. She was not entirely cold. Still fresh in death, still sweet in passing. Still between the living and the dead, her spirit not entirely removed. He gently pulled the sheet down across her body, and off her small toes.
She was all small. And if she’d worn her nightgown in death his father had removed it, to prepare for embalming. She barely had feminine breasts. Her arms and legs were thin, her wrists no bigger round than stalks of sugarcane. Her shins and ankles almost bird-narrow, ending in the slim flat feet. Her waist was like a boy’s, not narrow and flaring into her hips. Her hands were turned up, as if she were consciously laid out in sacrifice, merely drugged by the high priests who’d laid her there.
He imagined that if he had known her, they would have walked to a little clearing in the woods. She would be silent, as always, and hardly able to look at him in her shyness. And in his own, little else to say. They would have sat together in slanting afternoon sunlight and let the quiet sounds of the woods gather around them for their company. He took the robe off and stood there a long moment with his eyes closed.
-I love you, he said to her. -You have to know that.
He began to cry a little, his eyes welled up. He had loved her and he hadn’t even known it. He began to be flooded by memories of her. He’d seen her eating by herself or with a couple of almost equally silent girlfriends in the school cafeteria. He’d seen her sitting on a bench beside the stadium reading a book and eating an apple one day. She wore a sweater and a tartan skirt and penny loafers. He imagined her helping him remove them, one by one, the light sweater, the skirt and shoes and socks off her feet, her underwear and a little brasiere there more for modesty than support.
The table hardly creaked when he climbed atop it and lay in the narrow space beside her. -I do love you, he whispered. He had hardly to push apart her thin legs, she was in the attitude to receive him already. At her neck, and behind her ears, in her hair, the musty sweet-and-sour smell of a week’s neglect in her bed. He could hardly hear the sounds he made for the louder sound of the blood rushing behind his eyes.
As he laid his weight upon her, her lips parted and an almost imperceptible exhalation escaped them, the odor of something strange and familiar too, an animal’s breath, and rotten flowers, the scum of an iron-rich creek near the swamps, the odor of richly decaying life, life in death, the dying always overtaking the living so the richness of the roots of life must push up unevolved from the earth and into an almost instant decomposition. She was thick and solid in her tissue, hard in parts of protruding bone like stones beneath a mat of firm moss, and cool but dry. Inside her was thick and cool and close but not entirely unyielding, his hard prick like a rigid fetus inside a cold womb. He moved himself deeper, slowly, with a wild restraint born of his barely contained respect and love for her, which fought within each second in his mind with a violent lust. He gripped the delicate knobs of her shoulders, which fit snugly into the palms of his own small, childlike hands. His mouth was at her ear, and into it he whispered desperate declarations of his passion, her beauty, oh how she was giving more of herself to him each moment. Some heated current ran its hot millipede fingers up his spine, shocked through his brain and out his scalp, his follicles pure heat valves, his jaw thrown open as if to eject his own heart, some shout must have rolled out of his diaphram though he could no more distinguish sound from some other force than if it had occurred in a world yet to know any living, breathing thing, his drool on her
neck making a wet spot he could see, when he could see again, spreading beside her lank dark hair on the table beneath them.
He closed his eyes and lay there, his breath returning slowly to normal, his heart returning to a dreaded calm, when he heard the little noise that made him open his eyes again. It was a sound like the first little cheep you hear sometimes outside your window at dawn when a bird wakes up in its nest. And when he looked he saw first her mouth move, the lips press together, and then her narrow brow furrow over her thick dark eyebrows. His own breath caught in him like he’d been delivered a blow just as she caught her own, and her eyes opened like those of a child who’s been sleeping long and hard and he was up and off her still thumping gently with the last of what he’d done, and standing there watching her.
She lay there blinking for a long moment, then sat up.
-Mama?
Her voice small and crusty, weak. A thick gray cloud in her eyes, clearing.
-Where am I?
Parnell had retreated further away from her into a darker corner. Now she was blinking her eyes and looking at him.
-Where am I?
He couldn’t move. She stared at him a moment, then felt on her right shoulder where Parnell had drooled, looked at the faint glint of moisture on her hand. She looked down and tentatively touched her lower abdomen, her tummy, felt herself, made a quiet hnngh sound, an almost delicate expression of puzzlement. She saw the sheet still bunched at her feet and reached down to get it. She pulled it up over her waist, and then held it while she got down from the embalming table. Her bare toes flexing as they touched the cold concrete floor. She fixed the sheet around her shoulders like some kind of biblical robe and found the door with her eyes and started for it slowly, like a sleepwalker. She had forgotten him. She was not fully awake. He did not know what. He did not know what this was. Her hand found the doorknob and she opened the door and then stood there a minute in the doorway, looking out, looking up the stairs. And then she started up the stairs, going slowly, a little shaky, her hand on the railing. At the top of the stairs she opened the door to the main floor and stepped through.
Parnell snatched up his robe and put it on and followed her quietly in his slippers. When he got to the top of the steps she was almost to the front door at the end of the entrance hallway. She pulled on the door a second, and Parnell almost cried out, thinking she would not be able to open it and his parents would wake at her rattling the knob. Then he heard the lock tumbler click and the door creaked open, not too loudly, and she walked out into the streetlamp light on the front porch. He hurried forward to catch the door before it shut to and just did catch it and opened it to look out. The girl was out to the sidewalk now, still looking about her as if in a dream.
He was paralyzed with terror, but what could he do? In the mist of the bare light before dawn she was a diminishing figure wrapped in a white sheet, her dark hair and bare white feet exposed, a slip of leg when she took her steps, wavering, like a child drunk or a poor corpse wandering toward its gloom as a ghost, until she disappeared in the faint light, a wisp becoming one with the misty fog, and he closed the door quietly, leaned against it trying to catch his breath, and then stole up the stairs and crawled back into his bed and lay there for what seemed hours until he heard his parents stirring.
He lay there curled in his bed unable to move, his mind a wild jumble of fear and horror. What had he done? What would become of him now? He was more alive and awake and full of terror and wonder than he had ever felt in his life, and waited for the news to spread to the proper authorities who would come to arrest him, and thought about what he would say.
It could have been a few minutes later, it could have been an hour, he couldn’t tell, when he heard the telephone ring. And in a minute he heard the door to his parents’ room open, and his father rushing down the stairs. And then his mother calling down to his father, and he heard her go by his room and down the stairs. And he waited longer, lying under the sheets and awaiting whatever would happen. He heard their car start and leave. Then nothing. And he stayed there until some long time later, it seemed, his mother opened the door to his room and stuck her head in, a queer look on her face.
-Parnell, hon, come on down to breakfast.
-What is it, Mama? I heard Papa leave.
She stood there a second, looking at him.
-That Littleton girl, she finally said, and looked then as if her senses came back. -She just up and walked out of here sometime last night!
-The dead girl, Mama?
-Well, his mother said slowly then, I suppose that’s what she was. But now she’s alive and down at the hospital.
-She’s at the hospital? He lay there breathing hard and looking at his mother, but she seemed distracted. -How can that be? he said barely above a whisper.
-How can anything be, darling? she said. -My good Lord, to think we came close to burying that child, and her alive the whole time.
Parnell could hardly find the words, but finally he said, -How did she come to wake up like that?
His mother looked at him oddly then, and his heart seized up for what seemed the hundredth time that day.
-I don’t know, she said slowly. -I guess she’d just slept long enough.
When his father came home and went downstairs, Parnell waited until he was alone and went down there and went quietly into the preparation room, where his father sat on a stool looking over some papers beneath the small lamp he had set up there.
-Papa? he almost whispered.
His father looked around at him over his glasses, then turned back to his work.
-Your mama tell you what happened?
-Yes, sir.
-Very strange business.
-Papa, he said after a minute. -Is that what happened to those other people?
His father turned slowly to look at him, removed his glasses.
-What other people, Parnell?
-The ones that would be gone.
His father said nothing, just stared at him. Then he saw him glance at the dark corner over the by the sinks and he saw old black Clint, his helper, standing there staring at him also, and a chill ran through him.
-The ones, I would come down and they would be gone?
His father continued to stare at him. Then he spoke slowly.
-It’s been a hard night for all of us, Parnell. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You need some sleep, son.
-I’m sorry, Parnell said. -I wasn’t spying on them.
-You should never come down here alone, Parnell, his father said. -Not yet. There are things you don’t understand. He paused. -Will I have to put a lock on the door?
-No, sir.
-Go on to bed, son, he said then.
His father watched him as he turned and walked out of the room and closed the door behind him and stood there a moment, and heard murmuring conversation between his father and old Clint but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He went upstairs to his room and lay there all day with no coherent thought in his head until sometime in late afternoon he dozed off, and would not come down to eat supper. His mother brought him a sandwich up to his bed and sat on his bedside smoothing back his hair as he ate it, and whispering, -Poor boy, sometimes I wish we weren’t in this business, it’s no place for a little boy to grow up.
-Yes, ma’am, he said, and forced some bites of the sandwich down, though his mind still raced wildly, and for the next several days, when he feigned sick to stay out of school, terrified to go there lest the other children see in his face what he’d done. Until finally he was forced to go back, and he crept the halls more fearfully than ever, more invisibly than ever, and spoke to no one, and became again simply the strange Parnell all the children had always known, who kept to himself and would be a mortician when he was older, and was therefore an oddity to be abided with some amusement and unarticulated dread. And after some time, late in the year, the dead girl returned to school, as well.
He would see her in the hallways,
after that, but like Parnell she was more the way she had been than ever before. She clutched her books to her thin chest, she kept her eyes down at her feet, and moved quickly from class to class. But Parnell, when he saw her now, saw more than he could bear. Her life, her living, the vital self she carried through the drab hallways, seemed a continuous miracle and the source of a deepening shame, even as the horror at what he had done became for him in his private and unchallenged thoughts something commonplace. Replaced, as it was, by simple shame, a secret and unmentionable embarrassment. In what little niche of her memory was she aware of what had happened? In what dream that visited her in the hours she could not recall, long before she would awake, this miracle of awakening every day? What part of Parnell existed in there, to be known by no one but Parnell and a part of Constance Littleton that might never resurface, and if it did could not be believed? Some students, some of the boys, called her the Dead Girl and would laugh. Other students said she had no memory of anything from when she went to sleep until she woke up in the hospital. Wandered from the funeral home like some risen mummy and went straight to the hospital. It was like an angel had guided her there, some of the pious girls said. But if it was an angel, Parnell said to himself, it was a fallen one, awakened now to see the darkness of the world all around him.
Finus Connubialis
SEVEN YEARS FINUS and Avis Crossweatherly spent in a desultory dance with one another, a rutting seven years in which they scratched whenever possible at an itch neither seemed able to truly satisfy for the other, yet they tried. In the seventh year Avis conceived and they married quickly in a ceremony at his parents’ beach house on the Alabama coast. They bought a small home in north Mercury and set about what would later seem to Finus the time-honored practice of slow connubial dissolution.
At a barbeque Earl Urquhart put on for several couples at his lake house one year, Finus and Avis lounged about on the patio of the little concrete block cabin sipping beer while the children ran in and out of the water, romping on the bank until they got hot again and then running back and jumping in. Only Finus and Avis’s little boy, Eric, did not join them. They’d forgotten his swimsuit, and he stood on the lawn looking awkward in the sailor boy outfit Avis had purchased for him the day before at Marx Rothenberg and which she’d forbade him to get dirty or wet. Finus watched as Eric stood in the sun there—a seven-year-old boy slightly pigeon-toed in his meekness, little hands by his sides, his pale straight hair almost glowing in the sunlight, looking more like a fragile gathering of light in the shape of a child than a real, a corporeal, child—as the other children shrieked and flopped onto the grass beside him and ran crying chasing one another back to the water, where they splashed around and screamed in delight. Every now and then Finus would see him glance back at the adults up on the patio in the shade of the loblolly pines.