by Brad Watson
-You should have said something before I took my clothes off.
-I didn’t have time. I didn’t know what y’all were up to. Well I couldn’t, I had my own pants around my ankles. But what I wanted to say, you put a spell on me that day. It’s like it’s never worn off, all these years.
Just saying those words released something in him, a prickling, blood pressure up, compromised vision.
-What kind of spell?
-That’s what I’d like to know. I was stricken. Smitten, maybe, but stronger than that. I wanted you, somehow. I was so mad you decided to marry Earl.
She laughed, half dismissal and half embarrassment. She lifted her line from the water, examined the worm on the hook, and lowered it in again.
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while.
-I don’t have to remind you that you’re still a married man. I probably shouldn’t even be out here fishing with you, come to think of it. Sometimes I forget you and Avis are still married.
Finus snorted. -Wish I could. No, sometimes I do. But only for a moment or two at a time.
-Listen, Finus. Oh, I don’t even like to throw my mind back so far. But you were right way back when you said I wasn’t ready to get married, too young. And so much of my life went into it. I just want to be alone, live with Edsel and his family awhile, as long as they want to stay with me at the house. I’m just tired, I feel worn out. Like I’ve had the life drained out of me. I know I’m not real old but I feel old. You’re a good man. You had a bad marriage, I know. I did too in some ways, but it was good in others. If you want to try to convince Avis to give you a divorce, well go ahead, I think it’s best anyway. But I don’t want to run right into something else again. I’ve lived a whole life already, seems like. I may have more in me but not right now. Maybe not ever. I just want to rest. All this mess has just exhausted me.
-I’m not talking about marrying. He laughed. -I don’t really know what I want, Birdie.
-So what else is new? she said, but gentle, mocking him.
-Finus, she said after a bit, you and I are friends and I like it that way, always have. Even if you have seen me without my clothes on.
And she laughed, then, to think of it, and the sight and sound of it released a flood of feeling that was deeper than the old surge of sexual desire, though he felt a stir of that, too. How much he was drawing upon that indelible image he could not know. It didn’t matter.
-I love you, Birdie. Always have, from the first time I saw you, I believe.
-You don’t mean that any more than you did the last time you said it.
But she remembered that he had once said it, a long time ago. He took note of that.
Obits
AS FINUS GREW older, obituaries came to make up a goodly portion of the Comet, which was nearing the end of its arcing streak as was its body of readers. Often he was asked to write the obits for people not necessarily from Mercury though well known throughout the county because he made an attempt to tell something notable, or even simply funny or unusual, about that person’s life. Your average obituary was a disgrace in its sterility. Nor could he stand the notion of families writing their own, which some papers were allowing now. He could just imagine the tears and flapdoodle from those pens, along with a host of the awfulest verse. He should know. Some still had the audacity to ask him to print their own words, whereupon he’d tell them to take it to one of those papers that made you pay for obit space. His newspaper wasn’t the community wailing wall. You couldn’t convince a body anymore that there was integrity in the use of the language.
In the awkward days following Earl’s death, he wrote his obituary with some restraint, given his anger about what Levi and Merry were up to then.
EARL LEROY URQUHART, 55
He built a sound business and his own small wealth from little more than grit, savvy, long hours, and professional integrity.
He loved nothing more than taking his skiff to Pascagoula to fish for trout, redfish, Sound cats, and tarpon.
He once hit a negro woman on the head with a high-heel shoe, in his store, for some impertinence.
Earl Urquhart, prominent Mercury businessman, died last Friday while splitting firewood out at his lake north of Mercury. He was 55 years old. Coroner Parnell Grimes gives as cause of death a heart attack. An autopsy was requested by members of his family. There was no evidence, Grimes said, of foul play.
Mr. Urquhart was born in Cuba, Alabama, but his family soon moved to Mississippi and he grew up in Union. The Urquharts moved to Mercury in 1915. Soon after, Mr. Urquhart met Birdie Wells, and wasted little time in courting her and persuading her to marry him, though she was just sixteen years old at the time. Mr. Urquhart was already a successful businessman by that time, and soon was managing a chain of shoe stores in the south for a New York manufacturing firm.
Mr. Urquhart worked in New York for a while, opening new stores for his company. In 1928, after a series of different assignments which took him to cities such as Baltimore, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Atlanta, he opened his own store in Mercury and settled there with his growing family. Through shrewd business practices and a conservative approach to marketing, he managed to keep his store through the Depression years. He opened another store in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1950. He owned partial interest in a shoe store run by his brother, Levi Urquhart, also in Mercury.
Mr. Urquhart was known as an honest man who worked hard and treated all fairly. He never drank, people like to point out. My impression was he wasn’t proud of it so much as just not interested in liquor. He loved fishing, and often traveled to the coast to fish in the Mississippi Sound off Pascagoula and Biloxi in his own boat. He also owned a piece of land around a small lake just outside of Mercury, where he kept a couple of horses.
He was an emotional man and it was not unheard of for Mr. Urquhart to engage in quick bouts of fisticuffs on occasion, if insulted or if he perceived it to be the case. Most men treated him with respect, accordingly.
He is survived by his widow, Birdie Wells Urquhart, his daughter, Ruthie Mosby, his son, Edsel, and three grandchildren. Services were held at Grimes Funeral Home, with interment at Magnolia Cemetery.
LATER FINUS WROTE about the death of Birdie’s daughter, Ruthie, when she succumbed to cancer in her early fifties. And about her son, Edsel, of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight (striking something of a blow to those who still entertained the thought that Earl’s similar death, at fifty-five, was suspicious). And he wrote a heartfelt one about the death of Birdie’s grandson, Robert, in an automobile accident at the age of twenty-two.
ROBERT EDSEL URQUHART, 22
When he was only five years old, he wandered into the woods near his family’s home and was lost—so everyone thought—until nightfall, when searchers saw the light of a fire. Reaching that spot, they found little Robert, pellet gun by his side, roasting a young squirrel over a campfire. A little lean-to he’d constructed sheltered him from the elements. He invited everyone to sit down and join him for supper.
He was a precocious child in other ways, as the family story goes that he could stand on the transmission hump on the car’s backseat floorboard and name the make and model of every car headed their way before it got to within a hundred yards.
But he definitely seemed more at home in the woods, and there wasn’t a plant or animal he didn’t know by name and habitat, simply by first-hand observation. This, in a time when the big woods had already begun to disappear in the south, and there was something of the boy that seemed not of his time, and something that seemed to project a quiet awareness of this. He would have spent every waking minute in the woods, had his family allowed it—they almost wish they had, now.
Robert Edsel Urquhart, 22, died in a car wreck on Langtree Road last Saturday night. He was looking for a boy who had insulted his girlfriend—boy was a friend of his—not to fight him, but just to ask him to be civil and apologize. As he and his girlfriend and two other young people headed in Robert’s car up
Langtree Road, another car came speeding around the sharp turn near the entrance to Ludlum’s Woods, left the ground, and hit Robert’s Jeep head-on. Somehow, no one else was seriously injured. Robert died instantly in the collision.
It was typical of the young man to try to settle a dispute between two angry people. He had a hot temper himself, but it was superseded by a kind disposition and a desire for everyone around him to get along. His grandmother, Mrs. Birdie Urquhart, never made any bones about the fact that Robert was her favorite grandchild—and I have permission and even the blessing of Mrs. Urquhart’s other two grandchildren to make that statement.
Mrs. Urquhart once told me that Robert was the only child she’d ever known, other than herself, who took to nature as if he were truly at home in it. When she told him the name of a tree, or bush, or bird, he would remember it. She said a bird once lit on his shoulder as they stood still in a thicket watching another bird, and the boy, though only five years old, knew to be still and not make a sound until the bird had flown off on his own. She said to him, Do you know what kind of bird that was on your shoulder? He said, Yes, but then wouldn’t tell her what kind of bird he thought it had been. Later that afternoon she asked him again, and he said, I know what kind of bird it was. Was it a finch? He wouldn’t answer. Was it a sparrow? He wouldn’t answer. At supper she told the story to the others, and said, I know you know what kind of bird it was, Robert, so why won’t you tell us? And Robert considered this a minute and then said, If I told you, a bird would never land on my shoulder ever again.
He is survived by his mother and father, Edsel and Janie Urquhart, his grandmother, Mrs. Birdie Urquhart, and his maternal aunts and uncles. Pallbearers are his uncles Tom, Bernard, and Rupert Williams, and the deacons of the United Methodist Church.
One morning in late February ’77, suffering the gray chill of a drizzling front that seemed to swell his aching bones, Finus rose and went down to the Comet office before coffee, before the radio station, and began typing what he’d composed in his head during the night.
AVIS CROSSWEATHERLY BATES, 76
She was a basketball star in her little country school up in Kemper, and went on to play for Ole Miss, where she majored in education. Became a teacher and taught in the Mercury public schools for forty years.
She once had her husband (yours truly) thrown in jail for missing a child support payment, and then had him thrown out when his buddies down there left him in charge of the keys.
Most famous quotation: When told that her estranged husband (still yours truly) might have a brain tumor (false, rumor), she is reported to have replied, -As if he ever had a brain.
Avis Crossweatherly Bates died last night, bitter and twisted in her body by the disappointments in her life, her heart. Her father was a hard man, and possessive, he loved her so much. Saw her as everything he hadn’t been able to be or do, and what a burden that was. Because the school’s girl’s basketball team wore these cute little skirts to play in, he followed the bus to every game, never let her out of his sight, ever, she never made a move his stern bony countenance wasn’t hovering over as if from a cloud at her shoulder, like an angry God.
After college, she taught history at the high school, and used to remind yours truly, whenever he got too full of himself, that no one through history remembered the lowly scribes but by the quality of their words, and that he was after all just a small-time hack. This was about as true as words could be.
Well, you can imagine. You fight your way into town from a hardscrabble cattle farm way up in the sticks, fight your way through college on an athletic scholarship in the days when (especially for women) that didn’t amount to more than room and board, fight for your independence every step of the way, get the man you want, and it all turns to manure, after all. Marriage, a tough business. It wasn’t happy for Miss Avis, that’s for sure. Yours truly had no small role in that. And yours truly was never forgiven. Add that to the list, as there’s plenty yours truly has never forgiven himself for, too. We tell ourselves, after they’re gone, I should have been a better father, husband, friend, brother, sister, daughter, son. But truth is most of us do the best we can, just have a hard time accepting our limitations—accepting that we dealt with things according to our best lights and capacities for dealing. Disappointments flock to us like crows and mock us from their perches on buildings or the flimsy swaying tips of pines, or flying over, a glimpse of black wing and parted beak, or in dreams, caustic, ephemeral. You love someone, you hate them. The major crime, as has been said: indifference. The two-headed monster, love and hate, accompanies our halcyon days. Much love to Miss Avis, my estranged embittered bride. I ask her forgiveness for all inadequacies and wrongs. May she rest in peace.
Survivor: Finus Ulysses Bates, husband.
He’d wanted to add long-suffering after his name, but thought better of it. Let her have the last harsh words. On her deathbed, he’d been there, holding her hand. She’d looked at him, her red-rimmed eyes brimming with tears. -You ruined my life, she said in her strained and halting voice. He’d only nodded, squeezed and patted her hand. And later that night, she’d passed on. That was just Avis, she’d needed to say it. He never for a moment thought that, in her heart, she believed it was all that simple.
II
Her Remembrance of Awakened Birds
CARS CLACKITY-CLACKING by out on the old highway, tires slapping the tar dividers, always put her to sleep, and Earl, it would wake him up in the middle of the night, he’d have to get up and go in the kitchen, make a pot of coffee and smoke before coming back to bed. His heart racing. The man had to be going all-out even sleeping, when he could sleep. It was all that, killed him. They could say all they wanted about her but it was that what killed him, cigarettes and no rest and womanizing, and work all the time, and just that temper, all pent up and not enough chances to steam it out. She gave him every chance she could and then some, let him rant and rave all he wanted, but it wasn’t enough. The man had plenty of poison in his own glands, keeping that backed up in him for want of putting it into her, but it just wasn’t in her to do that all the time, rutting away like he wanted, and she reckoned he didn’t let it build up too much, with Ann and all the girls at the store as wanton and willing vessels.
The old mockingbird with the nest in the camellia was singing in through the window screen again. She’d had Finus’s radio show on earlier though she missed whatever he’d said about her, he’d said he was going to say something and she’d said not to tell people she was out here about to die, they’d come and wear her out visiting and kill her for sure, and she didn’t want to go that way, with people all around gawking. But when she turned on the radio and heard Finus that bird was out there, cocking his head, and when she turned him off in a little bit sounded like the bird was mocking Finus, singing a waw-waw-waw song made her laugh out loud, it had to be Finus’s old sawing drawl he was after. She wondered sometimes if that crazy bird wasn’t mocking her, nobody knew better than she did how she yammered on, when she was feeling good anyway, when she was on the telephone, talk talk talk, and suddenly in the middle of yapping-on hear that bird trilling some loud funny song didn’t sound like any other bird, and she’d think My lands, that’s me!
Now there he was, bouncing on that little camellia branch and cocking his head in and making some rrrack! rickety sound like a crow.
Out back of the house the old junk cars from her son-in-law’s junklot across the road had accumulated over the years, spreading into her back lot where there was once just the little field laced with honeysuckle and hanging oak boughs and Creasie’s cabin—now fallen in on itself and vines—gathering like the empty husks of giant cicadas, all through the ruined apple orchard. She used to make the best pies of those tart green and brown speckled apples. She couldn’t look out the window on the east side of the house or go in the backyard without seeing all those empty rusted car bodies sitting there. Like a joke on Earl, who had loved the automobile second only to other women.
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-I don’t mean anything by that, now, your papa was so good to me and took care of me all these years, and had to live with me to boot, but you know it’s the truth!
Her granddaughter said nothing, but her chin jutted out a little more and she looked away. That Mosby chin, like pictures you see of those old kings and such that inbred so much, though she didn’t think that’d been the case with the Mosbys, just bad luck. They say you’re attracted to yourself in your mate. You’d think they’d not liked the chin so much, though. Ruthie’d had a normal chin, but this child had come down through her Papa’s line. Edsel’s boy Robert had looked more like the Urquharts, before he’d died in the car wreck. He’d be grown now like Laura, here, if he’d lived.
Her granddaughter sighed.
-I’ve got to take Lindy to dance lessons and Chaz to baseball practice, and Dan’s on the road again. I probably won’t be back by today but I can check in around dinner to make sure everything’s okay.
-No, hon, Creasie’s got some peas and greens and we’ll just eat vegetables. I don’t have an appetite, anyway. She coughed dryly into a tissue. -I got some cream in the freezer, maybe I’ll just eat some of that later, to settle my stomach.
-Okay, her granddaughter said with another sigh, and kind of, it seemed to Birdie, huffed in a tired way out of the room.
ONE LATE AFTERNOON at Pappy and Mamaw’s house, she was just about seven years old, she and Lucy’d been sent over to stay with them, and Pappy took her out into his garden. Gardening was his passion, then, and his garden was lush and beautiful. It was dusk. The light faintly blue, and graying. Pappy had taught her the names of the flowering bushes, the pink camellias and wild azaleas with their yellow blooms, his roses and on down the little slope in back the tall sunflowers like Uncle Will would grow himself one day. Pappy knelt down beside her. Little Lucy was in the house asleep. And in the light becoming so faint she was afraid they were disappearing into it, like with the lessening vision they would both just sift into the gray and disappear, so she gripped his empty coat sleeve with her small hand, the thin wool fabric weightless between her fingers where he’d lost his arm in the war. His long white beard and hair looked silver and luminous in the spare light. He covered her hand with his own and said softly, -Listen, Birdie, can you tell it’s something special? She looked at him, afraid. He whispered, -Something has happened. Can you tell?