by Brad Watson
-Hello, Creasie, he said, to force a greeting.
-Mr. Finus.
-She in the den?
-She in the back laying down, Creasie said, already headed that way. -I’ll go see if she’s awake.
He followed her as far as the living room and stopped while Mike wearily followed Creasie on back. The room contained, as if sealed there, the chilled stale odor of a neglected museum dedicated to the finer middle-class living room in the 1940s. Heavy furniture with thick and gnarled wooden protrusions like mummified hands at the ends of the armrests, no give he knew to the cushions beneath fabric developing the sheen of old clothing mothballed for years, springs as hard as the springs on the rear axle of his truck. A grand piano at one end of the room gave his peripheral vision the image of a reconstructed stegosaurus. The gas logs in the fireplace, artificial hickory, not fired in twenty years. Then Creasie’s rag head popped into the far doorway and beckoned. He started across the living room, passed Creasie going the other way and listing slightly to one side, drifting back toward her kitchen.
Birdie was more drawn than before and pale, as people whose hearts are failing are, skin seeming thinner and papery, and her pale blue eyes were rheumy, though he could still see in them the innocent mischief that was her nature. She laughed.
-Mike’s already made himself at home.
The old dog had lain down beside the window, and looked with his eyes over at Finus coming in as if to say what kept you?
-You look all right, Birdie. You still look yourself.
This was true if qualified by age and illness. She was puffy with the fluid around her heart. Her hair was long and clean, silver and resting across her shoulder as she sat up against the pillows. Still the small impertinent mouth and gapped teeth. But her eyes were rheumy behind the wire-framed glasses, her hands bent and all spotted up, nails long and yellow, she’d been cared for but couldn’t really care for herself, the details showed.
-I’m not sure I ever wanted just to look myself, she said, and laughed a little.
Her bedroom was pleasant and even fairly cool, though the day was hot, late July. It was at the northeast corner of the house, and there were windows on the north and east walls, and outside the windows there were blooming azaleas, and out in the oak-shaded yard beyond there were dogwoods that in March had been solid white with blossoms, now pale-barked and leafy green. Birds flew from the dogwoods and the oaks nearer the creek at the border of the property and flitted into the azaleas, you could hear them pecking at its mulch below. A mockingbird sat somewhere nearby out of sight but not out of mind, belting a repertoire. Finus liked to imagine the phrases the birds were going through: ohmygodhelpme! ohmygodhelpme!, dearme dearme dearme, lookahere! lookahere!, boogedieboogedieboogedie, therewego therewego therewego, who, me? who, me?, stick close! stick close! stick close! stick close!, I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Some mornings he woke up and heard the Eurasian collared doves calling, a big Old World bird new to Florida and spreading north fast, their voices hoarse like young roosters crowing, What world is this? What world is this?
The sun lay full-bore upon the north meadow beyond but here broke through the oak boughs only in bright angled blades to the sparse and spotty lawn grass.
-This old house, Birdie said. -I don’t like being out here alone at night, but I don’t reckon I’ll have to be much longer. I mean, Creasie’s here but she just goes back in her room after supper and it’s like being alone. Oh, I tell you, Finus, I feel so weak. I wish I could just go ahead and die.
Finus said nothing and kept his face neutral.
-Tell me again what happened at the home, he said.
-Oh, well, I reckon I died and came back.
-You said that. But, now—you mean all the way out?
-I tell you, Finus, after Pud died, it just like to killed me. It ain’t right. She was ten years younger than me. And then Edsel and Ruthie. She stopped and her face went blank as if she’d forgotten what she was talking about. But she hadn’t. Just at a momentary loss for words. -And I said to myself I’m just not going to stay around any longer, it’s just not right, everybody dying but me. I believe I just started to shut down. She fiddled with a tissue at her nose. She looked up. -Well I believe I died. I was going so peaceful, just like I’d always hoped I would, and it felt so restful, and then something started happening and I woke up with all them standing over me and tubes sticking in me everywhere. Choking—it was awful! I was so mad! And now here I am, just miserable. You tell me what good’s in that. I told them just to go to the devil, I was going home. Laura and Joe said they’d hire a nurse but I told them I didn’t want it, just let Creasie tend to me best she can.
The outburst winded her and she rested a few minutes, breathing hard and deep and slow. -I reckon they think I’m being hardheaded. I don’t want it to be hard on them. But I don’t want some nurse out here pestering me. I just want to go ahead and die.
-Well, Finus said, sitting in the chair beside the bed and lifting his own glasses to rub at his eyes and the skulled skin loose around them, then replacing the glasses to refocus on her. -Sometimes I think that old saying, One foot in the grave, is almost literal, you know. I mean sometimes you feel like you can almost see into it, like there’s a period there when you’re a little of both, the living and the dead. That’s dying.
Birdie just looked at him blankly a moment, and laughed.
-You’re a crazy old coot.
He got her a glass of water from the bathroom tap and she drank from it. Her nails needed cleaning pretty bad. He wanted to go get some tissue and a nail cleaner and take her hand and help her with them, but such tenderness would embarrass her, he knew. He took the glass from her hand when she’d sipped and set it on the little table beside her bed and sat back down. It was true she was left all alone. Her grandchildren took good care of her but you didn’t like to wear out the young, didn’t feel worth it, not if you had Birdie’s temperament anyway.
-I just remembered a dream I had last night, he said to her then.
-Do you believe in dreams? She turned her head on the pillow to look at him.
-Well I think they come from the waking life. People used to think they came from the gods, or God. He waved a hand at the thought.
-I never could remember my dreams, there’d be just a little flicker of it when I woke up, then gone, she said.
-Well this one just now came back to me, because of your telling what happened to you at the home. All right. In this dream I was a young man again, and strong as I could be, it felt fine. And every night—in the dream, I mean—my spirit would go out of my body and fly around the world, seeing all kinds of things. I might go way over to China in the old days, before there were any Western people there, you know. Or I might be in the body of a sea turtle, swimming deep in the Gulf. And while I was gone out of my body I had this dog who would guard it.
-You never had a dog till you got old Mike, did you?
-No, I never had a little dog of my own when I was a boy, Finus said. -I don’t know why. Avis didn’t like dogs, is why I didn’t have one as an adult, I mean older. But I don’t remember why I never had one as a boy. My papa had a dog, some kind of old black-and-white dog. And we were friends, but he wasn’t really my dog. Anyway, I had this dog in the dream, guarding over me lying there, and I can’t remember what he looked like. He was a talking dog, I guess.
Birdie said, -You’re making all this up.
-I was out spriting around and this dog got restless one night and went out wandering, and some people came and found my body and thought me dead and took it off and buried it, so when I came back the next morning I had nowhere to go, and I had to find a body to go back into or my spirit would die. And I looked around and I saw the dog coming home, but when he saw me he ran off, and I saw a horse, but he shied and ran off, too. Then I saw this old, old man lying out in the high grass in the field where the horse stayed. He was so tired he was about to die, and the sun was about to come up over
the treeline and so I quick went into his body and was safe. And then I woke up.
Birdie looked at him blankly a moment.
-That’s how I got so old, Finus said.
-Aw, now, you read that somewhere, she said, and laughed. -I know you. Well Finus it’s good to see you, but you know I told you to say on your show that I didn’t want any company. They say it’s all this fluid around my heart that’s making me feel so bad. It’s just so hard to breathe.
Finus nodded. -I thought I’d come out just for a minute, I don’t want to wear you out.
-I guess I look as bad as I feel.
-Naw.
She did look miserable and tired. He couldn’t trouble her anymore.
He stared at her a long while.
-That time at the Potato Ball when you said you wanted me to run away with you, I thought you were serious, she said. -If I’d a been Pud, I’d a made you do it! She laughed again, and coughed.
-Well, he said after a bit, if I’d a been Pud’s Anton, I reckon I would’ve done it, too. But I was a shy boy, kind of. I sure was smitten, that’s true.
-Well, I reckon it wouldn’t have been any crazier than doing what we did do.
-Ha, he said. -I guess that’s the truth.
They looked at each other. He tried to imagine what it would have been like, to have had a whole life with her as his mate. Seemed like something that would’ve had to happen in a separate universe or something. Maybe it had.
-I should’ve done it, Birdie. I should’ve run off with you. I was a coward, I chickened out. It’s the most disappointing thing I ever did in my life. I’m still ashamed of it.
-Aw, now, don’t be, she said, dismissive. -Finus, I tell you, I don’t think I could’ve lived with you. I mean I probably would have, since I lived with Earl and never left him, but I don’t think I’d have been happy with you.
-Why not?
-Well Earl was hot-tempered and he run around on me, and I don’t think you’d have done that, even with Merry, if you’d been married to me. But you’ve always been so gloomy. Even back then. I think I would’ve just lost patience with you, being so glum all the time. One thing you could say about Earl, he had a temper but he wasn’t gloomy. He was cheerful enough.
-Maybe I was gloomy because I didn’t get you. He grinned at her.
-Aw, fiddle, she said. -You were gloomy when we was just boys and girls. I remember I used to tell you to cheer up.
-I don’t remember that.
-Well I did. And you would always say, What’s to be so cheerful about? And I’d say, Well life! Can’t you just appreciate how everything’s so pretty and life can be so much fun?
-And what would I say to that?
-Oh, I don’t know. I don’t remember. I just remember you were a sweet boy, but just as gloomy as you could be. I said one time I think, I’d never marry Finus Bates, he’s so gloomy.
-You didn’t.
-Well, maybe I did. She laughed. -I don’t remember! My lands, that seems like another lifetime, it was so long ago.
-I guess it was, he said.
-Gloomy, just like that! she said, and laughed again. -Now, look, why don’t you stay and eat dinner? I’m not real hungry, myself, and I know Creasie has plenty to eat.
-Listen, I’m not gloomy, I’m just introspective. How can you say we wouldn’t have been a good couple just because I was a little moody?
-Now don’t get upset, she said.
He heard the slappity sound of another car’s tires out on the highway, passing by.
-Say what you want though, Finus, but you are gloomy.
A mockingbird flew up to the window screen with the sound of ruffled skirts being tossed. It perched on the sill, cocked its eye at him. Startled him. He eyed it back. Thought for a moment he recognized something in its hard beady glare. The bird parted its beak as if to speak.
-Shoo, he said, half rising and making a shooing motion with his hands. The bird flew off. Mike lifted his old hoary head from the floor beside the dressing table.
-What was that? Birdie said. -That crazy mockingbird?
Finus looked at her. He’d forgotten for a second just where he was, forgotten she was even in the room.
-What does it matter now, anyway?
-See what I mean?
He caught sight in the corner of his eye now another face, looking round the doorjamb, a faded blue kerchief knotted above the brow.
-You better rest up, Creasie said to Birdie, unless you want to pass on in front of Mr. Finus.
Birdie flicked at her with a hand.
-Mm hmm, Creasie said, retreating. -Dinner be ready directly.
Meaning lunch, of course, and Finus could smell Creasie’s unmatchable cornbread muffins and pots of greens and peas with okra and it made him suddenly hungry enough to stay if anyone asked.
-Stay and eat dinner, now, Birdie said.
He skitched his cheek at Mike to wake him.
-I’ll run on, he said. -No need for you to get dressed. And he leaned over and gave her a kiss on the cheek, her skin soft and malleable as a plucked dove’s, and squeezed her cold thinning hand, and her eyes had already fallen aside in a half-focused gaze of distraction as he showed himself out.
Finus Uxorious
AT THE BRIGHT blurred window there was a shape, and a sound like pecking on glass. Finus reached to the bedside table for his spectacles, put them on, but the shape was just a flitting shadow, gone, maybe just a figment of his now cluttered and wayward imagination. He cast a cautious, sidelong glance at the stuffed chair in the corner of the room: his dead wife Avis was no longer there. She’d been there the night before as he lay in bed waiting for sleep, just sitting there looking at him with the stony gaze of the indignant dead, saying nothing but refusing his silent demands that she go away.
He hadn’t slept too well. Creasie’s call in the afternoon, day before, had set off all his memories about Birdie, now she was gone. -Miss Birdie’s passed on, was all she’d said.
After a moment, he said, -You okay, then?
-Yes, sir. I’m all right.
-I’ll take care of it then. You wait there with her.
-Yes, sir. I ain’t got nowhere else to go.
He had called Parnell Grimes, let him take care of it. No need to go back out, see her like that. He’d have his last memory of her, alive.
He wondered now if he’d have some sort of Birdie vision, now that she was gone.
He lowered his feet from the bed to the floor beside the sleeping head of ancient Mike, scratched the dog’s head, and shuffled into the bathroom. He stood over the toilet and made water, a pretty good stream, better since he’d been taking the saw palmetto. He looked into the mirror, gave himself a little upper body massage. A spry eighty-nine, he suffered the loose skin of the aged, as if it had been removed from someone larger, stretched and dried, then pulled over his old meat and bones like bad taxidermy. There was nothing to do but accept he was very old. He still walked every day, some days did a few half-push-ups and stomach crunches, and he gave up beer, it gave him such gas. Now he drank only bourbon and gin, and that in moderation. He could only be thankful. He easily passed for seventy-something. Most his age were long gone to the boneyard.
In the kitchen he poured himself a cup of coffee from the automatic coffeemaker he’d set to make coffee by itself every morning at four fifty-five. Outside the window over the sink, the courthouse lawn and the tall Confederate monument and the white concrete courthouse itself were just touched with the slanting yellow light cutting over the bluff to the southeast of town. Finus tasted the dark, bitter coffee and touched his fingertips to the window glass, already warm at this hour in late May. He heard clicking old claws and Mike walked stiffly into the kitchen and leaned his head against Finus’s leg, stood there wearily.
-Good old Mike, Finus said. -You still tired? Dreaming them squirrel dreams? Wear you out, old boy.
The dog was fifteen years old, which made him even older than Finus in dog years.
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br /> Finus took his coffee to the bedroom and sat on the edge of his bed and let his parts hang over the edge of the mattress. His sac sagged like an old bull’s, and he wore his britches a little low on the hips to make plenty of room for his equipment, whose function now was mostly to get in the way of crossing his legs. Inside his apartment in the Moses Building above the offices of the Comet, he often went naked in the mornings and after evening baths, as clothes were so restrictive and there was too much cinching up of critical parts. He had few visitors, none of them women. The triangular Moses Building wedged itself into the convergence of two streets leading to the civic enclave of the courthouse, its annex containing the sheriff’s department and the food stamps office, an abandoned highrise parking lot that had failed in the seventies, and a row of shops trying in a desperately futile way to help revive downtown in the wake of the mall one mile south. The mall had been failing in its own hapless and inane fashion since its construction, also in the seventies, the decade during which it seemed to Finus that the entire country had seen a failure in terms of morals, economy, politics, and fashion.
At his age he was by some sort of osmosis as venerable in this town as the passing century itself, and was sometimes hailed on the sidewalk: Hey, Mr. Bates! What’s the word, Finus! Slow down, there, Mr. Bates, you’re moving too fast! And such foolishness as that. Finus bathed in it. There was nothing, he had once observed in his obituary for Adolphus William Spinks, a well-loved and longtime mayor, like local fame. It put the national and international variety to shame.