by Brad Watson
A watering in his saliva glands sent him shuffling to the kitchen for another cup and his daily ration of gin-soaked raisins, an arthritis preventive he thought maybe he’d picked up from Paul Harvey, though he wasn’t sure. For all he knew, they were keeping him alive. He dipped his fingers into the jar and rolled or plucked out exactly nine and dropped them into his mouth, chewing while he rinsed his fingers, and then poured another cup of coffee. If that didn’t keep the arthritis away, he’d help it out with a little Bombay on the rocks later on. Mike lay on the kitchen floor now, and breathed heavily when Finus came in, as if he found all this activity tiresome.
He sipped the coffee on the way back to the bathroom, set the cup down on the sink’s edge, and sat down on the cool toilet seat, which made his pecker draw up like a catalpa worm. He set his feet apart on the cool tiles, hands on his knees like half of a serious discussion, and stared at the blank opposite wall, the nubble of plaster covered by a coat of glossy blue enamel paint. He waited. He ran a hand through through the thick white hair on his head, secure in the knowledge he’d take it to the grave, they were his immortal hairs, always warned Ivyloy to use his Kryptonite scissors on them, didn’t want to dull or break the blade.
-I’ll use the ones you brought back from Mars, Ivyloy once said.
-That’ll do.
Finus detected now the smallest, most insidious of movement. He closed his eyes. What an ungodly business, a man should be afeared like Adam, terrified of this body our garden that contains the seeds of our own demise, slow and cruel deterioration from God’s own image—whatever that was or had been he was sure we were not made in it anymore. Not just the aged. Why did Genesis never once mention shit? Or did it? Finus reached his arm back and flushed, the old toilet roaring like a waterfall. He remembered his first indoor toilet, when they’d moved into town. He’d run down the stairs to see where it all dashed out, looked into all the rooms, expecting disaster, but they were pristine. That had to have changed the mental parameters of the human race, there. No doubt one reason primitives were nomadic was because they so befouled a place they had to move on, but no more—it all just disappeared. Now he pulled off a great pile of tissue to make a wad. Are you a folder or a wadder? he’d once said to a man he didn’t respect. The man hesitated. That’s what I thought, Finus said, and turned away with a dismissing wave. You had to let a man know when he wasn’t acting right. Finus’s friend and physician Orin Heath had once said, -Well Finus, you’ll live as long as a sea tortoise if you can still take a good crap every day.
-That’s my former life, Finus said. I know every inch of the Gulf of Mexico.
-You’re deep all right, said Orin, it’s deep around you, considering the subject.
-I know where the treasure is, down there on the old pirate beach, Finus said.
-I bet you do.
Finus whacked the toilet handle again and stood up. Done and hardly a stink. He took his cup back out to the bedroom, stepped carefully into a pair of boxers, and opened the dresser drawer containing his pants, all cotton khaki slacks cleaned and pressed at the One Hour Martinizing. He pulled on a pair, then selected a white Oxford short-sleeve shirt from the next drawer and angled his longish arms into the sleeves.
So he’d have to write two obits, today. Parnell told him, when he’d called about Birdie, that Midfield Wagner had passed on, too.
He finished dressing, turned off the radio, went into the living room and picked up the phone and called Parnell Grimes at the funeral home for a couple of details about Midfield and Birdie, then coaxed Mike downstairs for a little walk to the courthouse lawn across the street to do his business, then praised him up the steps again. The dog made his way back to the bedroom for a long siesta. In the kitchen Finus filled Mike’s water bowl, shook out a few chunks of food from the sack, then poured himself a third cup of coffee, which he drank standing at the sink. He set the empty cup down in the sink, navigated the stairwell down to the street, and went out into the morning air. He allowed himself a glance at his reflection in the plate-glass windows of Ivyloy’s barbershop, dust motes suspended in the slant rays reaching the chair and around the glass jars of tonic and oil. He’d forgotten to shave or comb his hair and his reflection showed him to look a little seedy. He stopped and took a look, ran his hand over his bristly face and over the top of his head. Maybe he’d stop back in at Ivyloy’s before dinner and get a shave, a nice hot towel on his face. A good way to relax after writing a few things up in the morning.
He remembered the first time he’d seen Birdie. Small child astride a big short-haired dog that carried her slowly down a stretch of narrow beach along a peninsula that jutted into Mobile Bay, following an old spotted gray horse that clopped along in the sand, head down as if pondering. In the afternoon sun they made a picture both forlorn and comical. Where had she been going, a little girl astride a hound and following a downtrodden dray? He hadn’t called out to ask. It was beatific, the way he remembered it now.
His family had been vacationing down in the old Henrietta Hotel on the Alabama coast. The day was bright and clear but blustery. By noon the sky turned gray and low, and soon took on a weird, greenish glow. He stood on the deck with his mother and father and grandfather while they looked at it and murmured to one another about it. By early evening the wind was blowing hard and then sometime in the night he was taken from his bed wrapped in a blanket and put into the back of a wagon with other people from the hotel and they traveled down the old road to the army fort at the end of the peninsula. There they were taken into the huge vaulted munitions rooms deep within the fortress walls where they and the Commandant and a group of soldiers sat around a wood stove, the soldiers and his parents and grandfather drinking coffee and talking while the wind howled. Finus fell asleep again with his head in his mother’s lap in a little brick recess in the wall on which there had been piled soft blankets, and the wind howled him sweetly into dreams he forgot as soon as he woke the next morning.
It was a watery world around the fort, as he could see through still pelting raindrops from the high parapet where his grandfather took him to see. The marsh east of the fort was lapped with little waves, tips of tall sea oats just visible above them and the sky a gray soapy foam. Pines to the south and farther east waist deep in brown water, the clumped tops of the scrub oaks just showing. A group of officers in their ranger hats stood a few feet away from them, looking through binoculars to the east and pointing and talking.
When they went out in the long rowboats to look for survivors in the bar pilot village a few miles east of the fort, his father and grandfather let him go along. He sat beside his grandfather in the prow of the boat in which the Commandant sat with his father in the rear as two soldiers manned the oars. They launched at the marsh’s edge, and rowed between the pines and around the clumps of scrub oak tops, in the lapping brown water and debris from broken limbs and here there the strange item, a floating washtub or wooden ladle, a well bucket, a floating length of swollen rope. An old steel gray and rusted buoy rocked against the side of a high dune as they neared the village. A sopped and pitiful rag doll, face-up and bobbing. Finus wanted to reach for it, but did not. The others seemed to glance at it and look away.
When they reached a place from which they could see the bay out beyond the battered piney dunes the boats slowed for a minute as the Commandant directed them to spread apart and search for survivors. One boat of soldiers headed out into the bay for the other side, where someone had seen something through the binoculars in the far trees. Another struck out farther east, to cut into the sluiced gaps of a flooded tall and broken pine forest, their tops cracked and splayed and gleaming yellow-white wounds luminous in the gray air. The boat with Finus in it turned to go straight inland at the village site, and they had not gone far when there was an exclamation from the Commandant, who stood up in the boat and hailed someone. Finus looked. A man on a ragged grass and sandy knoll stood up and gazed at them as if they were an apparition, and for a moment he see
med one himself, then he raised one arm in silent reply. And then sank to his knees.
-What are they doing out here, Pawpaw? Finus said quietly to his grandfather.
His grandfather, watching the man, said, -They live out here. Or did.
-Where are their houses?
There were no structures at all in this place, and mostly water, and little ground showing at all but for this knoll, and further on another two like it, where now other figures stood and hollered at them, waving their arms.
-Gone, his grandfather said. -The hurricane has washed them away. Out into the bay, maybe.
They took in the man on the first knoll and with him those left in his family, a woman and child and a man about the woman’s age. The man who’d stood first was older, with a long white beard, and had raised one arm when he’d seen them because it was all he had, his other sleeve wet and pinned upon itself higher up.
He said, -An angel of the Lord sent you to come find us here. We thought we were lost. Some were, he said. His voice was high and soft and trembling.
In the seat just behind Finus and his grandfather in the prow, on the bench between them and the two soldiers rowing, was the little girl he’d seen on the dog. She sat in the woman’s lap wrapped in a dry army blanket and staring at Finus with large, close-set watery blue eyes and a tiny mouth like the chirp of a bird.
-What’s her name? Finus said to no one in particular.
The girl turned her face and buried it in her mother’s chest. Her mother patted her and looked at Finus.
-Her name is Birdie, the woman said. -She’s my little girl.
-I’m Finus Bates, Finus said. -Were you out all night in that storm?
The woman said nothing but tears welled in her eyes and the man beside her put his arm around her and patted her shoulder.
-Shh, Finus, his grandfather said then, for he was near to crying, too, just seeing this and feeling for them in a way that surprised him, so suddenly, he just wanted to bawl.
The old man with the long white beard said, -It was the hand of God brought this storm, to punish us. This was a paradise, he said to the Commandant, his voice rising. -This was our Eden. Now we’re driven out, for our sins.
-Yes, sir, the Commandant said. -You’re safe now. We’ll have you all safe in the fort very soon.
-Where’s your dog? Finus said then to the girl, who yanked her head from her mother’s bosom and stared at him wide-eyed and then screwed her own face up tight and began to cry herself, as did Finus when the girl’s mother glared at him so.
-Pull, gentlemen, the Commandant said to the soldiers manning the oars. -We have more work to do when we’ve taken these few to safety.
They would find the dog, on the way back to the fort, barking with hopeless energy on a treeless nub of wet sand some ways to the west, and pick him up, and the girl hugged him to her tightly until they arrived at the fort and her mother coaxed her arms from around it until they could get inside, whereupon the girl sat in a corner in one of the munitions rooms and held the dog tight and would not let go, every time Finus peeked in around the corner she was there, holding the dog like it was a huge impassive furry child that only she had the power to comfort.
In the years after the storm, Birdie’s grandfather moved them to Mercury, where he’d received succor long ago on his way home from the Civil War, and where Finus’s grandfather had told him he and his kin would also befriend him. Finus played with her when they went to visit. He and Birdie roamed in her grandfather’s garden, among the bougainvillea, azaleas, and deeply sweet-scented gardenias, down the hill behind their house into the woods where they would roll little balls of sweetgum sap onto their fingers and chew it delicately between their top and bottom front teeth. Birdie’s two front teeth were gapped, which gave him a strange stirring in his heart. But she was no more claimable then for sappy loving sentiment than she ever would be, and would always deflect his attempts to moon. Uxorious was a word he later learned and would apply. She had a face, it seemed to him, that was unreal somehow, as perfectly unreal as a doll’s yet with the capacity to open, become human in an instant, and suck him in unawares. Her chattering banter would cease and she would be vacant, not unlike someone having a mild epileptic seizure. As if she’d been grazed by a fleeting memory and her mind had gone out with it for a ways. And then, her mind coming back to the moment, she would turn her eyes to him and before he could gather his far-flung self again she had drawn him into her like some stronger, brighter heavenly body. He was possessed, almost, something essential in him trapped in her, trapped but not entirely uncomfortable. He could never quite reconcile her real presence with what her presence suggested to him, and it kept him not only enchanted but also confused in some deep sense he couldn’t grasp. More than one evening after a visit he wished he could convince his father to drive them back out to the Wells house, so he could see she was still there and had not vanished, that he hadn’t only imagined or daydreamed the day. This was not her fault. To her mind, as far as he could tell, she was as normal as the next girl. It was all in Finus, this sense of her. He had no idea what to say to her. When he looked into a mirror, it was if he saw nothing there.
She would point out the trees and flowering shrubs and tell him their names, taught to her by her grandfather. The shapes of their leaves and of their branching were for her the fundamental shapes in the world, what could be more beautiful, as God knew what shapes by which our minds arranged themselves, by which our imaginations are arranged. And he would name with her the songbirds he heard calling and could identify that way, his own grandfather’s gift to him, those flitting shapes like darting shadows or figments of the spirit.
Like all early childhood friends they drifted apart with different schools and new friends, though their families attended the same church and later they attended school together, too. But he wouldn’t be touched again by that sense of her, as if his spell had been suspended, until her cartwheel. In an instant, and unexpected, it would happen again. Years later, off to college, he would write an essay in his English class, ostensibly on a couple of English poets. He would describe a hypothetical situation in which a young man is watching a young woman across a large crowded room, such as at a ball or dance. The young man’s hands are shaking. He has seen her walk into the hall that evening and a great roaring has begun in his ears and receded into the back of his head. His vision has tunneled down as if he is about to faint. He sees two little images of her before him, tiny as if in a miniature painting on his corneas. He later decides that every bit of his blood had rushed to his heart, and that there could not be a more powerful sign of love than your almost dying in the presence of it, than it being so powerful it could kill you. His transformation is complete. This phenomenon, Finus realized when he was forced to read things like Astrophel and Stella and Shakespeare’s sonnets, was a thing from the past, a different world, when people really did die of love. Maybe because it was just harder to end up with the one you loved back then, because of stricter rules and harder circumstances in general. But also maybe because love was more real to them then, when there were fewer things you could use to distract yourself from something so frightening and strange. That’s the modern habit, he wrote in his paper, the fear of love has become so ingrained in our character that we no longer even recognize love, in the same way that we shy away from the recognition of evil, for fear it will consume us with its terrible and inexplicable attraction. The professor wrote back, Mr. Bates, other than a suggestion to find a more powerful and graceful word than inexplicable, your essay is remarkable, and I should only hope that you are able to complete your studies at the university before whatever it is that threatens to consume you does so and ruins your academic career.
He looked up. Someone had hailed. A figure hardly more than a nebulous collection of white light, somehow on the courthouse lawn, though he could tell it was his boy, Eric, dead now almost fifty years. He wanted to call out, My darling son, my boy! and stood there a moment fixated i
n the vision of the moment. How was it he was seeing the boy at this time of the morning, when usually he only sensed his presence in distorted slips of air that revealed, like thin and vertical flaws in a lens, the always nearby regions of the dead? He waved back, his heart turning over in love and sadness. Closed his defective eye, damaged by a pellet of birdshot in 1918, and the boy dissolved back into the air.
Saviors
PARNELL GRIMES, NOW county coroner as well as owner of Grimes Funeral Home, leaned over the stainless-steel preparation table and gripped the edges of the starched white sheet with his plump, short, pink fingers and pulled it away from Birdie Urquhart’s face. Even at this great age and dead she had a lovely face—a fact often more obvious in death, with the very old, since their stricken, weary, saddened, impish, or disengaged eyes distracted one from their essential features.
For a long time now he had believed that he and Miss Birdie were partners in the context of their secret crimes, he and Miss Birdie, each the perpetrator of some strange and solitary criminal act that no one would ever know about—or so she must have believed, for only he knew of both his and hers and he would never tell of either. But it was knowing of hers that made the bond, for him.
Miss Birdie’s face was classically oval-shaped with a good nose—straight, medium-length, none of the bulbousness of some old noses. She’d always had beautiful hair and kept it long, combed up in a bun or even in braids coiled at the back of her head, but now it had been let down and it lay white and fragile and across her bare left shoulder. He pulled the sheet away from her breast, hips, and legs, and looked upon her naked corpse, discolored around the edges of her buttocks and the backs of her arms and calves. As with many he tended, her skin had smoothed like a baby’s, its wrinkles fleshed with death’s gentle swelling, and had the seeming translucence of those white dead not sallow with tobacco smoking or racial complexity. He used to watch her when he was a boy and she was, he guessed, in her middle thirties, at the old Mercury Park pool. He’d owned a Kodak then and was known for going around taking pictures, all black and white, of course. One he’d taken was of several regulars there at the pool in the forties, a photo in which Miss Birdie’s image seemed luminous tissue among the shaded, shrunken features of the others. Next to Miss Birdie, they seemed corpses already, no more to Parnell’s practiced eye than fleshed skulls drying in their gradual and imminent declension toward the grave. Somehow the hard light of that day fell softly upon Miss Birdie and did not cast the sharp, cadaverous shadows it cast upon the others. They, the others, would preclude the creative process behind his art, which after all required a model, a ghostly ideal lingering vaguely in their faces. He used to watch Miss Birdie, her beauty reminiscent of the early movie stars’, unable to keep himself from fantasizing that she would depart the world early in some nondisfiguring accident, without the usual markings and poolings. And that he would be allowed to gaze upon her.