by Brad Watson
He felt for a moment a vague stirring of the old desire, but long ago he had vowed he would never again betray his calling. Was not a man in Parnell Grimes’s profession indeed a priest, a medium, the only one allowed to gaze upon the naked flesh of those whose bodies would not be seen again until they arose into the kingdom of heaven?
This analogy had not actually been his own. It was the inspiration of Selena Oswald, who would become his wife. Selena had given him the gift of redemption, so that he could live his life with some sort of hope for his confused and deeply stained soul. And it was the corpse of Miss Birdie here now before him that caused her, Selena, to swell again into the void she’d left inside him since she’d died.
He had thought perhaps he would never marry, would be like a suffering, perverted priest with many imaginary wives, the poor and vulnerable, old and young, ugly and beautiful, all lovely in God’s eyes, all returning to clay in his hands. But when he met Selena, then just twelve to his eighteen, he had lusted after her with the fervor that only a young man who believed he knew an exquisite corpse in the making could lust.
He had first seen and met her when he and his father had the unhappy occasion to prepare her mother, Mrs. Medina Oswald, for viewing and burial. The woman, only thirty-nine and known to be a vigorous Primitive Baptist, had died of a coronary, an hereditary ailment, her heart greatly enlarged. Parnell in his youth considered that her flaw most likely was the too-great love she exercised for her husband and children. Solemnly with his father he greeted them for the viewing: Mr. Oswald, a mailman bewildered by this unhappy event; his son James, a tall young deputy sheriff with the slow and solid look of a laborer; and then Selena. When he held out his hand toward her long, slim, pale one she did not move, and he looked up into her eyes and was shocked and even afraid. This twelve-year-old girl may as well have pierced his breast with a spear and held him before her as he died. Her gaze was not one of fearfulness or repulsion or anger, nor was it liquid with the more common helpless grief of the mourner. It was lucid. He sensed that in his own eyes she sought something no one had ever had the courage or audacity to seek before: the vision of her beloved as she was last, before the preparation, in the great nakedness of death, between the dying and the viewing. She looked down at Parnell’s hand, held oddly open before her, as if she understood something of the intimacy of his art, understood the nature of the intimacy he had experienced with her mother—and then she took it into her own flawless hand, sending a mild current through his arm. He believed she understood his secret, that which he’d hidden even from his father (who approached his craft with all the reverence of a taxidermist). She was on to him, instinctively, although she did not yet understand what she knew.
He courted her with patience, first befriending her brother James, and seeing her whenever he joined James at their house in the early mornings after cruising with James on the sheriff’s department’s graveyard shift, which is what they always called it whenever Parnell rode along. He learned much about police work, which would lead to his running for coroner and winning, but he learned even more about Selena, who would appear in the mornings, sleepy-eyed, one who did not especially like to rise, carrying her books in one of her father’s old and worn leather mailbags and dropping it beside the kitchen door so that she would not forget it on her sleepy way out. From the corner of his eye Parnell watched her, a tabby kitten named Rosebud in her lap, as she pushed her grits around and cut her fried egg as if it were of no more interest to her than a shingle. Then she would dutifully eat it all, without relish. Parnell knew that a woman with little interest in food beyond what was necessary for sustenance would age gracefully. And though slim the girl had hardly a visible bone about her, no hard and jutting cheekbones or brows or chin. Her nose, though straight, was small and unobtrusive. Her eyes neither bulged nor seemed so sunken as to suggest the specter of sockets. She would be beautiful until the end. He would never have to gaze upon her as bones and skin and a sac of dying organs wheezing, rotting even as she sat across from him at the breakfast table, still wearing the drawn and cracked deathmask of her desiccated facial cream. She would no more dry up than an apple never plucked from the tree, until it fell into the grass and reentered the soil discreetly in its swift and natural collapse from within, its skin retaining to the end its general dignity. She drank her milk like an athlete, though, and would eat her egg, eventually, and after some time would bid them farewell, saying, -G’bye, Jim, g’bye, Rosebud, g’bye, Mr. Parnell, her father having been gone since five o’clock to the post office.
When she turned fifteen he began to strike up conversations with her whenever they were alone in the kitchen or the living room or on the Oswalds’ front porch. Then he began to invite her on walks down to the drugstore or to the park just beyond. And it was there, one day, she admitted that his continued presence in their home had allowed her to move gradually beyond her grief over her mother, and finally to imagine those who daily lay before him to be embalmed.
-Embalmed, she said to him. -Parnell (for she’d stopped calling him Mr., which he missed in a way), that word had always horrified me. But the more you were around, I started to think about it in another way, thinking about the word balm in the middle of it. I started to think that you see it as soothing the body, in a way.
Parnell’s heart surged. They were sitting on a bench beneath a broad water oak in the park, she on one end and he on the other. He was the most ordinary-looking of men, shaped something like a cheap cigar, small hands and feet, beginning to bald. But though his face, neither round nor slim, had no distinguishing features, it was saved by his eyes, which were mysteriously handsome—it was as if Errol Flynn had stepped up behind a cardboard cutout of Parnell and put his eyes behind the empty eyeholes. And women had often been arrested, just for a moment, upon gazing at Parnell, until they remembered where they were and who they were talking to, and pulled themselves back into the world, looking upon Parnell Grimes, mortician, and they determined that his captivating eyes were merely another manifestation of his strangeness and even perhaps part of what made him creepy.
And now Selena looked into them. She had known him long enough, had become accustomed to him, so that as will happen she saw his eyes moreso than she saw the rest of him.
-Yes, he said. -Embalmed is a beautiful word. What it really means is to preserve the memory of the beloved, to cherish the memory. It is not distasteful to me.
-Parnell, she said, what does one look like when you get it?
He paused. He knew exactly her dilemma as she gazed at him, her heart filled with morbid curiosity, her mind with the budding intelligence of a girl near marrying age—she was sixteen now. How could he answer so as to maintain an element of each in her, to open her imagination to his art in a way that he must have in a lifelong companion? Were he to wed a woman who would take the conventional view she would soon shudder and shun him as she would the idea of her own mortality when such awareness descended upon her. He would marry only one who understood the beauty of death’s role in the world and, beyond that, the strange and inviolable beauty of the dead themselves.
Oh, he could tell her some horrible things. Of breaking jaws to fix gaping mouths into beatific smiles. How one must cement the eyelids down to keep them from popping open as the loved ones gazed upon them one last time. Of embalming fluid seepage. Of how Mrs. Vogel’s skin began to turn green. Of the time he helped his father to sew up and sew on the head of Mr. Fondelet, which had been removed somewhat raggedly by his disker. Of how her own mother’s face was hardened into such a grimace from her painful death his father’d had to pry it into a more relaxed expression and keep it there by inserting three steel rods. But these things were immaterial, in Parnell’s view. What mattered was the presentation, the viewing of the final restoration. The body was no longer important, in itself. In truth, it was the ravaged memory of the bereaved that Parnell restored.
He tried to take her hand, but she shrank and pulled it away.
; -Selena, he said after a moment, holding her uncertain eyes with his own gaze. He chose his words carefully. -I know you might think me strange. But when I go into the preparation room and take my first look at the beloved, I feel the most soothing kind of peacefulness flow into my heart.
He felt her relax her resistance then, after a moment.
-I don’t think it’s strange, Parnell, she said, looking calmly and frankly right back at him now. -Shouldn’t we feel at peace around the dead? It seems to me like they prepare the way for us, in their brief presence with us, I mean. In our minds.
Parnell was astounded and, for a moment, speechless.
-You’re too young to be so wise, he said.
Her expression, as she considered this, was inscrutable. She looked away.
-I have always had, she said, a certain understanding of things. For a while, I felt very close to God.
He leaned forward and took her hand.
-Selena, my calling is almost religious, to me. When I see the dead lying alone and unadorned on my preparation table, they look to me like they are God’s children once again. To me they are as beautiful as babies, and it is my privilege to place them, like the midwife, into God’s hands.
He had the soft but commanding voice of a gentle preacher, Parnell did—not unlike her own late mother’s, she said to him once—and Selena’s face had opened as if hearing him read from the scripture.
They married the day after her graduation from the high school, and rented a little cottage far out the peninsula down at the Gulf, not far from the old fort. Since it was already hot they would emerge only in the late afternoon or early evening to play in the surf or to hunt for sea turtle nests in the dunes. Later they ate shrimp and fish they bought from a little seafood plant on the bay and cooked in the cottage’s tiny kitchen. She didn’t know much about cooking, Selena, not being one who much cared about food. But the first evening, she seemed proud as she set the steaming plate of boiled shrimp between them on the dining table and took her seat. They’d been on the beach all afternoon and were still in their bathing suits, and as she placed the meat of a large shrimp between her teeth and bit into it, its juice spurted toward Parnell. Startled, she laughed with her mouth open, holding the other half of the steaming shrimp between her thumb and middle finger. Parnell stood up from his chair. She watched him, waiting, then dropped the shrimp gently onto her plate. They engaged in a slow precoital tango toward the daybed in the living room. Their fingers clutched skin still sticky and gritty from the afternoon on the beach, still pale beyond the possibility of tanning, blushed with sun and red-rimmed about the edges of their suits. Parnell, in love, his mind on fire with love as if he’d inhaled some powerful essence of it from Selena’s pores, nevertheless sensed an irritating hesitation deep in his blood. A gray fear began to gather behind his eyes like iron filings. He closed his eyelids and attempted to pray as he normally only pretended to pray. As he did he felt Selena change somehow, and fearing he’d ruined the moment with her he opened his eyes and pulled back to find her looking at him in a way that nearly froze him. It was the same look she’d locked upon him the first time they met, at her mother’s funeral, when she had first divined his secret. And now he felt something happening in her. He felt it in his fingertips against her sunwarmed skin, now cooling. He felt the very character of her tissue begin to evolve against him, and he was afraid.
A word escaped her lips as little more than a breath: -Parnell, she said, her lips barely moving. Her eyes no longer penetrated him, but softened in focus and seemed to drift away.
-What is it? Parnell whispered in return.
-Parnell, she said, I want to pretend.
-Pretend what? he said, his voice scarcely more than the last little bit of a breath to empty the lungs.
She made an absent gesture with her hand, turning it outward, palm up, as if to receive a coin, or a key.
-Pretend I am more beautiful than alive.
When his pounding heart subsided enough to allow it, he held her by the arms and laid her down upon the daybed. She looked at him again in that absent way, then tilted her head back onto the mattress, her mouth parted. She whispered again, -Parnell. And she said something else, too faint to be heard. Hands upon her cheeks, growing cold, he leaned down to her lips. He laid his ear just barely against them. -Parnell, he heard her whisper again, something’s wrong.
He knelt and grasped her by the arms again, and believed he could feel something in her beginning to slow and thicken, heard a gentle rasping deep in her throat. The shadow of her dusky blood crept into tender crescents below her eyes. The delicate fibers in her cornea quivered, and in her dark pupils the tiny reflected image of Parnell’s face seemed to dissipate and disappear.
-Parnell, she whispered, barely audible, save me.
Then she lay still, eyes upon the ceiling. The cottage timbers shuddered in the gusts off the Gulf. Parnell rested his head upon her breast. He could hear the crushing sound as breakers collapsed against the beach. -Parnell, she whispered again, don’t be ashamed. Take me, like you want to do. Parnell began to tremble. He knelt before her on the daybed, and pulled apart her cool and sticky, lovely white legs. In a moment he groaned as heat flushed through him. He gave in and fell upon her. Her breath huffed out as from a cushion, her arms lay rigid at her sides, her head arched away as if in the throes of some horrible death, eyes turned to look unseeing out the Florida windows, lovely mouth opening in dry exhaustion. Parnell crushed his lips to hers, the ripe taste of shrimp still upon them. He squeezed her small and lolling breasts to his chest. And slowly she began to change again, her whisper taking voice again, love literally coming alive beneath him. He heard himself saying her name, his voice deep and crusty as a troll’s, and she responded with a cry that shot into his spine. Blood slammed at the ends of his fingers and toes. He was momentarily blinded. She gripped him with her heels and nails and he felt as if there were no longer any bed beneath them, and a roaring in his ears became their own sobs. She clasped him to her. She knew then, she would tell him one day, that he had unbound her from the tyrannies of grief and fear. Those who would embrace the beautiful dead are most open to the living, have nothing to fear, neither loss nor oblivion. The world was flesh and blood and bone, and through the blessed privilege of sensual touch lay contact with the spiritual world. The air is adrift with what presences are left behind, which find new forms in the living, in those who are most open and alive themselves, not slaves to ignorance and fear. In this world, Parnell had given her that. But in his secret heart Parnell knew, and he would always believe Selena knew, that it was Selena who had saved Parnell.
Selena in Ecstasy
WHEN SHE WAS a child listening to her mother’s sermons she came to realize the possibility of the divine in an ordinary life, this miracle that had occurred with Our Lord Jesus Christ was as much chance and the openness of one’s divine nature to the miracle as it was the big finger of God pointing out he or she. We do not choose God, her mother had boomed from the pulpit over and over. God chooses us. Our choice, she always said, was to be open to God or to close our hearts forever and ever. Her mother was obsessed with death. She always said she couldn’t wait to go to the other side, to be in heaven. Such words had so frightened Selena that her own obsession with death took a hard turn toward salvation and the only way to guarantee that was to be the agent of it herself. She drew pictures of heaven in her first-grade class, and all the angels were her mother. God was a very old man with wild hair that hid his eyes, and a fierce beard that hid his features, and in his hand he held a long-handled scythe. Beside him stood a smaller figure with jet-black hair and a little wand of her own. And who is that? her teacher asked brightly. That’s me. Really? the teacher said brightly as before. Why are you standing next to God, hon? I am standing at the right hand of God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, Selena said. The Christ Selena, who died for your sins. You’re not dead, though, honey, the teacher said. And Selena hon, it’s the angel
of death that carries the scythe, her teacher said. Not God. God is the angel of death, Selena replied. Selena the Christ is the life everlasting. Selena is a very wise child, her teacher wrote home in a note, but with somewhat disturbing notions. Perhaps she has been exposed to ideas which she is not yet equipped to handle.
She did not see God as evil, but indifferent to the kinds of things that so grieved human beings. He was above all that, and so she strove to be more like God in this way, and this made her an aloof child, difficult to reach or decipher emotionally. At twelve she knew from the scriptures it was time to shoulder the burden to which she had opened her infinite heart. It was in the evening, very late, in her bed. She rose to her knees in the moonlight soft on her bedcovers and asked God to take her then and to use her to His ends, and a flood of emotion washed through her as she had not felt in her life to that point. She wept a long time, wept herself into exhaustion, and then it was that the spirit entered her and gained a hold.