The Heaven of Mercury

by Brad Watson

  There were miracles she performed, in her own quiet way. She could make her teacher call on her for an answer, if she wanted her to. And if she wanted to be passed over, she could control that, too. It was a simple matter of will, and something she did through her eyes, which were large and such a dark brown as to appear almost solid black globes of softened glass. If she wanted into a group of other children who were occupied with something, she approached them and they parted to let her in. And if she was not interested, she was invisible, they never even sensed she was near. She could arrest animals with her eyes, as well, and keep them from approaching or slinking away. Her cat, Rosebud, understood her every mulling thought, and watched her as she would an object of prey, but one beyond her powers to prey upon, and therefore a kind of god. She did not worship, though, being a cat. She expected to be worshiped herself, Rosebud did, and so was always unsatisfied. But when Selena touched her on the top of her head between her ears, she gently closed her eyes and was absolved of her envy and felt content, for a brief while anyway, to be just a cat. Other things she could do were make birds fly from a bush without herself making a sound or a move, turn bad dogs away tails tucked, shut up talkative grown-ups who got on her nerves, and if she really wanted to and it was something she rarely did, knowing it would be an abuse if she did it too often, she could change the weather. But more often she merely willed weather to stay as it was, since she liked most kinds of it, rain and storms as well as sunny days and clear nights. She could make a tree die, if she thought it was a bad tree, though this was rare. She could make other people, the whole town, sleep later in the morning, if she wished. If she was sleepy and didn’t want to get up for school, she could do this, and when she finally dragged herself to the schoolhouse, her father’s old postal bag stuffed with her books slung over her shoulder, the others would be just arriving, too, all sleepy and draggy, including the teachers, who yawned and slurped from cup after cup of coffee, and declared they just couldn’t wake up this morning to save their lives. She could simply slow things down. And sometimes she did. Riding in the backseat of their old black lurching car to church she could tell there were fewer cars on the road, the people inside looking sleepy and tired, and there were fewer people in the church itself, and her mother had to work extra hard at her sermon to keep them awake and responding with Amens and nods of the head that weren’t nod-dings-off. When Selena noticed that, and before the collection plate was passed, she willed them to wake up a little bit, and they would. At home she scaled herself back. For some time she wasn’t sure if she wanted her mother to know her secret or not. She realized she might not be believed, and that her mother might think it a sacrilege that she even would think such a thing.

  When her mother fell to her early death Selena at first believed she had been horribly wrong, deluded in her sense of herself, but in prayer that day and following she came to understand she had seen this about to occur, had felt its presence in the hand her mother used to stroke her head as she lay falling asleep in bed in recent evenings. And if she were not some kind of Christ, a notion that had begun to slip from her presence of mind after all in the way that the awareness of breathing slips away from those who have their health, that was okay. It was not necessary to save the world or mankind in order to practice her obsessions.

  She knew Parnell to be someone in touch with God, in his own way, a person through whose hands people passed on their way to God. She saw him as an instrument whose own powers he didn’t understand, and therefore an innocent. He was the last person to see her mother in her natural earthly form, before the preparation for burial and the soothing of the living souls. When she held his hand there in the funeral parlor she could first feel its presence and then she could see the divine glow in him as a faint blue aura about his oddly beautiful body. She could see something soulful in him that had come, she knew, from his having been so intimate with so much death. He had his hands on death, and wasn’t afraid. He understood something about it that other people did not. After they married, when people were brought into the funeral home to be embalmed and buried, she absolved them all of all their sins, quietly, to herself. They would all enter heaven, to keep her mother company, and she would send them all with a message, that when her work on earth was done she would join her in paradise.

  SHE KNEW OF Parnell’s sickness, something she had divined anyway, through various things he said to her which first implied it and later confirmed it for her in the months of their courtship. When she had first taken his hand in the funeral parlor she had sensed something strong in terms of his relation to the dead, but had not included sexual passion in what she sensed until he told her of the girl who’d been in the farming accident and how she had changed him. A general anxiety had to that point given him such problems he thought they would undermine his chosen career: sweaty palms, a nervous pallor, a popeyed uncertainty in his speech. His father barred him from working the parlors. This continued until one day when the body of a girl in his high school class, mortally wounded in a hay baling accident, was brought from the hospital to the Grimes embalming table—naked, flayed, pale, and cold. Her child’s face mauled by indifferent machinery. It had been a face, Parnell recalled, upon which none of her peers’ eyes had rested in admiration. She’d been as plain, even homely, as a day-old drop biscuit. And now he looked upon her remains (beyond the corruption of his confused imagination, Selena would come to understand), disfigured with slices and gashes from the baler, and he saw beyond them more clearly than anyone had ever been able to see just what her perfection had been, and realized that he loved her and mourned her loss. That day, he began to understand something of his mission, and the experience was liberating. His grief filled him with a bouyant joy, and immediately he arrived at a deeper understanding of all that he’d felt and feared. Later, when they had no such secrets between them, after he had further confessed the nature of these fears, telling her what had happened with the Littleton girl, she comforted him, absolved him. Together they giggled like children over the fact that the messenger of such a mission had been unspeakable lust.

  From the time they married and she moved into the second floor of the funeral home with Parnell, this place that had been his lonely habitation since his parents had died when he was only sixteen, when he had taken over the business at that young age and done quite well with it, she had felt more at home than she had since the day her mother died. Her own home, since then, had been such a lonely place, even with her father and brother living there with her. She had felt more comforted by her cat, Rosebud, than she had with her family, though they loved her and she loved them. The cat, Rosebud, had a way of looking at her that was so unguarded, so frankly a look into who she really was and what she felt, that she knew no living human being could match it. And the week she’d been at the Gulf with Parnell on their honeymoon, Rosebud had disappeared, and she knew this was because Rosebud’s role in her life had come to an end. That her life with Parnell in the funeral home would now supplant it in ways she would come to understand. So she grieved for Rosebud, but not unconsolably.

  In only that first week she had asked Parnell to let her assist him in the embalming downstairs in the basement. He hesitated only a moment, and then she could see settle into his features the knowledge that this was her destiny as much as it was his own. He gave his regular assistant, Mr. Peach, a two-week vacation, and she worked with him on every body that came to the home during that time. The greater her experience at handling the dead, the greater her desire for communion with them.

  It had been entirely a risk, an experiment, that first time she had drifted herself to near-death to be revived by Parnell on their honeymoon. As a child, and soon after her mother’s death, she’d discovered the ability quite on her own. She’d walked away from the house on a cool and overcast day when low gray clouds carried over with a breeze from the front that pushed them. She walked to an old pecan grove a couple of blocks away and lay down in the tall grass that had grown up around
them, an old crop of nuts from the now sterile trees knobby on the earth beneath her back and legs. She could see the clouds pass as if through the gnarled and flay-barked limbs and ragged narrow leaves of the pecans. She closed her eyes and pushed herself in her mind toward where her mother had gone. She saw a nebulous blue glow aswirl in the spot just between her closed eyes and put her concentration into it. And passed into it and through it. She felt herself traveling somehow in this direction, not through the limbs of the trees and the billowy clouds above them but beyond them in some other-dimensional way. As if sucked in upon herself the weight of her body seemed released, she herself was weightless. She traveled as if flying in a dream but without the sense of moving through the world, or of there even being a world. Through time, perhaps, but not thinking that, either. And after some time of very swift but relative travel in this way she slowed, something like slowing, or came into herself, what that was she couldn’t say, and seemed to float there, and had the sense she was waiting. Some harmonious and distant, untraceable musical sound. And she began to fill with a kind of happiness. She was content to be just there, and was not disturbed for a time with the expectation of there being anything else. But something began to nudge its way into this state, and gradually she became aware of it as a presence, and something physical in the world, and there was a heaviness on her as well as a warm wetness about her face. She opened her eyes. There sat Rosebud two inches from her eyes, sitting on her chest, licking her face. Rosebud mewed, a question, Mggrrrow? As her sense of being in the world again curled into her body, she roused, petted Rosebud. How did you follow me way down here? she said. Rosebud wound her way around her legs, her tail straight up, stopped and looked up at her words. They walked back home together.

  In time, with Parnell, she began to love thinking of the new places and the new ways. At first she had merely lain in their bed waiting for Parnell to come upstairs to find her there, to speak to her as he removed his business clothes, to stop and turn his head slightly toward her when she did not respond, to creep over and touch her here and there. And she was in that state she had somehow perfected, of being there but not there, in her body but out of it too, somehow breathing though her lungs all but still, all but dormant, and she seemed to see him through her closed lids, which in those moments seemed to her as thin a membrane as the protective covering on the eye of a fish, she could see right through them, the image before her pulsing almost imperceptibly behind the tiny, spidery veins.

  But this gave way soon enough to other places. The supply closet off the main hallway. In a plush chair in one of the parlors, Parnell having to pull her lifeless body from the chair onto the carpeted floor. Collapsed into a heap on the kitchen floor, half a sandwich left on her plate at the table. Once, in the little hedged bit of private yard they kept behind the home. And finally on the preparation table itself, surprising Parnell there as he came in tugging on a pair of surgical gloves, only a miracle he hadn’t brought a policeman or distant relative of the deceased in there, of the one who lay under the sheet just feet away from Selena’s supine, naked, chilled but latently vital form.

  They rarely went through the long elaborate playing out of the game, after the honeymoon, as it was Parnell’s genuine fear that had led to it that time, and he was no real actor, Parnell. Which is not to say he had no imagination. For when he stood over her and she didn’t respond, though he knew she was only playing again, his imagination soon took him to the time and place when this would be no game, when he would be speaking to a Selena who would never respond, and it filled him again with the old grief and lust.

  This was her understanding, and she understood Parnell. She understood perhaps better than Parnell himself his attraction to the dead. She had known the first time she looked into his eyes that he was less fearful around the dead than around the living. What threat the living presented to him she wasn’t quite sure, at the time, but she came to understand even that. It was that he and the dead shared the same secret, which was that the fearful illusion of mortality—and immortality, as well—is lifted like a veil to reveal something simpler and more profound, without fear. Only the dead see one another, and themselves, for what they truly were, or are. The terrifying idea of time did not apply at all.

  What was it, the evening she went on her way, not to return? Parnell had stepped outside to get something he’d left in the car. She had stepped out of her dress and was walking about upstairs in her slip, barefoot, cooling off. She went into the bathroom, the soles of her feet cool on the bare blue tiles there. It felt so good. She lay down, the coolness of the tiles pressing through the silky thin material of the slip. She placed the palms of her hands down on them, too, pressed the back of her neck against them. It felt wonderful. A breeze from the ceiling fan in the hallway wafted in and over her, lifting a tuck of the slip from one of her knees. She knew Parnell would be up in a second, and she couldn’t resist letting herself go. She closed her eyes, she found the blue swirling light in the darkness in the center of her forehead. She drifted deliciously. Delicious the last thought of that peace and of the stirring excitement of finding him on her, in her, as she came back to the world. She was weightless and moving swiftly toward the place of stillness. There she lay, in a kind of heaven, while in another, heavier, more burdensome world her love made his way to and from the drugstore to retrieve the package he’d thought he’d left in the car, to where the body of his beloved Selena awaited him, serene and beautiful in her slight undergarments, her lovely feet bare and clean, her palms down on the blue tile floor.

  Finus Homerus

  AN EMPTY STOMACH always sharpened his sadness. He leaned himself on down the sidewalk in the brimming morning, light like a bubble to the range of his vision in the air. So stunning now he stopped, to take it all in. Mercury lay nestled into the vale below the piney ridge to the south. It was the ridge over which the 1906 cyclone had skipped and fallen down onto Front Street, blasting to splinters and rubble what had been built since Sherman’s March, when the town’s first buildings had all been burned to the ground. After the cyclone the town had been rebuilt again with brick and stone into a thriving city in the twenties, its apogee, after which the railroad industry had abandoned it for Birmingham, where there was steel. Never enough gumption and guts in this town to sustain much strength. Throughout the century it hung on by its fingernails. And now downtown lay in a gauzy summer morning haze, and somehow its sleepy survival filled Finus with a kind of saddened joy.

  There had been lately some occasional things envisioned, rare but distinctive, so that he had to wonder if he wasn’t himself walking along so close to the edge of another dimension, like a man half in the mirror, half out. The week before, he’d been standing there in the Comet office talking to Maxine Thornton, a big redhead who’d been a real looker in her day, Miss Mercury and all, even though she was on the heavy side, went all the way to the state beauty pageant, and all on account of having a most beautiful, ICBM bustline. She lost at state, came home, went to work in the chamber of commerce office, took on a walking regimen, marching around town in the hours between dawn and the start of the working day, gradually diminished in size to something like petite. But the boobs were a casualty of her fitness plan, much to the chagrin of old farts who liked to watch her flapping along in pink walking togs. So, standing in his office talking to Maxine Thornton, his assistant Lovie out to lunch, Finus was listening to Maxine talk about an ad for the upcoming Business Fair when she pulled out her left bosom and held it cradled there in her hand, big brown nipple bold as an eyeball staring right at him. Finus snatched off his glasses, closed his bad eye, no boob. -Well, what? Maxine said, coylike. Finus told Ivyloy about it later on, still in a daze.

  -Well, I liked her better heavy, myself, Ivyloy said. -Now that’d been a bozoom.

  HE MADE HIS way to the Dreyfus Building, watched his reflection in the polished gold doors of the old elevator, rode it to the fifteenth floor, nodded his hello to Floyd, the sleepy engineer, sett
led in. Played “The Star Spangled Banner” to help wake everybody up.

  -Good morning in the a.m., each and every one of you, and it’s a fine morning, if a little sad by my lights.

  -Midfield Wagner, farmer and carpenter, passed on last night. I’ll tell you a little about old Midfield, wasn’t really all that old. And Birdie Wells Urquhart. One of my oldest and closest friends. Companion. I need to spend a little time talking about Birdie, if y’all don’t mind.

  First he would tell about Midfield, in order to (though he wouldn’t say so) get it out of the way. He would tell about Midfield’s life. Twenty-two years at the Steam Feed Works, twenty before that with the telephone company, Named Midfield because of where he was born, while his mama was out picking ears of Silver Queen. Raised on the farm the family lost in the Depression. Started out stringing wire from here to India Beach while they were still digging the Intracoastal Waterway down on the coast. Caught malaria when he was only twenty-five, camping out in the swamps and digging pole holes, and recovered from it though many had died. He lived to suffer a stroke last night while out back feeding his dogs.

  He said when and where the services would be, moved on to other business, news items about the day. He was saving Birdie for last.

  He told about some of the high points of her life, including physical ailments she overcame such as colon polyps and gallstones in her forties, hysterectomy somewhere along in there, thought she was going to die of infection, didn’t. Told about being widowed at fifty-four, living the rest of her life in that condition. Didn’t go into the unpleasantness with Earl’s family. He wound around back to her early years. He told the story of how he first met her, down in the little fishing village where she lived before her family moved to Mercury, the village wiped out in a hurricane, the same one that would move inland and spawn the tornado that wiped out most of Front Street in Mercury, 1906. How she made a life up here after that. How the vision of her as he’d known her young was what endured, for him.