The Heaven of Mercury (17 page)

He had a temper like a lion! But he'd get over it.

She could hear a gentle swishing in the trees. Could be rain, coming.

When they'd go out to that lake Edsel and Janie's little Robert would say, wasn't but about three, -Su-u-re is a lot of
horse
grunt around here. A little boy then, now long gone in the car wreck. What was the good in her living so long, when such things happen to young people? It just wasn't right your children and even grandchildren should die before you. Finus would know about that.

She couldn't hear. She'd heard thunder last night, oh, it was so loud one time. It's funny about hearing, the way it goes. She finally got her hearing aid to work right, got it to squeak, but that lady down at the nursing home said she just took hers out, said she'd heard enough already. Earl used to sell that woman shoes, and she never would listen, and he just quit selling to her, he said he'd rather not have her business than to misfit her.

She knew he opened that store down in Tallahassee so he could be with Ann, she knew that.

-Miss Bird?

Old Creasie sticking her black head in the door.

-No, I'm all right, now just go on!

Merry even wrote that book, nobody would publish it, all about the family, and made Birdie out to be someone who pretended to be dumb but was really devious. Well she might have let them think she was dumb, but she wasn't devious, she just wasn't going to have all that fussing and fighting, the Urquharts did enough of that among themselves. And Earl knew she knew what was going on. Every now and then he'd come to her crying, You're the best woman in the world! No woman'd put up with me but you! Things like that. Crying. I'll never do it again! She didn't say anything much, but naturally it killed something in you. She loved him but she didn't respect him too much.

You know the first train that come through up there where Earl was born, where they lived when he was a boy, said it scared him so bad he run in and got under the bed. He used to tell the story. Little boy, he was. He was born in 1899. Maybe they'd all been different if the times had been different. These days nobody thought anything about sex, but back then it wasn't so common, so maybe those Urquharts were just ahead of their time that way. Except with them it was more like couldn't think of anything but sex. Peggy one time, she was Levi's oldest daughter, and she told her mama, Rae, never will forget, she said old Junius Urquhart felt up under her dress. The idea of such a thing, and his own granddaughter, too. And the old man said, Aw, she's just lying. But Birdie knew now it was true because just about three weeks before Ruthie died she told Birdie and Pud that he did her the same way when she was a little girl. Birdie said, Why didn't you tell us before now? Said,
Ruthie, that's ruined your life and you hadn't ever told us anything about it
.

Now that old man could have done well by his family if he'd wanted to. He was a good insurance man, but all he cared about was chasing women. One time he put Edsel on his lap and was talking to him, before Edsel knew it big tears was rolling down his grandfather's face, and Edsel was a sensitive child, you know, and he started crying too before you know it, and he says, What's wrong, Grampaw? And old Junius says, Son, nothing's wrong, that has sold me more insurance than anything in the world. That's what he'd do, you know, in the Depression. Go into people's houses and when they wouldn't buy insurance he'd start to cry, say That's all right, he knew times was tough, he could hardly feed his own family, he never knew when they'd be out on the street, and so on, and they'd buy a little bit. He worked hard, but he wasn't honest.

My lands they was all bad, Earl too, but she held her head up and acted like she didn't know a thing in the world because listen she knew that she could not work and make a living, she'd married too young and was spoiled, and she knew Earl would never marry anybody he just slept with, so she let it go. She knew he respected her, in spite of everything. And everybody depended on Earl, everybody looked up to him, never dreamed he'd die as young as he did, just fifty-five years old. And when he died everybody just fell apart. She'd lived almost as long without him as she ever did with him, and got by all right. But Pud's death like to killed her. And Lucy going like that, on the stairs in her home, and nobody there. And losing Ruthie and Earl and then Robert. Well it wasn't fair she should have to live through all that, she should have gone before any of them except Earl.

None of the Wells girls turned out well in married life, she guessed, well Pud did but Lucy didn't. She was so beautiful, Lucy, nothing but a set of big brown eyes in a little birdlike face, and married that silly man couldn't let go of his mama and then had to just divorce him, and then married that old goat, wasn't nothing but a servant to him, he wouldn't take her anywhere. Birdie felt so sorry for her. Pud's Anton was a good man but he was as crazy as she was, always clacking his teeth out like a cash drawer, the kids just loved it.

There was that mockingbird come back and looking in. If he had any sense he wouldn't build in the camellia, he'd build in one of the trees in the yard. She loved to climb trees when she was a little girl but once she got up there she'd be too scared to climb down. Never would forget, climbed up in the loft one time and couldn't get down, and stayed there and worked her stomach till she nearly bled, she was so scared. Always scared of heights but couldn't help but climb up. Just a birdbrain, she guessed, reason they named her Birdie.

The mockingbird went into his repertoire, so loud it sounded right in her ear.

Sometimes she liked to think she could have poisoned Earl like Levi and Rae said. It was so ridiculous, she liked to think she could have done it. She'd thought she was losing her mind there for a while, would go into the spice cabinet pulling out little spice tins, sniffing, thinking, Did I do something I didn't even know? She had for a while put boiled sassafras water in his coffee because there was a doctor in Huntsville who'd said it countered the bad effects of tobacco. But she'd stopped because Earl said it tasted so bad. But could it have done some damage before she stopped? It froze her to think so. Levi and Merry had it like some old detective story, like she'd made him scrambled eggs one morning and sprinkled arsenic or—what was it Pappy had in his garden? hemlock—into it, and he'd gobbled it up, gone out and got into the pickup and over to the lake, down to the woodpile to chop some wood, the old mare snuffling up to him wanting some sugar, and fell out, spooking the horse so it ran off across the dam and into the woods. She liked to think sometimes she could have done that, not because she hated him or wanted him to die but just because it'd surprise everybody so, the ones with any sense, who weren't crazy, it'd be so contrary to their notions about little old Birdie—Merry might have said she was devious but get right down to it she thought she was a birdbrain, too. It's been so many years since all that, she couldn't even be sure to tell you the truth herself that maybe she didn't.

Mockingbird was so loud she couldn't even see, like she was passing through that song into nothing.

T
HAT MORNING, FINUS
had steered his old Chevy pickup into the long driveway, two parallel curving shaded wheelpaths of cracked concrete ruptured here and there by the roots of thick tall oaks, and parked beside the old pumphouse beyond which now leaned the stacked empty carapaces of gutted ancient automobiles. They filled the once grassed little meadow between the house and old Creasie's cabin at the back edge of Earl's property. But since his death these discarded wrecks had been hauled here for storage from Birdie's son-in-law's junkyard across the side road. It was something probably would have driven Earl Urquhart into a rage, him a man so in love with glamorous cars that he'd bought new every year, always paying cash. He'd had him a nice little estate out here, Finus thought as he helped his old collie, Mike, down from the passenger side and together they walked around the house back into the front yard to the main entrance.

He'd held the railing to the broad covered stoop and climbed the old Mexican tile steps, rung the buzzer. Another car went by out on the old highway, its tires slapping a regular rhythm on the tar dividers. In a minute the door to Birdie's house opened to reveal Creasie, bent over a little. She looked up at him, then cast a scant eye down at Mike, then stood back and held the door open. -Come on in, she said, shooing them, as if they were both old dogs late for a feeding. -She don't want no company but I imagine she'll see you. She said the other day she wanted to talk to you. He passed Creasie and nodded down to her, her appraising eye cast up at him, and he took in her old dress cinched up beneath her baggish bosoms and ending at the SlimJim presence of her scrawny shins. Her feet in dilapidated Keds like tattered skiffs with big dusky bunions thrust out either starboard prow.

-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?