The Heaven of Mercury (19 page)

-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 in 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.

P
ARNELL 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.

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.