The Heaven of Mercury (24 page)

Finus ignored him and glanced into the mirror.

-You didn't even comb my hair.

-Did I cut it?

-No.

-Well, then, comb it yourself, your highness. I ain't no hair stylist, I'm a barber. I
cut
hair.

-You're not disposing me to knock out a good one on you when the time does come, Finus said.

-If you wait till I'm gone, which ain't likely to happen, as old as you are, it won't make a whole hell of a lot of difference to me, now will it? Ivyloy popped the apron in his hands and squinched his face up in the way he had that said,
So there
.

 

HE WAS GRAVITATED
in a light atmosphere of aftershave down 5th toward the little hummock upon which old McLemore Cemetery received the earthly elements. A single small cedar tree remained on the downslope beside a family plot circumscribed by a low and time-scoured brick parapet, an undermined and sunken little wall. A solitary water oak, somewhat stunted but thick with limbs and hard green little leaves, hung on in the far corner. It must be old, Finus thought, left from when this little hummock clearing was edged by the woods around, out on the southeast outskirts of the town. The yard's old iron rail fence crooked along the borders, arthritic. He'd buried Avis there, along with his mother and father. Of course this became the last thing for which she could never forgive him. He knew he should have laid her out in Magnolia, the newer cemetery on the north end of town, where her own mother and father had bought a plot that sat waiting near their own, and where he and Avis had buried Eric. But at the time his thinking was her old man had held enough claim on the poor woman, right down to the way she could never trust a soul, could never open up and feel anything much beyond suspicion and disappointment and smoldering rage. Well, they could lay him out here in the plot next to her, let her complain throughout eternity, if she liked. He'd had Eric's grave moved over here after Avis's funeral. He lay beneath the cedar down below.

He opened the creaky gate and stepped through onto the dry, mown grass, its blades crunching beneath his shoes even this early, dew sucked in long before. They kept the grounds up but never watered. There'd been little rain. And this was the high ground here, nothing to drain down into the little hummock, a lone green patch in this neighborhood, with a view of the new overpass, the railyard, and beyond that downtown, looking small and upcropped and hazy. Just a short walk from here, where homes and little groceries and laundry and seamstress shops had cobbled up in the forties and fifties, the neighborhood had now declined: the shops empty, the homes listing with the topography, and housing what seemed the invisible poor. Their bare yards were littered with no broken wagons and Big Wheels, no rusted Pontiac hulls on concrete blocks. Old men and old women, probably, he didn't even know anymore. He'd known poor Jane Caulfield, a sexless maiden who'd lived with her aunt and her aunt's lover and partner in the dry cleaning business, until the aunt had died and Jane had been discreetly and kindly moved to a nursing home out on 39 North and stayed there until she died and was buried here in McLemore Cemetery, down the slope next to the big Schoenhof plot. She'd been a pretty young girl and no one knew exactly why she became almost a recluse and certainly an old maid after a lively youth of dances and running about, if not actual dating. Her wan smile had driven boys to fall in love with her, the first whiff of which sent her into a retreat so swift and silent it generally took them a year or two to get over it and date some normal girl.

He went to Eric's grave first. He'd refused the military marker the army offered, and put a nice modest stone down flat at its head. The boy was mute in there, a young voice now old in time and distant, the stone nothing to Finus but cold marble etched with what might as well have been Greek or Arabic, he couldn't read it anymore. After a minute or so he walked up the hill to see Avis. A wiry strange cat approached to arch and rub its side along the edge of her headstone, tail up and quivering while the cat turned its strange gaze upon him. The cat had an odd mouth, looked like, a cat with an underbite, you never saw that.

-You're an odd one, Finus said, and thrust his hands into the pockets of his khaki trousers.

You're an odd one, said the cat, its mouth quivering in the way a cat chirkling at birds will do.

-Copy cat, are you.

The cat said nothing then. It was an old tomcat he could see now, and its haunches quivered again as it sprayed a little urine on Avis's stone.

You tainted me off men forever, the cat said then.

Finus cocked his head for a new angle on it.

The cat said, Why'd you marry me, anyway, if you never loved me?

-Don't blame me for all that, Finus said. -You hated your old dad before you ever met me.

The cat stopped, still arched, and stared at him.

-Just because you could never stand up to him, Finus said, so you took it out on me.

You'll never be the man he was, the cat said, its underbite forcing the odd, high-pitched chattering of a cat longing to sink its teeth into some taunting bird.

-And I thank the gods for that, Finus said. -Poor old miserable son of a bitch, no wonder he went on those drunks, and no wonder he got mean and violent when he did. Scratching a living and then a fortune out of brambly land and marginal cattle, trading on his wits and growing hard-hearted just to feed all you young'uns, and your mother got the worst of it.

Don't even speak of my mother, the cat said. You cannot comprehend a strength like hers.

-No, Finus said after a moment, I'll give you that. She was an amazing, sweet woman, as sweet as he was hard. I loved her, too.

You never loved anyone but yourself.

The cat lay down on the grave, its back against the headstone, and began to groom itself.

-You're one to talk, Finus said. -You never even had that.

A little warm gust, the afterthought of a breeze, nudged his ear, an almost imperceptible rustle in the hard green leaves of the oak. Finus snorted in disgust.

-Old Mike was here, he'd shake you like a rag doll.

The cat said nothing, just stared at him. He sighed.

-I'll get some flowers out here, he said, as much to the empty granite vase at the stone's base as to the cat. The cat merely paused a moment, one paw suspended before its odd-shaped mouth, then resumed licking and combing its ears with the paw. Finus sighed again, wished for the first time in some fifteen years he had a cigarette, and turned back toward town.

The cat, its paw suspended midlick once again, watched him until his head disappeared beneath the cemetery's knoll, then settled in to see what else might flit or wander into the grounds. Squeezed its indifferent eyes together and began to purr in the delicious warmth of the morning.

T
HE CUSHMAN GOLF
cart seemed to sag half-melted in the hard overhead sunlight on the steaming asphalt there. Its white vinyl seat was hot as a woodstove through his britches but not unbearable. And it cranked right up, stuttering to life sounding as much like a gas-powered generator as ever, and it jumped as lively as ever when Finus kicked off the brake and whipped it back out of the space and down toward the doughboy soldier monument, his old Ben Hogans rattling in their bag on the back at every bump and turn. The accelerator pedal needed a good greasing, it was sticking and he had to give it a good pop to release it, and the cart would shoot ahead, but the governor kept the speed down once he got going. He kept both legs inside the cart. Wasn't one of those who liked to hang the left leg out, as he'd seen more than one idiot's knee turned that way. Seemed like fat men did that more than others, why was that? Lazy? Didn't want to have to swing more than one leg out when they stopped for the ball? Not enough room on the seat? Finus hadn't even taken up the game until Avis died, hadn't gotten the cart till he turned eighty, was holding up the other players, walking so slow. Turned out to be a good way to get around town on a hot, or a cold, day, too.

It had the old shaft-type steering mechanism, which Finus loved, was painted a plain off-white, no roof like the newer electric E-Z-GOs, and the biggest difference from them was its motor, the little two-stroke gasoline job that announced to anyone, on the course or on the streets of Mercury, that Finus Bates was rounding the bend.

As he was, past the World War I monument and onto 22nd Avenue, headed down 7th Street. He could see the jumpy reflection of himself and the cart in the plate-glass windows of the old Kress Building, where the town boys boxed these days, building gutted and adorned in the center of the old floor with an elevated ring. He honked his claxon in front of the fire station, where the boys all flung an arm up from their lawn chairs and hailed.

Looming now in a sort of plantation palatial splendor and unavoidable, Grimes Funeral Home basked in the morning's heat, its tall white columns like silent sentries, half a dozen large white rocking chairs on the veranda. He parked the Cushman at the curb and went on in. The air-conditioning quickly turned the sweaty parts of his shirt to coldpacks and Finus peeled it loose from his skin and jiggled it while he cooled.

He hated how funeral parlors went for opulence in the grand lowbrow middle-class fashion as if we all were shooting for such a parlor in heaven, but it served us right after the hymns about streets of gold. Here in Grimes's old foyer the windows were either leaded and colored glass supposedly from Italy, as in the front door and side panels, or clear and wavy with antique imperfection, as in all the other windows, and when one stood in the hushed, sunlit rooms and looked outward through the warped panes, the view seemed appropriately distorted when one considered he was standing in the halfway ground, an earthly equivalent to limbo, the place where we stood between the worlds of the living and the dead. This idea, the situation, was appealing to Finus. If it weren't for the pretentious furnishings, the Italian or Victorian fainting couch (a divan, he supposed, or maybe a chaise longue), the high-backed stuffed chairs done out in embroidered crimson silk, the dolorous presence of an ancient pump organ in the foyer complete with hymnbook open to “Come, Ye Disconsolate,” he would have thought Parnell's place quite pleasant. But he couldn't get past the ridiculous idea, reinforced by the luxurious Cadillac hearse, gleaming metal caskets with plush pillowy pink and blue linings, and the fat, florid, professionally mournful faces of Parnell's two young assistants, stationed at the parlor doors like courtly eunuchs, that some poor truck farmer or frame carpenter who never felt comfortable in a suit his whole life should want to be trussed up, made up, displayed like a mannequin, and then paraded through town as if he'd been the third duke of Ellington or whatever. Ceremony was important, sure, but ceremony could be as simple as washing a body with cool rags and laying it out on a plank.

He'd thought Parnell's place more interesting when his wife, Selena, was alive, her presence something like a silent screen tragedienne's, intense and weird but it had seemed appropriate to the setting, at least gave it a little flavor in Finus's opinion. Why shouldn't the parlor of the dead be a weird place? Though the dead be among the living at all times, they are not in their bodies, which people paid such as Parnell to briefly preserve as a strange totem to their own finite forms in a way not so different, as far as Finus could see, from the way in which they preserved sported beasts on the walls or in museums or, in a more subtle sense, the way they kept the images of those they loved or thought interesting preserved on little pieces of photosensitive paper. And the thing about photos was that as truly as they recalled the way light struck and rebounded from the object of our bodies at the time the camera's shutter blinked, it was still a lie. A piece of photosensitive paper was not a retina, was not attached to a brain, so the image was at best secondhand and all the immediacy of the image's vitality and meaning to the viewer was lost, reincarnated as a kind of art. There was its value and its limitation.

Here now came the little footballish shape of Parnell Grimes, these days looking partially deflated with his advancing years, advancing slowly toward Finus in the warbling light of the room, arm and tiny mottled pinkish greeting hand outstretched. He was bald on top but for a little tuft of down at the front of his head that he kept oiled to a dull silver and pulled to one side instead of straight back like anyone with a smidgen of self-awareness would have done. Well I can't criticize the bald, Finus said, running a hand through his own thick white hair and allowing himself a cool and calming moment of mortal smugness.

Parnell clasped Finus's large hand in both his own and drew close, looking up sympathetically, as if he couldn't break the habit.

-Finus. Good to see you. Come on back to the office and sit down.

Finus followed his little waddling shape out of the main parlor, casketless at the moment, past the other arched and stuccoed entrances to mournville where space awaited other dead, to Parnell's modest but beautifully decorated walnut-and-oak-furnished office in the sunny corner room back of the house.

When they were seated, Parnell leaned back in his chair, put his little hands before him in an attitude of contemplation or prayer.

-Now what can I do for you today, Finus?

Finus said well he thought he'd get the official word on the cause of death for Midfield plus an update on the services, and Parnell gave Finus his official grim nod, cleared his throat and shuffled through a few papers on his desk and said, well, it appeared to be cardiac arrest as he'd suspected, though just between you and me Midfield did have a fairly high level of alcohol in his blood and the cause may just as well have been liver failure, at least to some degree.

-Say he'd probably been drinking for a while.

-Quite a while, I imagine.

-Been on a drunk.

Grim nod.

-And Birdie? Her heart, too, I'm sure.

Grim nod. -A lot of fluid around it, as expected.

They sat in silence. A clock ticked on Parnell's wall and Finus glanced up to see his favorite object in this place, a cuckoo clock mounted in a little birdhouse. He remembered initially fearing to see what might pop out of there upon the hour, perhaps some little rattly skeleton or a little body tray to slide out as if from a morgue, the corpse sitting up to say Cuck-oo! After all a skull paperweight lay on papers at the rear of the bookshelf behind Parnell. Didn't look real, though. Too white. He'd never asked. Oddly indiscreet, it seemed to him, for an undertaker.

He wasn't ready to get on, yet, but couldn't think of much to say as Parnell was an odd one, not like undertakers Finus knew who were generally average citizens, interested in this and that, if possessed of a light-switch activation for maudlin gravity. Parnell and Selena had never had children, never went to a sports event, attended only the sermons at church and never Sunday school or Wednesday suppers, and never belonged to a weekend supper club. People said they'd often driven over to Jackson or up to Birmingham on weekends, to see movies and plays and so on, the occasional symphony concert. He supposed they were cultured, Parnell had that dignified air, and Selena, you'd have thought her an heiress if you hadn't known she was just a postman's daughter from Mercury, Mississippi, and married to a local undertaker there. The way she always had one of Parnell's eunuchs drive her here and there in Parnell's Lincoln while she sat in the backseat to one side, staring ahead or reading a book, and was not going to the grocery store or the drugstore but to get her hair done or for a manicure or out into the country, as it was said every now and then one of the eunuchs would drive her to a little spot out at the old springs where she would swim alone for half an hour, dry off and then come back, her hair in a white towel, herself in a thick white robe.

-Well other than all that, how you getting along, Parnell? he finally said.

-Oh, fine, in general, Parnell said. -You? How's your health, Finus?

Always an ominous question from his ilk.

-Well as can be expected, Finus said. -Get much worse and I expect you'll know it.

They laughed.

-I was just thinking about your missus, gone all these years, Finus said. -I'm sure you still miss her.

-Yes, Parnell said, nodding, looking down for a moment, as you miss your loved ones, I'm sure. Then he said, -Sometimes it seems like she's not really even gone, even now.

-I know what you mean, Finus said.

-Do you? Parnell said with a little smile, looking up.

-Probably not the same thing, Finus said.

Parnell gave him a curious look, the smile gone and the old look of grief returning, except it looked like the real thing now and not his practiced expression, but said nothing.

-Mrs. Bates and I were not much the lovebirds, Finus said.

-Ah, Parnell said, nodding with a sad conspiratorial smile. -I heard you on the radio this morning, saying Miss Birdie had been your childhood sweetheart.

-An exaggeration common to the neglected, Finus said with his own sad conspiratorial smile.

Parnell added an actual wink to his own.

-I'm surprised, then, that you two never became the item in your later years, her a widow and all.

-Mrs. Bates and I never divorced.

-Yes, but after her death, Parnell said.

-Well neither of us was that keen on marriage, after our firsts, Finus said. -Poisoned by it, you might say.

-Yes. That old business, Parnell said, and the moment, somehow, turned inexplicably awkward. -Well, he said, with a nervous laugh, I'm certain
Mrs
. Urquhart wasn't poisoned.

-As opposed to Earl, you mean? Finus cocked his head.

-Ha ha! Parnell said. His smile tightened and he raised his brows.

-Something funny about all that, even now, ain't it, he said to Parnell, giving him the stare. -You know I always wondered if that man's goddamn crazy family didn't really do him in, you know, and giving Birdie all that grief about it. They're all gone, now, of course. Birdie outlived them all.

Parnell only pursed his lips and nodded shortly. Only glancing to meet Finus's gaze.

-Birdie always said the only way to get along with your in-laws is to outlive them, Finus said. He allowed a little smile to Parnell, which seemed to ease him a bit. But then it wasn't an easing. It was something else, like a heaviness descending on the strange little fellow. He took on an almost maudlin look. Guess that shouldn't be surprising, Finus said to himself, given his trade.

-Well, maybe it was just as well you and Miss Birdie never married, Parnell said then, meeting Finus's gaze in a way so open and uncharacteristic, so free of his professional demeanor, Finus felt he was seeing him for the first time.

-How do you mean?

Parnell sat there looking at him frankly, and seemed as if something like grief and regret rested solidly in his features. It made Finus feel oddly vulnerable, himself, just sitting there looking at Parnell looking that way. He wanted to look away from it.

Parnell got up after a moment and opened a filing cabinet drawer. He drew a file from the front, laid it on his desk, sat down again, and rested his short blunt fingertips on it.

-Off the record, of course. Finus nodded. -And just between us. If I share this with you, Finus, it is not for publication nor for any other sort of dissemination. My father's reputation, as well as Miss Birdie's, depends on it. It's weighed on my conscience, though, as I expect it weighed on hers.

Finus leaned forward now. He looked at the file, but couldn't read its subject heading from where he sat.

-This is a collection of articles and information I gathered over some years on the Atomic Energy Commission, Parnell said, and settled his own gaze on Finus then, as if he'd said something final. Finus looked at the file a moment, looked back at Parnell, then picked up the file and skimmed through it. From what he could gather, going fairly quickly through it, there had been a long-running government project to collect dead bodies and body parts, on the sly, for use in testing the effects of atomic radiation on the human body. He looked up after a minute.

-I've read a little about this, over the wires, he said. Parnell said nothing.

Finus said, -What could this have to do with Birdie?

The men sat silently a minute, looking at one another.

-This information, Parnell said, the possibility that my father was doing this, selling bodies and body parts to the Atomic Energy Commission in the early phases of that program, was used to blackmail me. The state forensics lab wanted to take a closer look at Mr. Earl's heart, after seeing the sample I sent them. He paused. -I talked them out of it.