The Heaven of Mercury (27 page)

-Why's that?

-Well, sir, she said, we got the white folks, poison enough. Then she bared her gums, gave that little wheezy laugh. -I reckon I can say that nowadays, cain't I.

-I reckon you can say whatever you want to.

She nodded.

-Ain't always been the case, she said.

Finus held the jar up a tad so the light caught it, seemed to be soaked up by the black gnarl inside it, a tiny black hole into which the fading afternoon light was sucked.

-You got any idea what this thing she was keeping on her shelf might be?

Old woman rocked once, using an old toe as black as the thing in the jar, about as gnarled, and seemed to regard the jar with her opaque eyes.

-I can't see too good, she said.

-It's just a mason jar. Got something in it I can't tell what it is. It was on Creasie's shelf, in the kitchen.

-Naw, sir, she finally said, drawing out the words. -Look to be some kind of old preserves, to me. Might be some old figs drawed up. Long past eating.

-I'll bet you're right on that.

-Might have something to eat inside, you hungry.

-Well, Finus said after a moment, I appreciate that. But I believe I'll pass. He nodded by way of saying good day, made his way with hobbling old Mike back up the trail toward his truck.

S
HE HAD NEVER
been naked in public in her life. She had been naked outdoors but not within sight of others aside from her friend Avis. Now it felt naked but not quite the same, though who's to say since she never went outside naked, not out in the open air with no cover. This was not naked the same way, but she was getting used to it. And she wasn't anymore like walking, but more like what you call flying in a dream, just sort of moving just ahead of some awareness of the body or of moving itself, an effortless here and there. She had no voice but a sound like a gentle wind rattling dry fall leaves. Once in a moment she was frightened by the shadowy presence of tangled live oak limbs all around her. Then she was near and among the presence of the little town of Silverhill down near the Alabama coast, and the pecan groves in between there and Fairhope, and then there was the bay and the sifting of breeze through the wings of a flock of gulls who seemed to see her and roll their beady eyes in her direction and nearly crash into one another in distraction. She held her long dark hair out of her eyes and gazed upon herself at that height and thought, Oh, I was beautiful, I look like, I don't know. It was like the brief moment in her life between a child's comfort in her own skin, and the burning new awareness of what she was to a man.

Here, the streets of Fairhope were like none of the streets when she was a child and they would visit—all these homes had sprung up since then, none of the old waterfront homes survived, long gone, she had long ago mourned them and now their own ghosts lay over the newer homes like veils, or mosquito netting. She skimmed through the old live oak tops on down to the Grand Hotel, the ghost of the original Point Clear Hotel itself now barely visible to her among the broad oak boughs and the steam coming from the ventilation pipes in the roof of its successor. None of the long galleries and the swings, though the promenade was the same. On the bay, on the water's surface and out between two sunglint sailboats, a man leaning himself back out over the chop said
hah!
when his boat gave a tilt in her direction as she rose up to avoid a little wave. The man nearly fell out of his boat.

She spread her arms and legs and let the foamy tips of the chop skim into her navel, then deep into the water without the resistance to which she was accustomed, past the hulls of sunken fishing boats, the cracked beams of sailing vessels and the long bent and wrenched-off arms of hapless shrimp boats, the skeletal hulls of great tarpon resting in their long-quiet disgust, and automobiles, some she seemed to recognize from her youth, and she remembered the sinking of an early ferry taking travelers across to Mobile. She passed in through the rusted torpedo shaft of a submarine of which no one knew save those poor souls still locked inside, and drifted slowly past the stricken eyes of the crew boys who rode it to its death, and one said, Bless you, Miss Birdie, and she kissed his concave, whiskered cheek—he was all tears, in the briny deep. She left through the molecular lacunae of its old prop shaft and spinning blades. Seeing spindly legs ahead of her went to look, and circled with the speckled trout and a few lost snapper the beams of a natural gas derrick, and then swam away and left the water. Ahead of her lay the old fort. Through the decrepit buildings that were the captain's quarters and the officers' and enlisted men's barracks, she came through cracked panes which gave her some dread, and along the floors where boards had pulled apart from one another in age and ill health, these buildings propped up with the crude buttresses of those who would preserve them, their galleries gone as if from faces had fallen their features, poor noses and teeth and jaw, exposing the yaw of the corpse. She was caressed by the cool, clipped grass of the lawn inside the fortress itself, seeming ancient but no older than her father were he still alive. She drifted through the dark archways and chambers and then back into the yard, paused at the bloodstain on the steps where she'd had her picture taken as a girl with her sisters, where some confederate had died and left his ineradicable mark in the mortar. She slipped over the lip of the gun bay for the old disappearing cannon, no longer there, but its ghost too still lingering, even steel leaving its shape somehow in the air, a lingering particulate shade, collecting itself in her honor, to swing up and out over the water, and she entered its bore and followed its sighting above the Gulf itself and kept going, the earth receding, and she thought she must keep going into the lighter air and nothingness, but was drawn back in a dreamlike shift from there to here, the old lighthouse, in the balmy air currents moving east along the peninsula. Over the old site of Palmetto Cove. She heard cries and went down. There were the general calls of the animals once native to the shore, the wild hogs descended from the pigs the soldiers let go when the fort was first shut down, and the older, indigenous bears and panthers and even the shy, retiring ivorybill. The glow from the treasure laid in by pirates and sought by everyone and never found now called to her from beneath cypress but she paid it no mind. There were pirates hanging a man from the hanging tree, and whipping others back into the water. But those cries she heard first now became apparent to her in the spirits of two young girls who drowned in the storm of '06, huddled in the corner of a room in the house built by their father, who had earlier washed into the bay, their poor mother tumbled into a drowned thicket of scrub oaks whose dense branches held her by her clothing until the water rose and drowned her too. Soldiers would find their ravaged bodies in the trees in Bon Secour and would be ashamed at their own interest in the girls' bawdy contortions, long dresses lifted and twisted about their heads like murderous turbans, their drawers torn and muddy. A soldier unable to contain himself would begin to cry, as the others stared and drifted in the tide, and then discovered another girl alive and hanging from the high branches by her long blond hair.

This was a paradise, once, Pappy said. There, he was with her again.

It's all gone now. We had all our homes in here, you probably can't see it.

Though she did, now, free as she was to see all that had been in her mind's eye throughout her life, the little pine board homes with sheet tin roofs, and the smallish porches and wash sheds out back, the raked sand yards and the dogs roaming free and chasing off into the thickets after wild boar and deer. She remembered her grandmother once stepped out onto the front porch and shot a boar attacking their dogs, with a rifle she held seemed longer than she was. And all the homes separated by the dunes and the scrub oak thickets and some up on little hard dunes and the others nestled down into the flats between the shifting oblong mounds over which the children ran. And there were paths from there across the old fort road to the Gulf beach, and the children roamed them with the wildlife and stayed out of one another's way, human and animal, with a kind of natural grace.

You have no memory of your own, of the storm, I expect.

I remember the sound of the wind, and of being cold and in the water, in the dark, and being cold on the little hill by the oak trees.

She felt a cool breeze and they were a memory of hands clapping, a singing around the fireplace in his old home down on the coast, here on the peninsula, before the storm that blew it away, when she and her mother and father still lived with him and her grandmother there, before Pud and Lucy were born, and she smelled the heavy salt air, felt the cool freshness of the white sand outside the open windows, and heard the breeze in the tops of the longleaf pines, and the old heartpine house timbers groaned.

See here it is again, Pappy said. The sand white as sugar, the dunes high as the tops of the pines, and the little live oaks and the sea oats on them rustling and swaying, the tops of the little oaks swept back like wild women standing facing the wind so that their hair is blown back and their faces beautifully ravaged by it, and the white sand blowing in the little drifts and ribbing the upside of the dunes and in gentle swells down the sides toward the bay, stitched with the milkwort, the backdune drifts filled with the yellow flowering partridge pea and cropped up you see these wax myrtles and cacti and the yaupon holly, this wild rosemary, and you see these little holes for the ghost crabs and the beach mice, and their tracks leading to and fro. There was life everywhere, it was full and teeming with life, and with joy. There was no locks on any of our doors, which people say but it was true, here, there was simply no one and nothing to fear here, we knew everyone else and we knew the whole world here. We ate and lived on what was here, we needed nothing much from the outside. The fish from the sea. We kept pigs and cattle, a kind of longhorn which would feed on the palmettos and ranged the woods. And there were deer, chickens. Some things would not grow well and we traded for those from inland, but most what we needed we kept or raised.

The floor of the little bay there was full of sweet oysters you could scoop up in your hands, and the wild ducks came in the fall and stayed all winter long, part of the Lord's bounty. In the evenings in good weather the young people made fires of driftwood on the beach and gathered to sing songs and talk and to hunt for the sea turtles when the moon was full, and the ones in love would walk the sandy paths among the dunes. We had dances for them. It was an innocence.

We truly were a happy people. Some said they didn't miss it after it was gone but I did, aye, I still do miss every leaf and little grain of sand. We were three generations here, going on four, and most of us bar pilots. We moved by water, every boy sailing small boats as easy as breathing, came natural to us. This is where we belonged, see. It was like being made to leave paradise and the only life we knew, when it was destroyed. But we couldn't go back for the very land itself was washed away, nothing left. Wiped off the face of the earth. Nothing to do but find another life somewhere. That's why we moved inland.

It almost seemed it was a punishment. Like we had grown proud and inward. You can have a little world of your own but you cannot be so proud that you shut out the rest of the world entirely. Cousins marrying, such as that. A taking advantage of the bounty, it seemed it was. I don't know. A vague corruption, child. And then come the flood. It seemed like something terrible from the good book, to me.

The day before the storm it was raining hard and steady, and there was a blow. We watched it from the south beach and went home. Late in the evening there was a terrific crash in the sky, and a flash of light. We tried to go to the south beach again but had to take a rowboat where we'd walked earlier, the water was already so high. And by three or four in the morning it was blowing so hard the houses shook, and the water rushed beneath the houses, and the driftwood logs it carried bumped and crashed against the pilings and the floors.

Those who'd been back to the south beach later said the water had been like a great gray wall coming toward the shore, and it was all about us in that blackness later on. Not another flash of lightning, no more thunder, just a terrible roaring and howling of the wind. I and your father made our way to the Dixons' next house down to see how they were faring, pulling our way by the limbs of strong shrubs and the smaller trees. And when we arrived there we could see a lantern light in their upper floor and their faces in the dormer windows, and as we approached their gallery the whole house gave way and floated into the bay like a doomed ship departing, their hands reaching out the windows for salvation where there was none.

We made straight back to the house and gathered you all up, and lashed ourselves together with rope, and when we stepped off the gallery we had to hold you above our heads as the water was then shoulder deep. There was an old longhorn there at the edge of the gallery and we held to his horns and drove him to the edge of the yard towards high ground, to the fence, where we let him go and he was washed away. We knocked down the fence to get to the little hill where there were four strong oak trees, and when we got there we lashed ourselves to them, and each to the other. And others arrived there in the storm, finding some way, and they lay flat on the ground, and clutched onto us, trying not not to be blown away by the wind. McCutcheon was struck in the face by a flying piece of driftwood and died there on the spot. Something struck me in the chest and your grandmother held me up as I was unconscious for a while, else I'd have drowned then as the water was for a while even up over the little hill itself.

We held on there through the night, and when dawn came the water had gone down some and the gale died a bit, though it was still strong. Still we found oranges lying about that had been knocked from trees in the grove, and we found potatoes there, and a single egg lying there, a single egg! On the ground. When the water had gone down a bit more we dug up fence posts that were miraculously dry and managed to make a fire and roast that egg and feed it to you and the other two young ones there with us. We found jars of preserves floating in a few inches of water in the kitchen and ate them from the jars with our fingers, they was the best thing we ever tasted. I'll bet you remember that.

After the soldiers came in their rowboats to rescue us and take us to the fort, after the waters had finally subsided, we returned to search for the dead. But all we could find was the body of poor Agnes Drummond, whose children and husband were lost and not to be recovered, in the ruins of her home, her hair which had been beautiful and rich in color now a tangled gray and matted about her stricken face and shoulders.

And where our home had been there was nothing but a little body of water, a still pond, and the high dunes were gone save the one that saved us. And the only home of the dozen or more that had stood there was the little plank house John Keesler had built with his own hands, and it skewed and bent like a freak house at the fair, you couldn't stand on its floors and keep your balance.

Some said we should find another place like this and rebuild, all together, those that survived, but we hadn't the heart to do it, child. This place itself was gone, disappeared, wiped off the face of the earth, and we couldn't help but see it as a sign that a time and place had ended and we should move on. That's when the Bateses helped us move up to Mercury. And so it's been, so it was.