The Heaven of Mercury (5 page)

S
NOW FELL SPARSELY
on the frozen dirt road from Mercury out to the country, where they were going, dusting in the wind across the pastures. Creasie was cold inside the quilts Aunt Vish had given her. She was then just turning twelve years old, in two days. Aunt Vish had given her the women's secret that week, about the miseries, having babies. They were headed out to a house where Aunt Vish was going to midwife for a woman she knew.

Aunt Vish didn't like cold or snow. She had wrapped herself in two or three old gray horse blankets, hard to tell how many, and wore a pair of clean, frayed cotton gloves so her hands wouldn't freeze holding the reins. Every now and then she picked up an old riding crop, set in a knothole on the seat beside her, and flicked it against the rolling haunch of the big work horse that pulled their buckboard wagon along the road.

It was the first time Creasie'd seen snow. It didn't come here often, Aunt Vish said, sometimes not for twenty years, not enough to stick, anyway. There was a hush over the land. Every ragged isolated call of a crow, every faintly piercing hawk whistle, stood alone in the mind for that moment, the only sound in a silent world. The little road was clean and white, their buckboard wheels first to mark the snowy ruts. Creasie's nose was cold, but she kept the blanket parted to see the stark pastures, so pretty, the bare and veiny lone pecans and oaks, the long narrow pines.

Aunt Vish flicked the crop and nodded her head. Creasie looked up to see the little shack in the snow-dusted yard, beneath the splayed heavy bare limbs of a single oak. A cold black washpot sat on black dead coals below the leaning porch. A curl of gray wispy smoke rose from the narrow brick chimney. Three small black faces peered out from plain colorless curtains. Going to be cold in there, too, Creasie thought.

But inside, just one big room with a fireplace full of seething coals, the air was overly warm and smelled strong and ripe, like a squirrel just after Aunt Vish skinned it fresh in her little kitchen, and bad, too, like poop. An iron kettle hung low over the fireplace coals, something inside it steaming.

A dozen or more pairs of black eyes looked at her from faces nearly hidden in the gloomy light. Children from big to small, standing against the walls and squatting on the floor, all of them looking at Aunt Vish and then at her, at Vish, at her. She stuck to her spot where she'd stepped just inside the door.

Aunt Vish shed her coat and went straight for the steaming pot to ladle some of what was in it to a basin. She took a bar of soap from the hearth, dropped it in the basin, then went over to the big bed where the woman lay under a pile of quilts and blankets. A bright round copper face shiny with sweat, its brow furrowed, peered from where it was sunk in a dirty-looking pillow.

A big man she hadn't seen got up from a little wooden chair in the corner by the door and went outside. Creasie went to the window and looked out. The man walked past their buckboard and horse and walked straight into the woods across the road and didn't come out. She saw, didn't notice when he'd got up, that he wore no shirt, the gray-black skin looking frozen on his back. A little wisp of steam seemed to rise from his short, crumply hair. A gray tufty cat, trotting like a dog, followed the man across the road and into the woods. The cat had come from under the house. Creasie slipped back out the door and went to the edge of the porch, leaned over, and peered under it. The eyes and impassive faces of a small colony of cats and dogs peered back from curled, puffy forms laid about on the packed earth.

She heard the woman inside screaming. Just one loud scream and then nothing. The wind blew in gusts and whipped the light snow into little snow devils across the bare yard. She straightened up and looked at the horse. He shifted his haunches in the old cracked harness. Long dreamy puffs of warm air frosted from his nostrils. She wished she could fit there, in that warm air from his horse nostrils. A cold blast of wind came round the house and hit him broadside, whipped his mane and tail. The horse shifted footing and his hooves squeaked in the shallow fallen layer of snow. Aunt Vish's old leather crop rested in its knothole beside the seat, and the stringy tips of its braided horsehair flickers rested on the horse's chestnut flank. They were made from the horse's own tail. His name was Dan. A long, slow fart flabbered from the proud black lips of Dan's hole, and the smoke from it too trailed off in the air.

Her feet and hands were stiff with cold. Be like this when I'm old like Aunt Vish, all the time, she thought. She didn't want to go back inside. She listened. Still no sounds in there. She got too curious, went back in. Maybe the woman had died. She wanted to see her, see if her eyes stayed open. Aunt Vish said some people closed their eyes when they died, some didn't. Depends on what they seeing when they die, Aunt Vish said. They like what they see, they close they eyes. Don't like it, can't stand to look off.

All the eyes and faces of the children were in their same places and Aunt Vish was again washing her hands in the basin. Her sack was tied and set beside the door where Creasie stood. And next to it was a little bundle, like a loaf of baker's bread wrapped over and over in a stained and yellowing sheet. The woman lay in the bed with a rag on her forehead. Her eyes were open. She was looking at Creasie. Then the woman blinked. Creasie almost jumped back into the door she'd closed behind her.

Aunt Vish dried her hands on her skirts and went over, checked the woman's forehead, said something to her and patted her cheek. Then came over to Creasie.

-You take my sack, she said to Creasie.

-Yes'm.

Creasie picked up the lumpy sack full of Aunt Vish's tools. They clattered and clanked and clinked.

-Careful, child! They's glass in there.

-Yes'm.

Aunt Vish picked up the bundle wrapped in the dirty sheet, held it cradled in one arm, and opened the door. Creasie heard a quiet voice behind them, -Thank you, Miss Vish.

At the buckboard Aunt Vish lay the bundle on the seat between them, picked up the reins and the crop, flicked the crop against Dan's butt and said, -Hup. Dan pulled them away.

They followed their own ruts back toward town. Crows winged over moving faster than their wings, seemed like. A wind behind them. Their black heads looking this way and that. Creasie looked at the bundle, the edges of its sheets touching her quilts.

-Is that the baby?

Aunt Vish said nothing, then glanced at her, looked ahead.

-Mmm hmm.

-Is it dead?

-It's dead.

-Aunt Vish. How come the woman to thank you if her baby died.

Aunt Vish looked down her nose at her for a minute.

-I saved
her
life, she said. -That's something. If I could have killed that husband, now, I'd done some real good. Should have called me early on.

Creasie looked at Dan's behind, the tail lifted off it again. Here it comes, she thought. But nothing happened. Dan's tail dropped back down.

-Why you want to kill that man? she said to Aunt Vish.

-I don't. I expect
she
might.

In a minute, looking at the bundle.

-Can I look at the baby, Aunt Vish?

-No.

They rode on.

-Is its eyes closed or open?

-Who? What you talking about, child?

-The baby.

Aunt Vish gave her a fierce look that said hush up or else. She hushed.

-How come it died? she said real quietly after a time.

Aunt Vish didn't answer. They rode on. They made the turn toward the north part of Mercury, climbing the hill.

-How come we taking the baby with us?

-Hush up all your questions! Aunt Vish said. She nicked the crop tails against Dan's flank.

They rocked behind the clopping horse back to town, past the old Case mansion and the trail to the ravine, Creasie looking but holding back her question. Down winding Poplar Avenue, into town. Vish stopped in front of Dr. Heath's house. She reached around behind her for a little paper sack.

-Take these in to Dr. Heath.

Creasie jumped down and bounded up the steps, knocked on the door. Dr. Heath came in his robe, his hair up funny on his head.

-Hello there, Creasie, he said, looking down his nose.

She held the sack out to him. He took it, looked up, and nodded to Vish, who nodded back.

-Bye, Creasie said, and ran back to the wagon.

They clopped on into downtown. White people stopping on the sidewalk to look at them, to laugh at their rig, at Aunt Vish sitting proudly there with the reins in her hand. Past the fire station, where the firemen came out to call out to her, Hey old Aunt Vish! Vish didn't acknowledge. She pulled up before the white funeral home. Aunt Vish handed Creasie the reins, stepped down, reached back and picked up the dead baby in the bundle.

-You wait here with the wagon.

She went inside. Creasie waited. Old Dan shifted, clopped a hoof on the slushy pavement. Creasie burrowed down into her quilt. After a few minutes Aunt Vish came back out, climbed back onto the wagon seat and took up the reins. -Hup.

Creasie ventured, -He going to bury the little baby, Aunt Vish? A colored baby?

Vish said nothing for a moment.

-Something like that, she said.

They made their way back north of town to the ravine, Dan clopping carefully down the narrow trail. She wanted to ask why the white home would take in a colored child. She unhitched Dan and led him to the little shed Aunt Vish kept for him beside the creek. When she came back up Aunt Vish reached into the pocket of her dress, fiddled there a second, peering in, and came out with a paper dollar, handed it to her. It was more than Aunt Vish had ever given her at one time.

-I give you that. You going to have to go to work soon, though. Getting old enough.

She nodded.

-Thank you.

Thinking of what she might buy.

-You going out in the world, such as it is, Aunt Vish said.

Vish was looking at her.

-Don't you ever let no man mistreat you, now. Long as I'm around, no man ever going to mistreat you. You just come to me.

-Yes'm.

Aunt Vish smiled her black-toothed smile at her. Creasie looked up at the awful teeth in wonder.

-Why your teeth so black, Aunt Vish? she had once said to her.

Aunt Vish had cocked her head at her like a sleepy-eyed owl.

-Cause my heart's clean and white, Aunt Vish said. -Count your blessings it ain't the other way around.

S
IN WAS EVERYWHERE
and serious for Mrs. Urquhart. She was a scrawny and sallow woman, set upon by demanding spirits, a tight brown bun in her hair like an onion God drew forth from her mind, a punishment and reminder of evil's beautiful, layered symmetry. Her heart though good was a shriveled potato, with sweet green shoots of kindness growing from it, a heart gone to seed.

-As long as Earl has to work that job in New York, she told Birdie, you're welcome here, and I'll love you like my own. But you have to pull your weight.

That meant most of the cooking and cleaning, as Mrs. U was always off to some camp meeting or another, rolling in the dirt and speaking in tongues, for all Birdie knew. Something far from the Methodist mumbling she grew up with, anyway, or even Pappy's odd way of seeing the world.

The Urquharts had moved into town, to a two-story Victorian near the hospital, so that Earl's younger sister and brother could go to the town schools. Earl had insisted Birdie stay with them while he had to work in New York with his new job. He didn't say it, but Birdie figured he worried she'd get too fond of her own family again, if she stayed with them, and would leave him.

She could stand on the porch balcony in the evenings and watch cars and wagons go down the hill to the center of town, see the smoky outline of the buildings there, and the sun's glow sink and fade behind the bluff to the southwest, inflaming the distant sandy ridge full of beeches, white and blackjack oak, mockernut hickory, hemlock, and pine. She tried to get a few minutes to herself every day, before suppertime in the winter, and after supper in the summer, after Earl's family had settled into the living room to listen to the radio and talk. She didn't separate herself rudely but when she could get a moment alone she did.

When she could get away to town with Ruthie in a stroller, she pushed her down the hill to the drugstore or maybe to see a picture show at the Strand, stop in at Loeb's department store to look at clothes. Sometimes when Earl'd had a good month she bought a little outfit for Ruthie or herself, but not too often, as Mrs. Urquhart would frown on her vanity, say she ought to be sewing her own. Merry tagged along some days, usually when they were going to see a show, and when Birdie would stop afterwards to look at a dress Merry would make a face, standing there with a hip stuck out, not unlike a pretty version of her mother's bitter Holiness wrath.

-You just don't have the figure for that dress anymore, Birdie, she'd say. -It'd look a lot better on me.

She was just fifteen, just two years younger than Birdie, but already a tart. She almost had no choice about being bad, it seemed to Birdie, with her mother so obsessed with sin and wickedness.

Mrs. Urquhart was Holiness. Anything worldly was a sin, especially anything to do with the flesh. She was obsessed with the idea of a whore. The way Merry would stare at women in bright clothes and makeup, sauntering along the sidewalk below the porch, Birdie knew that's what fired her imagination. She, Birdie, had never even heard that word until she married Earl. But after they moved in with the Urquharts she heard it all the time, came to know it was about to twist from Mrs. Urquhart's mouth just from her expression, came to know just what a whore looked like, by Mrs. Urquhart's lights.

So little Ruthie grew up hearing the word and of course delighted in it. One day long after Earl had moved them out, she and Ruthie went over to visit, and Mrs. Urquhart's neighbor Mrs. Estes came up to see them. Mrs. Estes was a good woman, but she had a male friend who would visit her, and word was she'd once been pregnant out of wedlock, lost the child—a punishment, to Mrs. Urquhart's mind. -She ain't our kind, she'd say when Birdie protested Mrs. Estes was good. But she came up that day wearing rouge and eyeliner and lipstick and a bright dress imprinted with all kinds of fruit like bananas, peaches, and clusters of grapes, going downtown. Little Ruthie jumped up and blurted, -Oh, Mrs. Estes, you look so pretty, you look just like a whore! Tickled Mrs. Estes but Birdie like to died.

Earl's little brother Levi was puny with a big round head and hound-dog eyes, dark circles underneath them, laying about the house and complaining of polio. Polio!
Lazy-o
is what you got, she'd say. I'll tell Mama you whipped me, he'd say. He'd go to the toilet and cry, constipated, she'd have to go in, sit with him and then clean him up—he was far too old for that–and help him back to his bed. She'd see him smiling out the corner of her eye, and dump him there so he could wail she was mistreating him. Made him drink prune juice for the constipation and he threw it all up in the middle of the hallway out of pure spite.

Mr. Urquhart, old Junius, wasn't home much, out wandering the town and county all day, selling insurance or pretending to. Everybody said he was such a whoremonger, he'd pull a woman in off the street. He came in evenings smelling of whiskey and cigars, sat down to supper and ate it without saying a word, just looking at everybody in turn with those pale gleaming squinty eyes, wicked eyes she came to believe, always some kind of mischief going on, laughing to himself every now and then. Just his sitting there had Mrs. Urquhart interrupting every meal two or three times to say an extra grace over it, his wickedness was such a presence, it seemed. Kind of comical, really, when it wasn't scary, when he was in a good mood and seemed almost kindly. But one evening after supper, when everyone else was out on the porch resting and Birdie was alone in the kitchen with the dishes, he came in there. She heard something then felt him come up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and give them a squeeze. And kept them there a good minute, her scrubbing away harder than ever.

Finally she said, -What are you doing, Papa, for he made her call him Papa (as if he could hold a candle to her sweet, gentle Papa) like his real children did.

-You got a fine shape, he said, I'd say my boy's a lucky man, to have a good-looking young gal like you.

-Well, she said, shifting her shoulders trying to suggest he let her go. She could smell and even feel his whiskey and cigar breath on her neck he was so close.

-Let go, now, I'm trying to do these dishes.

He held on, but after a minute gave a little har har under his breath and let her go, not before patting her behind on his way out.

Merry said to her one day, -You don't like my papa, do you?

-What makes you say a thing like that? She was sitting by herself in the swing on the porch and Merry had come out, the little harlot in the making with her sleepy eyes.

-I can tell by the way you act around him. And he likes you, she added.

-Merry, you say the awfulest things. I ought to wash your mouth out with soap.

-I'd like to see you try.

-Well I could. Or get your mama to do it.

-I wish I had a cigarette, Merry said.

Birdie got up and went inside, left her out on the porch. Ruthie was asleep in their room. She picked up the moldy old book she'd found on the shelf in the foyer downstairs,
Extraordinary Popular Delusions
, and opened it to her mark in the chapter called “The Slow Poisoners,” all about how way back in England and Italy and whatnot people had discovered how to kill a body slowly with different poisons. They'd started to use it on their enemies, until it became so common in Italy for a while the story said a woman wouldn't think any more of doing it to a lover or husband than someone would to file a lawsuit today. It was interesting to her because Pappy had grown hemlock in his garden and told her about how people used to use it for poison in this wickedness or that, he'd been fascinated with it.

In the book she found, it was mostly women who did it. One old woman in Italy was like the queen of the poisoners, saw it as helping out poor women who had no other recourse. It was horrible, but funny too, and she had fantasized about doing something like that to old Junius, and watching him get more and more poorly until his skin boiled over and his eyes popped out. She laughed out loud, almost woke up Ruthie sleeping beside her on the bed. But the longer she was forced to stay there alone, Earl on the road, the more miserable she was, and scared of Junius, too. She wanted to tell on him, but if she did Earl would kill him. Mrs. Urquhart wouldn't be able to believe him capable of such a thing, anyway, in spite of his reputation and her tending to see evil and wickedness all around her. Birdie knew that for Mrs. Urquhart, evil was everywhere but remote, surrounding her and hers like a siege held off only by the force of her constant prayers, muttered under her breath every second of the day she wasn't gabbing aloud about one thing or another. It would be Birdie who seemed evil to her, coming out with such a wild story. She decided she had to get out of there before things got worse.

When Earl came home the next weekend she didn't give him an explanation or a choice. Just said, -Either you move us out of here of I'm going home to my family. So they moved to a little apartment on Southside on a day when the dogwoods were ending their bloom, and their white withering petals were strewn across the yards surrounding downtown. A flock of cedar waxwings like a rustling visible yellow-brown gust of a breeze rushed over their heads and into a chinaberry tree beside the Urquharts' porch, then out the other side red-flecked before the last one entered, a breeze delayed or caught in the branches and swirling on its way. And they were gone, she and Earl and Ruthie, from that house. She kept the bad blood to herself, though Earl knew something vaguely of it, and they didn't speak of it for some time.

After that it was easier, when he was away, because she'd fetch Pud and Lucy and bring them to town to stay with her, and run them back and forth to school in Earl's car, and would bring Mama in sometimes, too. And Sundays they'd go out there and make a big Sunday dinner so Mama and Papa could see little Ruthie and she, Birdie, could walk with Pappy in the garden and hear his wonderful awful stories.

Earl would be gone for months at a time. It was like she wasn't married, or maybe a widow already, such long nights ticking by in the lamplight, Ruthie sleeping, Pud and Lucy gone home. Here she was married, and pretty much alone. When he came back, she did her best to make it seem a good home, and to show him she appreciated him, though it seemed he had a hard time readjusting to being there, himself. She had the idea he was more comfortable with himself out on the road or working alone in the city.

Finally, though, Earl got the chance to open his own store in Mercury, and he bought them a little house just outside of town on the old Macon highway. It stood right across the road from where he'd build the big house with the deep front property during the war. One night in early June, the end of a hot day, they'd taken cool baths and lay in the bed with an oscillating fan blowing back and forth over them, and didn't talk for a while, just lay there. There was a big honeysuckle bush between their house and the one next door, and the sweet smell of it drifted in the window, and for the first time ever she let Earl know, instead of him letting her know, that she wanted him. He turned on his side in the faint light and soon she could see his handsome eyes just looking at her. His coming home for good, and making them a real home, had tendered her toward him. They'd grown ever more remote during his years on the road. She touched him. Something about the way it happened—he was so gentle, and took his time, and maybe for the first time it felt as natural as could be, their being together like that. She forgot the night outside, Ruthie snoring childlike in her room, and the scent of the honeysuckles became something else not-honeysuckle, just became something all through the moment, and she cried out softly. It made Earl cry after, just silent tears she could see in that faint light, a glistening. -I love you, Birdie, with all my heart, he said, and wept, and she held him in her arms until they both fell asleep.

She'd thought he'd been so happy and relieved that it made him cry. But later she'd think it must've been guilt and shame. That he must've gotten started with other women when he was on the road, and had a whole history of passion that'd had nothing to do with her. That, in this way, he had already left her far behind.

She blamed herself, as much as him. He'd never had any real love around his house, no tenderness, not like her when she was growing up. One day not long after that evening, she went into town, caught a ride with Hazel Broughton in her new little coupe, and went into the store and all the girls looked up like she was a robber come in with a gun. She said, -Where's Earl? No one said anything. -He's up checking stock, one of them—a girl named Arlenie—finally said, and fairly rushed up the stairs. In a few minutes here comes Earl down, and when she kissed him she smelled a kind of perfume on him, a scent she'd smelled in the store before. She said nothing, just looked at him, and he looked away, said, -Well it's real busy today, I'd better get to it, I need to work on some orders, and went into the office and left her standing there, all the girls avoiding her eyes.

-Where's Cinda? Birdie said then, of the girl she knew he'd hired not a month before.

Another long silence. Then Arlenie, again, mustering a smile, says, -Oh, she took a late lunch, I think.

And Birdie didn't say a word after that, just left and walked in a kind of blindness all the way to the library and stood there in front of the main doors until someone spoke to her. It was Finus Bates, standing there smiling a kind of fond, ironic smile at her, his expression changing when he saw the way she looked at him.

-Birdie, he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, leaning toward her just a bit. -Are you all right?

She felt a little chill go through her, and stepped back. She was carrying Edsel, almost two months along. She hadn't quite found the right time, just yet, to tell Earl.

She nodded at Finus, standing there perplexed, and started back toward Woolworth's.