The Heaven of Mercury (12 page)

O
UT AT THE
lake in February to split some firewood, Earl remembered a day when he was maybe fourteen or fifteen, and like this raising an ax (in their backyard, then) for stovewood, some kind of old flivver goes by, and froze him like a statue. By God I'll have me one of those one day, and get the hell out of Dodge, he said to himself. Said to his father one day, If I had me a car, I'd be out on my own and you wouldn't have to worry about
me
anymore. Junius says, Let me tell you something, an automobile is like a woman and you'll be ready for one when you're ready for the other. I'm ready, Earl'd said. You're ready, Junius said. You're ready, you say. Let me tell you what you're ready for then. You're ready to be beholden to maintenance for the rest of your life.
Maintenance
, son. Once you got a woman or an automobile, you don't work for yourself anymore. You work for maintenance.

Now, in his fifty-fifth year, raising the ax above his head and thinking in that moment nothing but strike, split, you motherfucker—angry then at he didn't know what, just everything—just at that moment it felt like his chest collapsed, everything in him, his entire weight and substance, compressed down within its walls, and an instant later ran up his arms and out into nothing. Then he was on the ground. Knowing somehow he lay there beside the pile of split chunks he'd cut, his face in the iron-rich clay of a gouge a miss had made in the topsoil. Thinking why would this happen to me as I'm chopping a fucking piece of wood for the fire. It had always been the time he smote his enemies, with an ax to a piece of hickory or oak. It helped him to keep things in perspective, helped him remember not to choke every son of a bitch that just happened to piss him off.

You didn't fuck with an Urquhart is what Papa had always said. And that included whether you were family or not. The time he rode to town with him in the wagon and they came upon Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Thad coming the other way and stopped beside each other in the wide road. Junius and Uncle Thad were talking.

Aunt Phoebe said, -Not now, not with Earl in the wagon.

-I don't care, he can't talk to me like that, Uncle Thad said to her, but looking at Papa.

-I'll talk to you any way I like and when I like, Papa said. -And I'm telling you if you do it again I'll kill you.

-It's not your cross to bear, Junius, Aunt Phoebe said. -Come on, Thad, let's go. Hup, she said, and tried to take the reins from Uncle Thad and Uncle Thad hit her in the face with the ends of the reins, not hard but it scared Earl.

-Papa, he said.

Papa said nothing but locked the brake on their wagon, handed the reins to Earl, and started to get down when Aunt Phoebe screamed out her husband's name. Papa leapt sideways away from Uncle Thad off the wagon and Uncle Thad had a knife. He was down off their wagon now too and was holding the knife out in front of him toward Papa.

-Papa, he whispered.

-Tell him to put up the knife, Phoebe, Papa said. He said it quiet. -Tell him to put up the knife or I'll kill him now.

Aunt Phoebe had kept shouting Uncle Thad's name, and now she was screaming at him, Put up the knife, Put up the knife. Uncle Thad walked toward Papa and Papa pulled out the little pistol Earl knew he always carried in his jacket pocket and fired into Uncle Thad's chest. Both teams bucked and Earl held tight to theirs. Uncle Thad stumbled backwards against the wheel of their wagon and vomited red onto his shirt. Aunt Phoebe fell across the seat reaching down for him and when the reins fell from her hand their team bucked forward. Papa stepped aside out of their way and dropped his pistol in the road to catch Aunt Phoebe as she fell from the wagon seat. She fought from his grasp and ran to Uncle Thad lying in the road and fell down on him screaming his name. And then she was screaming at Papa, You killed him, You killed him.

Then Papa went away for a while to the penitentiary. Sundays, Mama took him, Rufus, Levi and little Merry on the train to see him. The engineer got to know them and let Earl ride up front and blow the whistle when they arrived. Papa's head was shorn and he wore baggy striped pajamas and would talk to them in a room with only a table and some hard-bottom chairs in it. He would hug Earl and the little ones and sometimes he would cry and they would all cry, too, except for Mama, who kept her face still and hard and would hardly speak until sometime the next day maybe after dinner and then she would be more like herself again and would come into Earl's room when he'd just fallen asleep and start talking to him. I hope you won't be like your papa, she'd say. I hope you won't carry on drinking, fighting, running with whores. I pray to God.

He didn't like the drinking, either. When Papa finally came home after two years he took it right up again. After all we did to get you out, Mama said. After all that, you haven't changed. He would do it at home, then, sitting in the chair on the porch drinking straight from a bottle in his one pocket, the pistol back in the other like he'd never killed Uncle Thad with it. His friend the sheriff had given it back to him, said You might need it. He sold insurance then and made good money, never drank during the day, but at night. They never saw Aunt Phoebe anymore unless they went to Cuba in Alabama, where she'd gone to live with Uncle Thad's and Mama's family over there. Papa wouldn't go along. When they came home he'd say something ugly. Uncle Thad and Mama were brother and sister. Sometimes I think that's why he didn't like Thad, Mama said. Like he thought one of them had to be the family big shot. Your papa don't like nobody cutting his territory, business or pleasure or blood, none of it.

He, Earl, didn't like the drinking but what can a boy say about something like that. He fought other boys. Papa praised him for it, in word or gaze. Once when he fought after school in second grade he knocked the boy's front tooth out and brought it home and put it on his dresser. Mama wouldn't go into his room, told him to throw it away. Papa told her to leave him alone, she couldn't understand a boy's ways. They fought. He never hit her. That's why he argued with Uncle Thad, he told Earl. He hit Aunt Phoebe. Man hits a woman's no better than a dog, a sick weak dog, he said. He's a coward. Never be a coward, he said. Don't ever let anybody get away with crossing you, they'll never let you walk upright again.

Didn't need the lesson, it was in his blood. What it didn't do, like it did later with Levi and later with Papa, too, was turn to meanness. But just hot blood. Couldn't help it. Almost lost his job with the New York company that first time for catching a man up by his collar at lunch in the park one day. They'd gotten hot dogs from one of those vendors, taken them to the park, and the man said something about his accent. He had the man down on a pile of rocks and shoving a hot dog into his mouth before a New York cop pulled him off. Man said, No, I don't want to press charges, I'm going to have his job. I'll have his ass. He went for him again. No, let him go, the man said, I'll take care of that son of a bitch.

Well if the man had been smart enough to file an order he'd have had his ass, had his job, but went to complain and then didn't file an order and the manager says, Get your ass out of my office, you lying son of a bitch. Then calls Earl in and says Is it true, did you do that to him? And Earl says I'd do it again. Do it again, the manager says, and it will be your job. Just don't kick ass of anyone going to give us any real business.

He hit a man one time was trying to hire away his help, after he opened the store in Mercury. Found him in the barbershop getting a shave, towel on his face, couldn't see Earl come in. Snatched him out of the chair by the tie, dragged him out into the street like a leash dog and banged his head on the pavement a few times. Wanted to kill him, see his blood. You don't come around trying to steal my help, he told him. Cop had to pull him off again, but it was one of his buddies, Pinkie McGauley, had a laugh and sent the son of a bitch on his way. Yankee, anyway, trying to start up a cheap line in a store on Front Street and good riddance. He'd hit horses, mules, with his bare fists. Hit a nigger woman over the head with a high heel when she sassed him, didn't want her in the store in the first place then she says he's not fitting her right. Well he never hit anyone or anything didn't deserve it, just didn't have it in him to swallow an insult. Take it as you would, he was a man you didn't fuck with, like any Urquhart, but he wasn't mean. Just quick-tempered.

He could hold a grudge but not like Papa. Aunt Phoebe finally grew ill from her grieving, dying an early death, and calls for Papa to come over to see her on her deathbed in Cuba, and Mama badgers him with Bible verses till he finally consents to get dressed and go over there, of a Sunday afternoon. They're all there when Mama and Papa arrive, and Papa stands across the room. The others close to the bed. She's ashy pale, trembly weak, motions for him to come closer. He's got his hat in his hand, head cocked to one side like a fighter waiting for his opponent to get up after he's knocked him down. He steps closer to the bed, stands there, looking at her like he's studying her. No compassion in his hard blue eyes, just something like curiosity. That little cowlick of silver hair on the top of his balding head like a baby's first locks.

The old homeplace there, little more than an old dogtrot. Brown burnt-up cornstalks in the field beside, it's August and everybody's drenched with sweat and powdered with dust from the drive over, the highway nothing but gravel and the road from it just red clay dirt all dried. Everybody standing around in the heat and flies buzzing against the screens.

Aunt Phoebe's laid up on a stack of pillows.

-Well, he says after a minute, his voice kind of husky soft, I'm waiting. He looks again almost like what he is, her baby brother waiting on her word.

She has her speech prepared.

-I know I was wrong, she says. -I thought you didn't have to shoot Thad but I know he would have come at you with that knife. I know he wouldn't have stopped and you'd have had to shoot him anyway, and maybe gotten stabbed. But I couldn't forgive you for taking him away. I loved him too much. I let him beat me because I loved him. But I know that couldn't have gone on, either. Now I'm dying. I want to tell you I know you did it in self-defense, like you said to the judge. I'm sorry I didn't say so. I knew you wouldn't let little Earl into court. And I lied. I lied about the knife. But now I'm dying. I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for not telling it like it was and for you going to the penitentiary. I'm dying now and I need you to forgive me, Junius. Before I go to my maker.

Papa stands there a long time not saying anything. They're all straining their ears, sweat running into their earlobes, they let it stand, still. Aunt Phoebe has started to cry, not making a sound herself but the tears trickling down her chalky face.

Papa says, -You can rot in hell, for all I care, Phoebe. I'll never forgive you.

Aunt Phoebe's mouth then looked like it'd already been sewn shut by the undertaker, cinched in. Her eyes seemed smaller as if receding with her old soul. They watched him place his hat on his head, walk out without looking back. His own sister. Last time she ever saw him, nor would the closed lids of her dressed corpse deflect the light of his image, nor her shade darken his thoughts but for a flitting second as if seeking some sentimental purchase and, finding none, would it pass into scattered fields of those souls whose lives on earth had found nothing but unhappiness.

Poor Aunt Phoebe. Poor Aunt Phoebe, he'd often thought. I should have known seeing her grieve that no one in this family would ever sow much love in the family garden, what passed for love anyway being just a few unswept and moldered seeds at the base of an otherwise empty grain bin. A clutch of dry and twisted hearts. His love for Birdie was one thing, one move in the right direction, a grasp at goodness the closest thing to which he knew was his mother, poor God-ravaged grackle of a woman that she was, squawking scripture to ward off the terror of eternal fire. When Birdie balked at physical love it fired in him a muted, enraged despair, as if the demons in the old woman his mother had infected his bride somehow between the courtship and connubial bliss. Why, aside from his general greed, would his father have become the biggest pussyhound east of the Mississippi? Because the pussy at home was about as receptive as just that, might as well try to hold down the housecat by the nape of its neck and fuck it—that was his guess, anyway, given all signs and signals in the air all his growing up life.

Still, it was in the blood. Only one of them didn't cheat on his wife was Rufus, and that because he was a drunk half the time and a teetotaling holy roller the rest, and between being drunk on whiskey and drunk on Jesus he hadn't the time or the inclination for fucking around. Papa had set Rufus up in the barbershop years before. You never had to worry about Rufus being mean, that was for sure, only drunk. Earl always suspected he had a big heart and it was some kind of self-loathing kept Rufus such a gentle and ineffectual sap.

So he, Earl, would work hard and do well, finally set himself up in business, and extend a hand to Levi, helping to set him up with his own shoe store, too. Never mind competition, which was admittedly part of the plan, that with Levi as competition they could control things, keep a share each of different stock, swap around, lob customers back and forth between the stores like tennis balls. Never mind, of course, that Levi would order on the sly the same stock Earl was getting and offer it at lower prices, wouldn't put it out where Earl might see it but would sidle up to customers and happen to drop that he could get her this or that shoe a little cheaper than Earl, and sometimes that stock actually being Earl's own, which Levi would get out of Earl's store at night or Sunday mornings until Earl got wise and took away his key and slapped him around a little when he, Levi, called him, Earl, a liar.