The Heaven of Mercury (28 page)

If we have faltered as a family it is my fault, for letting the loss of this life I knew discourage me, so that I lost something of my sense of who we were, and I could not see life clearly from the new place that we came to live. I lived in confusion for some time, and was not wise as I should have been. If we had been here you never would have married Earl, though I think still he was not a bad man, he just had no vision, he plowed headlong into life like a man afraid, and I think most men are afraid. I cannot fault him for that for after we left here I knew some of that fear and lack of vision. It's the age, it's the way we live, it's difficult to overcome. I lost faith for a time in the ability of God to lead us, to give us that vision. I closed my eyes to his sight, and lost mine own.

Nobody faulted you, Pappy.

It's for no one else to do, Birdie. I fault myself. I don't condemn myself. I was human, like anyone else.

Where are you going? she said to him then. He was walking down a twilit white sand trail into the dense pine woods east of the house. He only raised his hand and was lost in the grainy light there. She was tired. She was drifting herself with a northern breeze to the Gulf side where gentle waves flopped and crushed themselves against the sand stained wet and draining. Two ladies lay on towels on the beach nearly naked, their skin glistening with oil. They seemed strange and familiar, too, like people she'd once known in a dream, and forgotten. Birdie went down and lay down on sand between them. They were sleeping. She looked up toward the deck of the beach house behind them and a young boy stood there, looking at her. She waved. He merely stared at her, and so she approached him and was there before him in the buffeting Gulf breeze. He was not afraid. He knew her, somehow. He put out his hand, and when he touched where she was he gave a start, and she wanted to say, it's only electricity, child, but she could not, and she rose away so that he would wonder for the rest of his life about the presence of this angel who visited him as he stood on a deck overlooking the Gulf of Mexico, when he was a just a boy.

T
HERE WERE CARS
everywhere, from the carport and down the driveways on both ends. Finus drove along the grass beside the driveway and parked by the sidewalk to the front door. But he chose to walk around back and go in the kitchen door, the familiar entrance, and avoid whoever might be playing gatekeeper at this event. Didn't really want to talk to Birdie's kinfolk or some righteous church woman full of baloney and saccharine goodwill. He went through the little archway between the carport and the kitchen door, opened the screen door, mounted the steps, and pushed open the stubborn door to the kitchen.

It was crowded, even in there, but at least those standing there were eating, occupied, and at best looked around with a chicken leg poised at their teeth and nodded, grinning at him, and kept eating. Howard Feckman did actually take a chicken wing from between his teeth a millimeter from biting in, set it down on the plate long enough to shake Finus's hand, then picked up another piece and bit on into it. In spite of all the congregated living bodies, which hovered over and around the tables of food, Finus could see and take in the impressive spread: dishes of broccoli and cheese casseroles, French green bean and mushroom soup casserole, apple crunch desserts, a coconut cake, several crusty pound cakes, large plates of cold fried chicken covered with plastic wrap, a massive ham, the cooling meat drawing up around a shank bone big as a severed sapling. Large aluminum pitchers of ice tea frosted with sweat, ice tinkling in tumblers as the tea was poured in. Sweet potato pudding with melted marshmallow topping. Dishes of snap beans cooked down and dark, sweet, and tartish. Baked squash with onion, soft as pudding. And tall slim sweating steel crankbuckets of homemade ice cream, vanilla and fresh peach, beside at least a dozen pies: glazed pecan, lemon icebox, sweet potato, custard, apple, chess, and what looked like a blackberry cobbler. The din from conversation and eating was considerable, almost made him smile.

He felt someone brush his elbow then and saw old Creasie standing there, eyes limpid and tired-looking, looking up at him. She wore a pretty pink dress with a clover print on it, and Finus was fairly sure it had been Birdie's once.

-Hello, Mr. Finus, she said to him.

-Hello, Creasie, he said. Finus wondered where this old woman would go now, what she would do. Maybe she had family somewhere, he had no idea. He wanted to ask her, but he didn't think he had the energy to listen, and he was certain she didn't much have the energy or will to tell him everything she could tell him. Same space, different worlds.

-Missed you at the services, Mr. Finus, she said then.

-Yeah, he said. -I wasn't feeling too well.

-Yes, sir. Better get yourself a plate, then, Creasie said. She reached over to the counter and got him a plate and some silverware. He took it from her hands, dark and weathered on the backs, light-colored in the palms.

-Thank you, Creasie, he said. -I believe I'm about to starve to death.

He got a plate and put some chicken, beans, squash casserole on it, and came back over by the sink and Creasie to eat it. He set the empty plate in the sink.

-You was hungry, she said.

They looked at one another for a minute.

-I was out to your old house in the ravine today.

She looked up at him as if not understanding his words for a second.

-Yes, sir, you was? What in the world was you doing way out there?

-Just exploring, I guess, he said. She nodded. -Had a conversation with old Vish out there. Was talking to Parnell Grimes yesterday, said some curious things, then Dr. Heath said I might talk to Vish about them.

-Miss Vish still alive, then, Creasie said. She nodded to herself and walked over to the sink and stacked a few small dishes in there. Finus followed her.

-I took the liberty of looking around your old place, he said. -Hope you don't mind.

-Umm, hmm, no sir, she said, running some water over the dishes and turning off the faucet, drying her fingers on the apron she wore over the skirt of her dress. -I don't never go out there no more.

-I was just curious, Finus said then, if you could tell me what is in that old mason jar in your kitchen. Strange-looking thing, aroused my curiosity.

She looked out the window, working at the snuff in her bottom lip for a second, then her eyes cut over at him.

-Yes, sir, what kind of old jar was it, now.

-A tall kind of mason jar, had some thing in it I can't even tell what it was. She was holding his eye then. -You know what I'm talking about then?

She nodded. Her attention seemed to wander a little and she sagged a little more in the shoulders.

-Fact, I got it out in the truck, if you'd like to see it, jog your memory.

She nodded again.

-I'll tell you, Mr. Finus. That was a long time ago. She stood there a long minute, seeming to think about something. -Yes, sir, I can tell you the story behind that jar, you help me do something here.

-All right, he said.

-You got a minute, then?

He nodded.

-Yes, sir, come on with me.

-Outside?

She nodded, motioning him to follow her. They went out the kitchen door, down the steps to the archway, and across the drive in front of the carport to the old shed out by the pumphouse. He followed her up to a door cut into the sheet metal siding, which was fastened to with an old hasp lock. Creasie reached up and shook the lock once, dropped it.

-I need to get in here for something.

-Do you not have the key?

-No, sir. Don't nobody know where the key to this old shed is. I didn't want to bust in there. You reckon it's all right to bust in, now?

She nodded toward the carport. -They's some tools in there back by the deep freeze, might be something that would work there.

He found a rusty-hinged toolbox and in the top tray a short crowbar, and brought that back over. He jammed the flat end behind the hasp lever and yanked and pried until the screws came out of the old wood, and the door swung free. He took hold of it and opened it wide, revealing a packed dirt floor with an old cylinder lawn mower and rusted child's wagon there, and shelves beginning chest high on which sat blackened hand tools and moldered collapsed cardboard boxes and wooden boxes topped with miscellaneous junk. On the shelf to their left sat a cobwebbed and rotten-clothed bizarre thing, a dummy of some kind with minstrel features, faded red lips and yellowed teeth and yellowed eye-whites, gazing at the space where the door now stood open, just over their heads. It almost made Finus jump.

-What in the hell is that thing? he said.

Creasie was standing there staring at it, something about her of the bereaved.

-Nothing but an old nigger dummy, Mr. Finus. What everybody done forgot about but me.

H
E SKIPPED THE
council meeting that evening, sat at the kitchen table and sipped from a bourbon and water, and looked at the blackened heart inside the jar he'd set down beside his glass. He wasn't hungry after the plate of food out at Birdie's.

After staring at the telephone a while, he picked it up, called the press that printed the
Comet
, and told them not to run Birdie's obituary.

-Just pull it, he said. -I'll run it next week.

He took his drink into the living room, thought about turning on the television for late-night crap and decided not to. Mike shambled creakily in and humphed himself to the floor at his feet with a wheeze. About midnight he woke up with his neck in a crick from leaning it back on the sofa in sleep. Mike snored gently on the floor. He sat there awhile working his neck with his fingers, feeling tired to the marrow and last drop of old blood. Then he got up slowly, careful not to wake old Mike, and went down the stairs to the street and got into his pickup. He laid the jar from Creasie's house on the seat beside him and drove through town past the orphans' home and turned in at the cemetery, lights off, around to where he knew Earl Urquhart's grave was.

Wasn't hard to find, with the earth in a mound over Birdie's fresh grave. The air was cooler, though there was little breeze. Finus took the jar and walked over to the graves, not sure what he intended to do. But there lying beside Birdie's grave was a shovel, apparently left there by one of the gravediggers.

He read the stone. Earl Leroy Urquhart, 1899–1955.

-Well, old Earl, Finus said, I don't mean this as a desecration. Just a restoration, of sorts. If it's just an old pig's foot, I'm sorry, no disrespect intended.

He took the shovel and made four neat incisions in the turf at what he figured about chest level for the body of Earl down deep, and lifted it carefully and set it aside. Then he dug enough earth out to place the jar a foot or so deep in the hole. He replaced the dirt, packing it down with the sole of his Red Wing, leveled it, then knelt and placed the piece of turf back on top of it, pressing it and shaping it until as best he could tell the surgery wouldn't be too obvious.

He stood up, brushed his hands off on his pants, knocked the dirt off his boots with the shovel, and laid the shovel back down next to the mound of Birdie's earth where he'd found it. Stood there catching his breath. For the first time in his life he seemed to feel every one of his true and earthly years. Maybe it's coming my time, he thought, where my time here and the way I feel about it have come together and will take me out of this light and into another, or eternal darkness. He figured he could take it either way, wouldn't make much difference to the man he was here and now. That would be that and then, not this and now. He looked about. Down behind him in the area where he had used to park and rut with Merry Urquhart now there were neat lines of headstones just as there were in every other part of the cemetery, the place was about filled up. He looked up. The night was clear, and the nearly full moon he hadn't noticed but had worked by stood high above the magnolia trees at the cemetery's summit, between Finus and the dim penumbra of the lights in town. He heard something and saw it moving toward him along the narrow paved pathway from the street. Some kind of dog trotting along, veered away from him and through the stones between him and the magnolias and stopped there when it saw him watching it. It stood stock still, sideways, head turned his way, to see what he was going to do.

Finus stood stock still, too. It looked just like the dog in his death dream, the one he'd told Birdie about, charged with guarding his body while he slept. Though it was clear the dog didn't know him and feared him. A guilty, negligent dog.

-Hey! Finus called to it. The dog twitched but didn't run. Both stood still watching the other. Then after a minute or so the dog seemed to relax. He looked away from Finus, looked around the cemetery, feigning a casual manner, sniffed the grass at his feet, as if something interesting there had caught his attention for a second. It was a transparent attempt to look innocent. He looked back at Finus, as if Finus had said something else. He hadn't. Then the dog trotted on his way, weaving around headstones, crossed the gravel path at the crest of the hill and disappeared over it down into the lower parts of the cemetery out of sight. Finus watched him go. His heart was racing. When it calmed he looked around at where he was, at Birdie's grave, at Earl's stone, at the other stones shining dully in the moonlight, at his truck waiting stunned or suspended, incomplete without him.

 

HE SLEPT TILL
two o'clock the next afternoon, took his time rousing, and went into the office at four, and finished rewriting her obituary early that evening. He took out the addendum about the poisoning, and inserted three new bulleted items:

• She was the best at making a little gumball out of sweet-gum sap of anyone yours truly has ever known.
  
• She developed later in life the ability to suck in her cheeks and make her lips into a funny little narrow pucker, made her look like a little mouse nibbling something, real comical, made all the children laugh.
  
• She once at age eighty speared an actual mouse using one of those sticks with a nail in the end of it, used for picking up paper trash, disgusted that everyone else had been too squeamish.
  

He put the copy in Lovie's basket, then put his overnight bag in the truck and helped Mike get up into the passenger seat. He filled the tank at the Shell station on the highway just south of town, then headed up the long hill that was the south ridge and rolled along the general decline to the Gulf coast.

It was a route he'd known since a small boy, though the roads had changed, improved. His grandfather accompanied them to the fort at the end of the peninsula, down on the Alabama Gulf coast, for dinner with the Commandant. His grandfather knew the Commandant, from the Spanish-American War. They ate by flickering lantern and candle light. Out the open, screened window, gentle summer waves flopped and crushed on the sand. Finus sat quietly as after dinner the grown-ups drank from small bowled glasses and his father and the Commandant smoked cigars that his grandfather leaned over and whispered to him came from Cuba.

-Go to the south window, Finus, and see if you can see the lights of Cuba.

He'd smirked at his grandfather, who knew he was too smart for that. His grandfather was big and open-faced, a bald and friendly giant, and his touch was gentle on Finus's shoulders and on his back, and when he tousled Finus's light brown hair. His parents were dressed in their best clothes, though he could not see his mother, she was eternally just at the edge of his eye. He was in his worsted wool suit, and the Commandant wore his dress jacket with the high collar and stars. The Commandant was a bachelor and had hired a Creole cook whose head at what seemed regular intervals appeared from behind the swinging door to the kitchen to look at him with oddly green eyes in her coppery face, and then disappeared again. The food was wonderful, fish in a sack, gumbo, fried grouper, bright white scallions like pearls with long green stalks, and boiled new potatoes so small and sweet they didn't even need butter. The Commandant gave him a very small measure of red wine. The others raised their glasses to him, love and admiration in their eyes.

 

HIS GRANDFATHER TOOK
him just before dawn on horseback down the beach and turned in through a pass in the dunes toward the old lagoon. They rode around the lagoon and down a trail into the thick brush and piney woods and dismounted in a little clearing on the trail and tied the horse to a bush. Fragrant with citronella his grandfather had rubbed onto their faces and necks and hands, they made their way slowly in a cloud of mosquitoes, yellow flies buzzing fiercely about. It was first light, now, dawn seeping into the air. There were thick patches of saw palmetto they made their way around, stepping on hummocks of spongy ground around marshy spots. The faint blue light seeming to emanate from the little rounded clumps of needled branches at the tops of the pines. There were dense and compact water oaks draped with moss that in this light seemed gauzy veils hung from the arms of great skeletal ghosts. They came to the edge of a clearing smoked with low-hanging fog and haunted with gaunt old giants, suffering ancient leafless oaks and tall crooked poles that were once grand pines, and here his grandfather motioned for him to sit beside him on the grass and to be quiet. All else was quiet. The low fog moved almost imperceptibly within itself, a slow swirling with what breeze made its way into the swamp through the scrub thickets and saw grass and younger pines toward the water.

The birds had begun their singing and their calls, a tuning up of the world, and he began to see them dipping through the fog of the clearing from one part of the woods to another. Crows called from far off. He could hear the rooster doves lamenting. His grandfather touched his hand and motioned with his eyes to one of the old dead oaks, high up, and he looked in time to see a huge bird, its rakish red crest thrust from a hole there, and then the bird launched itself and flew high across the clearing in a loping manner, its body black but for the scarlet head and large painted patches of pure white on the wings, calling in a strange, strong but small-for-its-size-sounding
kent, kent
, like a piercing loud toy horn, and was gone in the mist. Then another bird, minus the crest but with the strong white slashes on its black wings and on its breast, followed, with the same call. And the woods seemed silent again after that, all other birds diminished to relative silence.

-That's the ivorybill, his grandfather said then. -Almost gone from this world. You should not ever forget it, Finus. You may not ever see them again.

He wouldn't. The big storm would wash the hotel away, his grandfather would die just two years later, and for some time his family did not go to the beach. Did he know this somehow, the vision of a child? He thought of the birds again as a teenager and tried for some time to find the spot. And when he finally did, after three early-morning attempts, and sat there the next dawn, he saw nothing but songbirds and crows. It was a part of the world that was gone for Finus, as was his grandfather.

-They're a shy bird, see, the old man had said. -Don't like people. And they need lots of woods, lots of old dead trees like this one around. They rip the old bark off and eat the grubs out of there. And when people cut down the woods and grow new trees, it takes too long for old dead trees to come around again, and the birds have nowhere to go. They need no one else but themselves. They don't need the company of other birds, other animals. They're a solitary race of bird.

-Like you and me, Finus said.

The old man looked at him and laid a hand on his tangly brown hair.

-Ah, he said, you're too young for that, Finny. But you may be right. He smiled at him. -Don't be too hard on yourself, now. Don't be so hard to get along with.

-I'm not.

-No, you're easygoing. But you are a loner, aren't you?

-I like to be alone.

-I see it, his grandfather said. -It's too bad, but it's not so bad, after all. Just don't turn away from people so quick. Give them a long look, don't close up your heart, now.

-All right.

-An open heart will save you, but you have to be smart, too. You have to be careful who you open your heart to. Some people can't help but hurt you if they know it, he said, and kissed the young Finus on his forehead.

 

HE GOT THERE
at midnight and found his key to the old cabin and climbed the creaking sand-blown steps to the shaky deck and let himself in and lay down right away in the main room. He and Mike slept together in one of the daybeds and while he slept the ghosts of those whose lives left some parts of themselves there visited him and laid their soft and fog-drifted hands upon him. They passed into him some of the energy that always generated within them but which they could never contain and gather to take shape in the world as they'd known it. He woke in the faint light and gull-calling of dawn. The air in the cabin was suffused with age, he hadn't been down there in decades. One front window was broken out, the glass on the dry wooden floor beneath it. A pair of beach sparrows flitted in and out of the window to a nest hole in the corner ceiling. He went over to the refrigerator, which was somehow miraculously humming. Inside he found two cold ancient Schlitz cans and drank one straight off, and carried the other with him out to the truck.

He and Mike made their way carefully down the deck steps and to the truck, and he drove down to what he thought was the old path road to the Palmetto Cove site, bulling through a couple of deep sandy spots and crashing through some low pine limbs until he broke out right at the bay shore and had to slam on the truck's brakes to keep from tipping into the water. When he stepped out there was a good breeze blowing from the north, and a good thing because otherwise he realized he'd have been attacked by yellow flies and mosquitoes and had brought nothing to protect himself from them.

He took off his shoes and socks and rolled his pants up and waded a few feet out into the bay and leaned over and began scooping at the sand of the bay until he came up with a good-sized oyster in each hand. He tossed them onto the bank where he'd stepped in and where Mike lay watching him. Mike sniffed the oysters and lay back down. Finus kept scooping till he had something like a dozen big bay oysters, then he waded back in and sat on the bank and opened them with the short blade of his pocket knife and ate them from the shell, drinking the salty water that clung to the oysters' edges. He drank the second Schlitz from the refrigerator, tossing the old tab top into the back of the truck from where he sat. The strong breeze cooled him and he felt so tired he had to lie down awhile. He fell asleep, lying there.

In his dream he was first with his father and mother and grandfather again at the Commandant's house down at the fort, and they were all around the table and happy. They toasted one another, and Finus was grown up in his mind in the dream but also still a little boy. He loved them so much. Some part of him was not just himself but was Eric, also, and he was so happy to have Eric within him and did not question how such a thing could be. The Creole cook was in the dream but he could not see her, and she was also Creasie, and he was aware of Birdie's presence somehow though he was not sure how, and he wanted to leave the table to see where she was but he also didn't want to leave such good company, but then he did and when he wandered out of doors it was not nighttime anymore, but a cool and sunny fall afternoon.