Read The Heaven of Mercury Online
Authors: Brad Watson
He went to see Birdie that afternoon. Creasie met him at the door, nodded and hardly spoke, disappeared into the back somewhere. He and Birdie sat in the den. He asked her if she wanted him to help her with a lawyer or anything.
-This is harassment and slander, at best, he said.
-No, I'm just going to ignore them, she said. She sat in a stuffed rocking chair in the corner, fiddling with a silk handkerchief and looking out the window on the long front yard. -I don't want any more trouble.
-They're making it, not you.
-I'm not going to give them the satisfaction.
-Well, you let me know if you change your mind.
-All right.
She still looked out the window. Her hair was down, and beautiful. Her face was lined and puffy with the strain of everything. Her hands were slim and still pretty. The pale blue of her eyes in the afternoon light, absorbing the color of her pale blue dress. It was a still moment in the small room, steam heat ticking in the radiator against the wall. Through the door to the foyer he could see beyond to the big living room, cold marble fireplace with the big mirror over it, mute grand piano black in the corner like a museum piece. Here she was, a duchess set up in her little estate, the duke now dead at an early age, wondering what she was going to do with the rest of her life.
He wanted to ask her about Ann, Earl's girlfriend down in Florida. Not sure why he wanted to ask about that, then.
-Birdie, he finally said though. -I know Earl hurt you. Ran around on you.
She said nothing.
-Do you want to talk about it? All that?
-You're one to talk, she said. -You and Merry.
She was looking out the window. He shut up then, and they sat awhile in silence. Then Birdie opened a drawer in the little lamp table beside her and pulled out a letter in an envelope and handed it to him. It was addressed to Birdie, no return address. The postmark was back in September. There was another envelope inside, addressed to Earl at the shoe store, with a Tallahassee postmark from the same month. A letter inside it. He looked up at Birdie.
-Go ahead and read it, she said.
It was a letter written in what looked to Finus like a woman's handwriting. The salutation wasn't to Earl, was just a familiar
Hey
, followed by epistolary smalltalk, as well as some discussion of business. He looked up at Birdie again.
-It's from Ann Christensen, who runs the Tallahassee store, she said. -Go on.
Finus hesitated. -Was she there, at the funeral, then?
-She had the decency to hang back, but she was there.
Page two became personal again. It was a love letter, finally. She missed him. She hated not seeing him more than once a week, twice at best, but often only once or twice a month. She cherished their time on the Mississippi coast. She ached for him whenever they would part, after those times. She didn't even
want
to love someone as much as she loved him.
Do you think
, she wrote finally,
that Birdie would be all right if you did in fact leave? I want so much for us to be together, but I don't want you to be miserable because of it. I don't want us ruined by your guilt and fear and worry over her. Sometimes I get so jealous that you feel so protective of her, so fearful of her dependence on you. Wouldn't she be all right, in that house, with Creasie there to help her out, and all her biddy friends? I feel terrible urging you to keep thinking about this, I don't like to think of myself as a home-wrecker. But your children are grown and gone. They and your grandchildren could come to see us down here. We could run the businesses from here. Or hell, sell the Mercury store, let's open another one in Mobile or Jacksonville. I'm sorry. I can't help wishing for what I think is right, in spite of the fact that you are married. It's me you love, we both know that. We should be together. I try not to think about it like this. I can't help it. I love you.âAnn
Birdie was looking out the window at the day, a blustery wind blowing in a front, clouds sailing above the bare oak limbs in the front yard, bright blue between them. It had enlivened Finus, coming out. Now he felt they were in a muffled cocoon, buffeted by the wind and isolated from all that had made him feel good in it, before.
-Do you think he was going to leave you? he said. -
Did
you?
She shrugged, after thinking for a moment.
-I always said he'd never leave me for anyone he just slept with, she said, pulling at a loose thread on her skirt.
-But this wasn't just that, Finus said.
She shook her head.
-I knew that, anyway.
They were quiet a while.
-It had to be Merry sent me that letter, Birdie said. -Stole it from Earl's office and mailed it to me just for meanness. Meanness to him or to me, I don't know. Both, I guess. I think he knew I had it, what had happened. He was nervous and irritable about it. But he wouldn't ask.
-You didn't say anything to him.
She shook her head.
-I didn't want to make a fuss about it. She looked up. -Well what difference would it have made, anyway, Finus?
-Maybe make him face up to what he was doingâ
-And maybe decide to leave me. I didn't ever think he would, he knew I couldn't get by on my own. I've never worked, just been a housewife and a mother. Never went past the eighth grade. What would I do for a living?
Finus said nothing.
-I'm going to ask Edsel and his family to move in with me out here, I think, she said. -Just to have somebody around, and my grandchildren. They don't have a house yet, and this one's so big. Maybe they'd be happy here for a while.
-That sounds like a good idea.
He could still see her, a young girl naked in the woods, turning like a wheel in the light slanting through riverside trees. Looked at her feet now in the new slight slippers from Earl's store and remembered her short plump girl's feet flung up and over, how they made a
ka-thump
sound upon landing on the ground, the little muff of hair diaphanous in light from the leafy boughs behind her. He flushed with physical pleasure and a lamentable sense of loss. He wanted to go over, kiss her on the cheek. Felt as if he could not keep himself from doing it, in any case. But then he heard a whistling sound from the kettle, and Creasie pushed through the swinging door from the dining room to the kitchen. In a minute she came into the room carrying teacups steaming on little fragile saucers, no tray, just one saucer tilted in each hand, Lipton labeled tea strings hanging over the cup rims, a look on her face as if she were in some distant thought, had arrived in the room almost by luck, the kerchief on her head a comical nod to some old type though she was still a young woman, this belied too by the lump of dip pooching out her lower lip.
-Thank you, Creasie, Birdie said, her voice a little wavery.
-Yes'm, Creasie said, and ambled out of the room on, Finus just then noticed, a pair of pink-bottom, slightly squashed-down splayed bare brown feet.
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IT WAS ON
one afternoon while they were fishing for bream on a bed stinking of roe that he felt silently overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, that whether or not he understood what he'd felt for this woman now and at various times in the past he had to make a move, had to leap into something in order to understand the very element in which he existed, to understand his own mind.
He looked at her. Just a little plump with her fifty-four years, hair still dark brown and long, in a braid this day, a few gray strands, a little fleshier in the cheeks, but still pretty. The same impertinent mouth, the gapped teeth. Easy laugh. She saw him looking.
-What? she said.
-Do you know, Birdie, he said, I've seen you naked.
-What?
-A long time ago, the day you fell into the river during the picnic at the Methodist retreat. I was in the bushes when you and Avis came down the path to change you.
She colored. -Well what am I supposed to say to that?
-I don't know. Something happened to me that day, watching you. Avis saw me in there.
-Well what were you doing there? Just spying?
-Yes, but not on purpose. I'd gotten sick, went away from the camp, and y'all just happened along.
-You should have said something before I took my clothes off.
-I didn't have time. I didn't know what y'all were up to. Well I
couldn't
, I had my own pants around my ankles. But what I wanted to say, you put a spell on me that day. It's like it's never worn off, all these years.
Just saying those words released something in him, a prickling, blood pressure up, compromised vision.
-What kind of spell?
-That's what I'd like to know. I was stricken. Smitten, maybe, but stronger than that. I wanted you, somehow. I was so mad you decided to marry Earl.
She laughed, half dismissal and half embarrassment. She lifted her line from the water, examined the worm on the hook, and lowered it in again.
They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while.
-I don't have to remind you that you're still a married man. I probably shouldn't even be out here fishing with you, come to think of it. Sometimes I forget you and Avis are still married.
Finus snorted. -Wish I could. No, sometimes I
do
. But only for a moment or two at a time.
-Listen, Finus. Oh, I don't even like to throw my mind back so far. But you were right way back when you said I wasn't ready to get married, too young. And so much of my life went into it. I just want to be alone, live with Edsel and his family awhile, as long as they want to stay with me at the house. I'm just tired, I feel worn out. Like I've had the life drained out of me. I know I'm not real old but I
feel
old. You're a good man. You had a bad marriage, I know. I did too in some ways, but it was good in others. If you want to try to convince Avis to give you a divorce, well go ahead, I think it's best anyway. But
I
don't want to run right into something else again. I've lived a whole life already, seems like. I may have more in me but not right now. Maybe not ever. I just want to rest. All this mess has just exhausted me.
-I'm not talking about marrying. He laughed. -I don't really know what I want, Birdie.
-So what else is new? she said, but gentle, mocking him.
-Finus, she said after a bit, you and I are friends and I like it that way, always have. Even if you have seen me without my clothes on.
And she laughed, then, to think of it, and the sight and sound of it released a flood of feeling that was deeper than the old surge of sexual desire, though he felt a stir of that, too. How much he was drawing upon that indelible image he could not know. It didn't matter.
-I love you, Birdie. Always have, from the first time I saw you, I believe.
-You don't mean that any more than you did the last time you said it.
But she remembered that he had once said it, a long time ago. He took note of that.
A
S FINUS GREW
older, obituaries came to make up a goodly portion of the
Comet
, which was nearing the end of its arcing streak as was its body of readers. Often he was asked to write the obits for people not necessarily from Mercury though well known throughout the county because he made an attempt to tell something notable, or even simply funny or unusual, about that person's life. Your average obituary was a disgrace in its sterility. Nor could he stand the notion of families writing their own, which some papers were allowing now. He could just imagine the tears and flapdoodle from those pens, along with a host of the awfulest verse. He should know. Some still had the audacity to ask him to print their own words, whereupon he'd tell them to take it to one of those papers that made you pay for obit space. His newspaper wasn't the community wailing wall. You couldn't convince a body anymore that there was integrity in the use of the language.
In the awkward days following Earl's death, he wrote his obituary with some restraint, given his anger about what Levi and Merry were up to then.
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E
ARL
L
EROY
U
RQUHART
, 55
Earl Urquhart, prominent Mercury businessman, died last Friday while splitting firewood out at his lake north of Mercury. He was 55 years old. Coroner Parnell Grimes gives as cause of death a heart attack. An autopsy was requested by members of his family. There was no evidence, Grimes said, of foul play.
Mr. Urquhart was born in Cuba, Alabama, but his family soon moved to Mississippi and he grew up in Union. The Urquharts moved to Mercury in 1915. Soon after, Mr. Urquhart met Birdie Wells, and wasted little time in courting her and persuading her to marry him, though she was just sixteen years old at the time. Mr. Urquhart was already a successful businessman by that time, and soon was managing a chain of shoe stores in the south for a New York manufacturing firm.
Mr. Urquhart worked in New York for a while, opening new stores for his company. In 1928, after a series of different assignments which took him to cities such as Baltimore, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Atlanta, he opened his own store in Mercury and settled there with his growing family. Through shrewd business practices and a conservative approach to marketing, he managed to keep his store through the Depression years. He opened another store in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1950. He owned partial interest in a shoe store run by his brother, Levi Urquhart, also in Mercury.
Mr. Urquhart was known as an honest man who worked hard and treated all fairly. He never drank, people like to point out. My impression was he wasn't proud of it so much as just not interested in liquor. He loved fishing, and often traveled to the coast to fish in the Mississippi Sound off Pascagoula and Biloxi in his own boat. He also owned a piece of land around a small lake just outside of Mercury, where he kept a couple of horses.
He was an emotional man and it was not unheard of for Mr. Urquhart to engage in quick bouts of fisticuffs on occasion, if insulted or if he perceived it to be the case. Most men treated him with respect, accordingly.
He is survived by his widow, Birdie Wells Urquhart, his daughter, Ruthie Mosby, his son, Edsel, and three grandchildren. Services were held at Grimes Funeral Home, with interment at Magnolia Cemetery.
LATER FINUS WROTE
about the death of Birdie's daughter, Ruthie, when she succumbed to cancer in her early fifties. And about her son, Edsel, of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight (striking something of a blow to those who still entertained the thought that Earl's similar death, at fifty-five, was suspicious). And he wrote a heartfelt one about the death of Birdie's grandson, Robert, in an automobile accident at the age of twenty-two.
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R
OBERT
E
DSEL
U
RQUHART
, 22
Robert Edsel Urquhart, 22, died in a car wreck on Langtree Road last Saturday night. He was looking for a boy who had insulted his girlfriendâboy was a friend of hisânot to fight him, but just to ask him to be civil and apologize. As he and his girlfriend and two other young people headed in Robert's car up Langtree Road, another car came speeding around the sharp turn near the entrance to Ludlum's Woods, left the ground, and hit Robert's Jeep head-on. Somehow, no one else was seriously injured. Robert died instantly in the collision.
It was typical of the young man to try to settle a dispute between two angry people. He had a hot temper himself, but it was superseded by a kind disposition and a desire for everyone around him to get along. His grandmother, Mrs. Birdie Urquhart, never made any bones about the fact that Robert was her favorite grandchildâand I have permission and even the blessing of Mrs. Urquhart's other two grandchildren to make that statement.
Mrs. Urquhart once told me that Robert was the only child she'd ever known, other than herself, who took to nature as if he were truly at home in it. When she told him the name of a tree, or bush, or bird, he would remember it. She said a bird once lit on his shoulder as they stood still in a thicket watching another bird, and the boy, though only five years old, knew to be still and not make a sound until the bird had flown off on his own. She said to him, Do you know what kind of bird that was on your shoulder? He said, Yes, but then wouldn't tell her what kind of bird he thought it had been. Later that afternoon she asked him again, and he said, I know what kind of bird it was. Was it a finch? He wouldn't answer. Was it a sparrow? He wouldn't answer. At supper she told the story to the others, and said, I know you know what kind of bird it was, Robert, so why won't you tell us? And Robert considered this a minute and then said, If I told you, a bird would never land on my shoulder ever again.
He is survived by his mother and father, Edsel and Janie Urquhart, his grandmother, Mrs. Birdie Urquhart, and his maternal aunts and uncles. Pallbearers are his uncles Tom, Bernard, and Rupert Williams, and the deacons of the United Methodist Church.
One morning in late February '77, suffering the gray chill of a drizzling front that seemed to swell his aching bones, Finus rose and went down to the
Comet
office before coffee, before the radio station, and began typing what he'd composed in his head during the night.
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A
VIS
C
ROSSWEATHERLY
B
ATES
, 76
Avis Crossweatherly Bates died last night, bitter and twisted in her body by the disappointments in her life, her heart. Her father was a hard man, and possessive, he loved her so much. Saw her as everything he hadn't been able to be or do, and what a burden that was. Because the school's girl's basketball team wore these cute little skirts to play in, he followed the bus to every game, never let her out of his sight, ever, she never made a move his stern bony countenance wasn't hovering over as if from a cloud at her shoulder, like an angry God.
After college, she taught history at the high school, and used to remind yours truly, whenever he got too full of himself, that no one through history remembered the lowly scribes but by the quality of their words, and that he was after all just a small-time hack. This was about as true as words could be.
Well, you can imagine. You fight your way into town from a hardscrabble cattle farm way up in the sticks, fight your way through college on an athletic scholarship in the days when (especially for women) that didn't amount to more than room and board, fight for your independence every step of the way, get the man you want, and it all turns to manure, after all. Marriage, a tough business. It wasn't happy for Miss Avis, that's for sure. Yours truly had no small role in that. And yours truly was never forgiven. Add that to the list, as there's plenty yours truly has never forgiven himself for, too. We tell ourselves, after they're gone, I should have been a better father, husband, friend, brother, sister, daughter, son. But truth is most of us do the best we can, just have a hard time accepting our limitationsâaccepting that we dealt with things according to our best lights and capacities for dealing. Disappointments flock to us like crows and mock us from their perches on buildings or the flimsy swaying tips of pines, or flying over, a glimpse of black wing and parted beak, or in dreams, caustic, ephemeral. You love someone, you hate them. The major crime, as has been said: indifference. The two-headed monster, love and hate, accompanies our halcyon days. Much love to Miss Avis, my estranged embittered bride. I ask her forgiveness for all inadequacies and wrongs. May she rest in peace.
Survivor: Finus Ulysses Bates, husband.
He'd wanted to add long-suffering after his name, but thought better of it. Let her have the last harsh words. On her deathbed, he'd been there, holding her hand. She'd looked at him, her red-rimmed eyes brimming with tears. -You ruined my life, she said in her strained and halting voice. He'd only nodded, squeezed and patted her hand. And later that night, she'd passed on. That was just Avis, she'd needed to say it. He never for a moment thought that, in her heart, she believed it was all that simple.