Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

— Parnell, hon, come on down to breakfast.

— What is it, Mama? I heard Papa leave.

She stood there a second, looking at him.

— That Littleton girl, she finally said, and looked then as if her senses came back. -She just up and walked out of here sometime last night!

— The dead girl, Mama?

— Well, his mother said slowly then, I suppose that’s what she was. But now she’s alive and down at the hospital.

— She’s at the hospital? He lay there breathing hard and looking at his mother, but she seemed distracted. -How can that be? he said barely above a whisper.

— How can anything be, darling? she said. -My good Lord, to think we came close to burying that child, and her alive the whole time.

Parnell could hardly find the words, but finally he said, — How did she come to wake up like that?

His mother looked at him oddly then, and his heart seized up for what seemed the hundredth time that day.

— I don’t know, she said slowly. -I guess she’d just slept long enough.

When his father came home and went downstairs, Parnell waited until he was alone and went down there and went quietly into the preparation room, where his father sat on a stool looking over some papers beneath the small lamp he had set up there.

— Papa? he almost whispered.

His father looked around at him over his glasses, then turned back to his work.

— Your mama tell you what happened?

— Yes, sir.

— Very strange business.

— Papa, he said after a minute. -Is that what happened to those other people?

His father turned slowly to look at him, removed his glasses.

— What other people, Parnell?

— The ones that would be gone.

His father said nothing, just stared at him. Then he saw him glance at the dark corner over the by the sinks and he saw old black Clint, his helper, standing there staring at him also, and a chill ran through him.

— The ones, I would come down and they would be gone?

His father continued to stare at him. Then he spoke slowly.

— It’s been a hard night for all of us, Parnell. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You need some sleep, son.

— I’m sorry, Parnell said. -I wasn’t spying on them.

— You should never come down here alone, Parnell, his father said. -Not yet. There are things you don’t understand. He paused. -Will I have to put a lock on the door?

— No, sir.

— Go on to bed, son, he said then.

His father watched him as he turned and walked out of the room and closed the door behind him and stood there a moment, and heard murmuring conversation between his father and old Clint but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He went upstairs to his room and lay there all day with no coherent thought in his head until sometime in late afternoon he dozed off, and would not come down to eat supper. His mother brought him a sandwich up to his bed and sat on his bedside smoothing back his hair as he ate it, and whispering, — Poor boy, sometimes I wish we weren’t in this business, it’s no place for a little boy to grow up.

— Yes, ma’am, he said, and forced some bites of the sandwich down, though his mind still raced wildly, and for the next several days, when he feigned sick to stay out of school, terrified to go there lest the other children see in his face what he’d done. Until finally he was forced to go back, and he crept the halls more fearfully than ever, more invisibly than ever, and spoke to no one, and became again simply the strange Parnell all the children had always known, who kept to himself and would be a mortician when he was older, and was therefore an oddity to be abided with some amusement and unarticulated dread. And after some time, late in the year, the dead girl returned to school, as well.

He would see her in the hallways, after that, but like Parnell she was more the way she had been than ever before. She clutched her books to her thin chest, she kept her eyes down at her feet, and moved quickly from class to class. But Parnell, when he saw her now, saw more than he could bear. Her life, her living, the vital self she carried through the drab hallways, seemed a continuous miracle and the source of a deepening shame, even as the horror at what he had done became for him in his private and unchallenged thoughts something commonplace. Replaced, as it was, by simple shame, a secret and unmentionable embarrassment. In what little niche of her memory was she aware of what had happened? In what dream that visited her in the hours she could not recall, long before she would awake, this miracle of awakening every day? What part of Parnell existed in there, to be known by no one but Parnell and a part of Constance Littleton that might never resurface, and if it did could not be believed? Some students, some of the boys, called her the Dead Girl and would laugh. Other students said she had no memory of anything from when she went to sleep until she woke up in the hospital. Wandered from the funeral home like some risen mummy and went straight to the hospital. It was like an angel had guided her there, some of the pious girls said. But if it was an angel, Parnell said to himself, it was a fallen one, awakened now to see the darkness of the world all around him.

SEVEN YEARS FINUS and Avis Crossweatherly spent in a desultory dance with one another, a rutting seven years in which they scratched whenever possible at an itch neither seemed able to truly satisfy for the other, yet they tried. In the seventh year Avis conceived and they married quickly in a ceremony at his parents’ beach house on the Alabama coast. They bought a small home in north Mercury and set about what would later seem to Finus the time-honored practice of slow connubial dissolution.

At a barbeque Earl Urquhart put on for several couples at his lake house one year, Finus and Avis lounged about on the patio of the little concrete block cabin sipping beer while the children ran in and out of the water, romping on the bank until they got hot again and then running back and jumping in. Only Finus and Avis’s little boy, Eric, did not join them. They’d forgotten his swimsuit, and he stood on the lawn looking awkward in the sailor boy outfit Avis had purchased for him the day before at Marx Rothenberg and which she’d forbade him to get dirty or wet. Finus watched as Eric stood in the sun there — a seven-year-old boy slightly pigeon-toed in his meekness, little hands by his sides, his pale straight hair almost glowing in the sunlight, looking more like a fragile gathering of light in the shape of a child than a real, a corporeal, child — as the other children shrieked and flopped onto the grass beside him and ran crying chasing one another back to the water, where they splashed around and screamed in delight. Every now and then Finus would see him glance back at the adults up on the patio in the shade of the loblolly pines.

In that moment Finus felt all his own failings as a father well up inside him and he lost his appetite for even the cold can of Falstaff in his hand, which he’d so relished just a couple of seconds before. He judged that his paternal failings emerged from his seemingly terminal distraction, his tendency to daydream his way through the days and to resent insistent intrusions along those wayward paths. He was moody, melancholy, and took a kind of joy in solitude, a well of this inside him that must be filled at regular intervals. And if it was not, if the demands upon his attention caused this well not to fill each day or week or month or season, he felt edgy and irritable — and, ironically though with perfect logic, somewhat empty inside.

He stole occasional looks at Birdie, who seemed entirely self-possessed and content sitting in her green metal patio chair and sipping a glass of lemonade, bouncing one leg over the other and talking to Cicero Sparrow’s wife, Cornelia, who took slugs of her third or fourth Falstaff and wore a ridiculously wide-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses, to hide the wreckage of her alcoholic, insomniac eyes. Avis stood beside Earl, wearing her cream-colored summer dress and her new canvas summer shoes from Earl’s store, her short light brown hair swept back behind her ears, her so-often-suspicious or angry green eyes alight with good humor and eager attention. She was still a handsome woman. Finus had at some point in their past let himself let go, stopped comparing her to Birdie in appearance and attitude, and resolved to love Avis for who and what she was, to open his heart to her own clenched one, to open his longing to her long and harder-edged beauty, for he knew it was something to appreciate. Avis tossed her head back at some joke Earl had made, her slightly hoarse voice rising in high laughter, and when she glanced over at Finus he gave her a little smile, and she gave him a big broad one back in just the moment before her eyes registered all their troubles again swiftly like some hole in the sky sucking day into dusk, their dimmed and diminishing happiness, what little there was. She turned back to Earl somewhat sobered.