Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

He wasn’t sure when he’d started thinking about Birdie again. He’d not exactly put her out of mind, especially since her friend Alberta McGauley wrote their community’s column for Finus’s paper, and was always including Birdie in her gossipy ramble. But he had spent some two or three years thinking of her only peripherally, as some vague recurring figure spinning past, as past, on fortune’s ever-spinning wheel. One early February, as if he’d poked a stick in the spokes of that wheel and stopped it, he ran into her on the sidewalk outside Schoenhof’s, chatted her up for half an hour in the windy chill before he let her go to walk the two blocks to Earl’s store, where she was headed. She was aging well. They both were. Her hair still long, and braided, pulled up onto her neck. A wool coat buttoned up, calf leather gloves. The wide gap in her smile. Pale blue eyes easy and unguarded, unaware, it would seem, of the slow accretion of rekindled interest in Finus. She gave him a peck on the cheek. He watched her cross the street, turn the corner, disappear, the small round spot in the hollow of his cold cheek tingling as if infused with warm, charged particles fine as powdered steel.

WHEN EARL BUILT the new house across the road he let stand an old cabin out back, hired a maid for Birdie, and let the maid live out there during the week so she could stay later and help with supper, and be there earlier to help with breakfast, too. Said he could afford it now and wanted life to be easy for her, Birdie. Well just guilt, that. The maid, a girl named Creasie, got on her nerves, shuffling around the house in her bare feet like an old woman though she was only twelve years old. Because of his interest in herbs, Birdie’s Pappy knew the old medicine woman who lived down in the ravine at the north end of Mercury, and knew she had raised this girl and wanted to put her to work. So Earl had gone and picked her up. But from the beginning Birdie had doubts about her fitness.

In those days around Mercury, when you wanted one of them you just drove your car to the front edge of the old ravine, up where it was still woodsy and there was a little dirt turnaround in the lot next to the old Case mansion, and honked your horn. Directly one of them would poke his head out of the trail leading down in there, a boy or a young man usually, and you’d say, I need somebody to dig me a ditch, or whatever, and the boy or young man would say, How big? Oh not big just about ten foot long, yea deep, and the head would go away and in about fifteen minutes or half an hour up out of there would climb one, two, three of them, male or female depending on the job (you could ask for a washwoman or even a midwife in a pinch). But unless there was a specific job to do you rarely saw them outside the ravine. They did their trading in town on Saturday afternoons. This girl Creasie was some kind of perfect example of a ravine nigra, seemed not only to be in her own strange little world but hardly communicated outside of it, either, just a lazy Ye’m, or No’m, or a noncommittal Mmm-hmm, or just a vague and inscrutable heh heh heh. Never really making eye contact. Kind of insolent, but nothing you could really nail down. Everybody said the ravine nigras were half wild animal, anyway, and half something else like wood spirit.

They hadn’t been in the new house a year before the day Junius brought the dummy home from the trip to Little Rock, had sat him up in the backseat of his car for the drive like he was a real nigra and so everybody that saw him driving back into town thought he’d brought a strange nigra home with him. He let everybody think he’d brought home a real nigra man from Little Rock, Arkansas, and put him into a shed behind their house, Earl and Birdie’s house, and kept him there like a prisoner. One of his practical jokes. Mercury was small enough even then so that everybody knew what everybody else was up to, and people would say Well he was not just a strange nigra he was a strange- looking nigra. Mr. Urquhart would drive through downtown at a good clip so they couldn’t get a hard look at him, just see this black head poking up in the backseat with seemed like a funny expression, but who would ever think it was a wooden man, a dummy? If white people couldn’t tell strange black people apart then how were they to distinguish between the wooden and the flesh? Being driven around town like with a chauffeur, which even she thought it was odd the way black people got driven around by white people, the reason being there was no sitting on the same seat together no matter what, but wasn’t it funny. People knew this nigra was not from the shanties down in the ravine unless they’d been hiding him down there for some reason, and so for a brief period people were speculating that Creasie’s people had been hoarding this strange nigra down in the ravine, maybe because he was dangerous, maybe because he was crazy, or both.

But all of it died down when Junius got tired of the game and took the nigra out of hiding and showed him around before bringing him back over to their house, sat him up in one of her cane-bottom chairs out on the back sunporch, till he could figure out what to do with him. Mrs. Urquhart wouldn’t let it in her house. Birdie had to walk past this grinning abomination whenever she was coming from the back of the house, and got to where she couldn’t stand it and started going through the living room instead. When Junius got tired of her pestering him about it, he finally just took Earl aside one day and said Earl could just keep the nigra. Birdie said, — Well what in the world are you going to do with such a thing?

Earl said, — I don’t know, maybe some kind of advertising.

— But you sell women’s shoes. How is a colored dummy going to help you sell women’s shoes?

— I said I don’t know, Earl said. -Maybe stand him up in the display window, waving people on inside.

— Waving?

— He’s an electric nigra, Birdie.

— A what?

— He’s supposed to operate an electric saw, kind that you pull the saw blade across the board. So his arm moves like that.

— Like how?

He showed her.

— That doesn’t look like waving to me.

He just looked at her.

— It almost looks nasty to me, without the saw or whatever’s supposed to be in his hand.

Earl looked at her and didn’t say anything, she thought he might blow up, then he walked off. And not two days later put the electric nigra back out in the shed and there he stayed.

Creasie was spooked by it, she could tell. If she was heading to the back of the house via the sunporch she’d pull up shy of the French doors from the dining room and veer off into the living room instead, take the long way around. Birdie’d thought she’d be glad too when Earl put it up, but when she said something Creasie mumbled, — No’m, Mr. Junius likes to take us out to the shed and talk to it.

— Say what, now? You and who?

— Me and the children.

Meaning her grandchildren, Ruthie’s two and Edsel’s little boy, Robert.

— What do you mean, talk to it?

— Yes’m. He talk to that dummy like it’s real, then make like it talking back.

She told Earl about it and he said, — So what? He’s just playing a game with the children.

— Well don’t you think it’s strange to keep a wooden dummy locked up in a shed behind the house and to take little children back there and pretend it’s real and can talk to them? And then to leave and lock it up in there again, them all the time thinking he’s got a nigra man locked up in a shed behind the house, sitting up on a shelf like some boogie man?

Earl just laughed to himself. -You tell him to quit it, if you want to. I don’t see anything wrong with it.