Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

— Well Mr. Earl or Miss Birdie neither one much like dogs. Mr. Earl had him a hunting dog but he give it away to somebody. Miss Birdie hates dogs for they smell.

— Reckon that’s why they like the niggers around, he said.

She came to like him. A long and knobby man, knees and elbows as dry as dust and gray as ash, voice like the sleeping grumble of some panther beast.

— Only part of you still wood, she said to him that evening, giving him a squeeze.

He didn’t know what she was talking about and just mumbled, — What you talking about wood, and not much else as he wasn’t a talker.

She said, — Wooden man can’t make no babies.

He looked at her like he might say something sharp then, so she shut up.

Miss Birdie says the next day, — I don’t want you living in sin back there. If that man’s going to stay with you, you ought to get married. It ain’t right.

— Ye’m, we married, she said.

— I mean in a church, Miss Birdie said. And later she heard her saying to Mr. Earl, — Well where’d he come from?

He says, — I don’t know.

— He might be a thief.

— I think he’s just one of them turpentine niggers, come up from Florida to work the trees.

Mmm hmmm, Creasie thought, back in the kitchen scrubbing the stove. A tree spirit, come out of the tree when somebody carves themself a wooden dummy, been cooped up in a little shed and now out and resting free for a while with Creasie. She laughed to herself. She looked out the window and he was out in the yard, standing by a rake and staring back through the window at her. A little chill ran in her. She went back to the stove and when she looked up again he was gone and the pile of leaves he’d raked lying on the ground. She slipped out the kitchen door and ran around the corner and didn’t see him and kept on running, all the way around the house, Miss Birdie’s head popping out a window she just passed and calling, — Creasie! Where are you running to?

— Ye’m, (she would explain after she had stopped, seen him raking way out in the front yard by the magnolia tree, big dry leaves clacking at the rake, and sneaked back into the kitchen, out of breath), I was just chasing an old stray cat out of this kitchen.

— A cat ? she says. -What kind of cat?

— Ye’m, I on know, some stray. Some old orange thing, ears nubbed off.

— Orange! Miss Birdie says. -Now I saw an old gray cat slinking around here a while back. What’s all these strays!

— Ye’m, he kind of gray.

Miss Birdie stops and gives her that look.

— Well now was it orange or was it gray? I declare, Creasie, sometimes I think you just make things up whole cloth.

— Ye’m, well I try to tell the truth, but you know them stray cats move pretty quick, like my colors blurs. I think maybe the lectric done messed with my visions.

The look on Miss Birdie’s face then, just mystified, which was just as well, was what you ought to want in white folks, being colored.

EARL LOVED TO get into the Chrysler and head for the coast, Pascagoula, Maurier’s fish camp on the river, take his boat out into the Sound and go for redfish and trout. Fishing was one thing he loved to do to relax. Take Frank along, nigger riding in the boat on the trailer behind the Chrysler. Quick son of a bitch got to where he could catch a Camel butt when Earl flicked it out the window and it zipped back in the slipstream. Frank’d catch it in one big palm and calm as you please take it and get almost half a smoke out of what was left, taking it between two fingers and smiling at him as he smoked it, looking at him as he watched in the rearview mirror as if to say, All right white man, it’s your game but I can play it better than you, up yo ass, all right. So he got to where he would take him out on the boat too, in the mornings, Frank hung over from wherever he wandered off to the night before, some kind of coastal whore, probably white, the son of a bitch. He was a strange and sly one.

Junius said, — Why you want to hire that nigger to work around your place when I had provided a perfectly good electric nigger to do for you? Laughing.

— I wish you hadn’t sold that thing, Papa.

— You couldn’t rig it to rake leaves and mow the grass, I reckon. Wasn’t doing nothing here but sitting in that shed. I’m disappointed in you.

— I’m not a mechanic. You want to give me an electric yard nigger, give me an electric yard nigger, not one rigged up to cut boards in half.

— No imagination, son. It’s like the country, now. We can’t come up with something new to do with all these niggers multiplying like rabbits, we better hurry up and send them all back to Africa, like they should’ve done after the Civil War.

— I don’t think, Earl said, it was or is possible to load millions of niggers onto a hundred thousand boats and ship them all to Africa, contrary to popular belief.

— Well, we could’ve tried , Junius said. -Hitler wouldn’t have ever gone to war with us, would’ve needed our advice on how to get rid of the Jews.

— Well you warm my heart, Papa, Earl said. -And after you naming one of your sons after a Jew businessman.

— You know I don’t mean it, Junius said. -Old Levi was a good man, wasn’t like some Jews, whereas the only good nigger I ever knew was that electric one you had out in your shed. Kept his mouth shut, didn’t complain, worked when you plugged him in, stayed out of sight.

They were out in the backyard drinking lemonade.

— I tell you what, Earl said, things are going to have to change at some point. You had colored boys fighting in the war, fought for their country, came home and still just niggers, here. How you think that sat with them? I don’t see the harm in treating colored people like human beings. I’m not saying treat them like they’re white. But you treat people right and they’ll treat you right, colored or white. Trash is trash, colored or white. You deal with good people, you get good results.

— I tell you what, they shouldn’t have taken them in the army. Teaching niggers how to fight a war? That’s crazy. Hell, they’ll kill us all.

— Well I’m not sure I’d blame them. I was colored, I’d hang every white man I could get my hands on.

— See what I mean, Junius said.

— It’ll all settle in, one of these days, Earl said. -It’ll take a hell of a long time, but one day they will have their piece of the world, and my grandchildren or their children will be going to school with their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And whites will be marrying colored. And everybody becoming some kind of light shade of brown. That’s what it’ll be one day.

— I think you have lost your mind.

— It’s the law of nature. Things change slow but they always change. We got some shading going on already, have for a long time, and thanks if I may say so to many fine upstanding white people, present company not excluded.

— I don’t have any nigger children running around.

— I’m sure you put on a rubber every time you visited the woodpile.

— Ease up, son, Junius said. -My woodpile days is over, I expect. I’ll leave it to them boys delivering mail and newspapers to the quarters, such as that, getting their payment in the bedroom.

He drained his glass and rattled the ice in the bottom.

— How about getting up and getting your old papa another glass of lemonade.

— How about you call for one of them murderous niggers works for me to get it for you?

Junius said nothing, just held the glass toward Earl with an impassive, sweaty look on his face. Earl sighed, got up, and took the glass into the kitchen.