Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

— 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.

AS 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.

EARL LEROY URQUHART, 55

He built a sound business and his own small wealth from little more than grit, savvy, long hours, and professional integrity.

He loved nothing more than taking his skiff to Pascagoula to fish for trout, redfish, Sound cats, and tarpon.

He once hit a negro woman on the head with a high-heel shoe, in his store, for some impertinence.

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.

ROBERT EDSEL URQUHART, 22

When he was only five years old, he wandered into the woods near his family’s home and was lost — so everyone thought — until nightfall, when searchers saw the light of a fire. Reaching that spot, they found little Robert, pellet gun by his side, roasting a young squirrel over a campfire. A little lean-to he’d constructed sheltered him from the elements. He invited everyone to sit down and join him for supper.

He was a precocious child in other ways, as the family story goes that he could stand on the transmission hump on the car’s backseat floorboard and name the make and model of every car headed their way before it got to within a hundred yards.

But he definitely seemed more at home in the woods, and there wasn’t a plant or animal he didn’t know by name and habitat, simply by first-hand observation. This, in a time when the big woods had already begun to disappear in the south, and there was something of the boy that seemed not of his time, and something that seemed to project a quiet awareness of this. He would have spent every waking minute in the woods, had his family allowed it — they almost wish they had, now.

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 girlfriend — boy was a friend of his — not 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 grandchild — and 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.