Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

None of the Wells girls turned out well in married life, she guessed, well Pud did but Lucy didn’t. She was so beautiful, Lucy, nothing but a set of big brown eyes in a little birdlike face, and married that silly man couldn’t let go of his mama and then had to just divorce him, and then married that old goat, wasn’t nothing but a servant to him, he wouldn’t take her anywhere. Birdie felt so sorry for her. Pud’s Anton was a good man but he was as crazy as she was, always clacking his teeth out like a cash drawer, the kids just loved it.

There was that mockingbird come back and looking in. If he had any sense he wouldn’t build in the camellia, he’d build in one of the trees in the yard. She loved to climb trees when she was a little girl but once she got up there she’d be too scared to climb down. Never would forget, climbed up in the loft one time and couldn’t get down, and stayed there and worked her stomach till she nearly bled, she was so scared. Always scared of heights but couldn’t help but climb up. Just a birdbrain, she guessed, reason they named her Birdie.

The mockingbird went into his repertoire, so loud it sounded right in her ear.

Sometimes she liked to think she could have poisoned Earl like Levi and Rae said. It was so ridiculous, she liked to think she could have done it. She’d thought she was losing her mind there for a while, would go into the spice cabinet pulling out little spice tins, sniffing, thinking, Did I do something I didn’t even know? She had for a while put boiled sassafras water in his coffee because there was a doctor in Huntsville who’d said it countered the bad effects of tobacco. But she’d stopped because Earl said it tasted so bad. But could it have done some damage before she stopped? It froze her to think so. Levi and Merry had it like some old detective story, like she’d made him scrambled eggs one morning and sprinkled arsenic or — what was it Pappy had in his garden? hemlock — into it, and he’d gobbled it up, gone out and got into the pickup and over to the lake, down to the woodpile to chop some wood, the old mare snuffling up to him wanting some sugar, and fell out, spooking the horse so it ran off across the dam and into the woods. She liked to think sometimes she could have done that, not because she hated him or wanted him to die but just because it’d surprise everybody so, the ones with any sense, who weren’t crazy, it’d be so contrary to their notions about little old Birdie — Merry might have said she was devious but get right down to it she thought she was a birdbrain, too. It’s been so many years since all that, she couldn’t even be sure to tell you the truth herself that maybe she didn’t.

Mockingbird was so loud she couldn’t even see, like she was passing through that song into nothing.

THAT MORNING, FINUS had steered his old Chevy pickup into the long driveway, two parallel curving shaded wheelpaths of cracked concrete ruptured here and there by the roots of thick tall oaks, and parked beside the old pumphouse beyond which now leaned the stacked empty carapaces of gutted ancient automobiles. They filled the once grassed little meadow between the house and old Creasie’s cabin at the back edge of Earl’s property. But since his death these discarded wrecks had been hauled here for storage from Birdie’s son-in-law’s junkyard across the side road. It was something probably would have driven Earl Urquhart into a rage, him a man so in love with glamorous cars that he’d bought new every year, always paying cash. He’d had him a nice little estate out here, Finus thought as he helped his old collie, Mike, down from the passenger side and together they walked around the house back into the front yard to the main entrance.

He’d held the railing to the broad covered stoop and climbed the old Mexican tile steps, rung the buzzer. Another car went by out on the old highway, its tires slapping a regular rhythm on the tar dividers. In a minute the door to Birdie’s house opened to reveal Creasie, bent over a little. She looked up at him, then cast a scant eye down at Mike, then stood back and held the door open. -Come on in, she said, shooing them, as if they were both old dogs late for a feeding. -She don’t want no company but I imagine she’ll see you. She said the other day she wanted to talk to you. He passed Creasie and nodded down to her, her appraising eye cast up at him, and he took in her old dress cinched up beneath her baggish bosoms and ending at the SlimJim presence of her scrawny shins. Her feet in dilapidated Keds like tattered skiffs with big dusky bunions thrust out either starboard prow.

— Hello, Creasie, he said, to force a greeting.

— Mr. Finus.

— She in the den?

— She in the back laying down, Creasie said, already headed that way. -I’ll go see if she’s awake.

He followed her as far as the living room and stopped while Mike wearily followed Creasie on back. The room contained, as if sealed there, the chilled stale odor of a neglected museum dedicated to the finer middle-class living room in the 1940s. Heavy furniture with thick and gnarled wooden protrusions like mummified hands at the ends of the armrests, no give he knew to the cushions beneath fabric developing the sheen of old clothing mothballed for years, springs as hard as the springs on the rear axle of his truck. A grand piano at one end of the room gave his peripheral vision the image of a reconstructed stegosaurus. The gas logs in the fireplace, artificial hickory, not fired in twenty years. Then Creasie’s rag head popped into the far doorway and beckoned. He started across the living room, passed Creasie going the other way and listing slightly to one side, drifting back toward her kitchen.

Birdie was more drawn than before and pale, as people whose hearts are failing are, skin seeming thinner and papery, and her pale blue eyes were rheumy, though he could still see in them the innocent mischief that was her nature. She laughed.

— Mike’s already made himself at home.

The old dog had lain down beside the window, and looked with his eyes over at Finus coming in as if to say what kept you?

— You look all right, Birdie. You still look yourself.

This was true if qualified by age and illness. She was puffy with the fluid around her heart. Her hair was long and clean, silver and resting across her shoulder as she sat up against the pillows. Still the small impertinent mouth and gapped teeth. But her eyes were rheumy behind the wire-framed glasses, her hands bent and all spotted up, nails long and yellow, she’d been cared for but couldn’t really care for herself, the details showed.

— I’m not sure I ever wanted just to look myself, she said, and laughed a little.

Her bedroom was pleasant and even fairly cool, though the day was hot, late July. It was at the northeast corner of the house, and there were windows on the north and east walls, and outside the windows there were blooming azaleas, and out in the oak-shaded yard beyond there were dogwoods that in March had been solid white with blossoms, now pale-barked and leafy green. Birds flew from the dogwoods and the oaks nearer the creek at the border of the property and flitted into the azaleas, you could hear them pecking at its mulch below. A mockingbird sat somewhere nearby out of sight but not out of mind, belting a repertoire. Finus liked to imagine the phrases the birds were going through: ohmygodhelpme! ohmygodhelpme! dearme dearme dearme, lookahere! lookahere! boogedieboogedieboogedie, therewego therewego therewego, who, me? who, me? stick close! stick close! stick close! stick close! I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. Some mornings he woke up and heard the Eurasian collared doves calling, a big Old World bird new to Florida and spreading north fast, their voices hoarse like young roosters crowing, What world is this? What world is this?