Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

— What are they doing out here, Pawpaw? Finus said quietly to his grandfather.

His grandfather, watching the man, said, — They live out here. Or did.

— Where are their houses?

There were no structures at all in this place, and mostly water, and little ground showing at all but for this knoll, and further on another two like it, where now other figures stood and hollered at them, waving their arms.

— Gone, his grandfather said. -The hurricane has washed them away. Out into the bay, maybe.

They took in the man on the first knoll and with him those left in his family, a woman and child and a man about the woman’s age. The man who’d stood first was older, with a long white beard, and had raised one arm when he’d seen them because it was all he had, his other sleeve wet and pinned upon itself higher up.

He said, — An angel of the Lord sent you to come find us here. We thought we were lost. Some were, he said. His voice was high and soft and trembling.

In the seat just behind Finus and his grandfather in the prow, on the bench between them and the two soldiers rowing, was the little girl he’d seen on the dog. She sat in the woman’s lap wrapped in a dry army blanket and staring at Finus with large, close-set watery blue eyes and a tiny mouth like the chirp of a bird.

— What’s her name? Finus said to no one in particular.

The girl turned her face and buried it in her mother’s chest. Her mother patted her and looked at Finus.

— Her name is Birdie, the woman said. -She’s my little girl.

— I’m Finus Bates, Finus said. -Were you out all night in that storm?

The woman said nothing but tears welled in her eyes and the man beside her put his arm around her and patted her shoulder.

— Shh, Finus, his grandfather said then, for he was near to crying, too, just seeing this and feeling for them in a way that surprised him, so suddenly, he just wanted to bawl.

The old man with the long white beard said, — It was the hand of God brought this storm, to punish us. This was a paradise, he said to the Commandant, his voice rising. -This was our Eden. Now we’re driven out, for our sins.

— Yes, sir, the Commandant said. -You’re safe now. We’ll have you all safe in the fort very soon.

— Where’s your dog? Finus said then to the girl, who yanked her head from her mother’s bosom and stared at him wide-eyed and then screwed her own face up tight and began to cry herself, as did Finus when the girl’s mother glared at him so.

— Pull, gentlemen, the Commandant said to the soldiers manning the oars. -We have more work to do when we’ve taken these few to safety.

They would find the dog, on the way back to the fort, barking with hopeless energy on a treeless nub of wet sand some ways to the west, and pick him up, and the girl hugged him to her tightly until they arrived at the fort and her mother coaxed her arms from around it until they could get inside, whereupon the girl sat in a corner in one of the munitions rooms and held the dog tight and would not let go, every time Finus peeked in around the corner she was there, holding the dog like it was a huge impassive furry child that only she had the power to comfort.

In the years after the storm, Birdie’s grandfather moved them to Mercury, where he’d received succor long ago on his way home from the Civil War, and where Finus’s grandfather had told him he and his kin would also befriend him. Finus played with her when they went to visit. He and Birdie roamed in her grandfather’s garden, among the bougainvillea, azaleas, and deeply sweet-scented gardenias, down the hill behind their house into the woods where they would roll little balls of sweetgum sap onto their fingers and chew it delicately between their top and bottom front teeth. Birdie’s two front teeth were gapped, which gave him a strange stirring in his heart. But she was no more claimable then for sappy loving sentiment than she ever would be, and would always deflect his attempts to moon. Uxorious was a word he later learned and would apply. She had a face, it seemed to him, that was unreal somehow, as perfectly unreal as a doll’s yet with the capacity to open, become human in an instant, and suck him in unawares. Her chattering banter would cease and she would be vacant, not unlike someone having a mild epileptic seizure. As if she’d been grazed by a fleeting memory and her mind had gone out with it for a ways. And then, her mind coming back to the moment, she would turn her eyes to him and before he could gather his far-flung self again she had drawn him into her like some stronger, brighter heavenly body. He was possessed, almost, something essential in him trapped in her, trapped but not entirely uncomfortable. He could never quite reconcile her real presence with what her presence suggested to him, and it kept him not only enchanted but also confused in some deep sense he couldn’t grasp. More than one evening after a visit he wished he could convince his father to drive them back out to the Wells house, so he could see she was still there and had not vanished, that he hadn’t only imagined or daydreamed the day. This was not her fault. To her mind, as far as he could tell, she was as normal as the next girl. It was all in Finus, this sense of her. He had no idea what to say to her. When he looked into a mirror, it was if he saw nothing there.

She would point out the trees and flowering shrubs and tell him their names, taught to her by her grandfather. The shapes of their leaves and of their branching were for her the fundamental shapes in the world, what could be more beautiful, as God knew what shapes by which our minds arranged themselves, by which our imaginations are arranged. And he would name with her the songbirds he heard calling and could identify that way, his own grandfather’s gift to him, those flitting shapes like darting shadows or figments of the spirit.

Like all early childhood friends they drifted apart with different schools and new friends, though their families attended the same church and later they attended school together, too. But he wouldn’t be touched again by that sense of her, as if his spell had been suspended, until her cartwheel. In an instant, and unexpected, it would happen again. Years later, off to college, he would write an essay in his English class, ostensibly on a couple of English poets. He would describe a hypothetical situation in which a young man is watching a young woman across a large crowded room, such as at a ball or dance. The young man’s hands are shaking. He has seen her walk into the hall that evening and a great roaring has begun in his ears and receded into the back of his head. His vision has tunneled down as if he is about to faint. He sees two little images of her before him, tiny as if in a miniature painting on his corneas. He later decides that every bit of his blood had rushed to his heart, and that there could not be a more powerful sign of love than your almost dying in the presence of it, than it being so powerful it could kill you. His transformation is complete. This phenomenon, Finus realized when he was forced to read things like Astrophel and Stella and Shakespeare’s sonnets, was a thing from the past, a different world, when people really did die of love. Maybe because it was just harder to end up with the one you loved back then, because of stricter rules and harder circumstances in general. But also maybe because love was more real to them then, when there were fewer things you could use to distract yourself from something so frightening and strange. That’s the modern habit, he wrote in his paper, the fear of love has become so ingrained in our character that we no longer even recognize love, in the same way that we shy away from the recognition of evil, for fear it will consume us with its terrible and inexplicable attraction. The professor wrote back, Mr. Bates, other than a suggestion to find a more powerful and graceful word than inexplicable , your essay is remarkable, and I should only hope that you are able to complete your studies at the university before whatever it is that threatens to consume you does so and ruins your academic career.