Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

He looked up. Someone had hailed. A figure hardly more than a nebulous collection of white light, somehow on the courthouse lawn, though he could tell it was his boy, Eric, dead now almost fifty years. He wanted to call out, My darling son, my boy! and stood there a moment fixated in the vision of the moment. How was it he was seeing the boy at this time of the morning, when usually he only sensed his presence in distorted slips of air that revealed, like thin and vertical flaws in a lens, the always nearby regions of the dead? He waved back, his heart turning over in love and sadness. Closed his defective eye, damaged by a pellet of birdshot in 1918, and the boy dissolved back into the air.

PARNELL GRIMES, NOW county coroner as well as owner of Grimes Funeral Home, leaned over the stainless-steel preparation table and gripped the edges of the starched white sheet with his plump, short, pink fingers and pulled it away from Birdie Urquhart’s face. Even at this great age and dead she had a lovely face — a fact often more obvious in death, with the very old, since their stricken, weary, saddened, impish, or disengaged eyes distracted one from their essential features.

For a long time now he had believed that he and Miss Birdie were partners in the context of their secret crimes, he and Miss Birdie, each the perpetrator of some strange and solitary criminal act that no one would ever know about — or so she must have believed, for only he knew of both his and hers and he would never tell of either. But it was knowing of hers that made the bond, for him.

Miss Birdie’s face was classically oval-shaped with a good nose — straight, medium-length, none of the bulbousness of some old noses. She’d always had beautiful hair and kept it long, combed up in a bun or even in braids coiled at the back of her head, but now it had been let down and it lay white and fragile and across her bare left shoulder. He pulled the sheet away from her breast, hips, and legs, and looked upon her naked corpse, discolored around the edges of her buttocks and the backs of her arms and calves. As with many he tended, her skin had smoothed like a baby’s, its wrinkles fleshed with death’s gentle swelling, and had the seeming translucence of those white dead not sallow with tobacco smoking or racial complexity. He used to watch her when he was a boy and she was, he guessed, in her middle thirties, at the old Mercury Park pool. He’d owned a Kodak then and was known for going around taking pictures, all black and white, of course. One he’d taken was of several regulars there at the pool in the forties, a photo in which Miss Birdie’s image seemed luminous tissue among the shaded, shrunken features of the others. Next to Miss Birdie, they seemed corpses already, no more to Parnell’s practiced eye than fleshed skulls drying in their gradual and imminent declension toward the grave. Somehow the hard light of that day fell softly upon Miss Birdie and did not cast the sharp, cadaverous shadows it cast upon the others. They, the others, would preclude the creative process behind his art, which after all required a model, a ghostly ideal lingering vaguely in their faces. He used to watch Miss Birdie, her beauty reminiscent of the early movie stars’, unable to keep himself from fantasizing that she would depart the world early in some nondisfiguring accident, without the usual markings and poolings. And that he would be allowed to gaze upon her.

He felt for a moment a vague stirring of the old desire, but long ago he had vowed he would never again betray his calling. Was not a man in Parnell Grimes’s profession indeed a priest, a medium, the only one allowed to gaze upon the naked flesh of those whose bodies would not be seen again until they arose into the kingdom of heaven?

This analogy had not actually been his own. It was the inspiration of Selena Oswald, who would become his wife. Selena had given him the gift of redemption, so that he could live his life with some sort of hope for his confused and deeply stained soul. And it was the corpse of Miss Birdie here now before him that caused her, Selena, to swell again into the void she’d left inside him since she’d died.

He had thought perhaps he would never marry, would be like a suffering, perverted priest with many imaginary wives, the poor and vulnerable, old and young, ugly and beautiful, all lovely in God’s eyes, all returning to clay in his hands. But when he met Selena, then just twelve to his eighteen, he had lusted after her with the fervor that only a young man who believed he knew an exquisite corpse in the making could lust.

He had first seen and met her when he and his father had the unhappy occasion to prepare her mother, Mrs. Medina Oswald, for viewing and burial. The woman, only thirty-nine and known to be a vigorous Primitive Baptist, had died of a coronary, an hereditary ailment, her heart greatly enlarged. Parnell in his youth considered that her flaw most likely was the too-great love she exercised for her husband and children. Solemnly with his father he greeted them for the viewing: Mr. Oswald, a mailman bewildered by this unhappy event; his son James, a tall young deputy sheriff with the slow and solid look of a laborer; and then Selena. When he held out his hand toward her long, slim, pale one she did not move, and he looked up into her eyes and was shocked and even afraid. This twelve-year-old girl may as well have pierced his breast with a spear and held him before her as he died. Her gaze was not one of fearfulness or repulsion or anger, nor was it liquid with the more common helpless grief of the mourner. It was lucid. He sensed that in his own eyes she sought something no one had ever had the courage or audacity to seek before: the vision of her beloved as she was last, before the preparation, in the great nakedness of death, between the dying and the viewing. She looked down at Parnell’s hand, held oddly open before her, as if she understood something of the intimacy of his art, understood the nature of the intimacy he had experienced with her mother — and then she took it into her own flawless hand, sending a mild current through his arm. He believed she understood his secret, that which he’d hidden even from his father (who approached his craft with all the reverence of a taxidermist). She was on to him, instinctively, although she did not yet understand what she knew.

He courted her with patience, first befriending her brother James, and seeing her whenever he joined James at their house in the early mornings after cruising with James on the sheriff’s department’s graveyard shift, which is what they always called it whenever Parnell rode along. He learned much about police work, which would lead to his running for coroner and winning, but he learned even more about Selena, who would appear in the mornings, sleepy-eyed, one who did not especially like to rise, carrying her books in one of her father’s old and worn leather mailbags and dropping it beside the kitchen door so that she would not forget it on her sleepy way out. From the corner of his eye Parnell watched her, a tabby kitten named Rosebud in her lap, as she pushed her grits around and cut her fried egg as if it were of no more interest to her than a shingle. Then she would dutifully eat it all, without relish. Parnell knew that a woman with little interest in food beyond what was necessary for sustenance would age gracefully. And though slim the girl had hardly a visible bone about her, no hard and jutting cheekbones or brows or chin. Her nose, though straight, was small and unobtrusive. Her eyes neither bulged nor seemed so sunken as to suggest the specter of sockets. She would be beautiful until the end. He would never have to gaze upon her as bones and skin and a sac of dying organs wheezing, rotting even as she sat across from him at the breakfast table, still wearing the drawn and cracked deathmask of her desiccated facial cream. She would no more dry up than an apple never plucked from the tree, until it fell into the grass and reentered the soil discreetly in its swift and natural collapse from within, its skin retaining to the end its general dignity. She drank her milk like an athlete, though, and would eat her egg, eventually, and after some time would bid them farewell, saying, — G’bye, Jim, g’bye, Rosebud, g’bye, Mr. Parnell, her father having been gone since five o’clock to the post office.