Brad Watson - The Heaven of Mercury

When she turned fifteen he began to strike up conversations with her whenever they were alone in the kitchen or the living room or on the Oswalds’ front porch. Then he began to invite her on walks down to the drugstore or to the park just beyond. And it was there, one day, she admitted that his continued presence in their home had allowed her to move gradually beyond her grief over her mother, and finally to imagine those who daily lay before him to be embalmed.

— Embalmed, she said to him. -Parnell (for she’d stopped calling him Mr., which he missed in a way), that word had always horrified me. But the more you were around, I started to think about it in another way, thinking about the word balm in the middle of it. I started to think that you see it as soothing the body, in a way.

Parnell’s heart surged. They were sitting on a bench beneath a broad water oak in the park, she on one end and he on the other. He was the most ordinary-looking of men, shaped something like a cheap cigar, small hands and feet, beginning to bald. But though his face, neither round nor slim, had no distinguishing features, it was saved by his eyes, which were mysteriously handsome — it was as if Errol Flynn had stepped up behind a cardboard cutout of Parnell and put his eyes behind the empty eyeholes. And women had often been arrested, just for a moment, upon gazing at Parnell, until they remembered where they were and who they were talking to, and pulled themselves back into the world, looking upon Parnell Grimes, mortician, and they determined that his captivating eyes were merely another manifestation of his strangeness and even perhaps part of what made him creepy.

And now Selena looked into them. She had known him long enough, had become accustomed to him, so that as will happen she saw his eyes moreso than she saw the rest of him.

— Yes, he said. - Embalmed is a beautiful word. What it really means is to preserve the memory of the beloved, to cherish the memory. It is not distasteful to me.

— Parnell, she said, what does one look like when you get it?

He paused. He knew exactly her dilemma as she gazed at him, her heart filled with morbid curiosity, her mind with the budding intelligence of a girl near marrying age — she was sixteen now. How could he answer so as to maintain an element of each in her, to open her imagination to his art in a way that he must have in a lifelong companion? Were he to wed a woman who would take the conventional view she would soon shudder and shun him as she would the idea of her own mortality when such awareness descended upon her. He would marry only one who understood the beauty of death’s role in the world and, beyond that, the strange and inviolable beauty of the dead themselves.

Oh, he could tell her some horrible things. Of breaking jaws to fix gaping mouths into beatific smiles. How one must cement the eyelids down to keep them from popping open as the loved ones gazed upon them one last time. Of embalming fluid seepage. Of how Mrs. Vogel’s skin began to turn green. Of the time he helped his father to sew up and sew on the head of Mr. Fondelet, which had been removed somewhat raggedly by his disker. Of how her own mother’s face was hardened into such a grimace from her painful death his father’d had to pry it into a more relaxed expression and keep it there by inserting three steel rods. But these things were immaterial, in Parnell’s view. What mattered was the presentation, the viewing of the final restoration. The body was no longer important, in itself. In truth, it was the ravaged memory of the bereaved that Parnell restored.

He tried to take her hand, but she shrank and pulled it away.

— Selena, he said after a moment, holding her uncertain eyes with his own gaze. He chose his words carefully. -I know you might think me strange. But when I go into the preparation room and take my first look at the beloved, I feel the most soothing kind of peacefulness flow into my heart.

He felt her relax her resistance then, after a moment.

— I don’t think it’s strange, Parnell, she said, looking calmly and frankly right back at him now. -Shouldn’t we feel at peace around the dead? It seems to me like they prepare the way for us, in their brief presence with us, I mean. In our minds.

Parnell was astounded and, for a moment, speechless.

— You’re too young to be so wise, he said.

Her expression, as she considered this, was inscrutable. She looked away.

— I have always had, she said, a certain understanding of things. For a while, I felt very close to God.

He leaned forward and took her hand.

— Selena, my calling is almost religious, to me. When I see the dead lying alone and unadorned on my preparation table, they look to me like they are God’s children once again. To me they are as beautiful as babies, and it is my privilege to place them, like the midwife, into God’s hands.

He had the soft but commanding voice of a gentle preacher, Parnell did — not unlike her own late mother’s, she said to him once — and Selena’s face had opened as if hearing him read from the scripture.

They married the day after her graduation from the high school, and rented a little cottage far out the peninsula down at the Gulf, not far from the old fort. Since it was already hot they would emerge only in the late afternoon or early evening to play in the surf or to hunt for sea turtle nests in the dunes. Later they ate shrimp and fish they bought from a little seafood plant on the bay and cooked in the cottage’s tiny kitchen. She didn’t know much about cooking, Selena, not being one who much cared about food. But the first evening, she seemed proud as she set the steaming plate of boiled shrimp between them on the dining table and took her seat. They’d been on the beach all afternoon and were still in their bathing suits, and as she placed the meat of a large shrimp between her teeth and bit into it, its juice spurted toward Parnell. Startled, she laughed with her mouth open, holding the other half of the steaming shrimp between her thumb and middle finger. Parnell stood up from his chair. She watched him, waiting, then dropped the shrimp gently onto her plate. They engaged in a slow precoital tango toward the daybed in the living room. Their fingers clutched skin still sticky and gritty from the afternoon on the beach, still pale beyond the possibility of tanning, blushed with sun and red-rimmed about the edges of their suits. Parnell, in love, his mind on fire with love as if he’d inhaled some powerful essence of it from Selena’s pores, nevertheless sensed an irritating hesitation deep in his blood. A gray fear began to gather behind his eyes like iron filings. He closed his eyelids and attempted to pray as he normally only pretended to pray. As he did he felt Selena change somehow, and fearing he’d ruined the moment with her he opened his eyes and pulled back to find her looking at him in a way that nearly froze him. It was the same look she’d locked upon him the first time they met, at her mother’s funeral, when she had first divined his secret. And now he felt something happening in her. He felt it in his fingertips against her sunwarmed skin, now cooling. He felt the very character of her tissue begin to evolve against him, and he was afraid.

A word escaped her lips as little more than a breath: — Parnell, she said, her lips barely moving. Her eyes no longer penetrated him, but softened in focus and seemed to drift away.

— What is it? Parnell whispered in return.

— Parnell, she said, I want to pretend.

— Pretend what? he said, his voice scarcely more than the last little bit of a breath to empty the lungs.

She made an absent gesture with her hand, turning it outward, palm up, as if to receive a coin, or a key.

— Pretend I am more beautiful than alive.