Brad Watson: The Heaven of Mercury

— Bertram wouldn’t bite you, darling, I can’t find a mark anywhere, her mother said.

— I know, Birdie said softly.

— Well what happened, then, her mother whispered.

— Nothing, Birdie said. -I think I fell asleep sitting there. I must have had a bad dream.

Her mother kissed her and went out, closing the door. And later, when she was half asleep and heard somewhere distant in her mind the opening and closing of the bedroom door again, and a shuffling of little bare feet on the floor, she heard Pud’s voice whisper hot in her ear, Giddyup , and the two of them giggling as they ran back to their beds.

— Shut up, you hear me, she whispered loud back. -You just shut up, the both of you.

ONLY A FEW years after that, just married, she and Earl drove to Pensacola for their honeymoon. He was yippy the whole drive down, along those dusty country roads, and she could tell it was nervousness, and come to find out nervousness made his feet sweat, first time she had realized that, bad timing. He was undressing in the room, taking off his shoes, she in bed in her nightgown with the covers pulled up to her chin and trembling herself, but it struck her and before she thought she said, — What’s that smell, is that your feet? And he flushed red and went into the bathroom, she heard the tub water running, splashing around, he comes out in a minute with his trousers rolled up, his white bony feet on the hardwood floor. They were in the San Carlos Hotel.

— My feet sweat me sometimes, he said.

— Well, she said. -That’s all right. You’re human.

He finished undressing, she looked away, then peeked.

— My lands!

— What?

— Oh! She pulled the covers up over her eyes.

— That’s what it’s supposed to do, he said.

— Well I don’t want to look at it, she said. -Turn off the light. He did and got under the covers on his side, then sidled up and started kissing on her, rubbing himself hard against her.

— It feels like a bone or something, she said. Terrified he would stab her with it.

But he didn’t say anything else, passion just came over him, she guessed. She was too frightened to feel passion herself.

— Stop! she said. -Wait. I’m not ready.

— You have to be ready, he said, it’s our wedding night. Like he was all out of breath, and hoarse, and his breath stinking of cigarettes.

— Did you brush your teeth? Your breath smells so of those old cigarettes.

And something else, just the hint.

— Is that your feet, still?

— Well hell , he said, I washed them.

— Well maybe it’s just in my nose. Don’t cuss.

But then he was pushing on in her and she kind of screamed before she could stop herself. She’d found out later, much as she and her friends would talk about that sort of thing, much as old Dr. Wilson would tell her about it, that you could be ready for such as that, but she had little idea at the time, and the same went with Earl, the way he acted. And the pain. She tried to push him off her but he was too strong. Maybe some girls had muscles, girls like Avis, but she was spoiled. And she hadn’t ever liked a man enough to make her feel that way, to get ready , she just hadn’t. Spoiled that way, too, she guessed. But he kept on, didn’t take long but seemed like forever, like when the doctor went to work on you but even worse, the old snorting devil having his way, just a nightmare. And later that night, too, and the next morning. She could hardly stand up, much less walk. Didn’t want to leave the room, anyway, ashamed. After that just the thought of it scared her so, she wouldn’t let him touch her for a long while.

That’s what passes for sex, they can have it, she said to herself. She’d thought it would be tender, like a kiss, but down there, a gentle touching or pressing, a joining. Her childhood had just vanished. Of course Ruthie came along not too long after that, she was a mother at the age of seventeen. Sometimes she’d wake in the middle of the night, Earl sleeping beside her, Ruthie in the basinette at the foot of the bed, and she’d want to cry a little bit. Though she’d go into another room and do it. No sense in letting him see how unhappy she was. There was nothing to do about it but try to be happy, or satisfied anyway with her lot. She’d allow herself to grieve for the things that she missed in her life, as long as she was the only one who knew.

SNOW FELL SPARSELY on the frozen dirt road from Mercury out to the country, where they were going, dusting in the wind across the pastures. Creasie was cold inside the quilts Aunt Vish had given her. She was then just turning twelve years old, in two days. Aunt Vish had given her the women’s secret that week, about the miseries, having babies. They were headed out to a house where Aunt Vish was going to midwife for a woman she knew.

Aunt Vish didn’t like cold or snow. She had wrapped herself in two or three old gray horse blankets, hard to tell how many, and wore a pair of clean, frayed cotton gloves so her hands wouldn’t freeze holding the reins. Every now and then she picked up an old riding crop, set in a knothole on the seat beside her, and flicked it against the rolling haunch of the big work horse that pulled their buckboard wagon along the road.

It was the first time Creasie’d seen snow. It didn’t come here often, Aunt Vish said, sometimes not for twenty years, not enough to stick, anyway. There was a hush over the land. Every ragged isolated call of a crow, every faintly piercing hawk whistle, stood alone in the mind for that moment, the only sound in a silent world. The little road was clean and white, their buckboard wheels first to mark the snowy ruts. Creasie’s nose was cold, but she kept the blanket parted to see the stark pastures, so pretty, the bare and veiny lone pecans and oaks, the long narrow pines.

Aunt Vish flicked the crop and nodded her head. Creasie looked up to see the little shack in the snow-dusted yard, beneath the splayed heavy bare limbs of a single oak. A cold black washpot sat on black dead coals below the leaning porch. A curl of gray wispy smoke rose from the narrow brick chimney. Three small black faces peered out from plain colorless curtains. Going to be cold in there, too, Creasie thought.

But inside, just one big room with a fireplace full of seething coals, the air was overly warm and smelled strong and ripe, like a squirrel just after Aunt Vish skinned it fresh in her little kitchen, and bad, too, like poop. An iron kettle hung low over the fireplace coals, something inside it steaming.

A dozen or more pairs of black eyes looked at her from faces nearly hidden in the gloomy light. Children from big to small, standing against the walls and squatting on the floor, all of them looking at Aunt Vish and then at her, at Vish, at her. She stuck to her spot where she’d stepped just inside the door.

Aunt Vish shed her coat and went straight for the steaming pot to ladle some of what was in it to a basin. She took a bar of soap from the hearth, dropped it in the basin, then went over to the big bed where the woman lay under a pile of quilts and blankets. A bright round copper face shiny with sweat, its brow furrowed, peered from where it was sunk in a dirty-looking pillow.

A big man she hadn’t seen got up from a little wooden chair in the corner by the door and went outside. Creasie went to the window and looked out. The man walked past their buckboard and horse and walked straight into the woods across the road and didn’t come out. She saw, didn’t notice when he’d got up, that he wore no shirt, the gray-black skin looking frozen on his back. A little wisp of steam seemed to rise from his short, crumply hair. A gray tufty cat, trotting like a dog, followed the man across the road and into the woods. The cat had come from under the house. Creasie slipped back out the door and went to the edge of the porch, leaned over, and peered under it. The eyes and impassive faces of a small colony of cats and dogs peered back from curled, puffy forms laid about on the packed earth.