The Heaven of Mercury

Finus ex Machina

FIVE HUNDRED FEET above the highest building in downtown Mercury, thrust up amidst the light and swirling, lifting fog, the tower beacon for WCUV-AM glowed on and off with the regularity of a low pulse. Its red bulb illuminated a sphere of fog, so that it looked as if some throbbing, miasmic planet were drifting in the nebulous field of another, yet unformed. But then the huge red sun rose behind it all, the fog dissipated in wisps and curls, and you could see the skeletal structure of the tower, its base attached to the tip of the Dreyfus Building, at fifteen stories the closest thing to a skyscraper Mercury had. From a great distance it appeared to stand like a lone building left after a cyclone, though actually surrounded by all the low and empty-eyed smaller buildings in this slowly dying downtown, where few even of the remaining residents shopped or strolled, a town of twenty thousand that had been twenty thousand now for almost the entire century, a static death in a growing region, all migratory growth flowing around it. The aging downtown buildings, homes, railyards and junkyards, fairgrounds, car lots, truck stops, drab shopping centers, and small factories of Mercury were strewn east and west from this locus along a narrow valley one hundred miles inland from the Gulf coast, as if hurled there by the tornado that actually had destroyed the old section of downtown by the railroad tracks in 1906.

That being the blow that both stalled the city’s momentum as a growing rail and trade center and drove nearly all its black population out of what had been a discrete and sprawling neighborhood around the tracks and (destitute) to a wooded area around a long and broad wooded ravine north of town owned by the scion of a decrepit and brambly once-plantation there, a man who claimed that since the Case family had brought all the black people to Mercury in 1837, a Case should take care of them now when they had nowhere to go. He allowed them to squat in his woods, gave them rough materials with which to build little shacks, gave them food in the beginning, and there protected they huddled and intermarried and developed a reputation among Mercury whites as being insular, strange, and half-wild creatures of the wood, domesticated only to the point of performing household chores. Just in the previous thirty years or so, the last Case descendants either long dead or moved on to another kind of life, they had begun to trickle out to homes in old neighborhoods around the ravine and quietly slip their best (as wood creatures slip into our midst unbeknownst) into the local public schools and state universities and beyond, to live as real human beings in the real world. Mercury was still a curiously segrated town in that way. At this point, only its odd enervation knew no ethnic or social constraints.

The valley was a river basin once thicketed with tall pines and broadleaf and run by bear, panther, deer, raccoon, bobcat, coyote, and flown by all manner of bird. In downtown anyway, only the birds remained, with the occasional disoriented, desperate coyote or coon. The deer ran the woods around. The bear were gone north, the panther south and west, the bobcat to near extinction. When one spied a bobcat in the woods, the bobcat seemed as surprised, even alarmed by his own presence as the one who spied it. Again it was as if the 1906 storm, marking the new century’s change, had tossed all the old far around and left it ravaged for the new. But the birds returned, unfazed, to flick and flit through the streets and around the old blank-eyed windows of downtown, to crisscross the air above the dwindling number of humans who toddled along its sidewalks, who stood dazed in its dusty windows, not long for this world, who seemed but images left behind, photocopied in little pockets of palpable humidity. The birds lived on with a sublime unawareness of oblivion or genetic continuity, an ever-present life form that would never go away as long as the earth remained the blue-and-green planet we all know. The old saying went the cockroaches would outlive everything, but Finus Bates, for one, knew the birds would feed on cockroaches easily, happily, forever.

Inside the tiny studio on the Dreyfus Building’s fifteenth floor, Finus’s burled and veiny, spotted hand flipped a switch and sent a signal up the tower and into the air. He left his finger on the switch for a long, symbolic moment. He was the medium between electric power and radio wave. He would give the senseless impulse speech, and speech which was the words of not just Finus but the whole community, which was for some in effect the whole world. He felt as if he tapped the strength of life itself, with which he could infuse his listeners as a tonic against the possibility of not rising to meet the day.

He had the ironic, wizened face of a vaudevillian straight man, which he actually had been a few times in his late teens. When traveling vaudeville acts would stop in Mercury on the circuit, they sometimes wrote him in as a kind of punching bag for their roundhouse jokes because his somber dignified expression, onstage, was funny. He’d even gotten to know George Burns, in those days before George had made it. Old George would sometimes call on the phone during Finus’s radio show and they’d talk for a while, about vaudeville and Gracie and George’s memories of visiting Mercury, and about George’s revivified fame as Hollywood’s favorite geezer. Finus’s audience in Mercury, mostly old white folks, had gotten so used to hearing George Burns call him up every month or so that in unguarded moments they almost thought of George Burns as a fellow resident, someone with whom they shared a collective knowledge of their histories, their individual lives. After all, Finus would talk to George about them, George knew many of their names. These people wouldn’t have been surprised to see George tottering along Mercury’s cracked and cantilevered sidewalks looking for someplace to get a good martini. Some of the old men caught themselves at times pretty sure they had actually met George, stopped to shoot the breeze with him outside Ivyloy’s barbershop, watched him screw one of those plastic tips onto the crown of his cheap cigar.

After vaudeville, Finus stayed off the stage until radio offered another, of a sort, in his old age. WCUV’s owner asked him to just come in for a few hours each morning, talk to folks, play some music. Over the years his sense of his audience had become more and more personalized, as he developed a sense that the only ones willing to listen to him these days were the people he actually knew, who were many, and so he spoke to them directly, saying, — Alberta McGauley, this little number’s for you in memory of the time you rode that hot air balloon all the way across the county and into Alabama, supposing just to land at the local fairgrounds, or, — All right, Ed Kruxmier, it’s bean time so we’re going to string together a few little numbers in honor of all you truck farmers already out there weeding your beans. Hear me, Ed? Got your Walkman on? Just wave if you read me, Ed. Just tap on the headset. I must be talking to myself, today.

He was a literate man and his favorite poet was Wordsworth. He’d read “Intimations of Immortality” and had a sense of how as he’d grown up from a child he’d moved further and further away from his spiritual self, his spiritual origins, and he sensed that most people experienced the same thing, a slow uncoupling, like someone stepping out of the rocket for a nice space walk, secure in knowing the life cord kept them connected, however tenuously, to the ship. And then one day they realized that the floating cord was only that, attached to nothing but their own ass, and that they were at best more like a moon held detached but distantly in tow to its planet. A body of pale memories of when they were part of the world.

Because he was a newspaper man by trade, a morning radio announcer by choice and local popularity, he kept up with the news. In addition to local items, the Mercury Comet printed any bit of interesting science news Finus got through press releases from the government and private labs. His latest fascination was the scientists’ recent belief that there were other planets in other solar systems capable of supporting earthly life. There was water and oxygen. There were clouds and sunsets, seasons, the cycles of storms. Gave new meaning to the phrase “another world.” Now they were trying to explore Mars, to see if there’d once been some form of life there, preserved cryogenically beneath frozen oceans in evidence of God knows what. One of the scientists said, Take a good look at Mars, it’s what the earth will look like one day. It had all made Finus reflective. He’d been on the air now with his morning show for twenty-five years. Was it not possible that some of his earlier shows had made their way to antennae on other worlds, through far-flung space travelers just passing through, or via some slip between or among dimensions that diminished time and space? If anything, radio waves would be the medium to slip through. Whether the antennae be metallic rods for electronic receivers or some delicate, antlike, cephalic appendage among a people for whom radio waves were the primary means of communication, he wished he’d come across as a little more intelligent. But at least if they heard his show they’d have to recognize that he was representative of a friendly race, kind and considerate of one another, willing to spend time in resisting the isolation of the human soul.

He felt the power move through him as he put on the first record, listened to its familiar bars, cleared his throat, and spoke into the microphone as if into the ear of an old friend nearly deaf — close, and loud enough to be heard, but not too loud, in his deep rich baritone twang, — Good morning Mercury and surrounding environs, thinking, Who knows how broad an environ may be? For if radio waves were not a manifestation of a Creator’s presence in the universe he didn’t know what was, and if there be a God well then his environ is Everything is it not? He felt the frequency run in his veins from the tips of his toes and fingers to the top of his head, vibrating the horny cartilage in his throat, — Good morning in the a.m. to y’all, each and ever one of you, and it’s a beautiful morning, and he played his old 45 of “The Star Spangled Banner” and looked at the notes he’d scribbled on his pad: those who were born, those who had died, those who were winning at bridge these days, and those who had traveled and come home. There was a cancer-screening vehicle coming through for the outlying rural areas. He’d note that the garden club would be planting a tree downtown and that the Mercury Heritage Library had gotten in a large shipment of new books thanks to a grant from the Selena Grimes Foundation. He’d talk a little about what the almanac said as compared to the way things turned out to be, and chat with himself about the possibility of global warming, about the national debate over Social Security and medical care, and offer some words of wisdom for the millions of baby boomers already showing signs of being perplexed with a generation of youth who were making the impetuous sixties seem quaint and tame. Finus would put the world into perspective. There wasn’t anything better for that than good conversation. It was how everything that happened in the world got filtered down into ponder-able reality, considered and thereby experienced by all. It was important to understand you were a part of the world, and of everything that happened in it. After the president had addressed the State of the Union and gone on to bed and dreamed about being a naked child standing onstage having forgotten the words to “The Midnight Ride of Paul Revere,” after an astronaut had walked in space and come back and touched down and gone home and made love to his wife in passionate exhilaration and mortal fear, after a serial killer had murdered some innocent stranger and slipped back into rational life and gotten his hair cut and had a meal with his friends and maybe even gone to church on Sunday, was the experience soon any more his or hers than it was everyone’s who’d heard about it, imagined it, envisioned it, and mulled it over in his or her mind? It didn’t necessarily seem so to Finus, for whom all experience now seemed to have been filtered through his own blood and bones. He’d lived through eighty-nine revolutions around the sun. Long enough for the residual energy of millions of years to have mingled with and charged his own as if his body was a rechargeable cell.

But it would all become particulate, and slough away as dust adrift on the earth. The world would spin on, and toss and mix such dust as had been him and Albert Schweitzer and George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the poor souls of the Dust Bowl depression and the dead frozen Russians in Siberia, and poor Midfield who’d died the day before. And Birdie Urquhart, too, with whom he would visit nearly every day, sometimes for an early coffee before his show, when she would part the little curtains at the kitchen table, It’s candlelight, soon be time for Finus Bates to go in to work. Even Birdie would be more a part of him than ever before, now that she was gone. Everyone would be filtered through the eyes, skin, and lungs of the living, into the very fiber and sap of the trees, mingling and mixing and some finally slipping back out into what was not emptiness after all, but was the vast, articulate space between beautiful worlds.

Cephalantus Accidentalis

LATE MORNING, SECOND day of a July Methodist youth retreat to a wide and lazy stretch of the Chunky River, 1917, young Finus Bates felt the effects of a little shine he and the other boys had sneaked off to consume the evening before. He rushed from the campsite down a trail and slipped inside the thick-leaved cover of a buttonbush beside a tiny clearing. Hadn’t been there long, voided but still too shaky to leave, when he heard voices come along the path, and through the slivers of space between the whorled, elliptical buttonbush leaves he saw two girls, Avis Crossweatherly and Birdie Wells.

Finus went absolutely still. Birdie was soaking wet because (he would find out later) she’d slipped on the bank and fallen into the river fully clothed. Avis looked up into the air, then all around. Finus squatted under the dense, low cover of the shrub, pants around his ankles, ass cooling in a low breeze. Avis straightened and said, — My Lord, what is that smell?

— Something died, Birdie said.

Finus quietly began to scoop sandy soil and dead leaves between his legs over his sick scat.

But just after she’d made her comment, Birdie had peeled off the last of her wet undergarments and stood naked and pearly white in the light-threaded shade from the taller trees and this is what Finus looked up again to see. She had that shape and look all around of the actresses and models of the day, just fleshy enough to make a man think of reproduction. And that which had seemed merely ordinary inside her clothing now took on a baroque sensuality Finus could not have imagined in the abstract, much less in the reality of chattery Birdie Wells. Ample in the hip yet augmented in protruding carnality of bone, pelvic jut like a smooth white plow, a sweet little benaveled pooch, and shoulder blades beautifully awkward as the small futile wings of a hatchling. He gazed through the leaf lattice at the immaculate cradled shading of her visible ribs, smooth and defined of faint bone shadow, and the delicate scoop from which her long slim neck rose into an oval face made beautiful in this light and unself-conscious nakedness. A plum-shaped mouth, her sad and impish pale blue eyes. Not the face of a girl given to governing herself without considerable chaperonage and whackity discipline across the open palms — at least that was the way Finus imagined it.

Her dark brown hair curled about her ears in a bob, fleeting red hues in the slim rays of sun that slipped in and fell upon it. Compared to Avis Crossweatherly’s hard angularity, Birdie seemed like a regressive dream. Finus felt himself go curved and firm as a summer squash. He watched, his heart heavy with the grief of longing, as Avis approached Birdie with a white bath towel. But something struck Birdie at that moment. She turned away from Avis and did a naked cartwheel, her legs and low, scanty pubis flicking through the dappled light, the motion quick and graceful as a child’s, the child she still was in ways he would never see again, and she landed upright with a look of surprise and conquest on her face, little breasts aquiver. They were hardly more pronounced than little halves of peaches, he’d never seen a delicate color brown like the brown aureole around her nipples.

Upon landing she gave a little yelp of surprise, and then laughed out loud, spreading her arms for imaginary applause. Birdie’s face seemed so free of all self-consciousness and open, in a way he’d never seen before, to all the possibilities of her beauty. And never before that moment had he really understood beauty, or been able to look beneath or beyond the masks women wore over their beauty like veils — not just makeup, but the masks of conventional behavior and attitude, of modesty, of keen privacy, and of coy lust. He never really considered Birdie to be “beautiful” in the conventional sense, but he’d felt some kind of discreet and inarticulate longing for her, which he’d vaguely imagined had something to do with their kindred spirits. And then Avis stepped up to Birdie with the towel and began to buff her down, vigorous rubbing with the towel all over her shoulders, her back, and then gently under her breasts and between her legs. They were giggling. Some sound almost escaped him, some sort of muffled carp, and he closed his eyes then and thought he’d actually made no sound but maybe he had, since before he could detect her approach the leaves of his hideaway rustled and he opened his eyes to see a pair of hands parting the branches.

It was Avis. Her long, kangaroo face peered at him with no more emotion in her eyes than the animal she was often compared to. For a long moment, they stared at one another. My God! All the requisite proprieties between him and this girl vanished in that instant, as if a mischievous god had tossed some sort of magical clarifying dust in their eyes. Finus’s horrified humiliation was brief, for the look of cool, detached appraisal in Avis’s eyes — the gaze of an animal one realizes has no interest after all in eating one at that moment — both calmed and created a sort of detachment in him. He thought, Maybe she’ll stop paying so much attention to me now, stop embarrassing me with her flirtation when everyone knows I’m not interested in her. But she stared at him so long, her look penetrated him so precisely, that he understood this wouldn’t happen. She knew exactly what he had seen, as if through his own eyes. Her eyes, at that moment, were on his waggling member, which in spite of discovery still asserted itself. Avis Crossweatherly’s eyes went back to Finus’s own, and he sensed that she knew exactly what had happened inside him, beyond pure sexual infatuation, that he’d been imprinted with something beyond a simple, lustful fantasy. Years later, he would understand that she knew he’d been struck with an image of the ideal form as surely as if Birdie Wells had been a bathing goddess there in the wood, and she — plain Avis Crossweatherly — the goddess’s attendant maid.

— What is it, Avis? Birdie had called out then.

— Nothing, Avis said, and the leaves closed up again as she turned back to the glade. -Something dead, like you thought.

He would remember all this keenly years later, when he learned how Avis subtly worked on Birdie to accept the insistent but unwanted courting of Earl Urquhart, how Avis spoke so glowingly of Earl to Birdie’s parents, how Avis even hinted to Birdie that if Earl were to shift his affections to her, she would feel like the luckiest girl alive. But by then he figured it didn’t matter. He came to believe, in the late evening of his life, that it was all finally unavoidable. As fates will be.

Self-Reliance

HE’D CONFRONTED Birdie in a manner of speaking, about her imminent marriage, at the Potato Ball, spring of 1918. It was held at the old country club, now defunct and returned to pastures but for the lodge-style clubhouse. Men were a little scarce, most boys off to war. The stars and moon were out, the skylights open beneath the eaves of the hall, and the soft light spilled in upon them. They’d turned down the gas lamps. Finus had cut in on Earl, who let him so he could go smoke with some boys out back nipping raisin jack.

— You’re speaking to me again now? Birdie said, teasing him.

He said nothing, gave a grim smile. They danced, and Finus said, — So you are going to marry Earl for certain. And she said, looking at him with that gap-toothed lighthearted frankness she had, — Well I reckon — it’s all set. I wish they could do it all without me, though.

Finus said, — Are you sure you don’t just want to run off with me?

She stood still and stared at him, astonished. It wasn’t all astonishment, though. He thought he could see in her eyes that she might really consider doing such a thing if he was serious. He’d caught hold, for the moment, of some loose line in her that would attach itself to stray wildness. And then, he couldn’t explain this at all, something in him had panicked at the whole idea, of how much his life would change if he did that. Some current of reticence went down through his hands and into her bare shoulders. And Birdie sensed it, he could tell in an instant that she did, and before he could quell it as the momentary rationality of a sensible man that would always, of course, buck away from the acquiescence of love, it was over, she was knocking him on the arm and turning away.

— Here’s your sweetheart, she said, and Finus saw Avis Crossweatherly headed his way across the floor, her eyes pinning him to the spot. She came up and stood before him in a pale blue skirt and navy cashmere sweater.

— Dance with a girl? she said.

He smiled weakly, and took her hand.

A MONTH LATER, the night before Earl was set to marry Birdie, Finus got drunk at a card game in Earl’s honor at Marie Suskin’s whorehouse on 9th Street. The drunker he got, the less he felt like honoring Earl, so when he got Earl down a hundred dollars at stud he demanded that Earl go double or nothing and put up his fiancée as collateral. Earl, who never drank but had a temper, didn’t really like to gamble, knew Finus had long been sweet on Birdie, accepted and lost — three kings to Finus’s full house. Earl threw his cards down and they fought. Finus was bigger, knocked Earl down with a roundhouse and went outside, climbed into his old Model T. He meant to go out to Earl’s house, where Birdie was staying with her mother until the wedding there the next day. He would get her out onto the porch, and tell her that he loved her and there wasn’t anything he could do about it, and ask her to marry him, instead. They could move to some other town, if she wished, even to the Gulf coast, live in his father’s beach house, he’d work out of Mobile. He would tell her he was serious even though he was drunk. He would tell her he’d call on her later in the week, and then he would leave.

He carried a pearl-handled.32 revolver in his pocket, his father’s pistol, with which he meant to shoot Earl’s father, old Junius Urquhart, if he stood in the way. The Urquharts lived out past southside, beyond the highway, out the Junction Road. Finus roared across the highway hardly checking for traffic, fishtailed in the gravel on the other side, and then while trying to light a cigarette on down the road he slipped a wheel into the ditch, ramped into a thicket of sapling pines, and flew from the car through the old fabric roof like a circus performer on a vault. His head banged hard on the ground and he lay insensible for a while with a broad knot swelling up through the gash in his forehead.

A couple of his friends had followed him some five minutes behind. When they saw the lights of Finus’s car in the stand of pine saplings they went in and found Finus lying a few feet away on the ground, bleeding from the ear and the bump on his head, a burning cigarette stuck to his bottom lip, and so they at first thought him conscious, smoking beside his crashed car, which would have been just like Finus. They sat down in a ragged circle around him for a minute before they realized he was out, and about that time Finus opened his eyes anyway and asked where they all were.

— In a little set of pines just off the ditch, Curly Ammons said.

Finus noted the cigarette still in his mouth, spat it and asked for another. He lit up, pushed himself off the ground, touched the bloody knot on his head, and walked over to look at the car.

— I don’t imagine it’ll start again, not now, he said.

— Not likely, Bill said. -We can tow it in. I got a piece of cable.

— All right, Finus said. -Take it to Papa’s house. And he started walking.

— Better not go on out there, now, Curly called. -Old man Urquhart is waiting on you. One of Earl’s buddies called him on the telephone at Marie’s.

Finus gave a wave and kept on. Shoot him and his goddamn telephone too, he said to himself, righteous in the drunken certainty that Earl and Birdie’s was a marriage illegitimate in the highest moral sense. Contrary to natural law. There was a moon and he could follow the road easy. He smoked the rest of the fresh cigarette, and when he’d finished it he picked up his pace. He kept to one of the well-packed ruts. In the bright moonlight he could see the Urquhart house where it sat low in a grove of old oaks that seemed to guard the sprawling house like hulking gnomes. He walked into their shadows as the dogs started up. Old Junius’s rabbit dogs, beagles. They shot out toward Finus as if unleashed.

Junius stepped onto the porch, a stout man with an egg-shaped head gleaming in the porch light, toting a shotgun at the ready. When he saw Finus approaching at the edge of the grove by the highway, he hollered at the dogs to stop, raised the gun to a level above Finus’s head, and fired. He was a tough old man but he did not shoot to kill, he’d long ago had enough of killing. The gun was shooting dove load. One pellet dipped away from the rest like a dove itself and flew into Finus’s right eye. It felt like a grain of sand flung in a gale.

After Finus stopped screaming and the dogs had been put up, Junius helped him into the house and laid him on the sofa in the parlor.

Junius said, — Son, you’re lucky about that eye. He leaned forward to peer at it, then straightened up. -It don’t look so bad. I could’ve killed you if I’d wanted to. No riffraff is going to presume to win my son’s fiancée in a goddamn poker game.

Finus, though in pain, managed to get out, — Well, sir, what about the fool who would put her up in the kitty?

— Earl loses his temper, don’t think straight, Junius said. He sat in a chair next to the sofa, a stout man with a little tuft of graying hair on the top of his bald head, looking at Finus with small, glassy eyes.

— It’s a bad marriage, Finus said. -She doesn’t know what she’s doing. He knows every one of those whores by name.

— Hear tell it wasn’t just him by himself out there at Marie Suskin’s, speak of your attitudes toward females, Junius said. -My own opinion is every good woman could use a weekend in a whorehouse. And what was he to get if he won?

— Just to keep her. I had him down.

— Boy’s no gambler, Junius said.

Junius left the room and came back in a minute with a cold wet rag for Finus’s eye. He sat down, produced a worn deck of playing cards, and began to shuffle them on the coffee table between them. Finus held the cold rag to his eye, which was throbbing now and still hurt like hell. There was a sound been digging at him, tic tic tic, and when Old Junius pulled his pocket watch from the fob pocket in his vest it got much louder, TIC TIC TIC TIC, and when he put it up it was back to tic tic tic. Finus stared at where the chain disappeared into the folded generosity of the vest around old Junius’s girth.

— What kind of cards was y’all playing? Junius said.

— Stud, Finus said. -I was winning.

— Let’s see how you do with one eye then. He dealt onto the coffee table. -You win, I tell Earl a deal’s a deal and maybe he ought to think about calling it off, marry a woman better suited to him. I win, you buy me a drink next time we meet up in town and forget this foolishness.

The vast absurdity of the whole situation just then swooped down on Finus, and he was aware of the old man patronizing him. He sighed, said, — You want to go that route, I’ve already won her.

Junius ignored him, a placid look on his hamlike face. He dealt each of them two down and one up. Finus showed a two, Junius a queen.

Finus looked at him. Junius was without expression. He dealt two more each, up. Finus had his two and an eight and a jack. Junius had his queen plus an ace and a seven. They checked their cards. Finus squinted his good eye, saw a queen and a three. A pain shot through to the back of his head and something throbbed on the top of it. He tapped the table. Heard a tic tic tic tic. Junius dealt them each two more facedown. Finus checked his last cards. A queen and a two. Pairs of queens and twos, then.

— Just this hand? he said.

Junius nodded.

— Nothing to do but show them, then. Hearing in the silence that tic tic tic. He showed his two pair.

Junius turned over his cards. Full house, three aces and a pair of queens.

— All them queens, sitting pretty high in the deck.

— Make it bourbon, old Junius said. He stood up to leave the room. -I’m hungry now.

A car roared up into the yard outside and in a second Earl banged in the door, stood there lean and wild-haired, and pointed at Finus.

— You son of a bitch, I’m going to kill you.

— Let it go, now, son, Junius said. -Man knows he’s beaten.

Earl looked at his father, then at Finus.

— What happened to his eye?

— I winged him, Junius said. -Now go outside and cool off. I’m handling this.

Earl stood there staring at him, then at Finus, for a minute. Then turned around and went back outside.

— Where is Birdie? Finus said to Junius then.

— With her family, by the grace of God I suppose, Junius said. -Her mother took her back home this morning, didn’t want to spend her last night away from them. They’ll bring her over for the wedding tomorrow at noon. He took a half-smoked dead cigar from his jacket’s handkerchief pocket and lit it with a kitchen match. -With family is where she belongs, you ask me. Earl’ll never be happy with that girl.

— Why don’t you just tell him that? Finus said.

Junius puffed the cigar and waved the match out, tossed it into the fireplace.

— Nobody could ever tell Earl anything, he said.

In a little while Finus’s father came out in his car and took him to the hospital. He would keep the eye, they said, but it would be slightly defective, a spot or a blurry patch in its vision.

— I won’t ever see properly again, Finus said.

— You’ll see well enough, old Dr. Heath said. -You’re lucky. Man chases a woman into the path of a shotgun and comes out alive has got something to ponder. You ponder it, son.

The afternoon after the incident, he awakened in the hospital to see his father standing at the foot of his bed, wearing his business suit with the watch chain hanging from the vest pocket, which caused him to sense a peculiar gloom. His father’s hair was slicked down as if he’d just arrived at the office and Finus could smell the hair oil. With his long bony nose he looked like an oiled blackbird. He pulled the chain and extracted his gold watch, looked at it. He put the watch back into his vest pocket, straightened the vest. Finus cocked his head to listen, but this watch was silent to his gauze-covered ears. In addition to the patch over his eye, the entire top of his head was wrapped in a bandage — he’d suffered a concussion when he was pitched from the car.

— I’m going in to work, his father said. -You rest around the house, if you like, after you leave here. But don’t speak to me again until you can resolve not to act a damn fool in public. I’ll not tolerate that kind of behavior in my family.

Finus started to protest, then just said, — Yessir.

His father squeezed the bridge of his nose between finger and thumb for a moment, then released it. He looked out the hospital window, and seemed to Finus to have a sadness pass over his features. Outside the window it was a Saturday, and a few motor cars and some supply wagons in from the country passed by on the street, the shod hooves of the dray horses and mules clopping in the still, heated air. It was hay-cutting time, and where they had come from, where his father had grown up, tractors droned and mower blades clicked in the air domed high, blue-hazed, and empty.

— Do you really love that girl? his father said.

Just the question itself caused a wave of heat to rise from Finus’s spine into his aching head. He was haunted by the night at the Potato Ball, when he actually had her for a moment in thrall to the idea that he loved her, and that she should throw off Earl, and how he’d backed down. Jesus Christ! What had that been? What had caused him to hitch his emotions and blow his chance at happiness?

— Yes, he said to his father, I think. He felt overwhelmed. -I don’t know what I think anymore.

His father looked at him a long moment, made a face and looked away out the window.

— I tell you, son, he said. -It doesn’t pay to bank too much on the rightness of one woman or another. It’s all a difficulty, in the long run. He looked at Finus, picked up his hat.

— It’s not for me to tell you not to follow your heart, but I can point out this girl is simply not available to you. And you are still just a boy, whether you like the idea or not. I want you to go off to the university, make something of yourself.

Finus said nothing for a minute. Then said,

— You know I’d rather just stay here and help you run the paper.

— There’ll be plenty of time for that, you still want to after college.

His father shook his head.

— What about that girl you been seeing, now? What are you doing with that poor girl, if you’re so in love with this Birdie Wells?

Finus frowned and looked away.

— Well, what? his father said. -You think you can just jack people around like that, play with them like that?

— I’m not doing that. We just run around together some, that’s all, he mumbled. The last thing he wanted to think about right then was Avis Crossweatherly, with her determined if low-key tendency to attach herself to his arm somehow whenever they all went out in a group, and often when he was planning to head somewhere alone.

— Mind that’s all it is, then, his father said. -These things have a way of getting serious on a man before he’s aware of it. Especially if his head is lodged far up into his ass.

He picked up his hat from the chair and walked out.

Later that afternoon Avis Crossweatherly came into his room and stood at the foot of his bed. Though she was a tall girl with a narrow and somewhat flat face, hence the kangaroo jokes people made behind her back, she had a noble nose, which helped somewhat in close quarters to give her an odd kind of beauty. Though later Finus would think she’d never resembled her hard old father as much as she did in that moment. The old man was a self-made hardscrabble cattle trader whose only words to Finus when they would go out to his farm to ask his permission to marry (a moot point, her being a month or so along, pure ceremony) would be: — Have you any money in the bank, then? And when Finus said, — Yes, sir, a little, and business is pretty good, the old man nodded, said, — All right, then, and the two of them sat there on the porch for another ten minutes with the old man rolling cigarettes and smoking them and saying not another word until Finus got up, joined Avis, who’d been standing in the front yard holding her purse and pair of white cotton gloves in her hands, and left.

At the hospital, Avis was wearing a green dress, a green hat, and her white gloved hands held the handle of her white leather purse before her. Finus, surprised to see her there, didn’t know what to say.

— How are you feeling? she finally said.

— Well enough. They say I’ll keep the eye.

She stood there saying nothing, until Finus filled the silence and answered her unstated question with a lie about a bachelor party that got out of hand. Her face was like a nickel Indian’s set in stone.

— Where was the party?

— Out at Urquhart’s, he said. -We were shooting tin cans, drunk.

She stared at him a minute.

— Was Birdie there?

He shook his head. -Home, getting ready for the wedding.

In a moment, she nodded. Then she looked to see if the hospital-room door was closed, and walked over to his bedside.

— I know how you feel about Birdie, she said.

He didn’t reply, but looked away with his uninjured eye. He heard her sigh, and then in his good eye’s peripheral vision he saw her white-gloved hand reach over the hospital sheets, and to his astonishment he saw and felt it press gently against his groin, find his prick, and give it a gentle but firm squeeze. And what he couldn’t believe, in the context of the moment, was that under her strong fingers’ gentle pressure he responded like a bull at stud. He looked first at the hand, at the bulge of sheet beneath it that was himself, and then at her face, which wore an enigmatic expression of mischief and tenderness, something he’d never seen in Avis’s features before.

— You’ll get over her, she said then. She brought her gloved hand back to its demure position on the handbag. -I’ll help you, if you like.

It was a spell, in spite of his somewhat passive resistance, that would last through a strung-out period of dating some seven years in length, and through a long and unhappy marriage, and more than thirty years would pass before he would truly escape it. It was a moment that precipitated what he came to see as a long journey through a tangled wood, all as if in a semiconscious dream, a pretension of life. He would walk through it like a ghost, present but unaffecting of others, there but stirring no other’s blood aside from in memory, a softening shape about to molt and pass into what passed for the spirit, a free traveling current or pulse in the passage of time.

Giddyup

THE DAY BIRDIE WELLS gave in to Earl Urquhart, she and her friends had picnicked at the river in Finus Bates’s father’s old 90-T Overland. The car got stuck in a mud hole and trying to push them out Finus was covered head to toe, Pud up there trying to drive and slinging the mud all over him. Finus came around and hugged Birdie, shouted, — I love you, Birdie! and everybody laughed because she had mud on her clothes exactly in the shape of Finus Bates, according to Pud, and they all made him go back and jump in the river before they’d let him back in his own car to drive them home.

Earl’s car sat parked on the lawn in front of the gallery at her house. Pud and Lucy jumped out and ran into the house, but Finus grabbed her arm and said, — Birdie don’t go in there. Let’s ride around a little longer.

— Well I got to go in, she said, we were supposed to be home an hour ago. She turned to look at Finus sitting there behind the giant wheel of the Overland, looking like a pouting little boy. -Well maybe you do love me, she teased. -Are you jealous?

— I am, Avis said, her arms crossed. Then she tried to smile. -I’m jealous you got a man like Earl Urquhart in there just waiting to see you.

— Ooo, now, the others said, listen at Avis! Finus turned and gave Avis a curious look.

Birdie jumped out, and they all waved and hollered to her as Finus drove them away, scowling, looking back at Birdie as she went up the porch steps.

In the parlor Earl was dressed for Sunday, hair oiled and parted down the middle. He held a bunch of wildflowers she recognized from the patch they’d just driven by coming from the river. She’d even pointed them out and said Look how pretty, though it was just false dandelions. From the center of the yellow blossoms rose a stem of purple phlox he’d apparently found somewhere, and he didn’t seem to notice its sap leaking onto his fine suit pants. When he stood up to greet her she said, — Did you have an accident? He looked, flushed, and saw it was the flowers then and laughed. She liked him in that moment, shouldn’t have let on, for then he wouldn’t leave that day until she agreed to marry him, no matter how many times she said she didn’t want to, he was just crazy, followed her around the house, onto the porch, out back to the pasture where they kept the horse, would even have followed her down the woods path if she’d taken the chance and gone there. He was like a pesky fly or gnat in the shape of a man, swat and miss and he’s right back again. So finally it was almost like she promised to spend the rest of her life with him just to get rid of him for the time being.

It was later that night when she was in bed and Mama came to stand in the door, looking at her in that way, that she realized what she’d done.

Not long after that her grandfather, ancient one-armed white-bearded sweet Pappy, took her out into his garden, where he liked to walk with her and tell her stories. Everyone said the war had made him a little crazy, though she didn’t think so. There they were in the pale gloaming, supper done. He took hold of her arm and looked at her in that way that used to scare her, like he wasn’t looking at her but at something in his mind. -When I was a scout in the war, he said, one evening like this I came upon a Yankee soldier alone in the woods and laying on the ground.

— What was he doing? she said.

— Something un-Christian, Pappy said. He looked at her oddly. -I can’t tell you.

— Was he hurting somebody, or something?

— No, he was alone. He was committing a sin, is all I’ll say. But I could not blame him, it was war, though I thought it strange.

Her scalp and the back of her neck prickled, though she dared not pursue it but vaguely. Suspected she shouldn’t. She could hardly believe Pappy was even telling this story.

— Well what did you do?

— I laid my musket down and knelt there to say a prayer for him. He was God’s child, though a Yank. Well when he was done sinning he looked up and seen me and jumped, but I had his musket laid next to mine. I said, Don’t be afraid, I won’t shoot you. I took him back to camp and they shipped him to a prison in Georgia after asking him some questions.

— What kind of questions?

— Oh, about his company, what he was up to.

— Did you tell about what he was doing?

— No, it was a private thing, I respected that. I said he’d been asleep.

She could picture this Yankee soldier lying down on the forest floor and doing something to himself, something almost but not quite unimaginable. Her Pappy standing by, not her Pappy yet, a young man.

— Well it’s a strange story, Pappy. I don’t understand it much.

He looked away. Later she reckoned he was trying in his strange way to tell her something about men’s desires, how strong they could be, how they could be twisted into something awful, but in her family they simply didn’t have the words, trusted to God you might say for all that.

She wouldn’t have known a thing about sex if it hadn’t been for Pud, four years younger than her but would try anything. Put herself to sleep every night giddyupping, she called it. Would put both hands down there and rub herself, and say, It feels so good! not a care in the world what anyone would think. Pud, stop that! she would say, and Lucy would bury her face in the pillow, screaming in a funny way. But then Birdie caught not only Pud but Lucy herself doing it one night. Lucy! Of all girls. As soon as Birdie walked into the room and saw them, each in her own little bed, Lucy screamed and ran out of the house and into the yard, they had to go fetch her from the crook of a mimosa tree, sitting up there like a little skinny monkey, making mournful monkey sounds. They talked her down.

— It’s just something feels good, Pud said as they tramped across the dewy grass back to the house in their nightgowns. -There ain’t a thing wrong with it, I don’t care what anybody says.

Birdie hadn’t been any good at it, herself. But then one evening at one of their family gatherings around the fireplace, she was closest to the fire where their old dog Bertram lay sleeping. She sat astride him, for she’d always ridden him like a horse when she was small, before they even moved from the coast, before the hurricane. Now she was too big to do that, and he was old. So she kept her weight off him, most of it, with her legs. But his old backbone was touching her. And when he sighed it moved against her and gave her an odd feeling, a little shock. The talk around her faded to something like murmured talk in another room, or memory of people talking in a dream where she couldn’t see herself the dreamer, didn’t even know if she was there. She moved herself against Bertram again and the old dog groaned a little in his sleep. And again. And when it happened, it so took her that she cried out, not in pleasure exactly but more a mortal fear of what was she knew a forbidden and shameful pleasure, fear of it happening there in front of everybody in the room, who’d come slamming back into her awareness. She shrieked, as if the dog had bitten her, and fell into confusion and convulsive tears. And that’s what she told the others when they rushed to her, as the poor old dog scrambled away, his claws scrabbling on the worn wooden floor. He bit me! Bertram bit me! — Where? her mother said. She wouldn’t answer. Pud stood up then, pointed at Birdie and shouted Giddyup! and ran out of the room screaming with laughter. -Pud, hush! their mother said. -Somebody go chase down Pud. -He bit me! Birdie kept insisting until they finally calmed her and put her to bed.

— 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.

Aunt Vish

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.

She heard the woman inside screaming. Just one loud scream and then nothing. The wind blew in gusts and whipped the light snow into little snow devils across the bare yard. She straightened up and looked at the horse. He shifted his haunches in the old cracked harness. Long dreamy puffs of warm air frosted from his nostrils. She wished she could fit there, in that warm air from his horse nostrils. A cold blast of wind came round the house and hit him broadside, whipped his mane and tail. The horse shifted footing and his hooves squeaked in the shallow fallen layer of snow. Aunt Vish’s old leather crop rested in its knothole beside the seat, and the stringy tips of its braided horsehair flickers rested on the horse’s chestnut flank. They were made from the horse’s own tail. His name was Dan. A long, slow fart flabbered from the proud black lips of Dan’s hole, and the smoke from it too trailed off in the air.

Her feet and hands were stiff with cold. Be like this when I’m old like Aunt Vish, all the time, she thought. She didn’t want to go back inside. She listened. Still no sounds in there. She got too curious, went back in. Maybe the woman had died. She wanted to see her, see if her eyes stayed open. Aunt Vish said some people closed their eyes when they died, some didn’t. Depends on what they seeing when they die, Aunt Vish said. They like what they see, they close they eyes. Don’t like it, can’t stand to look off.

All the eyes and faces of the children were in their same places and Aunt Vish was again washing her hands in the basin. Her sack was tied and set beside the door where Creasie stood. And next to it was a little bundle, like a loaf of baker’s bread wrapped over and over in a stained and yellowing sheet. The woman lay in the bed with a rag on her forehead. Her eyes were open. She was looking at Creasie. Then the woman blinked. Creasie almost jumped back into the door she’d closed behind her.

Aunt Vish dried her hands on her skirts and went over, checked the woman’s forehead, said something to her and patted her cheek. Then came over to Creasie.

— You take my sack, she said to Creasie.

— Yes’m.

Creasie picked up the lumpy sack full of Aunt Vish’s tools. They clattered and clanked and clinked.

— Careful, child! They’s glass in there.

— Yes’m.

Aunt Vish picked up the bundle wrapped in the dirty sheet, held it cradled in one arm, and opened the door. Creasie heard a quiet voice behind them, — Thank you, Miss Vish.

At the buckboard Aunt Vish lay the bundle on the seat between them, picked up the reins and the crop, flicked the crop against Dan’s butt and said, — Hup. Dan pulled them away.

They followed their own ruts back toward town. Crows winged over moving faster than their wings, seemed like. A wind behind them. Their black heads looking this way and that. Creasie looked at the bundle, the edges of its sheets touching her quilts.

— Is that the baby?

Aunt Vish said nothing, then glanced at her, looked ahead.

— Mmm hmm.

— Is it dead?

— It’s dead.

— Aunt Vish. How come the woman to thank you if her baby died.

Aunt Vish looked down her nose at her for a minute.

— I saved her life, she said. -That’s something. If I could have killed that husband, now, I’d done some real good. Should have called me early on.

Creasie looked at Dan’s behind, the tail lifted off it again. Here it comes, she thought. But nothing happened. Dan’s tail dropped back down.

— Why you want to kill that man? she said to Aunt Vish.

— I don’t. I expect she might.

In a minute, looking at the bundle.

— Can I look at the baby, Aunt Vish?

— No.

They rode on.

— Is its eyes closed or open?

— Who? What you talking about, child?

— The baby.

Aunt Vish gave her a fierce look that said hush up or else. She hushed.

— How come it died? she said real quietly after a time.

Aunt Vish didn’t answer. They rode on. They made the turn toward the north part of Mercury, climbing the hill.

— How come we taking the baby with us?

— Hush up all your questions! Aunt Vish said. She nicked the crop tails against Dan’s flank.

They rocked behind the clopping horse back to town, past the old Case mansion and the trail to the ravine, Creasie looking but holding back her question. Down winding Poplar Avenue, into town. Vish stopped in front of Dr. Heath’s house. She reached around behind her for a little paper sack.

— Take these in to Dr. Heath.

Creasie jumped down and bounded up the steps, knocked on the door. Dr. Heath came in his robe, his hair up funny on his head.

— Hello there, Creasie, he said, looking down his nose.

She held the sack out to him. He took it, looked up, and nodded to Vish, who nodded back.

— Bye, Creasie said, and ran back to the wagon.

They clopped on into downtown. White people stopping on the sidewalk to look at them, to laugh at their rig, at Aunt Vish sitting proudly there with the reins in her hand. Past the fire station, where the firemen came out to call out to her, Hey old Aunt Vish! Vish didn’t acknowledge. She pulled up before the white funeral home. Aunt Vish handed Creasie the reins, stepped down, reached back and picked up the dead baby in the bundle.

— You wait here with the wagon.

She went inside. Creasie waited. Old Dan shifted, clopped a hoof on the slushy pavement. Creasie burrowed down into her quilt. After a few minutes Aunt Vish came back out, climbed back onto the wagon seat and took up the reins. -Hup.

Creasie ventured, — He going to bury the little baby, Aunt Vish? A colored baby?

Vish said nothing for a moment.

— Something like that, she said.

They made their way back north of town to the ravine, Dan clopping carefully down the narrow trail. She wanted to ask why the white home would take in a colored child. She unhitched Dan and led him to the little shed Aunt Vish kept for him beside the creek. When she came back up Aunt Vish reached into the pocket of her dress, fiddled there a second, peering in, and came out with a paper dollar, handed it to her. It was more than Aunt Vish had ever given her at one time.

— I give you that. You going to have to go to work soon, though. Getting old enough.

She nodded.

— Thank you.

Thinking of what she might buy.

— You going out in the world, such as it is, Aunt Vish said.

Vish was looking at her.

— Don’t you ever let no man mistreat you, now. Long as I’m around, no man ever going to mistreat you. You just come to me.

— Yes’m.

Aunt Vish smiled her black-toothed smile at her. Creasie looked up at the awful teeth in wonder.

— Why your teeth so black, Aunt Vish? she had once said to her.

Aunt Vish had cocked her head at her like a sleepy-eyed owl.

— Cause my heart’s clean and white, Aunt Vish said. -Count your blessings it ain’t the other way around.

Birdicus Urquhartimus

SIN WAS EVERYWHERE and serious for Mrs. Urquhart. She was a scrawny and sallow woman, set upon by demanding spirits, a tight brown bun in her hair like an onion God drew forth from her mind, a punishment and reminder of evil’s beautiful, layered symmetry. Her heart though good was a shriveled potato, with sweet green shoots of kindness growing from it, a heart gone to seed.

— As long as Earl has to work that job in New York, she told Birdie, you’re welcome here, and I’ll love you like my own. But you have to pull your weight.

That meant most of the cooking and cleaning, as Mrs. U was always off to some camp meeting or another, rolling in the dirt and speaking in tongues, for all Birdie knew. Something far from the Methodist mumbling she grew up with, anyway, or even Pappy’s odd way of seeing the world.

The Urquharts had moved into town, to a two-story Victorian near the hospital, so that Earl’s younger sister and brother could go to the town schools. Earl had insisted Birdie stay with them while he had to work in New York with his new job. He didn’t say it, but Birdie figured he worried she’d get too fond of her own family again, if she stayed with them, and would leave him.

She could stand on the porch balcony in the evenings and watch cars and wagons go down the hill to the center of town, see the smoky outline of the buildings there, and the sun’s glow sink and fade behind the bluff to the southwest, inflaming the distant sandy ridge full of beeches, white and blackjack oak, mockernut hickory, hemlock, and pine. She tried to get a few minutes to herself every day, before suppertime in the winter, and after supper in the summer, after Earl’s family had settled into the living room to listen to the radio and talk. She didn’t separate herself rudely but when she could get a moment alone she did.

When she could get away to town with Ruthie in a stroller, she pushed her down the hill to the drugstore or maybe to see a picture show at the Strand, stop in at Loeb’s department store to look at clothes. Sometimes when Earl’d had a good month she bought a little outfit for Ruthie or herself, but not too often, as Mrs. Urquhart would frown on her vanity, say she ought to be sewing her own. Merry tagged along some days, usually when they were going to see a show, and when Birdie would stop afterwards to look at a dress Merry would make a face, standing there with a hip stuck out, not unlike a pretty version of her mother’s bitter Holiness wrath.

— You just don’t have the figure for that dress anymore, Birdie, she’d say. -It’d look a lot better on me.

She was just fifteen, just two years younger than Birdie, but already a tart. She almost had no choice about being bad, it seemed to Birdie, with her mother so obsessed with sin and wickedness.

Mrs. Urquhart was Holiness. Anything worldly was a sin, especially anything to do with the flesh. She was obsessed with the idea of a whore. The way Merry would stare at women in bright clothes and makeup, sauntering along the sidewalk below the porch, Birdie knew that’s what fired her imagination. She, Birdie, had never even heard that word until she married Earl. But after they moved in with the Urquharts she heard it all the time, came to know it was about to twist from Mrs. Urquhart’s mouth just from her expression, came to know just what a whore looked like, by Mrs. Urquhart’s lights.

So little Ruthie grew up hearing the word and of course delighted in it. One day long after Earl had moved them out, she and Ruthie went over to visit, and Mrs. Urquhart’s neighbor Mrs. Estes came up to see them. Mrs. Estes was a good woman, but she had a male friend who would visit her, and word was she’d once been pregnant out of wedlock, lost the child — a punishment, to Mrs. Urquhart’s mind. -She ain’t our kind, she’d say when Birdie protested Mrs. Estes was good. But she came up that day wearing rouge and eyeliner and lipstick and a bright dress imprinted with all kinds of fruit like bananas, peaches, and clusters of grapes, going downtown. Little Ruthie jumped up and blurted, — Oh, Mrs. Estes, you look so pretty, you look just like a whore! Tickled Mrs. Estes but Birdie like to died.

Earl’s little brother Levi was puny with a big round head and hound-dog eyes, dark circles underneath them, laying about the house and complaining of polio. Polio! Lazy-o is what you got, she’d say. I’ll tell Mama you whipped me, he’d say. He’d go to the toilet and cry, constipated, she’d have to go in, sit with him and then clean him up — he was far too old for that — and help him back to his bed. She’d see him smiling out the corner of her eye, and dump him there so he could wail she was mistreating him. Made him drink prune juice for the constipation and he threw it all up in the middle of the hallway out of pure spite.

Mr. Urquhart, old Junius, wasn’t home much, out wandering the town and county all day, selling insurance or pretending to. Everybody said he was such a whoremonger, he’d pull a woman in off the street. He came in evenings smelling of whiskey and cigars, sat down to supper and ate it without saying a word, just looking at everybody in turn with those pale gleaming squinty eyes, wicked eyes she came to believe, always some kind of mischief going on, laughing to himself every now and then. Just his sitting there had Mrs. Urquhart interrupting every meal two or three times to say an extra grace over it, his wickedness was such a presence, it seemed. Kind of comical, really, when it wasn’t scary, when he was in a good mood and seemed almost kindly. But one evening after supper, when everyone else was out on the porch resting and Birdie was alone in the kitchen with the dishes, he came in there. She heard something then felt him come up behind her, put his hands on her shoulders and give them a squeeze. And kept them there a good minute, her scrubbing away harder than ever.

Finally she said, — What are you doing, Papa, for he made her call him Papa (as if he could hold a candle to her sweet, gentle Papa) like his real children did.

— You got a fine shape, he said, I’d say my boy’s a lucky man, to have a good-looking young gal like you.

— Well, she said, shifting her shoulders trying to suggest he let her go. She could smell and even feel his whiskey and cigar breath on her neck he was so close.

— Let go, now, I’m trying to do these dishes.

He held on, but after a minute gave a little har har under his breath and let her go, not before patting her behind on his way out.

Merry said to her one day, — You don’t like my papa, do you?

— What makes you say a thing like that? She was sitting by herself in the swing on the porch and Merry had come out, the little harlot in the making with her sleepy eyes.

— I can tell by the way you act around him. And he likes you, she added.

— Merry, you say the awfulest things. I ought to wash your mouth out with soap.

— I’d like to see you try.

— Well I could. Or get your mama to do it.

— I wish I had a cigarette, Merry said.

Birdie got up and went inside, left her out on the porch. Ruthie was asleep in their room. She picked up the moldy old book she’d found on the shelf in the foyer downstairs, Extraordinary Popular Delusions, and opened it to her mark in the chapter called “The Slow Poisoners,” all about how way back in England and Italy and whatnot people had discovered how to kill a body slowly with different poisons. They’d started to use it on their enemies, until it became so common in Italy for a while the story said a woman wouldn’t think any more of doing it to a lover or husband than someone would to file a lawsuit today. It was interesting to her because Pappy had grown hemlock in his garden and told her about how people used to use it for poison in this wickedness or that, he’d been fascinated with it.

In the book she found, it was mostly women who did it. One old woman in Italy was like the queen of the poisoners, saw it as helping out poor women who had no other recourse. It was horrible, but funny too, and she had fantasized about doing something like that to old Junius, and watching him get more and more poorly until his skin boiled over and his eyes popped out. She laughed out loud, almost woke up Ruthie sleeping beside her on the bed. But the longer she was forced to stay there alone, Earl on the road, the more miserable she was, and scared of Junius, too. She wanted to tell on him, but if she did Earl would kill him. Mrs. Urquhart wouldn’t be able to believe him capable of such a thing, anyway, in spite of his reputation and her tending to see evil and wickedness all around her. Birdie knew that for Mrs. Urquhart, evil was everywhere but remote, surrounding her and hers like a siege held off only by the force of her constant prayers, muttered under her breath every second of the day she wasn’t gabbing aloud about one thing or another. It would be Birdie who seemed evil to her, coming out with such a wild story. She decided she had to get out of there before things got worse.

When Earl came home the next weekend she didn’t give him an explanation or a choice. Just said, — Either you move us out of here of I’m going home to my family. So they moved to a little apartment on Southside on a day when the dogwoods were ending their bloom, and their white withering petals were strewn across the yards surrounding downtown. A flock of cedar waxwings like a rustling visible yellow-brown gust of a breeze rushed over their heads and into a chinaberry tree beside the Urquharts’ porch, then out the other side red-flecked before the last one entered, a breeze delayed or caught in the branches and swirling on its way. And they were gone, she and Earl and Ruthie, from that house. She kept the bad blood to herself, though Earl knew something vaguely of it, and they didn’t speak of it for some time.

After that it was easier, when he was away, because she’d fetch Pud and Lucy and bring them to town to stay with her, and run them back and forth to school in Earl’s car, and would bring Mama in sometimes, too. And Sundays they’d go out there and make a big Sunday dinner so Mama and Papa could see little Ruthie and she, Birdie, could walk with Pappy in the garden and hear his wonderful awful stories.

Earl would be gone for months at a time. It was like she wasn’t married, or maybe a widow already, such long nights ticking by in the lamplight, Ruthie sleeping, Pud and Lucy gone home. Here she was married, and pretty much alone. When he came back, she did her best to make it seem a good home, and to show him she appreciated him, though it seemed he had a hard time readjusting to being there, himself. She had the idea he was more comfortable with himself out on the road or working alone in the city.

Finally, though, Earl got the chance to open his own store in Mercury, and he bought them a little house just outside of town on the old Macon highway. It stood right across the road from where he’d build the big house with the deep front property during the war. One night in early June, the end of a hot day, they’d taken cool baths and lay in the bed with an oscillating fan blowing back and forth over them, and didn’t talk for a while, just lay there. There was a big honeysuckle bush between their house and the one next door, and the sweet smell of it drifted in the window, and for the first time ever she let Earl know, instead of him letting her know, that she wanted him. He turned on his side in the faint light and soon she could see his handsome eyes just looking at her. His coming home for good, and making them a real home, had tendered her toward him. They’d grown ever more remote during his years on the road. She touched him. Something about the way it happened — he was so gentle, and took his time, and maybe for the first time it felt as natural as could be, their being together like that. She forgot the night outside, Ruthie snoring childlike in her room, and the scent of the honeysuckles became something else not-honeysuckle, just became something all through the moment, and she cried out softly. It made Earl cry after, just silent tears she could see in that faint light, a glistening. -I love you, Birdie, with all my heart, he said, and wept, and she held him in her arms until they both fell asleep.

She’d thought he’d been so happy and relieved that it made him cry. But later she’d think it must’ve been guilt and shame. That he must’ve gotten started with other women when he was on the road, and had a whole history of passion that’d had nothing to do with her. That, in this way, he had already left her far behind.

She blamed herself, as much as him. He’d never had any real love around his house, no tenderness, not like her when she was growing up. One day not long after that evening, she went into town, caught a ride with Hazel Broughton in her new little coupe, and went into the store and all the girls looked up like she was a robber come in with a gun. She said, — Where’s Earl? No one said anything. -He’s up checking stock, one of them — a girl named Arlenie — finally said, and fairly rushed up the stairs. In a few minutes here comes Earl down, and when she kissed him she smelled a kind of perfume on him, a scent she’d smelled in the store before. She said nothing, just looked at him, and he looked away, said, — Well it’s real busy today, I’d better get to it, I need to work on some orders, and went into the office and left her standing there, all the girls avoiding her eyes.

— Where’s Cinda? Birdie said then, of the girl she knew he’d hired not a month before.

Another long silence. Then Arlenie, again, mustering a smile, says, — Oh, she took a late lunch, I think.

And Birdie didn’t say a word after that, just left and walked in a kind of blindness all the way to the library and stood there in front of the main doors until someone spoke to her. It was Finus Bates, standing there smiling a kind of fond, ironic smile at her, his expression changing when he saw the way she looked at him.

— Birdie, he said, reaching out to touch her shoulder, leaning toward her just a bit. -Are you all right?

She felt a little chill go through her, and stepped back. She was carrying Edsel, almost two months along. She hadn’t quite found the right time, just yet, to tell Earl.

She nodded at Finus, standing there perplexed, and started back toward Woolworth’s.

— Birdie? she heard Finus call out after her.

She was supposed to meet Hazel there for coffee. And then Hazel would drive her back out to the house, so she could start cooking, and have a decent meal ready before Earl came home at seven, regular as clockwork, for supper.

— Birdie? she heard Finus call after her again. -Is something wrong?

She lifted her hand, without looking back, in a feeble gesture could have stood for any number of things, I’m fine, No time, Got to run now, bye.

The Dead Girl

PARNELL GRIMES, SON of Mercury’s most prominent local funeral director, possessed a general grief for such as those unclaimed and unmoored in the world. By the time he was fourteen he’d developed a working fascination with his father’s profession, and had begun to sneak down into the preparation room to see the corpses who would be embalmed and presented the next day. And on some few occasions during that time, and always when the people had been mauled in accidents or contorted in some terrible death, he’d gone down in the wee hours to find them simply gone, disappeared, and had fled back to his room terrified that these walking dead would grasp him at every corner. The next day, their funerals would go on as planned, closed-casket. He’d been too terrified to say anything or ask, except once, and then never again. He’d pushed it deeply into a place where he would not have to think about them all the time. He was able to do that. Until the time he thought himself to blame.

The summer he was sixteen years old, he had been awake in his room one night and listening out the window to the occasional automobile rumbling past on the street. He’d seen the oscillating red of the silent ambulance light before he’d heard the car’s engine, and knew then he’d heard the telephone ringing earlier, as he’d thought, though it had awakened him from a deep sleep and he hadn’t been sure just then that it hadn’t been a dream. But he heard it now pull up out back, the whining sound of its transmission as it backed up to the preparation room doors, heard the two doors of the ambulance open and shut, heard the longer creaking of the heavy rear door, and then the rolling of a cart being removed and the voices of his father greeting the men quietly, and the men greeting him in return. And then the closing of the doors, and the ambulance driving off, with no red light now flicking, and then quiet. He rose and slipped into his clothes and shoes and crept down the stairs, in case his mother hadn’t awakened.

This was in the year before the strange and mysterious illness of first his father, who died a horrible suffocating death about which no one had an explanation, followed just a week later by his mother. He’d been horrified by the strange noises they made in the room outside of which he crouched fearfully, old Dr. Heath going in and out, weary, and washing his hands, it seemed the old man washed his hands so furiously in the pail in the hallway outside the room. And the doctor would not let him assist with their preparation, not that he’d wanted to but he’d thought it proper, almost an obligation. Dr. Heath laid a hand on his shoulder and said, — Son, it may be catching. And when first his father, and then his mother, lay in their caskets and he stood over them one after the other in the parlor, as he had over so many they’d prepared themselves, he felt a separation of himself from something he couldn’t pin down, death reversed upon itself, become something less clinical and more strange, as if all the making way they’d done for other people to that point had been slowly absorbed by them until it became them, too. And so he felt it then, himself, that he’d already gathered some of his own dying, and it would be a lifelong process of accumulation.

There was no explanation of what had happened for some two years until Dr. Heath saw the article that led him to suspect the psittacosis, and then investigated to find out that the gypsy woman his father had embalmed just before he got sick had been a breeder of imported parrots. And had died in much the same way. And when word leaked out, a veritable posse of men from town, friends of his father’s, went out to the camp with torches and drove the gypsies away on foot, warning gunshots popping the air, burned the gypsies’ wagons, tents, and all their belongings in a conflagration of hatred, grief, and fear. Parnell had seen it from some distance away, having run to follow the men at a safe distance. What he remembered was the terrible sounds of the birds in their cages, trapped there and burning, their shrieking like women and babies, which settled into an awful silence replaced by the quiet crackling of the burning wagons — and the stench, faint but coming to him in little waves, of burning flesh and feathers. He could not stand a bird in a cage to this day.

But on the night he’d awakened to hear the ambulance bring its cargo he’d crept downstairs and quietly opened the door to the preparation room to see something that made him catch his breath. The figure on the table was a girl near his age that he knew from school. He’d never spoken to her as she was a year older and a quiet girl, though he’d admired her. Her face seemed a sleeping face, not one with the contortions of pain or even the blankness of death, but with her mouth parted and her chin lifted just so, she seemed to be in an expectant sleep, as if she might wake any moment from the dream she kept alive by somnambulent will. His father turned and saw him, and pulled the sheet back over her face.

— I know her, Parnell said.

— You go on back to bed. You can’t help with this one.

— What happened to her?

Her father looked down at the form beneath the sheet.

— Nothing, he said. -This one’s a mystery. Her parents are beyond grief. She went to sleep and never woke up.

— How long has she been asleep?

— She’s dead, son.

— I mean, how long was she asleep.

— A week or more, his father said. Then after a moment he said, — She’s too close to your own age, Parnell. I don’t want you helping me with the young ones. There’s time later in your life for that sad business.

— Yes, sir. There won’t be an autopsy, then?

— The parents said they can’t abide the idea. There’s no evidence of foul play.

— Will you do the embalming tonight then?

— No, his father said after a moment. -I’ve had my toddy tonight. I think I’d better wait till morning.

— Yes, sir.

— You go on back to bed. Here, I’ll wash my hands and come up, too.

So he waited while his father washed in the sink, though Parnell’s eyes never left the vague figure of the girl under the sheet. He looked at the shape of her feet beneath it and could tell she wore no shoes. He imagined she was in the nightgown she’d put on the night she lay down to sleep from which she would never awaken.

— Father, he said. -Was she even sick?

— Ran a little fever, is all, nothing much. His father turned, drying his hands and looked at the girl. -I cannot imagine anything more awful. I hate to know it can happen. But I knew it before. I’ll try to forget again, if I can. Though you should, more than me. He smiled at Parnell. -It’s you with your child-rearing days ahead of you.

Not something Parnell could imagine, though. He walked with his father back up the stairs to the parlor level, then up the curved staircase in the foyer to their living quarters, and his father kissed him on the forehead before leaving him in his room and going back to bed with Parnell’s mother. Parnell undressed, took off even his underwear and socks, and got into his bed. Some minutes later he heard his father’s steady sonorous breathing, and some minutes after that, stepping into his slippers and pulling on his cotton bathrobe, he stole back down the two sets of stairs and into the preparation room. He felt his way in the dark around the wall to the sink, switched on the little lamp there above it, and turned around.

She was like a ghost there under the sheet. He could imagine, felt almost he had been there with her when she had drawn her last breath. The sweet expiration. This loss to him, to Parnell, of that which had never been his nor could be in life, and now here alone with him in death, she was. His heart ached with it.

He drew the sheet away from her face, his hands trembling, and the shock of her features, more alone with him than he’d ever imagined a girl could be, moved through him like a mild electric current.

He hadn’t noticed her much, but a few times, passing her in the hallway at school he had observed her shyness, how she walked with her chin tucked down in her neck, her dark brown eyes glancing up to make sure she didn’t run into anyone or get run over in the between-class rush, hardly daring to make eye contact with anyone. Glance up with a smile that seemed almost apologetic, then look down again and make her tentative way along. She was beautiful, he could see now, but no one would have noticed this, she’d been so demure and invisible. Now so visible it seemed a crime that she had never been admired by anyone but her parents, or maybe some boy just as shy as she was, someone who’d never have had the nerve to talk to her or ask her to a game, or ask her to dance at one of the dances they sometimes held at evening in the gymnasium. Someone like Parnell. She was a little dark, and her dark eyebrows were narrow but thick and defined, with a little arch like a V pointing upward in the middle of each one. And her eyes, closed, were wide-set. But it was her mouth that transfixed Parnell. It was broad and full, her lips a little dry and cracked, and now parted in death he could only imagine how expressive it must have been when she was at home, with family, and uninhibited by her shyness, how much joy she must have given to her mother and father, how much they must have hoped for her.

It was the hint of exotic in her features that began to sink into him now. What exotic locale they suggested he could not imagine, but someplace different. It was not the look of a gypsy. Until the woman with parrot fever, which ended it all, his father had often embalmed and buried gypsies; he had a friendship with the old gypsy queen’s son. He’d buried the queen, in that grand ceremony they’d conducted down 8th Street to the old cemetery west of town, Rose Hill. But she was not a gypsy. Her name, now he remembered, was Littleton, that was fitting. Constance Littleton, they called her Connie. Little Connie Littleton, here alone with Parnell. He leaned down and kissed her lips. Dry as desiccated clay. No give there. No, there was the faintest. She was not entirely cold. Still fresh in death, still sweet in passing. Still between the living and the dead, her spirit not entirely removed. He gently pulled the sheet down across her body, and off her small toes.

She was all small. And if she’d worn her nightgown in death his father had removed it, to prepare for embalming. She barely had feminine breasts. Her arms and legs were thin, her wrists no bigger round than stalks of sugarcane. Her shins and ankles almost bird-narrow, ending in the slim flat feet. Her waist was like a boy’s, not narrow and flaring into her hips. Her hands were turned up, as if she were consciously laid out in sacrifice, merely drugged by the high priests who’d laid her there.

He imagined that if he had known her, they would have walked to a little clearing in the woods. She would be silent, as always, and hardly able to look at him in her shyness. And in his own, little else to say. They would have sat together in slanting afternoon sunlight and let the quiet sounds of the woods gather around them for their company. He took the robe off and stood there a long moment with his eyes closed.

— I love you, he said to her. -You have to know that.

He began to cry a little, his eyes welled up. He had loved her and he hadn’t even known it. He began to be flooded by memories of her. He’d seen her eating by herself or with a couple of almost equally silent girlfriends in the school cafeteria. He’d seen her sitting on a bench beside the stadium reading a book and eating an apple one day. She wore a sweater and a tartan skirt and penny loafers. He imagined her helping him remove them, one by one, the light sweater, the skirt and shoes and socks off her feet, her underwear and a little brasiere there more for modesty than support.

The table hardly creaked when he climbed atop it and lay in the narrow space beside her. -I do love you, he whispered. He had hardly to push apart her thin legs, she was in the attitude to receive him already. At her neck, and behind her ears, in her hair, the musty sweet-and-sour smell of a week’s neglect in her bed. He could hardly hear the sounds he made for the louder sound of the blood rushing behind his eyes.

As he laid his weight upon her, her lips parted and an almost imperceptible exhalation escaped them, the odor of something strange and familiar too, an animal’s breath, and rotten flowers, the scum of an iron-rich creek near the swamps, the odor of richly decaying life, life in death, the dying always overtaking the living so the richness of the roots of life must push up unevolved from the earth and into an almost instant decomposition. She was thick and solid in her tissue, hard in parts of protruding bone like stones beneath a mat of firm moss, and cool but dry. Inside her was thick and cool and close but not entirely unyielding, his hard prick like a rigid fetus inside a cold womb. He moved himself deeper, slowly, with a wild restraint born of his barely contained respect and love for her, which fought within each second in his mind with a violent lust. He gripped the delicate knobs of her shoulders, which fit snugly into the palms of his own small, childlike hands. His mouth was at her ear, and into it he whispered desperate declarations of his passion, her beauty, oh how she was giving more of herself to him each moment. Some heated current ran its hot millipede fingers up his spine, shocked through his brain and out his scalp, his follicles pure heat valves, his jaw thrown open as if to eject his own heart, some shout must have rolled out of his diaphram though he could no more distinguish sound from some other force than if it had occurred in a world yet to know any living, breathing thing, his drool on her neck making a wet spot he could see, when he could see again, spreading beside her lank dark hair on the table beneath them.

He closed his eyes and lay there, his breath returning slowly to normal, his heart returning to a dreaded calm, when he heard the little noise that made him open his eyes again. It was a sound like the first little cheep you hear sometimes outside your window at dawn when a bird wakes up in its nest. And when he looked he saw first her mouth move, the lips press together, and then her narrow brow furrow over her thick dark eyebrows. His own breath caught in him like he’d been delivered a blow just as she caught her own, and her eyes opened like those of a child who’s been sleeping long and hard and he was up and off her still thumping gently with the last of what he’d done, and standing there watching her.

She lay there blinking for a long moment, then sat up.

— Mama?

Her voice small and crusty, weak. A thick gray cloud in her eyes, clearing.

— Where am I?

Parnell had retreated further away from her into a darker corner. Now she was blinking her eyes and looking at him.

— Where am I?

He couldn’t move. She stared at him a moment, then felt on her right shoulder where Parnell had drooled, looked at the faint glint of moisture on her hand. She looked down and tentatively touched her lower abdomen, her tummy, felt herself, made a quiet hnngh sound, an almost delicate expression of puzzlement. She saw the sheet still bunched at her feet and reached down to get it. She pulled it up over her waist, and then held it while she got down from the embalming table. Her bare toes flexing as they touched the cold concrete floor. She fixed the sheet around her shoulders like some kind of biblical robe and found the door with her eyes and started for it slowly, like a sleepwalker. She had forgotten him. She was not fully awake. He did not know what. He did not know what this was. Her hand found the doorknob and she opened the door and then stood there a minute in the doorway, looking out, looking up the stairs. And then she started up the stairs, going slowly, a little shaky, her hand on the railing. At the top of the stairs she opened the door to the main floor and stepped through.

Parnell snatched up his robe and put it on and followed her quietly in his slippers. When he got to the top of the steps she was almost to the front door at the end of the entrance hallway. She pulled on the door a second, and Parnell almost cried out, thinking she would not be able to open it and his parents would wake at her rattling the knob. Then he heard the lock tumbler click and the door creaked open, not too loudly, and she walked out into the streetlamp light on the front porch. He hurried forward to catch the door before it shut to and just did catch it and opened it to look out. The girl was out to the sidewalk now, still looking about her as if in a dream.

He was paralyzed with terror, but what could he do? In the mist of the bare light before dawn she was a diminishing figure wrapped in a white sheet, her dark hair and bare white feet exposed, a slip of leg when she took her steps, wavering, like a child drunk or a poor corpse wandering toward its gloom as a ghost, until she disappeared in the faint light, a wisp becoming one with the misty fog, and he closed the door quietly, leaned against it trying to catch his breath, and then stole up the stairs and crawled back into his bed and lay there for what seemed hours until he heard his parents stirring.

He lay there curled in his bed unable to move, his mind a wild jumble of fear and horror. What had he done? What would become of him now? He was more alive and awake and full of terror and wonder than he had ever felt in his life, and waited for the news to spread to the proper authorities who would come to arrest him, and thought about what he would say.

It could have been a few minutes later, it could have been an hour, he couldn’t tell, when he heard the telephone ring. And in a minute he heard the door to his parents’ room open, and his father rushing down the stairs. And then his mother calling down to his father, and he heard her go by his room and down the stairs. And he waited longer, lying under the sheets and awaiting whatever would happen. He heard their car start and leave. Then nothing. And he stayed there until some long time later, it seemed, his mother opened the door to his room and stuck her head in, a queer look on her face.

— Parnell, hon, come on down to breakfast.

— What is it, Mama? I heard Papa leave.

She stood there a second, looking at him.

— That Littleton girl, she finally said, and looked then as if her senses came back. -She just up and walked out of here sometime last night!

— The dead girl, Mama?

— Well, his mother said slowly then, I suppose that’s what she was. But now she’s alive and down at the hospital.

— She’s at the hospital? He lay there breathing hard and looking at his mother, but she seemed distracted. -How can that be? he said barely above a whisper.

— How can anything be, darling? she said. -My good Lord, to think we came close to burying that child, and her alive the whole time.

Parnell could hardly find the words, but finally he said, — How did she come to wake up like that?

His mother looked at him oddly then, and his heart seized up for what seemed the hundredth time that day.

— I don’t know, she said slowly. -I guess she’d just slept long enough.

When his father came home and went downstairs, Parnell waited until he was alone and went down there and went quietly into the preparation room, where his father sat on a stool looking over some papers beneath the small lamp he had set up there.

— Papa? he almost whispered.

His father looked around at him over his glasses, then turned back to his work.

— Your mama tell you what happened?

— Yes, sir.

— Very strange business.

— Papa, he said after a minute. -Is that what happened to those other people?

His father turned slowly to look at him, removed his glasses.

— What other people, Parnell?

— The ones that would be gone.

His father said nothing, just stared at him. Then he saw him glance at the dark corner over the by the sinks and he saw old black Clint, his helper, standing there staring at him also, and a chill ran through him.

— The ones, I would come down and they would be gone?

His father continued to stare at him. Then he spoke slowly.

— It’s been a hard night for all of us, Parnell. I don’t know what you’re talking about. You need some sleep, son.

— I’m sorry, Parnell said. -I wasn’t spying on them.

— You should never come down here alone, Parnell, his father said. -Not yet. There are things you don’t understand. He paused. -Will I have to put a lock on the door?

— No, sir.

— Go on to bed, son, he said then.

His father watched him as he turned and walked out of the room and closed the door behind him and stood there a moment, and heard murmuring conversation between his father and old Clint but couldn’t make out what they were saying. He went upstairs to his room and lay there all day with no coherent thought in his head until sometime in late afternoon he dozed off, and would not come down to eat supper. His mother brought him a sandwich up to his bed and sat on his bedside smoothing back his hair as he ate it, and whispering, — Poor boy, sometimes I wish we weren’t in this business, it’s no place for a little boy to grow up.

— Yes, ma’am, he said, and forced some bites of the sandwich down, though his mind still raced wildly, and for the next several days, when he feigned sick to stay out of school, terrified to go there lest the other children see in his face what he’d done. Until finally he was forced to go back, and he crept the halls more fearfully than ever, more invisibly than ever, and spoke to no one, and became again simply the strange Parnell all the children had always known, who kept to himself and would be a mortician when he was older, and was therefore an oddity to be abided with some amusement and unarticulated dread. And after some time, late in the year, the dead girl returned to school, as well.

He would see her in the hallways, after that, but like Parnell she was more the way she had been than ever before. She clutched her books to her thin chest, she kept her eyes down at her feet, and moved quickly from class to class. But Parnell, when he saw her now, saw more than he could bear. Her life, her living, the vital self she carried through the drab hallways, seemed a continuous miracle and the source of a deepening shame, even as the horror at what he had done became for him in his private and unchallenged thoughts something commonplace. Replaced, as it was, by simple shame, a secret and unmentionable embarrassment. In what little niche of her memory was she aware of what had happened? In what dream that visited her in the hours she could not recall, long before she would awake, this miracle of awakening every day? What part of Parnell existed in there, to be known by no one but Parnell and a part of Constance Littleton that might never resurface, and if it did could not be believed? Some students, some of the boys, called her the Dead Girl and would laugh. Other students said she had no memory of anything from when she went to sleep until she woke up in the hospital. Wandered from the funeral home like some risen mummy and went straight to the hospital. It was like an angel had guided her there, some of the pious girls said. But if it was an angel, Parnell said to himself, it was a fallen one, awakened now to see the darkness of the world all around him.

Finus Connubialis

SEVEN YEARS FINUS and Avis Crossweatherly spent in a desultory dance with one another, a rutting seven years in which they scratched whenever possible at an itch neither seemed able to truly satisfy for the other, yet they tried. In the seventh year Avis conceived and they married quickly in a ceremony at his parents’ beach house on the Alabama coast. They bought a small home in north Mercury and set about what would later seem to Finus the time-honored practice of slow connubial dissolution.

At a barbeque Earl Urquhart put on for several couples at his lake house one year, Finus and Avis lounged about on the patio of the little concrete block cabin sipping beer while the children ran in and out of the water, romping on the bank until they got hot again and then running back and jumping in. Only Finus and Avis’s little boy, Eric, did not join them. They’d forgotten his swimsuit, and he stood on the lawn looking awkward in the sailor boy outfit Avis had purchased for him the day before at Marx Rothenberg and which she’d forbade him to get dirty or wet. Finus watched as Eric stood in the sun there — a seven-year-old boy slightly pigeon-toed in his meekness, little hands by his sides, his pale straight hair almost glowing in the sunlight, looking more like a fragile gathering of light in the shape of a child than a real, a corporeal, child — as the other children shrieked and flopped onto the grass beside him and ran crying chasing one another back to the water, where they splashed around and screamed in delight. Every now and then Finus would see him glance back at the adults up on the patio in the shade of the loblolly pines.

In that moment Finus felt all his own failings as a father well up inside him and he lost his appetite for even the cold can of Falstaff in his hand, which he’d so relished just a couple of seconds before. He judged that his paternal failings emerged from his seemingly terminal distraction, his tendency to daydream his way through the days and to resent insistent intrusions along those wayward paths. He was moody, melancholy, and took a kind of joy in solitude, a well of this inside him that must be filled at regular intervals. And if it was not, if the demands upon his attention caused this well not to fill each day or week or month or season, he felt edgy and irritable — and, ironically though with perfect logic, somewhat empty inside.

He stole occasional looks at Birdie, who seemed entirely self-possessed and content sitting in her green metal patio chair and sipping a glass of lemonade, bouncing one leg over the other and talking to Cicero Sparrow’s wife, Cornelia, who took slugs of her third or fourth Falstaff and wore a ridiculously wide-brimmed straw hat and sunglasses, to hide the wreckage of her alcoholic, insomniac eyes. Avis stood beside Earl, wearing her cream-colored summer dress and her new canvas summer shoes from Earl’s store, her short light brown hair swept back behind her ears, her so-often-suspicious or angry green eyes alight with good humor and eager attention. She was still a handsome woman. Finus had at some point in their past let himself let go, stopped comparing her to Birdie in appearance and attitude, and resolved to love Avis for who and what she was, to open his heart to her own clenched one, to open his longing to her long and harder-edged beauty, for he knew it was something to appreciate. Avis tossed her head back at some joke Earl had made, her slightly hoarse voice rising in high laughter, and when she glanced over at Finus he gave her a little smile, and she gave him a big broad one back in just the moment before her eyes registered all their troubles again swiftly like some hole in the sky sucking day into dusk, their dimmed and diminishing happiness, what little there was. She turned back to Earl somewhat sobered.

Though Earl already had turned away and gone down to the lake bank to check on something in the johnboat he used to fish for bass and crappie in the lake. Avis stood there all alone for the moment, no doubt feeling slighted, feeling cheated by Finus for distracting her from one of the few openly pleasurable moments she’d had in some time. She came over and stood next to where he sat on the little parapet wall around the patio. And was about to say something to him when she looked over his head at the children and saw Eric out in the water up to his knees, his sailor-suit shorts rolled up high to keep them from getting wet.

Finus turned as Eric looked up toward the sound of his name, his mother’s voice. He looked shocked, as if he hadn’t expected to get caught. Then he called out in his own defense, — I took off my shoes and socks!

Avis set her can of beer down on the wall, stepped over it, and strode down the bank toward him even as Eric, a mild child’s panic causing him to hold the rolled ends of his shorts between his thumbs and forefingers almost as if they were a skirt, started pulling his feet out of the muck and high-stepping toward the bank himself.

— Avis, Finus said, hoping to check her.

But to his horror she met the boy as he came out of the water and had him by the ear pulling him up the bank, everyone on the patio now stopped to watch them. Finus saw her let go of his ear and get down in his face. He saw Eric bunch up his face in a frown and say something and stomp his foot, big mistake. He saw Avis’s hand draw back and slap him across his cheek, and then Eric opened his mouth wide and closed his eyes tight and let out a heartbreaking wail, and that’s when Finus went over the parapet himself, grabbed up Eric in his arms, muttered a furious Let’s go to Avis’s astonished face, and headed for their old Ford, whether she would follow or not. She barely had time to get into the car, mute and furious herself, almost didn’t get in at all when he hissed at her torso through the open passenger side window where Eric sat sniffling, You ride in the back. He popped the clutch and tore out of the gate and down the dirt road back to the highway. On the way home no one said anything until Eric, still sniffling, asked, as children will do when they know the advantage is in their court, — Could we stop at Brookshire’s and get some ice cream? Finus almost laughed, and said finally, — Later on this afternoon, I’ll take you. And he could feel the waves of intensified outrage from Avis in the backseat that he would take one step further to ostracize her in this situation.

Later, after he had taken Eric to get ice cream and had sat with him in the parking lot eating it, tall fountain glasses of ice cream and nuts and chocolate sauce and pineapple pieces and a cherry on top of whipped cream — Cupid’s Delights, the shop called them — and after he and Eric had driven out to the airport and watched an old biplane come in to land over the roof of the car, its wings wobbling slowly to stay on the center-line track of the runway, and they’d gone home with dusk approaching, Avis had come up as he sat reading the paper and drinking a bourbon and water in the den and stood there.

— I know I was wrong to do that, she said.

He looked up at her over the paper without replying.

— But you have no right to shame me for it, she said. -You know I love him as much as you do.

— Then why don’t you show it? he’d said.

She stood there a moment, her eyes moving back and forth between his own. Then she said,

— You have the gall to say that to me, when you hardly give him the time of day unless it suits your own fancy. When you stay at that newspaper office fiddling around until he’s almost ready for bed each night or already in the bed, and come in and tell him a story or just kiss him good night, then go to get yourself a drink and sit in this chair and ignore me. Meanwhile I get him ready for school in the morning, after you’ve gone early to have your coffee and breakfast with other men at Schoenhof’s and had yourself a shave at Ivyloy’s barbershop, and I take him to school and kiss him if he will let me and let him off, then go to school myself and teach a bunch of snotty brats all day, wishing a tenth of them were as sweet-natured and intelligent as my own child, and then I get out and go to pick him up again and take him home and fix him a snack, and let him go out to play, or I even play with him myself, help him put together his model airplanes, even throw him the baseball sometimes and chase his balls and comfort him when he frets he’s not as good as the other boys his age, and then I make his supper and make him do his homework and make his bath and make him say his prayers and put him to bed, and then sometime along in there you come home and fix yourself a drink and make some half-empty gesture toward being the most important man in his life and make no gesture at all toward pretending that you could ever want to be that in mine, and then sometime along around ten or eleven o’clock you go to your own room and go to bed. Sometimes you come in to tell me good night and sometimes you don’t. We are neither of us very important to you and yet you sit there like some righteous fool and lecture me on how I ought to show more affection to my son.

He’d had no reply to all that, for right then it sounded like the truth.

— I don’t know why you stay with me unless it’s for Eric’s sake, she said. -But I swear it doesn’t seem to me that you even care enough about him to stay for that reason anymore.

He grew hot over that and said through his teeth, surprising himself at the surge of emotion that nearly brought quick tears to his eyes,

— Who are you to say I don’t love my own child?

— Well if you do, she said, you might do a little more to show it.

ALSO AT THE barbeque had been Earl’s sister, Merry, now married to the hapless R. W. Leaf, who sold insurance with old Junius Urquhart. She’d sat apart from everyone in a reclining lawn chair, surveying the scene from behind a pair of sunglasses, her long dark hair curled and brushed back, her lips a bright red, fingernails and toenails to match. She sipped what looked like a glass of bourbon on ice. Whenever Finus’s glance happened to fall on her, she caught it like a fish he’d cast a line to and sent back along that line the tactile reverberations of a slow, salacious smile. He absorbed it into his own tight grin and cranked his gaze away from her legs, crooked and slightly askew up on the footrest of the chair.

Two days later, while Finus’s father was out for lunch, Merry strolled past the plate-glass window of the Comet, paused to look, then came in the door, little bell tinkling behind her like a fairy sprite announcing her entrance.

— Hello, Finus.

— Merry.

— I’d like to place a classified ad in your newspaper, if the rate is right.

She smiled, then unclasped her purse and pulled out a little notepad and tore off the top sheet, folded it, and handed it to him. He took it, looked at her standing there with an expression he could not quite read, then unfolded the paper and read: Meet me at 4:00, back lot of Magnolia Cemetery, in the oak grove.

What he would say to Avis in his mind when she had demanded, once — just once she had allowed him to see how this had hurt her, and he couldn’t remember too many times she’d shown her vulnerable side — demanded to know why he had done it, was: Because Merry was beautiful. Not pure, by any means, but she had a flowing, let-down, buxom, long-legged beauty that just made a man want to get down in a glade with her and rut. Let loose the wildness. Her hair was dark and long and full of wavy curls, and one of her dark brown eyes was cast just a tad inward. She kept her mouth parted in the company of men, just barely, as a silent and private signal to desire her. And always the not-quite-subtle eye contact, always looking at you at just the moment, and for the moment, that you happened to look up at her, as if she had been thinking privately how much she would like to give herself to you, and was now caught at it and secretly glad.

They met in the far back and then-unoccupied lots of the new Magnolia Cemetery north of town. There was a sharp downslope and little more than a packed dirt path leading to the woodsy brush around the creek, and still plenty of trees between there and the fresh graves up on the hill, and one could just see the steep Victorian gables of the new widows and orphans’ home above the tops of a thick and leafy oak tree if one looked up over Merry Urquhart’s bare and sculpted delicate shoulders as she rode him, eyes closed and head hung forward in pleasurable concentration on the ride.

It was true what they said about her breath, it was awful, but Finus had determined early on a way around that, and had taken to bringing along a half-pint of bonded bourbon and made it a ritual that they take a few swigs apiece upon first meeting, so the halitosis was somewhat alleviated, for long enough anyway. When she got to breathing hard it sometimes seeped its way through again but by then he didn’t care so much anymore and when they were finished and lying there first thing he would do was bring the bottle up again for a ritualistic toast to what they’d just done. Merry liked a drink enough that she never suspected the reason. And it made Finus a little more daring in his attitude, anyway, and assuaged the guilt for long enough to get home, clean up, and ease into the forgetting of what he’d done, on into the evening.

Maybe the more interesting question was why had Merry chosen to have a thing with him? Usually, Birdie would later say, it was just with men who’d come fresh to town, didn’t know a thing about her, and whom she wanted to buy insurance from her husband, R.W. That way when she was bored with them, which would take about two or three weeks, maybe a month, she’d have gotten something material out of it and R.W. in his ignorance would be pleased at how she’d sweet-talked a man into buying insurance from him. Oh he knew she was a flirt, he’d say, but couldn’t conceive as how his darling would go all the way. She kept up a charade with him her whole married life. And just what kind of a person can do that, day and night?

It was because of Birdie, he knew that. They were always jealous of Birdie because they were all in love with Earl, his whole family, in love with him and in hate with him at the same time. He was the oldest sibling, and the smartest, and the handsomest, and had the most drive. And he made the most money and had thereby control, in an implicit way, over them all. Even the old man, old Junius, was worshipful in a way and bowed to Earl’s power.

And so seducing a man like Finus, whose attraction to Birdie was similar to Earl’s, was next best thing to seducing her brother himself. At least Finus figured it that way. Once he and Merry took a ride out the Macon highway, nipping from a pint of bourbon, and he’d made a joke about her reputation, and added, — Ah, you’d fuck your brother if you thought you could get away with it. They were in Finus’s Ford, but Merry was driving. She gave him a look. He noticed they were gathering speed. Ripped through Lauderdale at about ninety. Somewhere on the other side, she threw the wheel so hard to the left that he’d been thrown against the door, a miracle it didn’t open and tumble him out. A miracle the car didn’t capsize and roll, killing them both, before she could get it out of fishtail and slow to seventy, and neither of them said another word about it. They rode back to Mercury in the oppressive dark coming on, silent, radio off, looking ahead at the road and placid, as if content enough in knowing the corrupt complicity of their union, and did their duty in the cemetery after hours, evening insects cheeping and chirring around them as the hot engine of the Ford ticked toward cool, and she shouted like she never had before and held him pinned beneath her strong hands on his shoulders, fucking him with a vengeance for having had the audacity to speak the truth about her enterprising nature. And when she’d finished, and before he had, she’d pulled up off him with a merciless lack of care, a heartless sound like a foot being pulled up out of muck, and stepped out into the deep green of the darkening graveyard and stood naked among what would be the plots of the dead come forty years hence, her bare long slim feet splayed in the gathering dew on the grass, her shape hippy and beautiful, the long dark hair a thick gout against her pale back, hands resting on those hips as she looked up at a canted half-moon, and waited while he shamelessly finished himself into his own palm, watching her, until the passion of the moment was a mockery of itself, and a chill set in, and that was the last he’d heard from Merry till she waltzed uninvited and late into a tea Avis had thrown, and let Avis know simply by her familiar gestures, by picking up the last half of a cookie Finus had left on his plate and eating it, looking frankly at him, what all had occurred. His whole head had been clanging with alarm from the moment she stepped through the door. And Avis had finally and just as frankly walked up to Merry and said, — I’ll thank you to take your whore self out of my house and never come back. Merry had smiled as if Avis had falsely praised her hair or her dress, dusted the cookie crumbs in a delicate way off her fingertips, retrieved her purse from where she’d set it, conveniently, on the floor beside her chair, and walked out, head held up in victory and hips rhythmically inventing the balance she needed to stride elegantly out the door in her high-heeled shoes, given her no doubt by her brother Earl and definitely superior to any other woman’s shoes in the room. And Finus had never wanted her more than in that moment, when he knew she would never even look at him with the slightest hint of familiarity again in his life.

AVIS OPENLY HATED him after that. He offered to divorce her, but she refused. So he moved out under cover of an unofficial separation and moved into the empty apartment over the Comet office downtown.

Mercury downtown was pretty lonesome at night, but pleasantly so. Few cars, so that when they passed on the street below their tires made an airy sound that he found comforting. The stoplights clocked through their preset changes, he could hear the clunking switchboxes as if over water, so clearly, and their red, yellow, and green glows were cast upon the asphalt in air heavy with the dissolving heat of the day like silent, benign messages of no import. And sometimes he would walk to the window and look out on them and if cars were stopped at them, at the courthouse intersection, he could see the people inside them, shapes variegated in black and white, sashed by the streetlights, and he saw arms crooked at windows, legs propped up on dashboards, bare feet sticking out sometimes, and heads turning to say something to one another and thrown about sometimes in animated talk or laughter. And it didn’t make him feel lonesome, it made him feel good about things, comforted by the presence of these people passing. He was surprised at how few of them he recognized. Very few. It was a larger town than he’d always thought, with more people in it and passing through it. Sometimes looking down on them he was amazed at the simple awareness that here were people with lives as complicated and multifaceted and connected by a web of acquaintances, friendships, and kin as his own, mostly with no connection to Finus at all. He felt silly at his age coming to this awareness so cleanly, so late. The world felt vast right within his hometown in a way it hadn’t really, before.

He did miss terribly seeing Eric every evening, tucking him in. He had a Frigidaire in the kitchen and sometimes its humming was the only other presence in the rooms. He sometimes had women to come over and he sneaked them in like criminals. Or like he was, receiving them. He guessed he technically was. When the telephone rang at night it was as loud as a fire alarm. Mostly his life at home was filled with silence. His relationship with Avis during this time was chilly but civil. He would call before going to pick Eric up, and he called to talk to him during the week, most nights. He didn’t always call, though, because sometimes the whole situation depressed him so he couldn’t bring himself to break that particular silence and pick up the phone.

Weekends, and the occasional weeknight when there was something the boy wanted to do with Finus instead of Avis, he had Eric with him in the place. And Eric loved coming to see him there, though he couldn’t understand why Finus wouldn’t move back home. Finus bought a radio, a nice wooden Motorola, and together they listened to local and national variety shows and the news broadcasts in the early evenings. They took walks in the quiet downtown and would stop in at the drugstore fountain for a Coke or ice cream. They took long drives in the country on the weekend days, just driving for long periods without talking much.

One late spring after school was out Finus took Eric on a boys’ vacation down to his family’s old beach shack out on the Fort Morgan peninsula. They threw their suitcases and floats for lolling in the Gulf swells into the 1931 Model B Ford four-cylinder car he’d bought new just a few years before, and rolled through Mercury just after dawn, climbed the high bluff road, and Eric turned in his seat to see the sunlight slanting in on downtown. He sat back down, and in a minute he looked over at Finus and said over the sound of the wind through the windows, — Only boys are allowed on this trip, Pop. Finus grinned and said, — That’s right, buddy. No girls allowed.

It was early June and so by ten o’clock the breeze coming into the car was hot and Eric’s cheeks flushed red as he laid his head down on the seat beside Finus and napped, his child’s lips parted, and Finus glanced down in wonder at how beautiful his little boy was, with his light blond hair and long golden eyelashes, his thin and delicate, perfect skin, faintly freckled across his small nose. He could hardly stand the idea that he had failed to make a good home for him.

Just before noon they stopped in Citronelle for lunch at a little roadside diner, and he and Eric pepped up with a Coke on ice and a hamburger apiece. They put the sweaty-cold Coke bottles on the table beside the glasses of ice, short little glasses with a roll in the glass near the rim, and Eric regarded it before he picked his up in one of his little hands and drank. Finus marveled at the boy’s fingers, so narrow and delicate at the ends, soft child’s fingers. There were moments such as this when he knew that he’d never love a soul like he loved this boy. Those moments when he could escape himself enough to know. All his life (he considered in such moments) he had imprisoned himself within himself, hardly aware of the world outside the small sphere of his terrible self-absorption. He did not consider himself to be a selfish man, a man incapable of caring for others, a man sleepwalking through his emotional life. But he was most often limited by an inability to see the world except through the dingy filters of self-conscious need. It was the most niggardly existence he could imagine, and he was filled with self-loathing and a desire to be some other way. To not be who he was. Which was akin (he thought at his most ironic) to some pathetic embodiment of the Old Testament Father: strong, selfish, jealous, vengeful, proud.

WHEN THEY’D EATEN he stopped for fuel at a station down the street, and they headed on.

Below Mobile the going was slower but the route prettier, through long flat fields of wheat, beans, and corn, till they crossed the canal. He took it slow down the old winding, wavy-surfaced, sand-shifting military road out the peninsula. By the time Finus stopped to let some air out of the tires for the sandy path from the road to the beach house, it was late afternoon, just in time for a late cooling-off swim in the Gulf.

He flung open the front and back doors and all the windows to let the Gulf breeze run through the screens. They stripped down and got into their trunks and went down the old splintery steps and Finus raced him to the water, let him win, and when Eric pulled up waist-deep Finus took him up and went out farther until the swells reached his chest, and he held Eric out and let him flail his arms at the waves. It was a calm day and there were hardly any breakers at all except right at the shore’s edge.

— Don’t let a jellyfish get me! Eric shouted.

— I won’t.

— Do you see a jellyfish?

— No, no jellyfish today. I see a shark there.

— Pop!

— Just kidding.

When they’d swum awhile they went back to the cabin and Finus got the ice chest from the back of the car and hauled it up the steps into the cabin and put on a pot of water and boiled the shrimp with some small new potatoes he’d picked up in Foley. When the shrimp had boiled he drained them and peeled them and set them out on plates with a sauce he’d made from ketchup, a little horseradish, lemon juice, and Worcestershire sauce, and he drank a cold beer with it, and they ate bread with the shrimp and potatoes, and he took his empty can and filled it mostly with cold jug water from the chest and poured a sip of beer in there from his own can and gave the water-beer to Eric. They sat out on the deck watching the sun go down in the water, two fellows having a good old time, and Finus wished every moment in their lives together could be like this.

BUT OH HELL the short of it was that in 1943 Eric was drafted into the army and shipped out to a training base in North Carolina. Finus and Avis both felt a little numbed by his absence, his infrequent letters, the sense that not only the reason for their (barely) surviving marriage but also the last medium for their animosity had disappeared. When they received word that Eric had died in a training accident at his base, never even sailed to France — or in the strange aftermath of it all — Finus felt almost as if their child had never existed, as if Eric’s whole life had been some kind of shared dream.

After the funeral, with military honors, Finus and Avis sat in her living room, he in the chair where he used to sit to have his bourbon and water at the end of a day. Avis was looking at him not with hatred or even plain anger, but with something more weary and resigned.

— I needed you, she finally said. -I did need you. I don’t know what it is in a man who seems to lose his feeling for someone, that’s if you ever really had it, as soon as that person really gives in and lets herself feel something for him. That’s what I think happened. She stared at him, waiting for a response. -What do you think? she said.

He tried to think, to respond to that, but it seemed his thoughts were just gears slipping, refusing to engage. His distraction was intimate and remote at once. He couldn’t really say what he felt.

— I think it’s more complicated than that, he finally said.

— I feel sorry for you, Avis said. -I used to think it was just that you fell in love with Birdie when we were only children, teenagers, and you never got over it. But now I don’t think it was just that. I think something in you makes it impossible for you to really love another person. God knows it’s a hard thing for someone like me to do, too, I know I’m far from perfect. But I think you’re worse, I’m sorry to say.

— Well maybe you had a little something to do with that, he said.

Avis said, very deliberately, — Go to hell.

He asked, this time, for a divorce, and again she refused. Something in her couldn’t give him that. He closed up the apartment above the Comet and moved to Tuscaloosa, Alabama, across the state line, took a job on the city desk. He drove from Tuscaloosa to Mercury to visit his parents once a month or so, but otherwise never went home. Attended his mother’s funeral in ’52. When his father died of a heart attack two years later, he quit the News, packed up, and went home to take up where his father had left off, with the Comet. Moved back into the apartment above it, nothing changed but the dust and two or three new creaks in the floors.

He wasn’t sure when he’d started thinking about Birdie again. He’d not exactly put her out of mind, especially since her friend Alberta McGauley wrote their community’s column for Finus’s paper, and was always including Birdie in her gossipy ramble. But he had spent some two or three years thinking of her only peripherally, as some vague recurring figure spinning past, as past, on fortune’s ever-spinning wheel. One early February, as if he’d poked a stick in the spokes of that wheel and stopped it, he ran into her on the sidewalk outside Schoenhof’s, chatted her up for half an hour in the windy chill before he let her go to walk the two blocks to Earl’s store, where she was headed. She was aging well. They both were. Her hair still long, and braided, pulled up onto her neck. A wool coat buttoned up, calf leather gloves. The wide gap in her smile. Pale blue eyes easy and unguarded, unaware, it would seem, of the slow accretion of rekindled interest in Finus. She gave him a peck on the cheek. He watched her cross the street, turn the corner, disappear, the small round spot in the hollow of his cold cheek tingling as if infused with warm, charged particles fine as powdered steel.

Negro Electric

WHEN EARL BUILT the new house across the road he let stand an old cabin out back, hired a maid for Birdie, and let the maid live out there during the week so she could stay later and help with supper, and be there earlier to help with breakfast, too. Said he could afford it now and wanted life to be easy for her, Birdie. Well just guilt, that. The maid, a girl named Creasie, got on her nerves, shuffling around the house in her bare feet like an old woman though she was only twelve years old. Because of his interest in herbs, Birdie’s Pappy knew the old medicine woman who lived down in the ravine at the north end of Mercury, and knew she had raised this girl and wanted to put her to work. So Earl had gone and picked her up. But from the beginning Birdie had doubts about her fitness.

In those days around Mercury, when you wanted one of them you just drove your car to the front edge of the old ravine, up where it was still woodsy and there was a little dirt turnaround in the lot next to the old Case mansion, and honked your horn. Directly one of them would poke his head out of the trail leading down in there, a boy or a young man usually, and you’d say, I need somebody to dig me a ditch, or whatever, and the boy or young man would say, How big? Oh not big just about ten foot long, yea deep, and the head would go away and in about fifteen minutes or half an hour up out of there would climb one, two, three of them, male or female depending on the job (you could ask for a washwoman or even a midwife in a pinch). But unless there was a specific job to do you rarely saw them outside the ravine. They did their trading in town on Saturday afternoons. This girl Creasie was some kind of perfect example of a ravine nigra, seemed not only to be in her own strange little world but hardly communicated outside of it, either, just a lazy Ye’m, or No’m, or a noncommittal Mmm-hmm, or just a vague and inscrutable heh heh heh. Never really making eye contact. Kind of insolent, but nothing you could really nail down. Everybody said the ravine nigras were half wild animal, anyway, and half something else like wood spirit.

They hadn’t been in the new house a year before the day Junius brought the dummy home from the trip to Little Rock, had sat him up in the backseat of his car for the drive like he was a real nigra and so everybody that saw him driving back into town thought he’d brought a strange nigra home with him. He let everybody think he’d brought home a real nigra man from Little Rock, Arkansas, and put him into a shed behind their house, Earl and Birdie’s house, and kept him there like a prisoner. One of his practical jokes. Mercury was small enough even then so that everybody knew what everybody else was up to, and people would say Well he was not just a strange nigra he was a strange-looking nigra. Mr. Urquhart would drive through downtown at a good clip so they couldn’t get a hard look at him, just see this black head poking up in the backseat with seemed like a funny expression, but who would ever think it was a wooden man, a dummy? If white people couldn’t tell strange black people apart then how were they to distinguish between the wooden and the flesh? Being driven around town like with a chauffeur, which even she thought it was odd the way black people got driven around by white people, the reason being there was no sitting on the same seat together no matter what, but wasn’t it funny. People knew this nigra was not from the shanties down in the ravine unless they’d been hiding him down there for some reason, and so for a brief period people were speculating that Creasie’s people had been hoarding this strange nigra down in the ravine, maybe because he was dangerous, maybe because he was crazy, or both.

But all of it died down when Junius got tired of the game and took the nigra out of hiding and showed him around before bringing him back over to their house, sat him up in one of her cane-bottom chairs out on the back sunporch, till he could figure out what to do with him. Mrs. Urquhart wouldn’t let it in her house. Birdie had to walk past this grinning abomination whenever she was coming from the back of the house, and got to where she couldn’t stand it and started going through the living room instead. When Junius got tired of her pestering him about it, he finally just took Earl aside one day and said Earl could just keep the nigra. Birdie said, — Well what in the world are you going to do with such a thing?

Earl said, — I don’t know, maybe some kind of advertising.

— But you sell women’s shoes. How is a colored dummy going to help you sell women’s shoes?

— I said I don’t know, Earl said. -Maybe stand him up in the display window, waving people on inside.

— Waving?

— He’s an electric nigra, Birdie.

— A what?

— He’s supposed to operate an electric saw, kind that you pull the saw blade across the board. So his arm moves like that.

— Like how?

He showed her.

— That doesn’t look like waving to me.

He just looked at her.

— It almost looks nasty to me, without the saw or whatever’s supposed to be in his hand.

Earl looked at her and didn’t say anything, she thought he might blow up, then he walked off. And not two days later put the electric nigra back out in the shed and there he stayed.

Creasie was spooked by it, she could tell. If she was heading to the back of the house via the sunporch she’d pull up shy of the French doors from the dining room and veer off into the living room instead, take the long way around. Birdie’d thought she’d be glad too when Earl put it up, but when she said something Creasie mumbled, — No’m, Mr. Junius likes to take us out to the shed and talk to it.

— Say what, now? You and who?

— Me and the children.

Meaning her grandchildren, Ruthie’s two and Edsel’s little boy, Robert.

— What do you mean, talk to it?

— Yes’m. He talk to that dummy like it’s real, then make like it talking back.

She told Earl about it and he said, — So what? He’s just playing a game with the children.

— Well don’t you think it’s strange to keep a wooden dummy locked up in a shed behind the house and to take little children back there and pretend it’s real and can talk to them? And then to leave and lock it up in there again, them all the time thinking he’s got a nigra man locked up in a shed behind the house, sitting up on a shelf like some boogie man?

Earl just laughed to himself. -You tell him to quit it, if you want to. I don’t see anything wrong with it.

She tried to let it go. Then Earl brings home the new vacuum cleaner that day, odd contraption like some kind of metal basketball on wheels with a hose and wire coming out of it, and Creasie doesn’t like it, of course, says, — Ye’m I’d just rather sweep, me, but Birdie says — Now they say these things will clean the rugs so you don’t have to haul them out and beat them every week, so I want you to try it. And they plug it in and Birdie pushes it around to show her how, and pretty soon Creasie, who’s standing there with this scowl on her face, big pout, takes the handle from her like to snatch it away and starts pushing it around. Then just to get her back, won’t stop vacuuming. Every day before Birdie’s even finished her coffee good, Creasie in there firing that loud, whining thing up, giving her a headache, till she hears a pop and a little scream and runs into the living room to see the wall smoking and the vacuum hose flung aside and Creasie laid out on the rug with her eyes wide open and quivering like a freezing person, can’t breathe.

Birdie jumped on her and started pushing her chest, be dog if she was going to put her mouth on a nigra to revive her. But she came to, blinked and smacked her lips a while, sat up. Birdie helped her to stand up, and got her a cup of coffee. And about halfway through the cup of coffee Creasie started cutting her evil looks. -Well I didn’t make it shock you, Birdie said, and Creasie stalked off back to the cabin and wouldn’t come back to work for two days. She told Earl, called him where he was in St. Louis on a buying trip, — I’m putting that thing out in the garage and when you get back you just don’t even stop, take it straight to the junk pile if it’s going to shock the nigra maid and make her even stranger than she already is.

— You can take that durned old nigra dummy too, while you’re at it, she says.

Which she repeated when he got home.

— It’s not out there anymore, he says, starting to eat his dinner and not looking up. -Papa took it and sold it to somebody.

— Well thank goodness for that.

— Thank goodness my foot, it wasn’t his to sell.

— I’m glad to be rid of it.

— That’s not the point. Point is he gave it to me, then turns around and sells it. He takes another bite of chicken and mashed potatoes. -I’m going to get it back. He won’t tell me where it is, said the man was just passing through. I’ll find out.

— You do no such thing. Why in the world would you bother to do that? I hate it! Why can’t you just let it go, if you know I hate it around here.

— It’s the principle of the thing, he says. -That son of a bitch never gave me anything when I was growing up, and now after all these years miracle of miracles he’s given me an electric wooden nigger and I don’t give a good goddamn if it’s a worthless piece of junk or not, he gave it to me and I’ll be goddamned if he’s going to just reach into my shed and take it back and sell it, because it’s mine.

— Well now you got a real nigra man living here, so you ought to be satisfied, she said.

The real nigra was that Frank, who’d just appeared the week before — a black ragged ghost, there in the yard raking leaves in the scant dark gray light of a late afternoon. -You there, she shouted out to him, what do you want? — Yes’m, he said, I’s just raking the leaves, something like that. She told him to talk to Earl, they couldn’t hire another nigra around the place. But Earl says, — Well I’m sure as hell not going to rake the leaves, and it’s hard enough to get someone over here to do that. Besides, he’s staying with Creasie out there, looks like, maybe she can use the company, better to help keep her around.

She’d have liked to be done with the both of them, with the lot of them, there were plenty of white people, even old people, could be got to do that work. She didn’t like them skulking around. If she hadn’t gotten to where she liked for Creasie to fetch her sassafras for tea from old Vish — it was good for her stomach trouble and other ailments, too — she might have just let her go, but then too firing one of them could be harder than hiring, so she didn’t.

Earl got to where he’d take Frank off fishing with him, down to the coast, where she knew he was seeing the woman he’d hired at the store that year and sent off to manage the new store in Tallahassee, so Frank knew that about him, about her, which was humiliating. She knew Earl was seeing her down there, but said nothing, it was out of her sight. But it made her feel all the more lost in her life, what she had become, and she would find herself sometimes on weekends when he was down there thinking she had slipped into another life where he wasn’t even alive anymore, had disappeared almost as if he’d been gone for a long time, and she wandered the grounds around the house picking leaves from the trees and bushes and memorizing their vein patterns, their shapes, and digging earthworms from the black earth at the base of the magnolia tree out by the road to take fishing by herself out at the lake. At the lake sometimes she would stay into the dark, and lie on the cot in the living room of the cabin smelling the rank smell of the bedding bream and would want to touch herself but when she did felt nothing, no desire, as if she were physically numbed as well, just made her think of her sisters and being girls together and she’d feel sad, and she would get up and drive in the darkness down the dirt road back to the highway.

She wanted to escape it all, go back to the past. To be a girl again. When she turned into the long winding driveway to the house and saw the bleak light spilling weakly from the curtains in the kitchen and den where Creasie sat there like a black shadow in the dim electric lamp’s penumbra with little Ruthie’s children in irregular orbits around her, she felt she was a stranger reentering a world she would have to remember all over again when she stepped in the door, by sight and touch and by things the others said that might bring her back to who she supposedly was, like someone lost her memory and struggling always against her own will to know something of this place, these people, these lives.

Discussion with the Dummy

CREASIE HAD HATED the dummy from the start. Mr. Junius would round up all the little grandchildren, Ruthie’s two and Edsel’s Robert, bring them out there and walk them out to the shed to see the dummy. Come on, let’s go see Oscar! he’d say. Come on, Creasie, you come along. And out they’d troop back to the shed, Miss Birdie fussing at him from the kitchen door the whole way, she didn’t like that dummy. Mr. Junius would rattle his keys and open an old hasp lock on the shed door, call out, Look alive, now, Oscar! Company coming! and he’d cre-e-e-eak open the big wide door that was nothing but another sheet of roofing tin on a frame made into a shed door. Blade of light would slice slowly into the shed’s darkness. And up on the highest shelf, feet dangling, eyes looking off to his left like a happy blind man, sat Oscar. He wore a dingy white shirt with no collar, shabby work britches with faded red suspenders, white socks, and a pair of knobby-toed work shoes that came over his ankles, if indeed he had ankles, she couldn’t say.

All of them looked up at Oscar in dread and a kind of wonder, though hers of a slightly different kind than theirs, wondering just what it was made this white man want to keep a colored dummy locked up in a black-dark shed like that, up on a shelf. Something about it very odd.

— Well hello there Oscar how you doin’ today! Mr. Urquhart’s most jolly voice would boom in the tiny stuffiness of the shed.

And there in a second would come Oscar’s voice, strange and muffled as if strained through cheesecloth: — Oh I’s fine Mr. Junius, how you?

— Well we doin’ all right here Oscar what you been up to?

— Oh nothin’ much Mr. Junie I guess I been busy with this’n’that, here’n’there.

— Well I just thought I’d bring the chulluns out to say hello to you, Oscar, it’s Sunday.

— Well they looking mighty fine Mr. Junie, mighty fine!

— Y’all say hello to Oscar now.

Hello hello hey they peeped, barely audible.

— Y’all want to touch old Oscar? You want to feel of his leg?

Silent, little heads barely waggling no, big eyes stuck on the dummy, hands clutching one another’s hands, and little Robert holding tight to Creasie’s.

— Well I reckon we better get on back to the house Oscar, is there anything I can get you, anything you need?

— No sah Mr. Junie I don’t need a thing!

— All right now.

And gently he would shoo them out and cre-e-e-eak the door would gently shut and rattle the lock back onto the hasp and she, Creasie, would be staring at the door and directly one of the children would always ask, GranPapa, don’t he mind being shut up in that shed all the time?

— Oh, no, Mr. Urquhart would say, old Oscar is a happy nigger. And she thinking how horrible it would be to be locked up in the dark like that all the time, dummy or no, it gave her nightmares, she’d be locked in there with him and he’d turn his old head at her and his awful red lips and white teeth would make her cry out in her sleep. He was going to bite her head off.

And then he’d taken her out there one Sunday afternoon Miss Birdie and Mr. Earl and the children gone into town, and she was going to head down to the ravine and see her mama but then he come driving up in his old automobile without honking the horn, had been to town but come back, said he’d thought she might be wanting a ride in. She said, — Thank you, sir, I’ll get my things from the cabin, and he followed her halfway there, stopping at the shed. She comes back and the shed door’s open, he’s in there, calls out, — Hey, Creasie, come here and help me with something. And when she steps in there he closes the door, nothing but dark and a cleaver blade of light through the black, across the dummy, and old Mr. Urquhart begins to run his hands all over that dummy, showing her this and that, though you could hardly see in there, just that blade of light from the door ajar. Then saying, — See this here plug in his heel here, this here’s an electric nigra, and then saying, — Why look here, I do believe this’s a horny old nigger here, too, my my I believe just the sight of you has put a spark in him, got him all worked up! — No, sir, she said, I don’t think he all worked up. -Oh, I believe he is, Mr. Urquhart said, and then he’d started doing something else — to her. He pushed her up against the wall and began to run his hands over her, and grabbing her, she was too frightened to breathe. When he pushed her down onto the floor of the shed she shouted and struggled, but he held her down and yanked at her clothing, and then he was lying heavy on her and pushing himself into her, the pain first sharp and hard down there and then cutting into her brain behind her eyes, and all the time looking up at that wide-eyed dummy up on the shelf, his amazed eyes wide open and dull in the blade of light from the door, and after what seemed a long time, a loud roaring in her head receded slowly into a distant noise and she heard a sound, a tic tic tic, and she could see a little gold chain disappearing into the little pocket in his vest which had ridden up on him and was close to her eye, a tic tic tic of the hidden watch in there, though this moment seemed outside of time, so that when he was at some point up and off of her and she was lying on the floor of the shed, she couldn’t have said how long she’d been lying there just staring at the dummy, not in her right mind. She said,

— You didn’t see nothing.

Dummy didn’t even blink.

— Son of a goddamn bitch! she heard old Mr. Urquhart say outside the shed door, his pocket change and belt buckle tinkling. And then in a softer voice, — Little nigger bitch, just talking to himself. -Bled on me like a stuck pig.

— I been stuck, she would say to herself later, when the capacity for reason had slipped back into her like waking up from a dream, but you the pig.

She heard him jingle off with his coins and keys. Heard the car start up. Heard him call out in a minute, — Come on, now, I’ll take you to town! Heard nothing but the car motor for a while. Heard the car door shut and heard him drive away. The dummy sat there.

She said, her voice strange to her own ears, — Why don’t they plug you into the electric? I know what you’d do. Go kill them all. Cut they throat.

She lay there a long time no longer in pain, as if drugged or drunk, and then pain came back dull at first and then sharp and an ache all over. She gathered herself best she could and hobbled back to the little cabin and washed up, changed clothes, and put a bunch of rags in down there, found a powder and took it and lay down awhile, and since it was too late by then to go to the ravine she figured she’d better go on back over to the house and fix supper, since Miss Birdie and Mr. Earl and the children would be back soon. And that day, wasn’t too cold for a day in December, but nearly dark at five o’clock, she finally gets back to the house, walking slow, hurting, a wad of rags stuffed into her drawers, and Miss Birdie is in there rushing about with supper.

— Creasie! she says. -Where have you been? Hurry up and help me here with supper before Mr. Earl throws a fit. And so she pitched in, feeling like the whole world was dark dark outside the kitchen in which they labored, feeling like she might faint anytime, and when she heard a car crunch up in the drive and heard old Mr. Junius hail from the driveway she slipped out the kitchen door and ran back to her cabin and wouldn’t come out at all that evening though Miss Birdie called her from over there, called out two or three times, but she lay in the dark that was the whole world outside that little bit of light in the kitchen across the yard that even itself was fading now into nothing.

A Tree Spirit

AUNT VISH KNEW the herbs, and when Creasie missed her period she went to the ravine to see her. Vish gave her a smelly green potion in a little wooden cup, told her to drink it and wait twenty-four hours there in her little cabin next door, where Creasie’s parents had lived when she was born, before her mother died and her father left her with Vish and went away. The next morning, Creasie left whatever there was in her of Junius Urquhart in a hole she dug in the loamy ground next to the creek at the bottom of the ravine. She never let herself get lured back to the shed again, never saw that dummy again but in her nightmares. Staring at her like he did the whole time it was happening. She tried to blank it out of her mind.

But she had nightmares all that year, after. She was still having them the night Frank came in through the window, silent as a ghost.

She was sleeping in her nightgown on top of the sheets, hot, having the dream, and woke herself trying to cry out. It took her a second to know where she was. She cleared her throat and had reached down to pull the covers up over herself when she saw him sitting there in the chair across from the foot of the bed in the wooden chair, black but for the faintly gleaming whites of his eyes, and screamed. He was up and onto her in half a second and had his hand over her mouth, whispering — Shut up now, I ain’t going to hurt you, I ain’t going to do nothing to you, hush up.

It was dark, he was flesh and blood, holding a big hard hand over her mouth. He was flesh and blood but for a second all she could think was the dummy. He took the hand away when her breathing slowed enough so he must have trusted her not to scream and they lay there like that, his breath on her hot and sour, smelled like liquor and a fresh-cut pine tree. He held her shoulder bones with big knotty hands and looked away as if listening for something, then his big eyes turned her way and he looked at her.

— What you want? she whispered, hardly able to gather the breath for speech.

— I just want to know the man own this big house need a nigger to work for him around here.

— Get off me.

— Just tell me.

— Get off me, I’ll tell you.

He rolled off her slowly and stood at the edge of the bed, looking ready to spring on her again if she started shouting. She couldn’t speak, thought to run. He made like to come at her again and she said, — He might need somebody to rake leaves and cut the grass. He hires it out whenever he thinks of it but Miss Birdie’s always on him to get it done, he don’t think of it himself.

He stood there a second, then nodded.

— I’ll speak to him in the morning then, he said. -You mind if I stay here tonight? I can sleep on the floor.

She didn’t say anything, but was thinking if he didn’t do what she thought he was going to do before, then she guessed he wasn’t going to do it later, either, and how could she keep him out anyway if he wanted in, and let him out couldn’t go for help as he’d be out there waiting on her, her heart like a bird fluttering the mites out of its feathers and wouldn’t stop. Then calmed again. Something about him, turning away toward the window, like she wasn’t even there. She changed, wasn’t afraid. Something about his face in the pale light from the window, like he was a man too far away in his mind to be a danger. She said, — I’ll make you a pallet with a quilt I got in the chiffarobe.

So she did, and gave him one of her pillows, and lay there wide awake and listening to him breathe and then snore, and at some point fell asleep in spite of herself. When she woke the next morning he was gone and the quilt folded with the pillow resting on top of it on the floor. She washed in the basin and got dressed and went over to the house and was cooking bread and Miss Birdie comes in the kitchen, says, — Creasie, Junius come by sometime, I don’t know when, and took that dummy off, and I know you’re as glad as I am about it, that old thing was evil. She looked at Creasie. -Is your lip busted? What happened to you?

She tasted the dried blood for the first time, ran her tongue over it. Stopped and had turned to Miss Birdie.

— What’d he do with him? she said.

— What?

— What did Mr. Junius do with the dummy?

— I hope you’re not sneaking out and going honky-tonking on me. Now don’t look at me like that.

— No’m. I just bit it, accidentally.

— You start acting like trash, now, I just can’t keep you on.

Miss Birdie looked just like a doll in a store when her eyes got big like that, little doll mouth. She thought maybe she would have laughed at her but she was fixed on what she’d said, about the dummy.

— Yes’m. What did Mr. Junius do with the dummy?

— Sold him or give him away, one, some man took him away. I don’t know where and I don’t care! Listen, she said, and gave her a five-dollar bill, if you go home to the ravine get me some more sassafras for my tea. I’m about out.

— Yes’m.

That evening lying there with the window open again, she had closed it but the room was just too hot, and a warm damp breeze blowing in from the black evening. And sometime late when she’s drifting off, in he comes, a quick shadow upping one bare foot onto the sill, and crosses the room without so much as a word and goes to where she’d left the quilt and pillow and makes up his pallet again and lies down, soon enough she could hear his gentle rasping, no more than a child’s snore coming from such a big man. Come dawn she crept in and looked him over good. He was sleeping with his mouth wide open and the morning light glinted off a gold tooth partway back in his mouth. Who puts a gold tooth way back in his mouth where can’t nobody see it? She stared till his eyes came open and he looked at her and closed his mouth and swallowed. -I’m Frank, he’d said in a hoarse dry voice. She said, — I’m Creasie. -I know, he said. Then she said, laughing kind of to herself, — I got a crazy notion about you.

Looking at her he says in this husky quiet voice like he wasn’t so used to saying much, — What?

She just shook her head.

— I thought you done gone.

He didn’t move, eyes droopy with sleep, and in a minute said in that same voice, — Where to?

— I don’t know. Nowhere. Just a foolish notion I come by.

— Ain’t nobody run me off. Not yet anyway. I’m on see if Mr. Urquhart won’t give me some work.

She looked back toward her little kitchen for moment, nothing but a corner where the cold iron stove sat like a big iron toad frog staring at her, wanting to croak.

— You can use the door next time you come in, unless you just like coming in people houses through the window.

She looked back but he was gone, out the door this time, his bare feet making no more sound than a breeze tippling through last fall’s leaves dry on the ground.

Which he would show up raking later that afternoon.

She watched him out the Urquhart’s kitchen window and whenever he would glance up she would turn quickly away, her face burning. She went out back to rinse some old rags in a washtub. She heard Miss Birdie holler at him from where she was in the kitchen, You there, what are you doing? And he says, Yes ma’am I’m raking the yard. Creasie was listening without looking up from the washtub. Miss Birdie says, Well I see you are raking, who are you? Name Frank, ma’am. Well you talk to my husband about getting paid, I don’t have any money for you. Yes, ma’am, he said, I will. And he did. Mr. Earl, home that afternoon, just looked at him for a long time, his short moustache twitching every now and then and his eyes kind of squinted, then he lights a cigarette and gives one to Frank, goes away. Next day, same thing, Frank weeding the beds, Mr. Earl coming home and standing there looking at him, gives him a cigarette, goes on in the house. Finally he comes out a little later and says to him, — You staying with Creasie now on my property?

— Yes, sir, Frank says.

— No sir! Creasie hollers from the breezeway between the kitchen and garage. -He ain’t staying with me. I’m not like that!

— Well, he says, ignoring her and just looking at him a while longer, I don’t care where you stay, but if you’re going to hang around here you might as well do some work I need done, and jangles his keys and change just like his old papa. And so Frank was on the payroll, such as it was, a dollar a week and sharing the leftovers with Creasie, who always had too much anyway and ended up throwing it out. It was enough for the time being. You couldn’t expect a whole lot more. It was just work and what little bit of pleasure you could find at the end of a day. If Creasie was working late with cooking for the next day, pies or baking a ham, Frank might come over to the Urquhart house and knock on the kitchen door and ask if there was anything he could do, or come fall and winter make sure the fire in the sunporch fireplace was going good, getting the coals so hot he could roll a big round log in there and it’d burn all night, Mr. Earl asleep in a chair across from it after his evening coffee. Then he’d lurk like a ghost in Creasie’s pantry till she was done and walk her back to the cabin.

Even as lonely as she was, it took her a while to find pleasure with a stranger. He was fairly tall, and with a head like a brick, hair kind of squared off on top, and a sleepy, wise look on his face. Not kind eyes but not hard, either, just eyes that would look at her without saying anything, and then turn to the peas and the greens, the pot roast or pork chops, the cold cornbread she brought back from the house. The Urquharts ate well, and so did they on seconds.

— If we they dogs, Frank said one evening, dogs eat well.

— Well Mr. Earl or Miss Birdie neither one much like dogs. Mr. Earl had him a hunting dog but he give it away to somebody. Miss Birdie hates dogs for they smell.

— Reckon that’s why they like the niggers around, he said.

She came to like him. A long and knobby man, knees and elbows as dry as dust and gray as ash, voice like the sleeping grumble of some panther beast.

— Only part of you still wood, she said to him that evening, giving him a squeeze.

He didn’t know what she was talking about and just mumbled, — What you talking about wood, and not much else as he wasn’t a talker.

She said, — Wooden man can’t make no babies.

He looked at her like he might say something sharp then, so she shut up.

Miss Birdie says the next day, — I don’t want you living in sin back there. If that man’s going to stay with you, you ought to get married. It ain’t right.

— Ye’m, we married, she said.

— I mean in a church, Miss Birdie said. And later she heard her saying to Mr. Earl, — Well where’d he come from?

He says, — I don’t know.

— He might be a thief.

— I think he’s just one of them turpentine niggers, come up from Florida to work the trees.

Mmm hmmm, Creasie thought, back in the kitchen scrubbing the stove. A tree spirit, come out of the tree when somebody carves themself a wooden dummy, been cooped up in a little shed and now out and resting free for a while with Creasie. She laughed to herself. She looked out the window and he was out in the yard, standing by a rake and staring back through the window at her. A little chill ran in her. She went back to the stove and when she looked up again he was gone and the pile of leaves he’d raked lying on the ground. She slipped out the kitchen door and ran around the corner and didn’t see him and kept on running, all the way around the house, Miss Birdie’s head popping out a window she just passed and calling, — Creasie! Where are you running to?

— Ye’m, (she would explain after she had stopped, seen him raking way out in the front yard by the magnolia tree, big dry leaves clacking at the rake, and sneaked back into the kitchen, out of breath), I was just chasing an old stray cat out of this kitchen.

— A cat? she says. -What kind of cat?

— Ye’m, I on know, some stray. Some old orange thing, ears nubbed off.

— Orange! Miss Birdie says. -Now I saw an old gray cat slinking around here a while back. What’s all these strays!

— Ye’m, he kind of gray.

Miss Birdie stops and gives her that look.

— Well now was it orange or was it gray? I declare, Creasie, sometimes I think you just make things up whole cloth.

— Ye’m, well I try to tell the truth, but you know them stray cats move pretty quick, like my colors blurs. I think maybe the lectric done messed with my visions.

The look on Miss Birdie’s face then, just mystified, which was just as well, was what you ought to want in white folks, being colored.

Woodpile

EARL LOVED TO get into the Chrysler and head for the coast, Pascagoula, Maurier’s fish camp on the river, take his boat out into the Sound and go for redfish and trout. Fishing was one thing he loved to do to relax. Take Frank along, nigger riding in the boat on the trailer behind the Chrysler. Quick son of a bitch got to where he could catch a Camel butt when Earl flicked it out the window and it zipped back in the slipstream. Frank’d catch it in one big palm and calm as you please take it and get almost half a smoke out of what was left, taking it between two fingers and smiling at him as he smoked it, looking at him as he watched in the rearview mirror as if to say, All right white man, it’s your game but I can play it better than you, up yo ass, all right. So he got to where he would take him out on the boat too, in the mornings, Frank hung over from wherever he wandered off to the night before, some kind of coastal whore, probably white, the son of a bitch. He was a strange and sly one.

Junius said, — Why you want to hire that nigger to work around your place when I had provided a perfectly good electric nigger to do for you? Laughing.

— I wish you hadn’t sold that thing, Papa.

— You couldn’t rig it to rake leaves and mow the grass, I reckon. Wasn’t doing nothing here but sitting in that shed. I’m disappointed in you.

— I’m not a mechanic. You want to give me an electric yard nigger, give me an electric yard nigger, not one rigged up to cut boards in half.

— No imagination, son. It’s like the country, now. We can’t come up with something new to do with all these niggers multiplying like rabbits, we better hurry up and send them all back to Africa, like they should’ve done after the Civil War.

— I don’t think, Earl said, it was or is possible to load millions of niggers onto a hundred thousand boats and ship them all to Africa, contrary to popular belief.

— Well, we could’ve tried, Junius said. -Hitler wouldn’t have ever gone to war with us, would’ve needed our advice on how to get rid of the Jews.

— Well you warm my heart, Papa, Earl said. -And after you naming one of your sons after a Jew businessman.

— You know I don’t mean it, Junius said. -Old Levi was a good man, wasn’t like some Jews, whereas the only good nigger I ever knew was that electric one you had out in your shed. Kept his mouth shut, didn’t complain, worked when you plugged him in, stayed out of sight.

They were out in the backyard drinking lemonade.

— I tell you what, Earl said, things are going to have to change at some point. You had colored boys fighting in the war, fought for their country, came home and still just niggers, here. How you think that sat with them? I don’t see the harm in treating colored people like human beings. I’m not saying treat them like they’re white. But you treat people right and they’ll treat you right, colored or white. Trash is trash, colored or white. You deal with good people, you get good results.

— I tell you what, they shouldn’t have taken them in the army. Teaching niggers how to fight a war? That’s crazy. Hell, they’ll kill us all.

— Well I’m not sure I’d blame them. I was colored, I’d hang every white man I could get my hands on.

— See what I mean, Junius said.

— It’ll all settle in, one of these days, Earl said. -It’ll take a hell of a long time, but one day they will have their piece of the world, and my grandchildren or their children will be going to school with their grandchildren or great-grandchildren. And whites will be marrying colored. And everybody becoming some kind of light shade of brown. That’s what it’ll be one day.

— I think you have lost your mind.

— It’s the law of nature. Things change slow but they always change. We got some shading going on already, have for a long time, and thanks if I may say so to many fine upstanding white people, present company not excluded.

— I don’t have any nigger children running around.

— I’m sure you put on a rubber every time you visited the woodpile.

— Ease up, son, Junius said. -My woodpile days is over, I expect. I’ll leave it to them boys delivering mail and newspapers to the quarters, such as that, getting their payment in the bedroom.

He drained his glass and rattled the ice in the bottom.

— How about getting up and getting your old papa another glass of lemonade.

— How about you call for one of them murderous niggers works for me to get it for you?

Junius said nothing, just held the glass toward Earl with an impassive, sweaty look on his face. Earl sighed, got up, and took the glass into the kitchen.

Creasie was standing at the stove stirring a pan of fried corn.

— Where’s that lemonade, Creasie?

— Yes, sir, I put it back in the icebox. You want me to bring y’all some more?

— No, I’ll get it.

He opened the refrigerator and got out the jug of lemonade and poured the glasses full. Dropped a couple of cubes of ice in, started back out.

— Mr. Earl, you want any more just holler, I’ll bring it out to you.

— All right.

When he got back out to the lawn chairs, Junius wasn’t there. He saw him lying in the shade of the oak tree over by the creek and walked over. Junius’s hat was over his face, his breathing heavy. He sat down beside him and drank down his glass, sipped at Junius’s. He saw Frank come out of the cabin then and go to the shed, get the fishing gear, and go to the car. Big buck grabbed the boat trailer handle with his bare hands and hauled it over to the car, hitched it, turned and waved at Earl sitting there. Bags already loaded into the car. Earl patted Junius on the arm and said, — All right, Papa, we’re heading out. Get Birdie to drive you home if you don’t want to take the train, now. Junius grunted, went on breathing heavy.

Frank was already sitting in the boat. Earl told everyone he made Frank sit back there, but truth was it was Frank’s idea and he wouldn’t budge from it. He liked it. Said come on up here, sit in the backseat. Thank you, sir, I like riding in the boat. All right then, Earl said, you hang on. I’m not taking it easy just because you’re crazy enough to want to ride in an open boat on a trailer going seventy miles an hour. Yes, sir, I like a little danger, Frank said. Suit yourself, then, Earl said. Pissed him off, first time they drove down like that, and flicking his butt out the window was done in anger. He saw Frank dodge it and try to catch it at the same time. That made him grin. So he kept doing it. Third time, Frank caught it and smoked it the rest of the way down. After that, he rarely missed. Crazy son of a bitch had his own cigarettes, now, too.

Ann’s car was already parked outside the cottage when they drove up to Maurier’s camp, the little Mercury coupe he’d given her, driven up from the Tallahassee store, which he’d had her in about six months. He drove over to the landing, backed the boat in. Frank unhooked the cable and pulled the boat over to the dock while Earl parked under the trees across from the cottages and went on in, waving to Frank. Routine was Frank’d be there next morning at five o’clock to go out on the boat. Ann would sleep in most of the morning, work on her books for the Tallahassee store in the afternoon, when he’d come in from fishing. Then he’d leave the catch with Frank to clean and ice down and they’d go out to dinner. Last day, Maurier would set up his propane kettle and Frank’d deep-fry the weekend’s catch and they’d all eat, Frank right there at the table with them. Even give him a beer. Ann liked her beer, and Earl wasn’t one of those teetotalers cared if anybody else drank, as long as they weren’t a drunk.

She was on the bed taking a nap in her clothes, pale yellow dress riding up over her knees and the toes of her stockings twisted from her shoes. Ceiling fan going full bore and blowing at a wisp of blond hair on her forehead, mouth just parted in sleep. Her eyes opened and without looking over at him, looking up into the fan blades, she said, — Hey.

— Hey, there.

He held back a second, watching her. Sensing her mood as if through air molecules in the room between them. She’d become tired of things being this way. Of only seeing him two or three times a month. He’d said, from the beginning, That’s all you want to see of me, if you take my advice. That’s about what I’m good for, when it comes to being pleasant company. Well then, she used to say, maybe you’re not the company I need to keep. May be, he would say. But you know I can’t leave Birdie, she can’t take care of herself. Then she would pout awhile. For such a good-looking woman, she had a bad pout. Changed her whole appearance. Scared him a little bit. Her brooding light blue-green eyes had stopped him in his tracks when she’d come in the store the first time. Can I help you? he’d managed to say. You can give me a job, she said right back, just the hint of a smile. All right, he’d said, without hesitation. When can you start? Right this minute, if you like, she said. He’d thought about it, said, Why don’t you start in the morning. But you can tell me your name now, if you want to. Ann Christensen, she said. All right, Ann, he said. I’m Earl. I know, she said. This is my store, he said. I know, she said. Stood there staring at each other a minute. Then she turned and walked out. Other girls hated her immediately, of course. Wasn’t six months he got the chance to open the store in Tallahassee and made her manager, that solved that. Except that he found himself driving to the coast every weekend so he could spend them with her at Maurier’s. By that time in love with her in a way he had not considered he was susceptible to. He’d never felt that way about a woman, before. Birdie had been cute, popular, and he realized he’d wanted to possess her, like a car or money. But just the presence of Ann had sucked something right out of him, left him spent and entirely open to something else. It made him feel vulnerable. Made him feel more alive. If he hadn’t already pretty much set himself up by then he might not have given enough of a damn to do it, after that.

He loved it, being there with her. Watch her walk around the little efficiency as graceful a woman naked as God put on the earth, as Eve, he had to think, not an ounce of self-consciousness in her, and just naturally beautiful. Maurier had an old swimming pool out under the oak grove beside the river and she’d put on her pink striped swimsuit, a one-piece, and get onto the diving board and dive into the water and come up wringing her hair behind her neck, then shaking it gently out, resting her arms on the side of the pool, and looking at him.

She looked at him now with those eyes, and a salty gust from off the Sound seemed to nudge him toward her, and she said, Come here. And he did.

FRANK WAS SITTING in the boat at the dock next morning at five. Had the gear loaded, ice chest packed with ham and cheese sandwiches from Maurier’s wife’s kitchen, and bottles of Coca-Cola and ginger ale, crackers, and tins of sardines.

— You drive, Frank.

Frank primed the motor, pulled the cord, and got them going away from the dock. They bumped out through the gentle swells and about two miles out Earl raised his hand and Frank motored down and they dropped anchor.

— Going for trout, Mr. Earl?

Earl nodded. -No cover out here. There’s a channel though.

He rigged his own line with a jig and a worm tail and began to cast.

— You can fish if you want to, Frank.

Always a pause after he spoke to Frank before Frank answered. Nothing you could call insolence, just shy of that, and just enough to establish some of his own purchase on the moment.

— Thank you, no sir. Just feel like sitting here today.

— All right.

Pause.

— I likes to fish but I don’t really like it.

— You mean to eat it?

— Yes, sir. I grew up on the river and seemed like that’s all we eat, fish. -Well you eat it when we cook it up here.

— Yes, sir, I don’t like to be rude. I mean I can eat it and like it all right every now and then but I don’t hardly care for it no more.

He had one of those rusty sibilant voices, like a hoarse whisper, like he liked whiskey too much, but Earl hadn’t ever seen him drink anything but beer, and he’d given him that. Sat there on the bench seat before the motor like a meditation in black, big squared-off head held at attention to something not here in the boat.

— What do you most like to eat?

Blink.

— Oh I like fresh vegetables, you know. And chicken. I love barbeque.

— Me, too, Earl said, reeling in and casting again, jigging the line. -You like, I’ll get a rack of ribs and you can cook em up on the drum grill.

— Yes, sir, sure will.

— We used to keep pigs awhile, when I was a boy.

— Yes, sir, we did too till a flood come and drowned them. We didn’t get no more after that.

— How old were you?

— I guess about nine, ten years old.

— And had to eat fish the rest of your life after that.

Rusty laugh.

— Yes, sir, near bout.

— I reckon I’d hate it too.

He cast. The swells made slurping sounds against the boat. Light coming up behind a gray cloud cover, darker below with silvery metallic openings. Gulls glided past angling their heads at them curiously. Laughing.

— I never liked hog-killing, he said. -All that mess. I wouldn’t keep a pig now.

— No, sir, I didn’t like it either. My papa had a gun, but he wouldn’t use it on his hogs. He used a hammer.

— A hammer? How’d he do that, put them in a chute?

— No, sir, he just hit em with a hammer.

— I mean how’d he get up on them?

— He bait them with corn.

— Bait em? How you mean?

— First time I went out with him, he says to watch this. Got his old claw hammer in his right hand, hid behind his back, like. Got a palm full of feed corn in his other hand, going up to the hog and holding out that corn, saying, Here, pig. Hog watch him, saying, I don’t know. Keep saying, Here, pig, walking up slow. Pig finally inch over there, you know. He trust him. Start nibbling the corn out his hand. That’s when he brung the hammer around and hit him hard square in the forehead.

— I be damned.

— Yes, sir, laid him right out. Like to struck me hard as the pig, to see that. I was just a little old young un. I liked to watch them pigs.

— Probably one of them was your pet.

— No, sir, no pet. But I thought they was interesting, you know. They was like a family, playing all the time. Didn’t fuss and fight, like we did. Just scooting around the pen, chasing each other, squealing. Not that old hog, I mean the young uns. Well, they strung up that hog by his heels, was going to bleed him. I snuck up there and look at him, his old tongue hanging out. Them corn kernels there still stuck to it.

— I be damned.

Frank laughed.

— Yes, sir, took me a while to trust my papa again, too, after that. He offer me a extra piece of gingerbread at Christmas, you know, I be looking for that hammer.

Earl looked at him, then laughed out loud.

— Where in the hell did you come from before you showed up at my place?

— South of here. Florida.

— Turpentine, then?

— Sir?

— You a turpentine worker?

— No, sir. My papa was, for a while. I just wander, do yard work. You know, like for you.

— You plan on staying around?

Frank said nothing for an extra beat, his face got solemn. Looking out over the Sound.

— Well, sir, I’d sure like to make me a little money.

Earl reeled in, set his rod down.

— Get me a sandwich and one of those Cokes.

Frank reached into the cooler and brought them out.

— Get yourself something.

They sat and ate for a minute, sipping the Cokes.

— What you got in mind?

Frank appeared to study the question for a while.

— Well, sir, you know how you get me to help out down to the store every now and then, up in the stockroom where you has your cot.

Earl stiffened a little at that. Let it go.

— Go on.

— Well, sir, I know how you cares for Miss Ann, and she off down there with that store in Tallahassee, and you having to travel down there all the time, and I don’t mean to step in where I oughtn’t but I know you worried about her, yes sir. And I thought maybe you put me to work down there for Miss Ann, make sure nobody gives her no trouble. I could work around the store, and keep up her yard same as I do yours here. I’m from Florida, now, Mr. Earl, I know how to get by in Florida.

— I can see you do.

Frank nodded.

— Yes, sir. Now, you know I wouldn’t ever say anything about Miss Ann and yourself, not to nobody.

Earl lit a Camel and stared at him a minute.

— Don’t recall asking if you would.

— No, sir. I’m just saying.

— You just saying.

— Yes, sir.

The boat rocked in the swells. It was quiet, occasional gull creak.

— Damned if you ain’t about either the dumbest or the smartest black son of a bitch I ever knew. Didn’t know better I’d think you were extorting me, here.

Frank shook his head and smiled.

— No, sir. Do what, now?

— Aw kiss my ass. Extortion. Blackmail, call it.

— No, sir, I ain’t — no, sir, don’t say that. Mr. Earl, I’m saying I wouldn’t do that, now.

— Yeah, Earl said. -That’s how they all do it.

Frank shook his head and gave the Mississippi Sound his grave look again.

— I don’t know whether to knock you in the head with this anchor and throw you overboard or pay you a compliment, Earl said.

— No, sir. You don’t have to do neither one.

The two men sat there looking at each other, boat rocking, clouds creeping overhead, gulls laughing and creaking, swells slopping against the bow.

— Well what about Creasie? She tells Birdie you two are married.

Frank drank the rest of his Coke, set the bottle in the boat floor beside his feet.

— Well, no sir, we’re not married, not official. She’s a good woman, now. I can tell she’s set on making babies, though, and I figure she keep on trying she going to get it right one day.

— You want that?

— Mr. Earl, he said, I can’t afford no babies, nobody knows that like you.

— I know it, Earl said. -I can’t afford you to have no babies, either, know what I mean.

— Yes, sir. Frank smiled a wan smile. -I guess I just as soon Creasie didn’t know nothing about it.

— Go like you came.

Frank nodded. -Yes, sir, I guess that’s about it.

He sat there watching a gull while Earl finished his sandwich and drink and watched him. Earl felt like he’d never seen this joker before in his life, like he’d just winked into his boat there beside him out of the air. What am I thinking, he said to himself. Big son of a bitch could break my neck and take this boat to goddamn Cuba, if he wanted. But that’s not what he wants. Just wants a better job. He shook his head and pitched the empty Coke bottle into the water.

— Cover, he said.

— Mr. Earl, Frank said.

— Yes, goddamnit.

— If you was to pay me a little more than what you paying me now, I think I could get by down there in Tallahassee, now. I wouldn’t ask but I been there, and it cost more to get by.

— How much more then do you figure it costs to get by?

— Well, sir, I guess I’d be doing at least two, three times the work I do here, and quality work, too. And it cost more just ever way you look at it. Say fo’ times what I make here I figure I can get by in Tallahassee, yes sir, that’s about all it take.

Earl stared at him a minute, then looked away, speechless. In a little bit he reached over the bow and hauled up the anchor and laid it in the boat at his feet. Motioned with his arm for Frank to crank the motor, get them going. Frank hesitated, then nodded, turned slowly to the motor and gripped the pull cord. He held this station for a long few seconds, then gave it a snap pull and set it firing, phlegmatic, then a baritone pushing them up and out into the Sound.

A MAN COME into the store one day to take his order on Tweedies and says, — Say you know I was in Conway, Arkansas, the other day and saw this thing, man had a hardware store and out on the porch had this nigger dummy working an electric saw, and I stopped to see it. Said he got it from you. I said I was going to be calling on you this week, what a coincidence.

— What’s the name of the store? Earl says.

— What?

— What’s the name of the man’s hardware store. I’m going to buy that nigger dummy back from him.

— What for? says the salesman. -What use you got for it in a women’s shoe store?

— I’m not going to use him in my goddamn store. It’s my dummy and I want it back. My father sold it without asking me.

— Well don’t tell the man I told you where it was.

Drove up there the next Friday evening, arrived the next morning just as the man was opening his store and setting Oscar out on the porch along with a radial-arm saw and fixing his hand to the handle.

— Yes, sir, how can I hep you this morning? Earl standing there below the porch steps with his hands in his trousers pockets, tired and a Camel in his lips.

— That’s my nigger you’ve got there, I’m afraid.

Man just straightened up and looked at him oddly.

— You from Mississippi?

— I am. My papa sold you this thing without asking me. I’d like to buy it back.

— Well, now, I don’t know. This thing’s pulled in a lot of business for me, here. Sides, this is what it was made for! Mr. Urquhart said you own a ladies’ shoe store. -Yes.

— Well, sir, not to be disrespectful, but I can’t see you got much use for this fellow in a ladies’ shoe store. -Never mind why I want him back. I just said he was mine and was sold without my knowledge or permission. I understand you paid good money for him, now I’m offering to pay good money to get him back.

Man stood there blinking in the early sun for a minute, squinting at him. Hand on Oscar’s arm as if to hold him back, to quiet him. Oscar grinning as ever in the morning light, as wide-eyed and oblivious as ever, ready to work if need be, ready to sit forever if need be, waiting in the dark on some shelf if need be. There and not there.

— Well, sir, the man said slowly. He’s worth a lot more to me than what I paid for him, considering the business he brings in. I sell him back to you, I’m going to want to get me another one. First off, bound to cost more to get another one these days. Second, I wouldn’t count on being able to find another one, if I was to try.

— What did you pay Papa for him?

He paused.

— I paid fifty dollars.

— I’ll give you a hundred.

— Mr. Urquhart, this nigger’s already made me at least five hundred dollars in business.

— I’ll give you two hundred cash, then. You’re not on the highway, here. You’ve already got all the new business from this thing you’re going to get. It’s just decoration now and I’m offering to make it seven hundred dollars you’ve made from him, which gives you a profit of something like twelve or thirteen hundred percent on your investment. I don’t know about the hardware business, but in the shoe business we don’t usually get returns like that.

Man stood there blinking.

— I don’t have all day, Earl said, lighting another Camel. -I got to get back to Mississippi by this evening.

— WHAT DID YOU want to go and do that for? Birdie said.

— It belonged to me.

— Well we sure don’t have any use for an old colored dummy you’re going to let sit and rot out in the shed.

— It might be valuable one day.

— Well that’s not like you, to say something like that. It’s of no use to you now, and that’s what I’d expect you to say about it.

— So it makes no sense.

— It doesn’t seem to, to me.

— Well then all right it makes no sense. Humor me this once.

— For two hundred dollars? That takes a heap of humor, Earl.

— Humor me. If I want to keep an electric nigger dummy in my shed, then let me do it and leave me in peace. Some things a man does he can’t explain and doesn’t care to.

He went out to the car, reached into the backseat and pulled him out, hefted him limp and wooden onto his shoulder and carried him out to the shed and set him against the wall there while he unlocked the hasp on the door. When he’d opened the door, he walked in and struck his Zippo and looked around, saw the empty spot on the high shelf where he’d kept it before Junius sold it, clanked the Zippo shut. He went back out, hefted it back onto his shoulder, and took it into the shed and pushed it up onto the shelf. In the dim light he reached up to straighten the head on the shoulders, to rest the hands in the lap. He turned the feet so they pointed straight ahead where they hung there. Stood there to catch his breath, then light a smoke.

— What say, Oscar? he said, his eyes adjusting to the darkness in the shed so he could just see the black face with the white teeth, the painted whites of its eyes, in the glow of the cigarette. -Welcome home, you yellow pine son of a bitch.

He went inside and picked up the phone and dialed a number and Junius answered.

— Papa, I have that nigger dummy back out in my shed.

There was silence on the other end of the line.

— What’d you go and do that for?

— It wasn’t yours to sell, that’s what for.

— The hell it wasn’t. I’m the one found it.

— And you gave it to me. What I still don’t understand is why you all of a sudden up and stole it from me. You never gave me the money you got for it, by the way, and now I’m out two hundred dollars for it.

— Goddamn, son, I didn’t pay but twenty!

— To hell with that. What did you get for it?

— I don’t remember. Broke even, maybe.

— You’re a liar, you got fifty, which means you made thirty dollars profit on my property, which means you owe me that plus another hundred and seventy dollars.

Junius scoffed. -I’m not responsible for your lack of common sense. And I’m telling you I think that thing is bad luck. You better get rid of it.

— I never knew you to be so superstitious. I’m keeping it, I don’t give a damn if you like it or not. That’s my electric or dummy or whatever nigger out there, and you keep your goddamn hands off of it, now. In fact, I’m locking it in there, so don’t even think about stealing it again.

— Stealing! Goddamnit, I don’t give a shit if you keep it or not, then. But if you ever bring that thing out in my presence I’ll shoot the son of a bitch full of holes on the spot.

Junius hung up. Earl, laughing to himself, went back outside and lit up again. Stood there in the evening on what he’d made into a fine little fiefdom of his own in the flattened land, the brief plains between Mercury and rolling pine woods and farmland north, smoking, thinking it’s not so bad old Earl you got a good woman for a wife and you got healthy children and a good business and another woman who loves you willing to take what’s just her share, and here you got your own goddamn electric nigger out in the shed, to boot. Now what can you hold up to that, you old pig-eyed son of a bitch.

Wisdom

SHE COULDN’T HELP thinking that if they’d had babies, if they could have had babies, Frank might have stayed. Lord knows she’d tried, but nothing took. Began to seem like he was like a mule, some concoction of a beast not able to reproduce itself. But it settled in finally that it had to be her, and most likely something to do with the potion Aunt Vish had given her before, after Mr. Junius, to get rid of what he’d put in her.

One day she’d walked out into the untended pasture behind her cabin and sat down beneath a solitary oak in the middle of the field. There was a crow sitting in the top of the tree, started calling to another crow over in the woods. Crow was saying, What! What! Other crow comes back, What! What! Don’t nobody know what, Creasie grumbled. A big rumble followed down in her belly, and she pressed it with her fingers, lay on her back. She put her hands on her breasts beneath the scratchy blouse she wore and pressed them, wondered if she’d ever nurse a child, nestle a child of her own into her bosom. The crow hopped down a few branches and cocked its head at her. He stretched his head up and called again to the other crow, other crow called back. Then he cocked his head at her again, said, Rrraaack. She felt a muscle or something rise up beneath her hand and turn over, go back down.

Sunday she asked to have the afternoon off, told Frank she was going to visit her aunt, and caught a ride into town with Mr. Earl, who dropped her off near the ravine. He said he’d pick her up again at five. She watched him drive off, then walked on in. Down past the old Case house, down the dirt road, which turned into the steep trail down to the creekbed, and it was good to be back in with the trees and wild shrubs, all the viny green. She came to the narrow clearing where the old cabins were and went all the way to the end, to the last one nearest the creek. Aunt Vish was sitting on her front porch in a rocking chair with her eyes closed, rocking. When Creasie stopped at the base of the steps, Vish said, — I smell somebody works for white people.

— Just me, says Creasie.

— Mmm hmm, what you want now, girl.

— Nothing. Just want to ask you something.

Vish just kept on rocking. After a while she said, — I got all day but I don’t know why you want to take it.

— I can’t have no babies, looks like, Creasie said. -I been wondering about that potion.

— Mmm hmm, Vish says.

— What was that potion you give me?

— Did what you wanted.

— Yes’m. How good did it work?

— Did what you wanted.

— Ye’m. But what all did it do, besides that?

Vish opened her eyes, put the toes of her ragged old shoes onto the porch boards and leaned forward, looked at Creasie. She leaned to one side and spat snuff juice off into the dirt.

— Potion can’t do but one thing at a time, she said then. -You want a remedy make a baby go away, that’s what it gon do. You want one make the babies come, then that’s another thing. Herb you taken might taken too good. That happen, I can’t do nothing about it. Risk you take.

— You didn’t tell me.

— Can’t give a body wisdom, Vish said. -You get that on your own.

— Can you give me some of that baby-making potion, then?

Vish looked at her a minute, then nodded.

— I can give you whatever you want, child. What you gon give me?

— Ma’am?

— What you gon give me, child! You never give me nothing for that remedy.

Creasie didn’t know what to say.

— I’m sorry, Aunt Vish. I thought, it being me — I didn’t know I was supposed to pay you for it.

— Didn’t know! What you think, I live on air? You getting paid, ain’t you?

— Ye’m. I’m sorry. I can pay you now. I can pay you for the baby potion, too. Me and Frank wants some babies.

— Say he does too.

— He wouldn’t mind. She only partly lied. Hadn’t said anything to him about it.

— Vish sat back and stared at Creasie a long moment, saying nothing, then closed her eyes and rocked some more.

— I can give you anything you want, child, but I expect that potion done took too well with you. She opened her eyes and spat and looked at Creasie long and from afar again. -You bring me something from the white folks’ house, I’ll think on it, see if I can come up with something.

— What you want me to bring?

— Use your brain, child. You’ll think up something old Vish can use.

Creasie stood there a minute, neither of them saying anything.

— I could use some new pots and pans, Vish said then.

— Yes’m. It might take a while.

— Like I said, I got time.

SO SHE WENT back to work. Made it seem like time was standing still. Time hung in the space between Frank’s coming and Frank’s going, she knew it would be just a patch of time that would disappear as if it never happened. Nothing but up in the early morning to cook for the Urquharts, then clean up and dust and wash clothes and cook again, dinner and supper, then make her way on back to her little cabin where Frank would be on the front porch smoking, his feet up on the rail, and waiting on her and a late supper for himself. He’d eat it out there, weather permitting, and then they’d go on into the cabin and to bed. She could see him getting bored, restless. He’d wake up in the middle of the night and she’d wake up at some point and see him sitting there beside the bedroom window, looking out. She loved the look of his body in the faint light from the window, just a shadow of the man, his shape, liked the way the memory of his shape stayed in her mind when she couldn’t see him, perfect like that.

— Don’t be sitting up, she said to him. -Come on back to bed, now.

— What is it? she said when he climbed back in silent and staring at the ceiling.

— Need something, he mumbled.

— I’ll give you what you need.

After a minute,

— Need something, I don’t know. I ain’t got nothing.

— You got me.

— We ain’t got nothing, woman.

She said nothing.

— I need to make me some money, one thing, he said.

— Well, who don’t.

— I got some ideas.

— Like what.

— I don’t know. Just ideas.

— We got a little money saved, she said.

— Nothing, he said. -I got more money in this tooth in the back of my head than you got stuffed in this mattress.

She’d every now and then take a pot of greens out to the cabin, kindly forget to bring it back next day, never the best pot, but one she’d used from way back in the cupboard, one Miss Birdie wouldn’t miss. One old skillet with rust spots she scrubbed down real good, reseasoned, and made the bread in then set in the windowsill empty and slipped back to the house to take it out the window from the shrub bed late at night. These she took on this and that weekend out to Aunt Vish, who took the item, held it before her at arm’s length to inspect it, nodded, set it down on the porch beside her. The Sunday afternoon she took the skillet out, she saw a twitch in the corner of Vish’s mouth.

— That’s better than the old one I got, she said, taking it and holding it in her lap to study it. She hefted it and set it back in her lap. -Bigger, too.

Then instead of setting the skillet down beside her feet she rocked a couple of times and launched herself feebly out of her chair with the skillet held before her and went into her cabin. Creasie, standing on the porch, heard her hard bare feet shuffling inside, heard the gentle clank of the skillet as she guessed Vish set it down on top of her stove. In a minute she came back out and handed Creasie a little snuff tin.

— Put just a pinch in a glass of tap water, pour just a little dash of vinegar in there, drink it first thing in the morning, she said. Seven days, she said. Don’t do it no longer than seven days, now, you hear me?

— Yes, ma’am. Seven days.

She took it home, started the next morning, using some vinegar she’d brought over from the Urquhart house in a little jar. She dipped water from the bucket of water she’d pumped at the well beside her porch steps, opened the snuff tin, and sniffed first. There was a light sandy-colored powder in there, like pale ground mustard or something, had no odor she could make out. She sneezed, blew her nose. Then took a pinch and dropped it into the cup of water, poured about a teaspoon of vinegar in, and drank it down. She stood there a minute, very still, but felt nothing but just a faint little ball of heartburn from the vinegar, which subsided. Went on over to the house to work. Same thing next morning, standing there, nothing. Same thing next morning. Frank standing in the kitchen door watching her, said, — What is that?

— Nothing, she said. -Just a remedy Aunt Vish give me.

— What’s ailing you?

— Nothing much, she said, unable to look at him. -Just a little ache in my bones.

Same thing the fourth day and the fifth. On the afternoon of the sixth day she was on her hands and knees in Miss Birdie’s bathroom scrubbing the tile floor and up out of her before she even knew she felt a thing funny came a quick gush of something yellow with little streaks and spots of red. She felt something lower down inside her then and quick got up onto the toilet, frightened not only of what was happening but that Miss Birdie might come back and see her sitting on her toilet and fire her right then and there. Same as up top, a little gush then fell from her into the toilet, and she was afraid to even look at it, her eyes tearing up anyway. She quick wiped herself and flushed, and it was only that she forgot to put the paper into the toilet and accidentally looked down and saw it in her hand that she knew it was a dull dark dried-blood brown, and she made a little cry and dropped it into the toilet, quickly cleaned up what she’d thrown up with toilet paper and then her scrubbing sponge, and wrung out the sponge in the tub, flushed the toilet, and scrubbed out the tub then.

— What’s the matter with you? Miss Birdie said to her when she came through the kitchen on her way out to rinse the bucket at the faucet tap outside.

— No’m, she said, just feeling a little puny. I’ll be all right.

Frank walked two miles and borrowed a pickup truck from Whit Caulder and drove her into town that night and waited in the truck while she walked down into the ravine and knocked on Vish’s door. Vish came to the door with her coal oil lamp and cracked it, looked out, said nothing.

— I’m scared, Aunt Vish, she said. -That potion made me throw up, and blood like something came out me down there, too.

Vish said nothing, stood watching her with her head stuck just barely out the door, her eyes moving up and down her, like examining her feet and then her hands and then her face again.

— Best not take the rest, then, she said.

— Am I going to be all right? She was near tears, her voice tight.

Vish nodded after a moment.

— You be all right.

They stood there saying nothing. She was afraid to ask, then made herself.

— Is it going to work then?

Vish looked at her, her brow bunched up then, like she was mad. Then that look went away.

— Now what you think, girl?

Creasie stood there composing herself. No longer about to cry. Just feeling washed out.

— No, Vish said as she closed the door and went back inside, leaving her there on the porch. -You go home and rest awhile, if you can. Ain’t going to be no babies.

The door closed to, and she heard the dry sound of Vish’s feet shuffling off. She heard the tap tap at the truck’s horn from Frank, waiting. He was leaning against the driver’s side door when she came out of the trail, and he helped her into the passenger seat and climbed in and started it up, turned on the headlights.

— Well, what’d you get this time? he said.

— Hmmm? she said.

— What did you get from the crazy old woman this time?

She looked at him, a man who might as well be a stranger driving her somewhere, so unfamiliar he looked to her in the dark inside the truck at that moment, so strange the whole scene, him driving her somewhere, which he’d never done.

— The truth, she said then. -The truth is what I got this time.

Frank mumbled to himself as he pulled them into the road headed back out to the Urquharts’.

— Be crazy as that old witch yourself, you keep coming here, he said.

ONE EVENING SHE went back to the cabin and Frank wasn’t there, and wasn’t there the next day either. A little crazy with fear, and starting to panic, she burned meals and dropped a dish, Miss Birdie scolding, stood there looking at Creasie, shaking her head. Then mumbled something to herself and sat down at the table.

— You know Earl has gone and bought that old colored dummy back from whoever Mr. Urquhart sold it to and put it back out in the shed. Here we are scraping by, Earl putting everything he can back into the business and not even giving me enough to buy groceries half the time, and he up and pays somebody two hundred dollars for an old nigra dummy. It’s crazy!

That afternoon she went out to the shed but it was locked. She could barely see, tears blurring her eyes. She put her lips to the little crack beside the hasp lock and whispered, — Frank? Nothing. But such a chilled breeze came out there against her lips it scared her. She went on back to the house and there was nothing there, no sound in there and no light. Bedding thrown off onto the floor, stuffing in the mattress hanging out, her little flour sack full of dollar bills gone. And on the kitchen table a gold tooth with a little blood at the root, and nothing else.

Blood

OUT AT THE lake in February to split some firewood, Earl remembered a day when he was maybe fourteen or fifteen, and like this raising an ax (in their backyard, then) for stovewood, some kind of old flivver goes by, and froze him like a statue. By God I’ll have me one of those one day, and get the hell out of Dodge, he said to himself. Said to his father one day, If I had me a car, I’d be out on my own and you wouldn’t have to worry about me anymore. Junius says, Let me tell you something, an automobile is like a woman and you’ll be ready for one when you’re ready for the other. I’m ready, Earl’d said. You’re ready, Junius said. You’re ready, you say. Let me tell you what you’re ready for then. You’re ready to be beholden to maintenance for the rest of your life. Maintenance, son. Once you got a woman or an automobile, you don’t work for yourself anymore. You work for maintenance.

Now, in his fifty-fifth year, raising the ax above his head and thinking in that moment nothing but strike, split, you motherfucker — angry then at he didn’t know what, just everything — just at that moment it felt like his chest collapsed, everything in him, his entire weight and substance, compressed down within its walls, and an instant later ran up his arms and out into nothing. Then he was on the ground. Knowing somehow he lay there beside the pile of split chunks he’d cut, his face in the iron-rich clay of a gouge a miss had made in the topsoil. Thinking why would this happen to me as I’m chopping a fucking piece of wood for the fire. It had always been the time he smote his enemies, with an ax to a piece of hickory or oak. It helped him to keep things in perspective, helped him remember not to choke every son of a bitch that just happened to piss him off.

You didn’t fuck with an Urquhart is what Papa had always said. And that included whether you were family or not. The time he rode to town with him in the wagon and they came upon Aunt Phoebe and Uncle Thad coming the other way and stopped beside each other in the wide road. Junius and Uncle Thad were talking.

Aunt Phoebe said, — Not now, not with Earl in the wagon.

— I don’t care, he can’t talk to me like that, Uncle Thad said to her, but looking at Papa.

— I’ll talk to you any way I like and when I like, Papa said. -And I’m telling you if you do it again I’ll kill you.

— It’s not your cross to bear, Junius, Aunt Phoebe said. -Come on, Thad, let’s go. Hup, she said, and tried to take the reins from Uncle Thad and Uncle Thad hit her in the face with the ends of the reins, not hard but it scared Earl.

— Papa, he said.

Papa said nothing but locked the brake on their wagon, handed the reins to Earl, and started to get down when Aunt Phoebe screamed out her husband’s name. Papa leapt sideways away from Uncle Thad off the wagon and Uncle Thad had a knife. He was down off their wagon now too and was holding the knife out in front of him toward Papa.

— Papa, he whispered.

— Tell him to put up the knife, Phoebe, Papa said. He said it quiet. -Tell him to put up the knife or I’ll kill him now.

Aunt Phoebe had kept shouting Uncle Thad’s name, and now she was screaming at him, Put up the knife, Put up the knife. Uncle Thad walked toward Papa and Papa pulled out the little pistol Earl knew he always carried in his jacket pocket and fired into Uncle Thad’s chest. Both teams bucked and Earl held tight to theirs. Uncle Thad stumbled backwards against the wheel of their wagon and vomited red onto his shirt. Aunt Phoebe fell across the seat reaching down for him and when the reins fell from her hand their team bucked forward. Papa stepped aside out of their way and dropped his pistol in the road to catch Aunt Phoebe as she fell from the wagon seat. She fought from his grasp and ran to Uncle Thad lying in the road and fell down on him screaming his name. And then she was screaming at Papa, You killed him, You killed him.

Then Papa went away for a while to the penitentiary. Sundays, Mama took him, Rufus, Levi and little Merry on the train to see him. The engineer got to know them and let Earl ride up front and blow the whistle when they arrived. Papa’s head was shorn and he wore baggy striped pajamas and would talk to them in a room with only a table and some hard-bottom chairs in it. He would hug Earl and the little ones and sometimes he would cry and they would all cry, too, except for Mama, who kept her face still and hard and would hardly speak until sometime the next day maybe after dinner and then she would be more like herself again and would come into Earl’s room when he’d just fallen asleep and start talking to him. I hope you won’t be like your papa, she’d say. I hope you won’t carry on drinking, fighting, running with whores. I pray to God.

He didn’t like the drinking, either. When Papa finally came home after two years he took it right up again. After all we did to get you out, Mama said. After all that, you haven’t changed. He would do it at home, then, sitting in the chair on the porch drinking straight from a bottle in his one pocket, the pistol back in the other like he’d never killed Uncle Thad with it. His friend the sheriff had given it back to him, said You might need it. He sold insurance then and made good money, never drank during the day, but at night. They never saw Aunt Phoebe anymore unless they went to Cuba in Alabama, where she’d gone to live with Uncle Thad’s and Mama’s family over there. Papa wouldn’t go along. When they came home he’d say something ugly. Uncle Thad and Mama were brother and sister. Sometimes I think that’s why he didn’t like Thad, Mama said. Like he thought one of them had to be the family big shot. Your papa don’t like nobody cutting his territory, business or pleasure or blood, none of it.

He, Earl, didn’t like the drinking but what can a boy say about something like that. He fought other boys. Papa praised him for it, in word or gaze. Once when he fought after school in second grade he knocked the boy’s front tooth out and brought it home and put it on his dresser. Mama wouldn’t go into his room, told him to throw it away. Papa told her to leave him alone, she couldn’t understand a boy’s ways. They fought. He never hit her. That’s why he argued with Uncle Thad, he told Earl. He hit Aunt Phoebe. Man hits a woman’s no better than a dog, a sick weak dog, he said. He’s a coward. Never be a coward, he said. Don’t ever let anybody get away with crossing you, they’ll never let you walk upright again.

Didn’t need the lesson, it was in his blood. What it didn’t do, like it did later with Levi and later with Papa, too, was turn to meanness. But just hot blood. Couldn’t help it. Almost lost his job with the New York company that first time for catching a man up by his collar at lunch in the park one day. They’d gotten hot dogs from one of those vendors, taken them to the park, and the man said something about his accent. He had the man down on a pile of rocks and shoving a hot dog into his mouth before a New York cop pulled him off. Man said, No, I don’t want to press charges, I’m going to have his job. I’ll have his ass. He went for him again. No, let him go, the man said, I’ll take care of that son of a bitch.

Well if the man had been smart enough to file an order he’d have had his ass, had his job, but went to complain and then didn’t file an order and the manager says, Get your ass out of my office, you lying son of a bitch. Then calls Earl in and says Is it true, did you do that to him? And Earl says I’d do it again. Do it again, the manager says, and it will be your job. Just don’t kick ass of anyone going to give us any real business.

He hit a man one time was trying to hire away his help, after he opened the store in Mercury. Found him in the barbershop getting a shave, towel on his face, couldn’t see Earl come in. Snatched him out of the chair by the tie, dragged him out into the street like a leash dog and banged his head on the pavement a few times. Wanted to kill him, see his blood. You don’t come around trying to steal my help, he told him. Cop had to pull him off again, but it was one of his buddies, Pinkie McGauley, had a laugh and sent the son of a bitch on his way. Yankee, anyway, trying to start up a cheap line in a store on Front Street and good riddance. He’d hit horses, mules, with his bare fists. Hit a nigger woman over the head with a high heel when she sassed him, didn’t want her in the store in the first place then she says he’s not fitting her right. Well he never hit anyone or anything didn’t deserve it, just didn’t have it in him to swallow an insult. Take it as you would, he was a man you didn’t fuck with, like any Urquhart, but he wasn’t mean. Just quick-tempered.

He could hold a grudge but not like Papa. Aunt Phoebe finally grew ill from her grieving, dying an early death, and calls for Papa to come over to see her on her deathbed in Cuba, and Mama badgers him with Bible verses till he finally consents to get dressed and go over there, of a Sunday afternoon. They’re all there when Mama and Papa arrive, and Papa stands across the room. The others close to the bed. She’s ashy pale, trembly weak, motions for him to come closer. He’s got his hat in his hand, head cocked to one side like a fighter waiting for his opponent to get up after he’s knocked him down. He steps closer to the bed, stands there, looking at her like he’s studying her. No compassion in his hard blue eyes, just something like curiosity. That little cowlick of silver hair on the top of his balding head like a baby’s first locks.

The old homeplace there, little more than an old dogtrot. Brown burnt-up cornstalks in the field beside, it’s August and everybody’s drenched with sweat and powdered with dust from the drive over, the highway nothing but gravel and the road from it just red clay dirt all dried. Everybody standing around in the heat and flies buzzing against the screens.

Aunt Phoebe’s laid up on a stack of pillows.

— Well, he says after a minute, his voice kind of husky soft, I’m waiting. He looks again almost like what he is, her baby brother waiting on her word.

She has her speech prepared.

— I know I was wrong, she says. -I thought you didn’t have to shoot Thad but I know he would have come at you with that knife. I know he wouldn’t have stopped and you’d have had to shoot him anyway, and maybe gotten stabbed. But I couldn’t forgive you for taking him away. I loved him too much. I let him beat me because I loved him. But I know that couldn’t have gone on, either. Now I’m dying. I want to tell you I know you did it in self-defense, like you said to the judge. I’m sorry I didn’t say so. I knew you wouldn’t let little Earl into court. And I lied. I lied about the knife. But now I’m dying. I wanted to tell you how sorry I am for not telling it like it was and for you going to the penitentiary. I’m dying now and I need you to forgive me, Junius. Before I go to my maker.

Papa stands there a long time not saying anything. They’re all straining their ears, sweat running into their earlobes, they let it stand, still. Aunt Phoebe has started to cry, not making a sound herself but the tears trickling down her chalky face.

Papa says, — You can rot in hell, for all I care, Phoebe. I’ll never forgive you.

Aunt Phoebe’s mouth then looked like it’d already been sewn shut by the undertaker, cinched in. Her eyes seemed smaller as if receding with her old soul. They watched him place his hat on his head, walk out without looking back. His own sister. Last time she ever saw him, nor would the closed lids of her dressed corpse deflect the light of his image, nor her shade darken his thoughts but for a flitting second as if seeking some sentimental purchase and, finding none, would it pass into scattered fields of those souls whose lives on earth had found nothing but unhappiness.

Poor Aunt Phoebe. Poor Aunt Phoebe, he’d often thought. I should have known seeing her grieve that no one in this family would ever sow much love in the family garden, what passed for love anyway being just a few unswept and moldered seeds at the base of an otherwise empty grain bin. A clutch of dry and twisted hearts. His love for Birdie was one thing, one move in the right direction, a grasp at goodness the closest thing to which he knew was his mother, poor God-ravaged grackle of a woman that she was, squawking scripture to ward off the terror of eternal fire. When Birdie balked at physical love it fired in him a muted, enraged despair, as if the demons in the old woman his mother had infected his bride somehow between the courtship and connubial bliss. Why, aside from his general greed, would his father have become the biggest pussyhound east of the Mississippi? Because the pussy at home was about as receptive as just that, might as well try to hold down the housecat by the nape of its neck and fuck it — that was his guess, anyway, given all signs and signals in the air all his growing up life.

Still, it was in the blood. Only one of them didn’t cheat on his wife was Rufus, and that because he was a drunk half the time and a teetotaling holy roller the rest, and between being drunk on whiskey and drunk on Jesus he hadn’t the time or the inclination for fucking around. Papa had set Rufus up in the barbershop years before. You never had to worry about Rufus being mean, that was for sure, only drunk. Earl always suspected he had a big heart and it was some kind of self-loathing kept Rufus such a gentle and ineffectual sap.

So he, Earl, would work hard and do well, finally set himself up in business, and extend a hand to Levi, helping to set him up with his own shoe store, too. Never mind competition, which was admittedly part of the plan, that with Levi as competition they could control things, keep a share each of different stock, swap around, lob customers back and forth between the stores like tennis balls. Never mind, of course, that Levi would order on the sly the same stock Earl was getting and offer it at lower prices, wouldn’t put it out where Earl might see it but would sidle up to customers and happen to drop that he could get her this or that shoe a little cheaper than Earl, and sometimes that stock actually being Earl’s own, which Levi would get out of Earl’s store at night or Sunday mornings until Earl got wise and took away his key and slapped him around a little when he, Levi, called him, Earl, a liar.

Got into league with their sister Merry against him. Depended on Earl, the both of them, and the both of them hated him for it. Merry’d get drunk and drive around town shopping for dresses, purses, makeup, flowers, groceries, even whiskey and gasoline, and telling the merchants Send the bill to my brother Earl down at his store. He’d round up whatever hadn’t been unwrapped or worn or drunk or eaten or shot through a carburetor and fired out the tail and take it back, make her pitiful cuckold husband R.W. pay for some, and would end up paying himself for the rest. Then she’d laugh at him over it. Say What do you care, you got plenty of money, nobody’d ever squeeze a nickel out of you Earl if they didn’t steal it.

Your problem, he’d often said to her in private, is no man can satisfy you in bed so you just want to cut off every pair of swinging balls comes within your reach, but you can’t have mine, you’ll just have to be satisfied with R.W.’s hanging from your neck and all those johns’ stuck somewhere in your craw but don’t come looking to me for the piece of bread to help choke them down.

And Levi’s problem he had no balls in the first place, and a brain about the size of a testicle itself. He’d ruined Earl’s relationship with Maurier down at the fish camp in Pascagoula when he’d kidnapped that new salesgirl he lost his head over and then beaten her up when she tried to run off down the beach. When Earl found out he wired him there, LEVI STOP CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WOULD JEOPARDIZE ALL WORKED FOR TAKE SOME GIRL OFF BEAT HER UP STOP DO NOT LEAVE STOP I WILL BE THERE QUICK STOP EARL. Hauling ass through the blackleaved tunnel of 11 to 49, blowing the shutters off little towns along the way and down the flackity flackity 98 to the dirt road to Maurier’s, dawn just breaking over the Sound, and busting into the cabin, their cabin, he even had to go and do that, and Levi there lying naked on the bed and the goddamn girl tied up in a little kitchen chair in the corner and screaming her head off, wearing just a powder-blue blouse and trying to hide herself with her legs. Maurier in right behind him yelling Cajun patois, took all he had in him not to simply beat the shit out of Levi right then and there — pointed, said, I’ll deal with you later. Levi laughing, crying, couldn’t tell which maybe both. Turned to Maurier, You shut up, too, I’ll have them both out of here in thirty minutes. Don’t never want to see him again! You’ll never see either one of us again, goddamnit. Bon! Finee!

Fairly knocked and wrestled whining Levi into some clothes and shoved him onto a bus in town, gave the driver a ten, drove back to Maurier’s, where he’d padlocked her in the room with the phone removed. Went to the office to pay the bill, Maurier in there fuming. Said, I got to make a phone call first. You pay for it! I’ll pay for it goddamnit. Took out another ten-dollar bill and threw it onto his floor.

— Fred, is Pinkie there. Well where is he. Never mind. What time is it. Seven o’clock. All right. Tell him to be on the corner of 5th Street and 22nd Avenue at ten sharp. Wait on me if I’m not there, I’ll be there around then. I’ll make it worth it.

Put her in the front passenger seat she wasn’t nothing then but a foul mouth on a couple of scratched-up skinny legs and a cigarette he kept burning in her waving hands, where in the hell did Levi find them, floored it after gaining 49 again and headed north. Took about three minutes before she began to realize something about the speed. Seventy, eighty, ninety, topped a hundred straight through Perkinston. Talking slowed, then she got real quiet. Damn near up on two wheels in the hard curve south of Wiggins, she screamed and grabbed the armrest and the dash. Up to then talky enough, You better get me a good job somewhere else is what you better do, I know about you and that woman in Tallahassee, your store down there, you get me something like that, you set me up somewhere or I’ll have your asses, I’ll get you son bitches thrown so deep in jail you won’t never see the light of day I’ll—

— You want to take everything I’ve got because of my fool brother, do you, Earl said. -Well you can take every goddamn thing he’s got for all I care, but you threaten me and you got a whole nother problem, sister.

— You don’t scare me.

— You offer this kind of arrangement to Levi he’ll kill you and you know it, and you think you can just sit here and threaten me, then? Was looking at her and barely got back in his lane to miss a tractor trailer rig barreling by, foghorn blasting, woman screaming You’ll kill us both!

— That may be, but if it happens, happens say in a car crash, won’t nobody be the wiser, you’ll be dead.

— Like you!

— I’ve lived a good life, made money, my family’s secure. You’re just a young woman, got your whole life ahead of you. You want to throw it all away like that?

She rips through a mindless wide-eyed recital of every cuss-word or phrase she knows, goddamn son of a bitch motherfucker dick pussy asshole shit piss cunt prick go to hell! runs through them three or four times in a row, Earl thinking how most had to do with bodily functions, how little they strayed, two about condemnation, one comparison to a dog.

— Well I don’t think that’ll do it, he says. He doesn’t slow up until just outside the city limits, coasts down the highway past the airport and the creosote plant, down 8th into town, turned down onto 22nd and stopped there at the corner of 5th. Sitting there engine idling, girl still breathing hard, staring straight ahead, steaming, finally and mercifully mute. Hands her five one-hundred-dollar bills in plain view.

— This ought to get you to another town and another job.

She grabs it.

— Don’t you think you’re done with me.

He nods to Pinkie standing at the lamppost in his uniform, twirling his nightstick, who tips his hat to Earl, the girl.

— Pinkie here just saw you take that and put it into your purse, he says. -Good friend of mine. He don’t know just what this is. You could be a street whore, for all Pinkie knows. Wouldn’t hurt my reputation much, but you wouldn’t want it on your record. So we got a deal.

She spits a few choice ones, get out, slams the door, walks off. He laughs to himself, lights a Camel, waves to Pinkie, and drives out to the country to cool off awhile. Later over to Levi’s house, Levi in the bedroom lying down, Rae sitting and smoking at the dining table, gives him a murderous look full of sloppy lipstick.

— Don’t look at me, I just saved the damn fool son of a bitch.

— That’s what I’m steamed about.

— Not if you knew what I saved him from.

— I know, all right.

Levi turns off the radio when he walks in, gives him a grin, nothing but an inch or two of tiny teeth bared on the perfectly round ball of his head.

— If you ever pull a stunt like that again Levi I’ll kill you. You owe me five hundred dollars.

— For what.

— Never mind what. For saving your ass from picking cotton at Parchman for the next five years that’s what.

— You give that whore five hundred dollars? Whistles. -You got a cigarette?

Never get that money, he knew, but easier to keep Levi straight if he owes you cash. The memory of it would last a year or two, anyway, things somewhat under control. Before Levi and Merry like bad children cooked up some other scheme to entertain themselves and torment him and Birdie.

Asked himself sometimes why in the hell he never left Birdie for Ann whom he loved and there’s your answer: Might not have been much of a marriage but by God it was his family and a good one compared to anything he’d ever known, and be damned if he was going to give any of those godforsaken Urquharts the satisfaction of seeing him fail at anything.

Wanting to reach a hand out for the ax there in the graying film of his vision, not inches from his eye yet as if across some vast and light-bent field at the end of a long day, piecemeal light scattering the air like mercury from a broken thermometer skittling across the floor.

Habeas Corpus

AS SOON AS Miss Birdie called from the hospital and said Mr. Earl had died out at the lake, Creasie went to her cabin, got her coat, and walked down the driveway to the road. She stood nestled into the leaves of the redtop bushes beside the highway and when she saw the yellow-orange school bus coming she stepped out and flagged it down. It was how she got into town and back on the occasional weekday she needed a ride. All the children raucous in the back so it was the only time she rode a bus and sat up front behind the driver and she liked it. The view was good, with the world swinging by so fast when he made his turns. But she hardly noticed, today. Every so often a little balled-up piece of school paper bounced off the back of her head to the wild chorus of delight behind her but she paid it no mind.

When he had delivered all the children to their homes, the bus driver drove back to town and let her off beside the road near the path down into the ravine. She didn’t wave, as she normally did, when the bus drove off. She crossed the street and started down the trail. She hadn’t realized she’d left her house shoes on, with the heels all flattened, until she got on the trail, with its roots and little dips and gopher holes, and so she shuffle-stepped slowly along it. Her feet cold in them now. A rabbit scooted a brown-and-white blur from the trail’s edge across and into the brush on the other side and a gray squirrel barked at her from the low limb of an oak tree. And the winter birds everywhere, hardly singing but fluttering by so close as to breeze her face and sometimes squawking when they made a perch, or dipping away like on a bob string weaving down the trail ahead of her as it narrowed and the light grew gray and solemn blue through the deepening canopy of skeletal and veiny leafless great hardwoods and silent pines.

She went to her own cabin, which she’d painted green because she liked the color and the way it made the house almost invisible in green season when you were a ways off on the trail looking into the clearing at the bottom of the ravine. Inside, she shoved a few sticks from the trail into the stove, sprinkled them with some kerosene-soaked sawdust. When that was crackling she laid in a stick of stove wood and closed the door and sat beside the stove with her hands out, warming.

She got up and looked out her tiny kitchen window and could just see Vish’s cabin in the gathering dusk, come early here in February. Was ending up a dreary afternoon after the sun peeking early on. No drizzle but the air in the woods turning so gray and damp as to almost seem like it. She stood there looking. Couldn’t see anything for a long time and then a little light inside, just a flicker. She went back to the stove. Getting hungry. She got a sack of meal from the cupboard and poured some in a bowl. She got a dab of lard from a little bucket and put it in a skillet and put the skillet on top of the stove to heat. There was some water left in the water jug and she poured a little into the meal and stirred it. She took an egg from where it was wrapped in a soft rag in her handbag, cracked it into the bowl, and stirred that in. Would be better if she had some buttermilk but water would do. Just needed something on her stomach, for nerves as much as hunger.

When the lard in the pan started to smoke she gave the meal another stir and poured it in, hissing in the hot lard, watched it cook. She liked to make bread in the oven but didn’t want to fool with that, and with no milk it’d be better browned on both sides and crispy. She’d made it thin. She watched it thicken and crack on top and then she turned it over with a spatula. The bottom was dark brown. She cooked it another few minutes and took the pan off the stove and set it on the table and cut out a piece to cool on a plate, and she ate it with a cup of water from the jug, chewing and washing down the dry bread with the water, and looking at the little flickering flame in Vish’s cabin down the path. She saw something cross over inside and block out the flame for a second, then the flame again. She wiped her hands on a rag and took another drink of the water, closed the stove vents, and put her coat back on, looked out the window again, and then went out to the porch. It was getting pretty cold. She stepped carefully down the steps and into the path and walked toward Aunt Vish’s cabin.

— Creasie! she’d heard him call, heard a clatter in the sink. He stuck his head into the pantry, mad. -I’ll be back in an hour, so make up a fresh pot of coffee. That’s the worst cup of coffee I ever tasted in my life.

— No, sir, Creasie said to herself now as she stepped up onto Vish’s porch and lifted her knuckles to rap lightly on the old plank door. -I reckon it was worse that that.

AUNT VISH LOOKED made from a tough, blackened root in the flickering faint light from the coal oil lamp on the little shelf behind her. The cabin was hammered together of unplaned planks, burlap tacked to the walls for insulation tattered and torn here and there and stained. She held out a clean mason jar toward Creasie across the table. Her breath like smoke from her mouth when she spoke in the cold air.

— You put it in this. Tell young Mr. Parnell to put it in this.

— Yes’m, Creasie said. -What do I do with it after he give it to me?

Vish’s bloodshot, jaundiced eyes watched her without movement. Outside it was quiet as inside, not a breeze rustling a single dry leaf. Still February winter, maybe a drizzle drifting in, maybe a patter on the dead leaves carpeting the trails. The woods around there black as what you see when life goes out, before whatever light in whatever world comes next shows itself, black nothing, switches of branches and sticky spiderwebs like some gauntlet between here and there.

— You keep it with you.

After a moment, Creasie nodded.

— Yes’m.

The old woman’s hands lay on the table before her, two black crooked claws, long yellow nails resting on the unfinished plank top of the table. She showed what teeth she had then, one long dark horse tooth in front, gaps between what seemed occasional sharpened incisors here and there on back.

— Tell him what I told you to. Don’t tell him who I am. He smart enough, he’ll know.

— Yes’m.

— Say Clint, helped his old papa, done told me about it. He’ll remember Clint, all right, used to help them out down there. Tell him I know about the government, them bodies.

She nodded. She waited a minute, didn’t want to say it. She was afraid.

— Yes’m. What if he calls the police.

— If he smart, if he got any brains at all, child, he ain’t going to call no police. People find out what his daddy was mixed up in, ain’t going to be no more business for Grimes Funeral Home.

She nodded, looking down.

— You go on. You never been here, now. I don’t remember you, I don’t know you. I’m just a crazy old nigger woman, you know what I mean?

She looked up. Old woman grinning at her with those snaggly black teeth. She grinned back, a little.

— Yes’m, she said. Everybody know that.

— That’s right, the old woman said, raising her eyebrows and leaning back in the flickering yellow lamplight. -Everybody. Ha ha ha, she laughed then, her voice deep like a man’s and quiet like she was laughing to herself, but those old bloody eyes never leaving her own.

Black Heart

PARNELL HAD JUST gone downstairs for a glass of milk when he heard a tap-tapping at the front door and when he looked out the side panes he saw a young colored woman standing there holding a jar in her hands. He saw her eyes cut over and see him looking. He sighed, opened the door enough to look out, as he was wearing his house robe and slippers. She stood there looking at him, mute and frightened it seemed.

— Yes? he said. -How may I help you, Miss?

— Yes, sir, Mr. Grimes, she said then. -I need to see you about Mr. Earl.

— Earl Urquhart?

— Yes, sir.

— Did you know Mr. Urquhart?

She stared at him, her eyes pools of something awful, he couldn’t tell.

— Yes, sir.

— Well, what, did you work for Mr. Earl, then?

She didn’t say anything for a moment, then she nodded.

— Yes, sir, she said, I worked for him, out at the house. I did. And Miss Birdie. Work in the house.

He looked at her, wondering what she was doing there. Maybe she wanted to view the corpse but didn’t feel like she could come to the funeral, though black and white were always welcome at a funeral.

— The funeral isn’t set till day after tomorrow, he said then. You could visit Mr. Earl then. I’m afraid he’s not been prepared for viewing, just yet.

— Yes, sir, she said, and stood there.

— I was just going to bed, Parnell said.

— Yes, sir, she said, I didn’t want to see Mr. Earl. I needed to get something from him.

Parnell thought, What in the world. He saw the jar in her hands then.

— What do you have in the jar, there?

— It’s a empty jar, the woman said.

— I can see that, Parnell said. Thinking, what? Some piece of jewelry or something? Did she think Earl Urquhart owed her money and come now to collect it in what looked like an empty preserves jar? Colored people. You couldn’t figure them.

— It’s late. What did you say your name was?

— Creasie Anderson, she said. -I keep house for Mr. Earl and Miss Birdie.

— Well, Creasie, why don’t you come back in two days and attend the funeral, I’m sure that’s what Miss Birdie would want.

The woman stood there, didn’t move, just staring at him with those eyes. He was about to shut the door when she spoke again.

— She say to tell you she knows about the government bodies. She said to tell you she knows old Clint what helped your papa sell them bodies to the government, and if I said that to you that you would let me in.

Parnell lost his hearing there for a long moment, and his vision seemed to tunnel down to a small round area within which this strange little brown woman with a kerchief on her head stood on the home’s veranda. Then through the roaring he heard something plaintive.

— What are you talking about? he said, though he was whispering now, without even thinking he needed to whisper, some automatic response to alarm. -Old Clint who used to work here? Who said?

He heard something again. Selena’s voice, from up at the top of the stairs, out of sight.

— Parnell, what is it?

He stepped back and motioned the woman to come in, and put a finger to his lips.

— Nothing, my darling, he called up to Selena, his voice sounding strange in his ringing ears.

— Parnell? Are you coming up? Selena’s voice carried like the quavery notes of some strange wind instrument down the stairs. -Come up to see me?

— Wait for me, Selena, he called, shooing the colored woman ahead of him down the hallway toward the door to the basement stairs. -I’ll be up soon, sweetheart.

— I’ll be waiting on you, Selena’s voice floated down, playful now, enticing.

He whispered to the colored woman when they reached the door to the basement stairs.

— Shhh, now. We can talk down here.

He watched the woman go slowly down the narrow stairway, holding to the rail, and tried to gather what she was saying into his brain. After his father had died, Parnell had been going through his papers when he saw a packet of official-looking letters, unmarked as to their origin. They were cryptic but seemed to suggest his father was involved in a project of some sort and that this involved those people and maybe more he didn’t know of who’d disappeared from the home but whose funerals had gone on as planned. And then one evening about a year after his father died another strange man came calling on his father, and when Parnell informed the man his father had died an unexpected death, along with his mother, the man nodded and stood there a while.

— Did your father tell you anything about activities on his part to assist the federal government, sir, in a study of some sort?

— No, Parnell said after a pause.

— He did not inform you in any way of his cooperation with a very important government project involving matters of national security, sir?

— No, sir, Parnell said, his heart racing. -Perhaps you can inform me, sir.

The man looked at him. Then he looked him slowly up and down, as if appraising him. Then the man said, — I’m sorry for your father’s untimely death, Mr. Grimes. Then he turned and walked away and got into a black car with plain hubcaps across the street and drove away.

For a while Parnell had been convinced that the government had something to do with his parents’ death. That whatever his father was involved in must have endangered him, he must have known something he wasn’t supposed to know, and so some strange espionage-like death was concocted for him. And for a long time after that he had worried that they believed he knew something and would one day be coming for him. But he never heard from them again. His mind was now reeling with the absurdity of the whole business now coming up again in the form of this dumpy little auntie standing there beside him at the empty preparation table, still in her old ragged coat, holding the jar in her two hands in front of her and just waiting.

— Miss V — and she stopped. -She say—

— Who is this she? Parnell interrupted her. He heard a tremulous quality in his own voice and realized he was beginning to perspire.

— Say we got to have the poor man’s heart, she said then, not looking at him.

— What? Who’s heart? Earl Urquhart’s heart? You are telling me you want this man’s heart? To put in that jar there?

Woman just nodded. She looks worse scared than I do, Parnell thought.

— This is insane! he almost shouted. He started to take her by the arm and rush her out the back door then, but she said again,

— She say to tell you old Clint know about your papa and giving the government them bodies. She say we got to have Mr. Earl’s heart in this here jar or she going to tell about it.

— Who says? he fairly hissed, throwing his arms up in the air.

— Mr. Grimes, I can’t say! she said, looking at him now and he could see tears in her eyes now, beginning to run down her big cheeks.

A thought tickled up to the front of his brain as if released from some little air bubble in the back of it somewhere. That this woman was an emissary of Birdie Urquhart. This was the man’s widow asking him to give her maid her husband’s heart in a goddamn mason jar, for God’s sake. Earlier that evening a drunken woman had telephoned him, said she was Earl Urquhart’s sister, and that she wanted him to do an autopsy (she’d ripped out the word in her slurring speech) on the man because in fact he’d been murdered (ripping that one out, too). He’d hung up on her, thinking it a vicious, foolish prank. And now a chill settled into his blood. Mrs. Birdie Urquhart. He felt a strange and ridiculous momentary sense of relief that maybe this actually had nothing to do with his father and the bodies but it was too confusing and his thoughts wheeled into chaos again.

My God, he thought then. This woman he’d worshiped from afar for much of his life, who looked like the movie stars he’d idolized as a child, who seemed some sort of essence of feminine allure to Parnell, about whom he’d fantasized in the earliest mixings of his contorted desire.

Standing there in the dim room lit by the auxiliary lamp in the corner looking at this frightened colored maid he felt a calm move through him as if he’d been administered a drug. It was the calm of the man who has resigned himself to a terrible turn of events in his life, say a murderer of some sort, whose deed is done and he resigns himself to the way it is and does not acclimate his mind to the anxieties of the lawful majority. He let go of the colored woman’s arm then and went over to the locker, opened it, and wheeled the gurney with Earl Urquhart’s body on it out, and turned the overhead lamp on and pulled back the sheet from his stricken face. He heard the woman catch her breath.

— You might want to wait outside, he said. -This won’t be pretty.

She stood there like an idiot, apparently unable to move.

— Suit yourself, then, he said.

He got out the scalpel and the saw and the spreader from the chest where they were stored, where his father had stored them since Parnell was a child, and went to work. When he’d opened him up, he took the separator, set it in place, then cranked it open. Adjusted his lamp. Then the second chill of the evening hit him, this one worse than the first, for the man’s heart was as black as if it’d been skewered and turned on a spit over a fire. Parnell wondered for a moment if a bolt of lightning could have shot down and pierced straight to this man’s heart, entering and leaving it clean as a blade of light and blasting nothing else. Hardly thinking, he quickly sliced a small section from one wall and concealed it on the other side of the corpse, between the arm and the ribcage. He paused and looked up at the woman. She was staring into the dead man’s chest.

— Look like some kind of buirnt root in there, she said.

— Open the jar, he said to her, all cool and formality again now. He felt possessed of a strange calm, as if resolving this weird issue for this woman would resolve more than he could understand. -You might want to look away, here. Plenty of time, I suppose, for you to see what is in here when you are on the way back home.

She stared at him with her baleful, frightened eyes and without looking slowly unscrewed the lid to the mason jar and held it tentatively out in front of her, and then she turned her head to look away at the stairwell leading out.

— You’ll be going out the back door, Parnell said as he leaned in with the scalpel and a pair of tongs.

THE WHOLE ORDEAL had taken only a half hour and now he was washed up and trudging in a horrified daze back up the stairs to their living quarters. He was muttering a prayer to himself, my God forgive me and mine own for all our sins and our wretched natures. When he reached the top of the stairs he just did catch a glimpse of a pair of bare feet and legs sprawled invitingly from the door of the guest room and for the third time in less than an hour, he felt a shock and a chill — then he calmed, almost smiled to himself, and began unbuttoning his shirt as he approached the supine form of his sweet bride there, just her nightie top on and her arms flung over her head. Again, a cool sweat broke on his broad forehead.

— I’m coming, my darling, he whispered, don’t go.

THE FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST from Jackson called him two days later, just after Earl’s funeral, having examined the sample of Earl’s heart Parnell had sent him via one of his helpers on the day following Creasie’s visit. After the usual civilities, the pathologist asked in a somewhat incredulous manner just what in the world that man had been up to in his days. Parnell took a long pause, then informed the doctor that his family had taken care of Mr. Urquhart’s father and his grandfather, as well, and that among the Grimes family, in a professional sense, the Urquharts were known as the Blackhearts, for the propensity toward this condition, for which Parnell had no explanation.

He said to the pathologist, — So you reached no conclusion, yourself, based on lab tests?

— Afraid not, the pathologist said. -It could be a damned interesting study, though. I’m tempted to come over and take a look at this situation myself.

He had a voice like a big man speaking with his cheeks full of cornpone, rich and congested and mealy. Strong and suspicious.

— It may involve negro occult matters, I’m afraid, Parnell said. -I’m not sure it would be something we could understand.

— Well if you are inclined to write up what all you know about it, I’d be interested to read such a document, the pathologist said.

— Personally I would like to put it to rest, Parnell said. -This family and their indecent ways and their dangerous and self-destructive habits have been a blight on this community. I would not relish the publication of any sort of record which might also blemish the reputation of the community by association.

— Well, the pathologist said after a moment. -Thank you for the enlightenment, Mr. Grimes. I’m afraid there’s nothing concrete this office can truly contribute to your understanding of what led to this man’s death. He paused. -Should you see any lateral evidence of this sort of thing, however, I’d be obliged if you would let me know so that I could take a peek, so to speak, at — ah — such goings-on.

— I will do that, Parnell said. -Good day to you, sir, he said, and they hung up.

Finus Inquisitus

LATER ON THE afternoon he’d seen Birdie outside Schoenhof’s, Finus got into his pickup and drove out into the country, taking little back roads in a meandering way around the circumference of Mercury, until at dusk he was rolling slowly past Birdie and Earl’s house on the highway. The lights were on in the kitchen and den, dark everywhere else. He slowed and turned down the road that ran between their house and the junkyard Earl’s son-in-law ran with his father and peered into the darkened three-car garage to see if Earl’s car was there. He’d be somewhat outside of propriety to drop in and say hello if Earl wasn’t home. He could see at least one car there. And then he saw the grainy shadowed figure standing in the driveway. He had to turn in, then, for to pass on by in that manner would be too odd. He pulled up beside the figure, Earl, who was just standing there smoking in the last light. Finus shut the engine.

— Finus, Earl said, offering him a cigarette. Finus took it, lit up. Earl looked up as if to check for an early moon, and the men didn’t say anything for a minute, smoking in silence.

Earl looked at him, took a last drag, and flicked the cigarette butt into the yard.

— Been a while. How’d you like Tuscaloosa?

— Never did feel quite like home, Finus said.

Earl nodded. -I never did get to tell you how sorry I was about your son.

— Well, Finus said. -That’s all right.

— I’m sorry about Merry, too, Earl said, all the trouble that caused. But you know as well as I do there’s no controlling that bitch.

— Ancient history, Finus said.

— Well, Earl said, and nodded. He gave Finus a faint smile. -You lost your boy. Can’t get a divorce, so I hear. You’ve nothing left to lose but your business, now that it’s all in your hands. May as well just work hard and play the field.

Finus laughed. No doubt about it, Earl looked like a movie star, handsome and confident in his manner. No wonder he had his reputation with the women. But even now he couldn’t help thinking what an odd match he was for Birdie Wells.

— I reckon I could get a divorce, if I wanted to pay the price, Finus said. He put on his best rueful smile. -I was just driving around, thinking, thought I’d say hello.

Earl nodded, looking at him, then turned away toward his house, where Finus could see Birdie’s stockinged legs through the den screen door as she sat in a chair, maybe reading from the lamp glow that bathed them.

— We’ll see you around, Earl said over his shoulder.

— Right, Finus said. -I’ll see you.

TWO WEEKS LATER, word came from a friend of Birdie’s that Earl had dropped dead of a heart attack while out splitting firewood at his lake. When Earl didn’t come home two hours after leaving, Birdie had driven out to check on him and found him on the ground next to a pile of cordwood he’d split, one hand still on the ax, his eyes open. She’d pulled him into her car by herself and driven him to the hospital, way too late. Parnell Grimes judged it cardiac arrest, and there was no inquiry.

That evening, Finus dressed and went out to Birdie’s house. Earl wouldn’t be ready at the funeral home till the next day. Finus knew Parnell never got them ready the same day if they came in after noon — he was a perfectionist.

Birdie was in her den, with visitors in there and the kitchen, a few scattered into the living room and sunporch. The visitors served themselves from a large percolator on the kitchen counter and ate baked goods from the kitchen table. Creasie was nowhere to be seen.

After Finus had been there a half hour, Earl’s brother Levi and his wife, Rae, and Merry came in, obviously drunk. Merry wore the requisite black, but around her neck along with a string of pearls lay some kind of fur stole. On her head was a bright shiny red hat that seemed made from the skin of some large exotic bird, half a dozen blue feathers askew from the crown, bedraggled, as if she’d just killed, skinned, and partially plucked the creature out in the yard and stretched it onto her skull still steaming from lifeblood. She looked over at Finus and closed her eyes slowly, let an odd smile slip across her lips, then opened her eyes and batted them once at him. He couldn’t help but wonder where Avis was at that moment, since he’d seen her car parked outside. Just then Merry murmured something to Levi, who gave her a look like he’d just swallowed his tongue and wanted to say something but just shook his head. Merry looked back up at Finus then and said, loudly enough for everyone in the room to hear, — Well I’m surprised you’re here, Finus. Being the disgruntled lover and all.

He was confused, at first, felt himself blush that she would joke about their old affair in public, but then he realized from the look she was giving Birdie that she meant Birdie, as in Finus and Birdie. Levi still hadn’t spoken, still didn’t look like he could. Birdie turned paler than she had been. Finus stood in the center of the room like some stiff ridiculous totem. Levi took Merry’s elbow and tried to pull her toward the door, whispering something to her, but Merry yanked her arm free and turned back to Birdie. Birdie looked up at her, horrified.

— I don’t know how you can sit there and play the grieving widow, Merry said. -Sweet little Birdie, she mocked her. -Well you don’t fool me.

— Merry, please, Birdie said, don’t do this.

— Do what, honey, tell the truth? Everybody thinks she is so-o-o innocent, she said loudly then, sweeping her arm around the room, almost losing the ridiculous hat from her head. It seemed the entire house had fallen silent, everyone in the den and in the other rooms, too. -Well, she went on — but Finus had heard enough and if Levi couldn’t handle her he would. He stepped over, took her by the upper arm, and hustled her through the kitchen and out into the driveway.

Outside, she twisted from his grip and swung her purse at him.

— What the hell, Merry.

— She killed him, is what, Merry said, pushing her hair back out of her eyes and spitting onto the sidewalk. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, smearing bright red lipstick on her pale skin.

— Jesus Christ, Finus said, are you insane? You couldn’t be that drunk.

— I don’t know how, she said, but my brother Earl was healthy as a horse and did not just keel over from a heart attack. Wasn’t enough she lived like a little queen out here, having her every whim, new cars, new clothes, a goddamn nigger maid to do all her work, this pampered little goddamn thing, but everybody knew Earl was fucking every girl came through his store, and everybody knew he fell in love with Ann after she went to work there, and everybody knew he set Ann up in the Tallahassee store so he could go down and be with her, and Birdie knew he was going to leave her for Ann and if you don’t think that’s enough motive for a woman to kill her husband you’re a bigger idiot of a half-ass small-town newspaper man than I took you for.

She realized she’d locked herself out of her car, took off one of the expensive high-heel shoes Earl no doubt had given her gratis from his store, and smashed the heel into the driver’s window shattering it. She tossed the fur stole onto the seat over the glass, climbed in, cranked up, and peeled out of yard. Finus heard something behind him then, and Avis walked up in the shadows, though he could make out the ironic smile on her face. She nodded to Merry’s car hurtling away.

— Too bad you two didn’t work out. You deserve each other.

Finus ignored her and went back in to apologize to Birdie for his part in the scene, even though that’d been ending it. He heard Avis’s heels clicking down the driveway toward her car.

THE NEXT DAY, Finus went back to the funeral home to pay Parnell Grimes, county coroner and funeral director at the home, a semiofficial visit.

The old Victorian mansion Parnell used for a home and business stood on the west side of downtown near the library. Inside, Finus could smell nothing of the large bouquets and wheels of flowers standing in the foyer and parlors, but only (perhaps in his mind) the faint and pervasive odor of the chemicals of the trade, something like and not like formaldehyde, and sitting across from Parnell Grimes in his back office, looking at the soft little pudgy fellow he was, his pinkness, he couldn’t help but entertain the morbid fantasy that a strange ancient secret funerary chemical ran in Parnell’s veins in lieu of blood. He seemed distracted, shuffling papers on his desk, glancing up at Finus with a nervous smile, asked what he could do for him. With his smoothness, his balding slicked-down head, and his tight black suit, he looked a little penguinish standing there, to Finus.

— You’ll have to forgive me, Parnell said. -Busy day. As always!

— No problem, Finus said. -Take your time.

— Um hmm, um hmm, Parnell said, shuffling his papers, raising his eyebrows and nodding, checking a drawer for something, shutting it. Then stopped all his fidgety activity, placed his pudgy little hands on the desk in front of him, and looked at Finus, eyebrows in a question mark. His child-size hands were almost translucent, made Finus shiver a little at the thought of them handling the dead — or him, dead. And within that cartoonish gathering of flesh blinked those deep-set and absurdly pretty eyes, like a movie idol’s, so anomalous as to shock one upon first noticing.

— Well, I was just passing by, really, Finus said. He put his hands in his pockets, jingled his change, smiled at Parnell. -Any new customers today?

— I’m afraid so, Parnell said. -Mrs. Terhune, from Southside.

— The tamale lady?

Parnell nodded.

— I’ll miss them, Finus said. -Used to buy them by the sackful.

— Selena will, too, Parnell said, referring to his wife, who lived with him there in the home. -She loves tamales.

— Mmm hmm, Finus said. -Say, Parnell, when I called yesterday you said Earl Urquhart died of a heart attack.

Parnell stood somewhat at attention, his head cocked in question.

— Yes?

— Well, I was just rechecking that. Just wondering, no real reason, if there was anything odd there, anything that might have suggested any other cause.

Parnell kept his odd, penguinish pose.

— No real reason, Finus said, just that he seemed so healthy, you know, just talked to him the other day. He shook his head. -Just goes to show.

Parnell, after a beat, nodded as if the pose had been prelude to some odd penguin mating dance.

— Yes, yes it does. You never know. Well, no, Mr. Bates, no sign, no reason to think anything other than cardiac arrest, as far as I could tell. I suppose it could have been a stroke.

— Hmm, yeah, Finus said.

The men stood there awkwardly a moment more.

— So, Finus said. -Well, Mrs. Terhune?

— Heart, Parnell said, doing the nod again.

— Umm hmm, Finus said. -Guess she probably ate a lot of her own fare.

After a beat, both men laughed a little awkwardly, though quietly.

— Well, I won’t keep you, Finus said. -I know you’re busy.

Parnell’s eyebrows jumped again and he shrugged his narrow little shoulders in the too-small black suit. He nodded.

— Yes, three funerals today, as I’m sure you know, Parnell said. -Sorry to be so distracted, Mr. Bates. He gave a nervous little laugh. -I’m terminally disorganized.

— Terminally, Finus said, and gave a little laugh of his own.

— Yes, oh, ha ha! Parnell said, standing up and starting to offer his hand, then withdrawing it as instead he came around the desk to usher Finus on out. -Well good to see you, Mr. Bates, sorry I couldn’t be more help.

— No, Finus said. -Just obligatory, newspaper business you know.

— Yes, Parnell said, already somewhere else, showing Finus to the door, and seeming already away from there into another room as Finus stepped out the door and said goodbye.

— Yes, Parnell said, thank you now, give my best to Mrs. Bates.

Though everyone in Mercury who knew Finus and Avis knew they’d been separated for years, a terminal separation, as it were. Well he was an odd one, Parnell.

Finus made his way on down the sidewalk in the cold gray of the afternoon. It was February. Earl’s wake tonight, services tomorrow, time would roll on. God help him, but he was thinking mourning period. He’d be visiting Birdie every now and then in between. Come late spring, he figured, all this would have pretty much died down. By then, it might be proper enough to propose that his visits take on a different tone. In the meantime, he’d check in on her every now and then to make sure she was doing okay.

BUT WHEN HE called her the next week she was upset. Wouldn’t say why at first, then finally told him she’d received two letters, unsigned, with no return address. The text of the letters was made from cut-out magazine headline words, odd sizes, accusing her of poisoning Earl, and threatening to have his body exhumed for an autopsy.

— It’s Levi and Merry, who else? Birdie said. -Finus, they have hated me and tormented me from day one, always jealous of me, jealous of Earl. And you should’ve seen them in the executor’s office the other day. They stood up after Earl’s will was read and said Earl would never have left them out, that something was funny, they were going to sue me, and just up and walked out. Hubert Cawthon called me and said they’d tried to get an order to dig Earl up, so I know it’s them.

Finus called Cawthon, the district attorney, and Cawthon’s assistant DA. Spud Meriwether confirmed, off the record, that Merry and Levi had indeed sought the order.

— Hell, Spud said, if anybody poisoned Earl Urquhart I’d think it his sister. Woman’s crazy. Besides, Parnell Grimes said he sent a sample from Earl’s heart to the state lab and came back negative.

— Is that right, Finus said, wondering why Parnell hadn’t mentioned this to him. -No poison, then?

— I reckon that’s what negative means, Spud said.

Finus knew from the grapevine that Spud had been one of Merry’s victims, too, only unlike Finus (apparently an exception) Spud had been stuck for a life insurance policy before getting out of his affair.

He went to see Birdie that afternoon. Creasie met him at the door, nodded and hardly spoke, disappeared into the back somewhere. He and Birdie sat in the den. He asked her if she wanted him to help her with a lawyer or anything.

— This is harassment and slander, at best, he said.

— No, I’m just going to ignore them, she said. She sat in a stuffed rocking chair in the corner, fiddling with a silk handkerchief and looking out the window on the long front yard. -I don’t want any more trouble.

— They’re making it, not you.

— I’m not going to give them the satisfaction.

— Well, you let me know if you change your mind.

— All right.

She still looked out the window. Her hair was down, and beautiful. Her face was lined and puffy with the strain of everything. Her hands were slim and still pretty. The pale blue of her eyes in the afternoon light, absorbing the color of her pale blue dress. It was a still moment in the small room, steam heat ticking in the radiator against the wall. Through the door to the foyer he could see beyond to the big living room, cold marble fireplace with the big mirror over it, mute grand piano black in the corner like a museum piece. Here she was, a duchess set up in her little estate, the duke now dead at an early age, wondering what she was going to do with the rest of her life.

He wanted to ask her about Ann, Earl’s girlfriend down in Florida. Not sure why he wanted to ask about that, then.

— Birdie, he finally said though. -I know Earl hurt you. Ran around on you.

She said nothing.

— Do you want to talk about it? All that?

— You’re one to talk, she said. -You and Merry.

She was looking out the window. He shut up then, and they sat awhile in silence. Then Birdie opened a drawer in the little lamp table beside her and pulled out a letter in an envelope and handed it to him. It was addressed to Birdie, no return address. The postmark was back in September. There was another envelope inside, addressed to Earl at the shoe store, with a Tallahassee postmark from the same month. A letter inside it. He looked up at Birdie.

— Go ahead and read it, she said.

It was a letter written in what looked to Finus like a woman’s handwriting. The salutation wasn’t to Earl, was just a familiar Hey, followed by epistolary smalltalk, as well as some discussion of business. He looked up at Birdie again.

— It’s from Ann Christensen, who runs the Tallahassee store, she said. -Go on.

Finus hesitated. -Was she there, at the funeral, then?

— She had the decency to hang back, but she was there.

Page two became personal again. It was a love letter, finally. She missed him. She hated not seeing him more than once a week, twice at best, but often only once or twice a month. She cherished their time on the Mississippi coast. She ached for him whenever they would part, after those times. She didn’t even want to love someone as much as she loved him.

Do you think, she wrote finally, that Birdie would be all right if you did in fact leave? I want so much for us to be together, but I don’t want you to be miserable because of it. I don’t want us ruined by your guilt and fear and worry over her. Sometimes I get so jealous that you feel so protective of her, so fearful of her dependence on you. Wouldn’t she be all right, in that house, with Creasie there to help her out, and all her biddy friends? I feel terrible urging you to keep thinking about this, I don’t like to think of myself as a home-wrecker. But your children are grown and gone. They and your grandchildren could come to see us down here. We could run the businesses from here. Or hell, sell the Mercury store, let’s open another one in Mobile or Jacksonville. I’m sorry. I can’t help wishing for what I think is right, in spite of the fact that you are married. It’s me you love, we both know that. We should be together. I try not to think about it like this. I can’t help it. I love you. — Ann

Birdie was looking out the window at the day, a blustery wind blowing in a front, clouds sailing above the bare oak limbs in the front yard, bright blue between them. It had enlivened Finus, coming out. Now he felt they were in a muffled cocoon, buffeted by the wind and isolated from all that had made him feel good in it, before.

— Do you think he was going to leave you? he said. -Did you?

She shrugged, after thinking for a moment.

— I always said he’d never leave me for anyone he just slept with, she said, pulling at a loose thread on her skirt.

— But this wasn’t just that, Finus said.

She shook her head.

— I knew that, anyway.

They were quiet a while.

— It had to be Merry sent me that letter, Birdie said. -Stole it from Earl’s office and mailed it to me just for meanness. Meanness to him or to me, I don’t know. Both, I guess. I think he knew I had it, what had happened. He was nervous and irritable about it. But he wouldn’t ask.

— You didn’t say anything to him.

She shook her head.

— I didn’t want to make a fuss about it. She looked up. -Well what difference would it have made, anyway, Finus?

— Maybe make him face up to what he was doing—

— And maybe decide to leave me. I didn’t ever think he would, he knew I couldn’t get by on my own. I’ve never worked, just been a housewife and a mother. Never went past the eighth grade. What would I do for a living?

Finus said nothing.

— I’m going to ask Edsel and his family to move in with me out here, I think, she said. -Just to have somebody around, and my grandchildren. They don’t have a house yet, and this one’s so big. Maybe they’d be happy here for a while.

— That sounds like a good idea.

He could still see her, a young girl naked in the woods, turning like a wheel in the light slanting through riverside trees. Looked at her feet now in the new slight slippers from Earl’s store and remembered her short plump girl’s feet flung up and over, how they made a ka-thump sound upon landing on the ground, the little muff of hair diaphanous in light from the leafy boughs behind her. He flushed with physical pleasure and a lamentable sense of loss. He wanted to go over, kiss her on the cheek. Felt as if he could not keep himself from doing it, in any case. But then he heard a whistling sound from the kettle, and Creasie pushed through the swinging door from the dining room to the kitchen. In a minute she came into the room carrying teacups steaming on little fragile saucers, no tray, just one saucer tilted in each hand, Lipton labeled tea strings hanging over the cup rims, a look on her face as if she were in some distant thought, had arrived in the room almost by luck, the kerchief on her head a comical nod to some old type though she was still a young woman, this belied too by the lump of dip pooching out her lower lip.

— Thank you, Creasie, Birdie said, her voice a little wavery.

— Yes’m, Creasie said, and ambled out of the room on, Finus just then noticed, a pair of pink-bottom, slightly squashed-down splayed bare brown feet.

IT WAS ON one afternoon while they were fishing for bream on a bed stinking of roe that he felt silently overwhelmed with a sense of urgency, that whether or not he understood what he’d felt for this woman now and at various times in the past he had to make a move, had to leap into something in order to understand the very element in which he existed, to understand his own mind.

He looked at her. Just a little plump with her fifty-four years, hair still dark brown and long, in a braid this day, a few gray strands, a little fleshier in the cheeks, but still pretty. The same impertinent mouth, the gapped teeth. Easy laugh. She saw him looking.

— What? she said.

— Do you know, Birdie, he said, I’ve seen you naked.

— What?

— A long time ago, the day you fell into the river during the picnic at the Methodist retreat. I was in the bushes when you and Avis came down the path to change you.

She colored. -Well what am I supposed to say to that?

— I don’t know. Something happened to me that day, watching you. Avis saw me in there.

— Well what were you doing there? Just spying?

— Yes, but not on purpose. I’d gotten sick, went away from the camp, and y’all just happened along.

— You should have said something before I took my clothes off.

— I didn’t have time. I didn’t know what y’all were up to. Well I couldn’t, I had my own pants around my ankles. But what I wanted to say, you put a spell on me that day. It’s like it’s never worn off, all these years.

Just saying those words released something in him, a prickling, blood pressure up, compromised vision.

— What kind of spell?

— That’s what I’d like to know. I was stricken. Smitten, maybe, but stronger than that. I wanted you, somehow. I was so mad you decided to marry Earl.

She laughed, half dismissal and half embarrassment. She lifted her line from the water, examined the worm on the hook, and lowered it in again.

They sat in uncomfortable silence for a while.

— I don’t have to remind you that you’re still a married man. I probably shouldn’t even be out here fishing with you, come to think of it. Sometimes I forget you and Avis are still married.

Finus snorted. -Wish I could. No, sometimes I do. But only for a moment or two at a time.

— Listen, Finus. Oh, I don’t even like to throw my mind back so far. But you were right way back when you said I wasn’t ready to get married, too young. And so much of my life went into it. I just want to be alone, live with Edsel and his family awhile, as long as they want to stay with me at the house. I’m just tired, I feel worn out. Like I’ve had the life drained out of me. I know I’m not real old but I feel old. You’re a good man. You had a bad marriage, I know. I did too in some ways, but it was good in others. If you want to try to convince Avis to give you a divorce, well go ahead, I think it’s best anyway. But I don’t want to run right into something else again. I’ve lived a whole life already, seems like. I may have more in me but not right now. Maybe not ever. I just want to rest. All this mess has just exhausted me.

— I’m not talking about marrying. He laughed. -I don’t really know what I want, Birdie.

— So what else is new? she said, but gentle, mocking him.

— Finus, she said after a bit, you and I are friends and I like it that way, always have. Even if you have seen me without my clothes on.

And she laughed, then, to think of it, and the sight and sound of it released a flood of feeling that was deeper than the old surge of sexual desire, though he felt a stir of that, too. How much he was drawing upon that indelible image he could not know. It didn’t matter.

— I love you, Birdie. Always have, from the first time I saw you, I believe.

— You don’t mean that any more than you did the last time you said it.

But she remembered that he had once said it, a long time ago. He took note of that.

Obits

AS FINUS GREW older, obituaries came to make up a goodly portion of the Comet, which was nearing the end of its arcing streak as was its body of readers. Often he was asked to write the obits for people not necessarily from Mercury though well known throughout the county because he made an attempt to tell something notable, or even simply funny or unusual, about that person’s life. Your average obituary was a disgrace in its sterility. Nor could he stand the notion of families writing their own, which some papers were allowing now. He could just imagine the tears and flapdoodle from those pens, along with a host of the awfulest verse. He should know. Some still had the audacity to ask him to print their own words, whereupon he’d tell them to take it to one of those papers that made you pay for obit space. His newspaper wasn’t the community wailing wall. You couldn’t convince a body anymore that there was integrity in the use of the language.

In the awkward days following Earl’s death, he wrote his obituary with some restraint, given his anger about what Levi and Merry were up to then.

EARL LEROY URQUHART, 55

He built a sound business and his own small wealth from little more than grit, savvy, long hours, and professional integrity.

He loved nothing more than taking his skiff to Pascagoula to fish for trout, redfish, Sound cats, and tarpon.

He once hit a negro woman on the head with a high-heel shoe, in his store, for some impertinence.

Earl Urquhart, prominent Mercury businessman, died last Friday while splitting firewood out at his lake north of Mercury. He was 55 years old. Coroner Parnell Grimes gives as cause of death a heart attack. An autopsy was requested by members of his family. There was no evidence, Grimes said, of foul play.

Mr. Urquhart was born in Cuba, Alabama, but his family soon moved to Mississippi and he grew up in Union. The Urquharts moved to Mercury in 1915. Soon after, Mr. Urquhart met Birdie Wells, and wasted little time in courting her and persuading her to marry him, though she was just sixteen years old at the time. Mr. Urquhart was already a successful businessman by that time, and soon was managing a chain of shoe stores in the south for a New York manufacturing firm.

Mr. Urquhart worked in New York for a while, opening new stores for his company. In 1928, after a series of different assignments which took him to cities such as Baltimore, Cincinnati, Memphis, and Atlanta, he opened his own store in Mercury and settled there with his growing family. Through shrewd business practices and a conservative approach to marketing, he managed to keep his store through the Depression years. He opened another store in Tallahassee, Florida, in 1950. He owned partial interest in a shoe store run by his brother, Levi Urquhart, also in Mercury.

Mr. Urquhart was known as an honest man who worked hard and treated all fairly. He never drank, people like to point out. My impression was he wasn’t proud of it so much as just not interested in liquor. He loved fishing, and often traveled to the coast to fish in the Mississippi Sound off Pascagoula and Biloxi in his own boat. He also owned a piece of land around a small lake just outside of Mercury, where he kept a couple of horses.

He was an emotional man and it was not unheard of for Mr. Urquhart to engage in quick bouts of fisticuffs on occasion, if insulted or if he perceived it to be the case. Most men treated him with respect, accordingly.

He is survived by his widow, Birdie Wells Urquhart, his daughter, Ruthie Mosby, his son, Edsel, and three grandchildren. Services were held at Grimes Funeral Home, with interment at Magnolia Cemetery.

LATER FINUS WROTE about the death of Birdie’s daughter, Ruthie, when she succumbed to cancer in her early fifties. And about her son, Edsel, of a heart attack at the age of forty-eight (striking something of a blow to those who still entertained the thought that Earl’s similar death, at fifty-five, was suspicious). And he wrote a heartfelt one about the death of Birdie’s grandson, Robert, in an automobile accident at the age of twenty-two.

ROBERT EDSEL URQUHART, 22

When he was only five years old, he wandered into the woods near his family’s home and was lost — so everyone thought — until nightfall, when searchers saw the light of a fire. Reaching that spot, they found little Robert, pellet gun by his side, roasting a young squirrel over a campfire. A little lean-to he’d constructed sheltered him from the elements. He invited everyone to sit down and join him for supper.

He was a precocious child in other ways, as the family story goes that he could stand on the transmission hump on the car’s backseat floorboard and name the make and model of every car headed their way before it got to within a hundred yards.

But he definitely seemed more at home in the woods, and there wasn’t a plant or animal he didn’t know by name and habitat, simply by first-hand observation. This, in a time when the big woods had already begun to disappear in the south, and there was something of the boy that seemed not of his time, and something that seemed to project a quiet awareness of this. He would have spent every waking minute in the woods, had his family allowed it — they almost wish they had, now.

Robert Edsel Urquhart, 22, died in a car wreck on Langtree Road last Saturday night. He was looking for a boy who had insulted his girlfriend — boy was a friend of his — not to fight him, but just to ask him to be civil and apologize. As he and his girlfriend and two other young people headed in Robert’s car up Langtree Road, another car came speeding around the sharp turn near the entrance to Ludlum’s Woods, left the ground, and hit Robert’s Jeep head-on. Somehow, no one else was seriously injured. Robert died instantly in the collision.

It was typical of the young man to try to settle a dispute between two angry people. He had a hot temper himself, but it was superseded by a kind disposition and a desire for everyone around him to get along. His grandmother, Mrs. Birdie Urquhart, never made any bones about the fact that Robert was her favorite grandchild — and I have permission and even the blessing of Mrs. Urquhart’s other two grandchildren to make that statement.

Mrs. Urquhart once told me that Robert was the only child she’d ever known, other than herself, who took to nature as if he were truly at home in it. When she told him the name of a tree, or bush, or bird, he would remember it. She said a bird once lit on his shoulder as they stood still in a thicket watching another bird, and the boy, though only five years old, knew to be still and not make a sound until the bird had flown off on his own. She said to him, Do you know what kind of bird that was on your shoulder? He said, Yes, but then wouldn’t tell her what kind of bird he thought it had been. Later that afternoon she asked him again, and he said, I know what kind of bird it was. Was it a finch? He wouldn’t answer. Was it a sparrow? He wouldn’t answer. At supper she told the story to the others, and said, I know you know what kind of bird it was, Robert, so why won’t you tell us? And Robert considered this a minute and then said, If I told you, a bird would never land on my shoulder ever again.

He is survived by his mother and father, Edsel and Janie Urquhart, his grandmother, Mrs. Birdie Urquhart, and his maternal aunts and uncles. Pallbearers are his uncles Tom, Bernard, and Rupert Williams, and the deacons of the United Methodist Church.

One morning in late February ’77, suffering the gray chill of a drizzling front that seemed to swell his aching bones, Finus rose and went down to the Comet office before coffee, before the radio station, and began typing what he’d composed in his head during the night.

AVIS CROSSWEATHERLY BATES, 76

She was a basketball star in her little country school up in Kemper, and went on to play for Ole Miss, where she majored in education. Became a teacher and taught in the Mercury public schools for forty years.

She once had her husband (yours truly) thrown in jail for missing a child support payment, and then had him thrown out when his buddies down there left him in charge of the keys.

Most famous quotation: When told that her estranged husband (still yours truly) might have a brain tumor (false, rumor), she is reported to have replied, — As if he ever had a brain.

Avis Crossweatherly Bates died last night, bitter and twisted in her body by the disappointments in her life, her heart. Her father was a hard man, and possessive, he loved her so much. Saw her as everything he hadn’t been able to be or do, and what a burden that was. Because the school’s girl’s basketball team wore these cute little skirts to play in, he followed the bus to every game, never let her out of his sight, ever, she never made a move his stern bony countenance wasn’t hovering over as if from a cloud at her shoulder, like an angry God.

After college, she taught history at the high school, and used to remind yours truly, whenever he got too full of himself, that no one through history remembered the lowly scribes but by the quality of their words, and that he was after all just a small-time hack. This was about as true as words could be.

Well, you can imagine. You fight your way into town from a hardscrabble cattle farm way up in the sticks, fight your way through college on an athletic scholarship in the days when (especially for women) that didn’t amount to more than room and board, fight for your independence every step of the way, get the man you want, and it all turns to manure, after all. Marriage, a tough business. It wasn’t happy for Miss Avis, that’s for sure. Yours truly had no small role in that. And yours truly was never forgiven. Add that to the list, as there’s plenty yours truly has never forgiven himself for, too. We tell ourselves, after they’re gone, I should have been a better father, husband, friend, brother, sister, daughter, son. But truth is most of us do the best we can, just have a hard time accepting our limitations — accepting that we dealt with things according to our best lights and capacities for dealing. Disappointments flock to us like crows and mock us from their perches on buildings or the flimsy swaying tips of pines, or flying over, a glimpse of black wing and parted beak, or in dreams, caustic, ephemeral. You love someone, you hate them. The major crime, as has been said: indifference. The two-headed monster, love and hate, accompanies our halcyon days. Much love to Miss Avis, my estranged embittered bride. I ask her forgiveness for all inadequacies and wrongs. May she rest in peace.

Survivor: Finus Ulysses Bates, husband.

He’d wanted to add long-suffering after his name, but thought better of it. Let her have the last harsh words. On her deathbed, he’d been there, holding her hand. She’d looked at him, her red-rimmed eyes brimming with tears. -You ruined my life, she said in her strained and halting voice. He’d only nodded, squeezed and patted her hand. And later that night, she’d passed on. That was just Avis, she’d needed to say it. He never for a moment thought that, in her heart, she believed it was all that simple.